Apple sells three million iPads over first weekend

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William Shatner – there’s an app for him
















RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – Actor William Shatner is having a moment. A couple of years after CBS canceled his Twitter-inspired “$ #*! My Dad Says” TV comedy, Shatner is at the top of the tech world.


The former “Star Trek” captain, now 81, is featured in Blindlight Apps “Shatoetry”, which catapulted to the top of the entertainment app list on Apple iTunes last week on its first day of release.













The celebrity app allows users to choose from hundreds of words to arrange sentences, which Shatner will then recite in his trademark voice and style. There is also a mode that allows Shatner fans to collaborate on “Shatisms” and there are single-player challenges like creating Haiku and poetry.


Shatner, who is currently touring the country with his critically-acclaimed one-man Broadway show, “Shatner’s World,” took a few minutes to talk technology with Reuters.


Q: How would you like to expand this app moving forward? Perhaps adding music?


A: “Well, we have that in mind. Words to music. We have in mind holiday things. We have in mind events in your life, words so that you can use them as well. We will increase this if people love it and tell other people that they love it. When we get an audience we know that is worthwhile, we will add to it.”


Q: One audience you know you definitely have out there is “Star Trek” fans. Do you see any opportunities with special app add-ons for them?


A: “Well, yes. I don’t think we’ll leave opportunity unexplored, but I wanted to be very careful about how we introduce it so it is not something that is derogatory or stupid. I want to make sure that it’s used in the way it’s meant to be used, which is for your entertainment.”


Q: Do you see opportunities for other actors to work with you on this app?


A: “We hope that it becomes popular enough to interest people into doing some words.”


Q: So users would be able to mix your words with other actors’ words through this app?


A: “Yes. Exactly. Have them do keywords like ‘love.’ There are certain words that everybody wants to use like ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and words that you use somewhere in your conversation… Commonly used words that are positive, I think that would be a way of getting a well-known person to take a chance in interpreting that word several different ways and know that they won’t look foolish, or be made to look foolish.”


Q: How are you taking advantage of today’s technology to connect with fans?


A: “I’m using it in as many ways as feasible. I’m doing podcasts. I’m certainly doing everything else, Facebook, Twitter and all that kind of thing. I’m taking advantage of communicating with the people out there as much as possible, and this app is one of those ways.”


Q: What technology do you have?


A: “I have iPhone, an iPad and I will be getting an iPad Mini shortly.”


Q: How do you use those devices?


A: “I don’t play games. I read the newspapers. I’ve got a dictation sound-to-print app and since I don’t type very well, I find myself dictating to it and sending the notes on. It’s a truly creative tool with. Once you have a means of communicating – there’s so much wrong with the world and so many crises in the mix here that, if we can communicate faster and better, we may be able to fix them before the end of the world, as far as human beings are concerned.”


Q: How’s the tour going for your show “Shatner’s World”?


A: “I’m going to be in Connecticut and New Jersey this week. I’m playing about four different places that are just opening up now. My heart goes out to the nightmare that these people are in. I feel a little awkward in talking about providing a laugh or two, but on the other hand some people may need that, and that’s what I’ll be doing….I will be with my heart on my sleeve trying to entertain people who have had a great deal of hardship in the last week.”


Q: A lot of my friends in New York and New Jersey are still without power after Hurricane Sandy.


A: “I know, and hopefully by the time I get there, there will be power. And hopefully by that time, they’ll be of a mind to be able to want to be entertained.”


(Reporting by John Gaudiosi, editing by Jill Serjeant and Marguerita Choy)


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Study: Stem cells from strangers can repair hearts
















LOS ANGELES (AP) — Researchers are reporting a key advance in using stem cells to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks. In a study, stem cells donated by strangers proved as safe and effective as patients’ own cells for helping restore heart tissue.


The work involved just 30 patients in Miami and Baltimore, but it proves the concept that anyone’s cells can be used to treat such cases. Doctors are excited because this suggests that stem cells could be banked for off-the-shelf use after heart attacks, just as blood is kept on hand now.













Results were discussed Monday at an American Heart Association conference in California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


The study used a specific type of stem cells from bone marrow that researchers believed would not be rejected by recipients. Unlike other cells, these lack a key feature on their surface that makes the immune system see them as foreign tissue and attack them, explained the study’s leader, Dr. Joshua Hare of the University of Miami.


The patients in the study had suffered heart attacks years earlier, some as long as 30 years ago. All had developed heart failure because the scar tissue from the heart attack had weakened their hearts so much that they grew large and flabby, unable to pump blood effectively.


Researchers advertised for people to supply marrow, which is removed using a needle into a hip bone. The cells were taken from the marrow and amplified for about a month in a lab at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, then returned to Miami to be used for treatment, which did not involve surgery.


The cells were delivered through a tube pushed through a groin artery into the heart near the scarred area. Fifteen patients were given cells from their own marrow and 15 others, cells from strangers.


About a year later, scar tissue had been reduced by about one-third. Both groups had improvements in how far they could walk and in quality of life. There was no significant difference in one measure of how well their hearts were able to pump blood, but doctors hope these patients will continue to improve over time, or that refinements in treatment will lead to better results.


The big attraction is being able to use cells supplied by others, with no blood or tissue matching needed.


“You could have the cells ready to go in the blood bank so when the patient comes in for a therapy — there’s no delay,” Hare said. “It’s also cheaper to make the donor cells,” and a single marrow donor can supply enough cells to treat as many as 10 people.


Dr. Elliott Antman of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who heads the heart conference, praised the work.


“That opens up an entire new avenue for stem cell therapy, like a sophisticated version of a blood bank,” he said. There’s an advantage in not having to create a cell therapy for each patient, and it could spare them the pain and wait of having their own marrow harvested, he said.


The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Hare owns stock in a biotech company working on a treatment using a mixture of cells.


Juan Lopez received his own cells in the study, and said it improved his symptoms so much that at age 70, he was able to return to his job as an engineer and sales manager for a roofing manufacturer and ride an exercise bike.


“It has been a life-changing experience,” said Lopez, who lives in Miami. “I can feel day by day, week by week, month by month, my improvement. I don’t have any shortness of breath and my energy level is way up there. I don’t have any fluid in my lungs.”


And, he said happily, “My sex drive has improved!”


___


Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .


___


Online:


Heart Association: http://www.heart.org


JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org


Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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My plea to the undecided: Stay home!

By Jeff Greenfield

As the momentous day approaches, with epochal consequences for an anxiously awaiting world, I take pen in hand—make that apply fingertips to keypad—to renew a traditional plea I first made more than 30 years ago. It’s a plea I’ve made in print, on the air and, now, through the miracle of digital technology. But its message never changes.

It’s a plea directed to those of you who are still uncertain about which way to vote. And it’s as simple as it is heartfelt: Stay home.

The candidates have been at this for years; both President Obama and Mitt Romney began running for the presidency six years ago. They’ve made speeches, answered (or evaded) questions and raised billions to convince you of their worth—or the other guy’s worthlessness.

The media have been covering their every move and word, even when the candidates thought they weren’t. (Can you say, “Cling to their religion and guns”? “47 percent”?) The coverage has been slanted, scrupulously fair, superficial, in-depth, misleading, dead-on. With the flip of a page or the click of a mouse, you have been able to find out every conceivable piece of information you might want on their backgrounds, families, values, experience, positions taken, positions abandoned, promises made, promises broken, and the music on their iPods.

And after all this time, you’re still trying to make up your minds. The overwhelmingly likely reason is this: You have the reasoning power of a baked potato.

OK, I grant that you may be of the small minority of concerned citizens who are genuinely torn and who have not yet evaluated the relative worth of health care reform notions, the vagaries of the tax proposals or the respective approaches to the increasing power of the renminbi.

But I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.

The odds are, you’ve just been too busy obsessing about the misfortunes of the Kardashians or the quality of your ringtone, to spend any time thinking about who might be the better president.

Well, that’s your right. Unlike the Australians, we don’t compel people to vote, and it would likely be a First Amendment violation if we tried. A refusal to vote can be seen as a statement that the electoral system is rigged, meaningless or so thoroughly corrupt as to deserve contempt. (“I never vote,” one citizen said long ago. “It only encourages them.”)

And there are other valid reasons for not voting. As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.

So it strikes me as a sound, honest statement for a prospective voter to say: “Look, I haven’t given this election a minute’s thought, and it’s just not fair for me to cancel out the vote of someone who actually gives a damn.”

Indeed, it’s not just sound and honest—it’s the ethically responsible thing to do.

Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights. In these days of early voting, we’ve seen people waiting in line for hours to exercise the franchise. Countless others, who have never had to fight for it, have spent real time either trying to decide how to cast their vote or donating their time to persuading others.

So if you’re one of those folks who have stayed utterly disengaged through all of this, do the honorable thing: Honor those for whom the vote really matters by staying home.

You’ll be doing yourself—and the country—a favor.

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Newspaper discloses new Cameron text messages
















LONDON (AP) — A British lawmaker says he’s asked the country’s media ethics inquiry to consider newly disclosed text messages sent between Prime Minister David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, the ex-chief executive of Rupert Murdoch‘s British newspaper division.


The Mail on Sunday newspaper on Sunday published two previously undisclosed messages exchanged between the pair, who are friends and neighbors.













Brooks is facing trial on conspiracy charges linked to Britain’s phone hacking scandal, which saw Murdoch close down The News of The World tabloid.


In one newly disclosed message, Cameron thanked Brooks in 2009 for allowing him to borrow a horse, joking it was “fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun.”


Opposition lawmaker Chris Bryant has asked a judge-led inquiry scrutinizing ties between the press and the powerful to examine the messages.


Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Read More..

“Wreck-It Ralph” hammers box office, sails over “Flight”
















LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Wreck-It Ralph,” Disney‘s animated film about a videogame character who destroys everything in his path, scored the highest-grossing opening weekend in Disney animation history with $ 49.1 million, as box office attendance picked up in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy.


The tally for “Wreck-It Ralph,” which features the voices of John C. Reilly and Jane Lynch, hammered the Denzel Washington film “Flight,” which generated ticket sales of $ 25 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to studio estimates on Sunday.













After a quiet box office last weekend with the U.S. East Coast preparing for superstorm Sandy, there was a jump in movie attendance this week in areas hit by the storm.


Dave Hollis, executive vice president of film distribution at Walt Disney Studios, told Reuters that movie attendance in affected areas was “very healthy,” boosted by school closures on Friday, which saw a bounce in matinee showings.


“In a nice way, ‘Wreck-It Ralph,’ in areas affected by the storm, ended up actually becoming an opportunity to relieve yourself from the reality that might be going on around you, we saw the theater business around areas affected by the storm very healthy,” Hollis said.


“The storm and its impact – I don’t know if it was a function of cabin fever or just escaping by getting into a movie theater, but there was definitely a gravitating-towards-the- theater phenomenon.”


Disney had developed “Wreck-It Ralph” for more than a decade and spent an estimated $ 165 million to produce the film, which featured cameo appearances by a Pac-Man ghost and Mentos candy.


The film was produced by the same team behind Disney‘s animated film “Tangled,” which earned the previous highest opening weekend gross with $ 48.8 million in 2010. “Wreck-It Ralph” was forecast to generate sales in the mid-$ 40 million range, according to Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office division of Hollywood.com.


New release “Flight,” in which Washington stars as an airline captain who saves his plane from crashing but is accused of drinking before the flight, beat industry analysts’ $ 13 million forecast. The film, produced by Viacom’s Paramount Pictures unit, was made on a $ 31 million budget.


STORM BOOST


Unlike “Wreck-It Ralph,” “Flight” did not experience the same benefit from school closures in parts of the East Coast, according to Don Harris, president of distribution at Paramount Pictures.


“The Disney movie would benefit from school being out in a large number of big urban and suburban eastern markets, they were always going to have a very good opening, I think they got a little help on Friday,” Harris told Reuters.


He also said that the target adult audience for “Flight” would have probably been occupied with Tuesday’s presidential election and being “more active in helping people in their neighborhood” in the aftermath of Sandy, and not necessarily attending theaters this weekend.


“We did about what we expected to do but we certainly didn’t get a bump. I don’t think it hurt us very much either,” Harris said.


Critically acclaimed Iran hostage thriller “Argo,” last week’s box office leader, came in third this weekend after generating $ 10.2 million in sales.


Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, “Argo,” produced by Warner Bros. and GK Films for $ 44 million, is based on the true story of a mission to rescue U.S. government employees held hostage in Iran in 1979. It has totaled $ 75.9 million in three weeks at movie theaters and earned Oscar buzz after stellar reviews from critics.


New release “The Man With The Iron Fists” was unable to beat “Argo’s” momentum this weekend and came in fourth with ticket sales of $ 8.2 million.


Starring Russell Crowe and hip hop artist RZA, the film, produced on a budget of $ 15 million, follows a blacksmith in 19th-century China trying to defend his village from warriors and assassins searching for gold.


In fifth place, “Taken 2,” an action-thriller starring Liam Neeson as a former spy who is kidnapped in Istanbul, earned $ 6 million this weekend. It has generated a total of $ 125.7 million at the U.S. and Canadian box office since its release last month.


Overseas, the new James Bond film, “Skyfall,” enjoyed a stellar second weekend, earning $ 156 million in ticket sales at the international box office. The film will be released in North American theaters on November 9.


Walt Disney Co released “Wreck-It Ralph.” “Flight” was distributed by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc. Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner Inc, distributed “Argo.” Universal Studios released “Man with the Iron Fists.” “Taken 2″ was released by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.


(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy and Ronald Grover; Editing by Eric Beech)


Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News



Read More..

Drugmakers offer to cap Greece’s medicines bill
















LONDON (Reuters) – International drug companies have offered to cap the total amount the Greek government has to pay for its medicines in a bid to resolve a crisis that is jeopardizing both the supply of drugs to patients and drugmakers’ profits.


The proposal was set out by the trade group the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (Efpia) in a letter to the Greek ministers of health and finance, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.













In exchange for a ceiling on outpatient pharmaceutical expenditure of 2.88 billion euros ($ 3.70 billion) in 2012, Efpia wants the government to commit to pay off all outstanding debts and promise not to allow further arrears to build up.


Under the plan, individual drug companies would be subject to a “clawback” if the cost ceiling is breached, based on their share of the Greek market.


The move follows growing concerns about the situation in Greece, where the government last month took the highly unusual step of suspending all drug exports from the country in an attempt to prevent shortages.


Richard Bergstrom, Efpia’s director general, said the industry’s offer to Greece reflected a new realism among major drug manufacturers, who have seen sales and profits eroded by steep price cuts and unpaid bills in austerity-hit Europe.


“Setting a growth cap or budget ceiling is not something we have ever liked to do in the past, but in the current environment it is better to do that and have some stability,” he said in a telephone interview.


Other pharmaceutical stability agreements have already been agreed in Portugal, Ireland and Belgium, and the model could be extended to other states in future.


“We’ve suggested this to a number of other governments as an approach to deal with the financial crisis,” Bergstrom said.


Both European and U.S.-based drugmakers have been hit by the worsening situation in Europe and executives have highlighted the issue as a drag on profits in recent third-quarter financial reports.


Andrew Witty, the chief executive of Britain’s biggest drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline , told reporters last week it was “not reasonable” for governments to think they could continue to squeeze the industry without serious knock-on effects.


In the latest sign of how the crisis is affecting the provision of healthcare services, German pharmaceuticals firm Merck KGaA said on Saturday it was no longer delivering its cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals.


Another German company, Biotest , which makes products from blood plasma, was the first drugmaker to stop shipments to Greece because of unpaid bills in June.


($ 1 = 0.7785 euros)


(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)


Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News



Read More..

Florida's I-4 corridor: The mother road of swing voters

By Bob Sacha and Maisie Crow


Interstate 4 bisects the center of America's most notorious swing state, running 132 miles from Tampa, through Orlando and ending near Daytona Beach. Fifty-five percent of Florida voters live in the I-4 corridor. It is often where elections are decided in a state that has frequently switched sides, voting for Republicans seven times and Democrats three times in the past 10 elections, and voting for the winning presidential candidate 90 percent of that time.


For the final installment of our Road Trip video series for Campaign 2012, Yahoo News headed to Florida in search of the exotic, perhaps mythical, undecided voter. Here are three of our conversations.


'I have been registered to vote for seven years, and I have never voted.'



In a state filled with colorful characters, Eve Banks, 25, entertains many of them at the Mons Venus club in Tampa. She also travels extensively for her work as an exotic dancer. Eve Banks is a stage name: "I don't want girls from my sorority looking me up online," she says.


"I'm living a version of the American dream," she told Yahoo News. "It's not like the white picket fence, but I do have the dogs and I do have the husband. And I have everything I want. It's just kind of a different way of achieving it."


In the 2012 presidential election, Banks will be voting for the first time, casting a ballot for Barack Obama, she says, because of his support for women. "I generally don't care about politics because I feel like little old me does not make a difference," she said. "But this year I think is a lot different than previous years because of what's at stake right now.


"There was a lot of discrimination against women, believe it or not, not even that long ago really if you think about it. And that'll all change if we don't put the right person in the position," Banks said. "No woman wants a government to control her body or her choices."


'It has gotten pretty ugly between the two. I'm not sure I would want to be a part of it.'



Lloyd Parker, 33, hasn't decided how he is going to vote. He was working for a land development company in Lake Tahoe in Nevada until business started to slow down. His best friend lured him to Florida to become an entrepreneur by starting the Savage Race, an obstacle race in the mud. We hung out with him during their third race in Dade City.


"The Savage Race is a four- to six-mile mud obstacle course," Parker said. "It's timed. Twenty to 25 military-style obstacles that challenge you in many different ways. And afterward it's a fun gathering with live music and a party atmosphere."


Parker called Florida a Savage Race of sorts for Obama and Mitt Romney: "It is everywhere. It seems to be all over Facebook, everything. Maybe that has turned me off a little bit. That it's just been too much of back and forth and negativity, and it probably pushed me away a little bit.


"I have not been following it very much lately," he told Yahoo News. "In the last month I have been extremely busy with this course. I'm out on a ranch with no cable."


'I think somebody that's been in the farming business as long as we have—I don't think we should have to pay any inheritance tax.'



When Dave Black, 73, started in the citrus-farming and ranching business 42 years ago in Clermont, he stood on his 22 acres and saw fruit trees everywhere. Now his property is down to 14 acres, and it is hemmed in by new housing developments on three sides.


"We've got enough houses," Black told Yahoo News. "I mean we should leave a little open space."


Black is voting for Romney because of his opposition to the inheritance tax, in the hope that he can pass his property to his children undivided and tax-free.


"The Electoral College, I don't care for," he said. "I want the people to decide, not this state or that state. You know, Bush, the first election, he won on electoral votes. He didn't win on popular votes. Gore beat him on popular votes. So, that's wrong. That's just my opinion."


Bob Sacha is a multimedia producer, a documentary filmmaker, a photojournalist and a teacher. Maisie Crow is a documentary photographer, a filmmaker and a visual storytelling teacher. Earlier this year, Bob Sacha and Zach Wise traveled to Nevada to talk to Hispanics about the presidential election. In October, they talked to small-business owners along Colorado's Colfax Avenue. In July, Bob Sacha and Miki Meek traveled to Northern Virginia to talk to Mormons about what a President Romney would mean to them. In March, they drove Ohio's I-71 and talked to Republicans before Super Tuesday.


Read More..

As foreigners go, Afghan city is feeling abandoned

























KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — By switching from studying business management to training as a nurse, 19-year-old Anita Taraky has placed a bet on the future of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar — that once foreign troops are gone, private-sector jobs will be fewer but nursing will always be in demand.


Besides, if the Taliban militants recapture the southern Afghan city that was their movement’s birthplace and from which they were expelled by U.S.-led forces 11 years ago, nursing will likely be one of the few professions left open to women.





















Taraky is one of thousands of Kandaharis who are weighing their options with the approaching departure of the U.S. and its coalition partners. But while she has opted to stay, businessman Esmatullah Khan is leaving.


Khan, 29, made his living in property dealing and supplying services to the Western contingents operating in the city. Property prices are down, and business with foreigners is already shrinking, so he is pulling out, as are many others, he said.


Many are driven by a certainty that the Taliban will return, and that there will be reprisals.   


“From our baker to our electrician to our plumber, everyone was engaged with the foreign troops and so they are all targets for the Taliban. And unless the government is much stronger, when the foreign troops leave, that is the end,” Khan said.


The stakes are high. Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city, is the southern counterweight to Kabul, the capital. Keeping Kandahar under central government control is critical to preventing the country from breaking apart into warring fiefdoms as it did in the 1990s.


“Kandahar is the gate of Afghanistan,” said Asan Noorzai, director of the provincial council. “If Kandahar is secure, the whole country is secure. If it is insecure, the whole country will soon be fighting.”


Even though Kandahar city has traffic jams and street hawkers to give it an atmosphere of normality, there are dozens of shuttered stores on the main commercial street, it’s almost too easy to find a parking space these days, and shopkeepers are feeling the pinch.


Dost Mohammad Nikzad said his profits from selling sweets have dropped by a half or more in the past year, to about $ 30 a day, and he has had to cut back on luxuries.


He said that every month he would buy a new shalwar kameez, the tunic favored by Afghan men; now he buys one every other month.


“I only go out to eat at a restaurant once a week. Before I would have gone multiple times a week,” Nikzad said, as he stood behind his counter, waiting for customers to show.


The measurements of violence levels contradict each other. On the one hand, many Kandaharis say things are better this year. On the other hand, the types of violence have changed and, to some minds, gotten worse.


“Before, we were mostly worried about bomb blasts. Now … we are afraid of worse things like assassinations and suicide attacks,” said Gul Mohammad Stanakzai, 34, a bank cashier.


Prying open the Taliban grip on Kandahar and its surrounding province has cost the lives of more than 400 international troops since 2001, and many more Afghans, including hundreds of public officials who have been assassinated by the Taliban.


Kandahar province remains the most violent in the country, averaging more than five “security incidents” a day, according to independent monitors. In Kandahar city, suicide attacks have more than doubled so far this year compared with the same period of 2011, according to U.N. figures.


“They are not fighting in the open the way they were before. Instead they are planting bombs and trying to get at us through the police and the army,” said Qadim Patyal, the deputy provincial governor.


The Taliban have said in official statements that they are focusing more on infiltrating Afghan and international forces to attack them. In the Kandahar governor’s office, armed Afghan soldiers are barred from meetings with American officials lest they turn on them, Patyal said.


And many point out that the “better security” is only relative. By all measures — attacks, bombings and civilian casualties — Kandahar is a much more violent city now than in 2008, before U.S. President Barack Obama ordered a troop surge.


There are no statistics on how many people have left the city of 500,000, but people are fleeing the south more than any other part of the country, according to U.N. figures. About 32 percent of the approximately 397,000 people who were recorded as in-country refugees were fleeing violence in the south, according to U.N. figures from the end of May.


The provincial government, which is supposed to fill the void left by the departing international forces, has suffered heavily from assassinations. It suffered a double blow in July last year with the killing of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of President Hamid Karzai who was seen as the man who made things work in Kandahar, and Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of the city.


Now, Noorzai says, he can neither get the attention of ministers in Kabul nor trust city officials to do their jobs.


He remembers 2001, when he and others traveled to the capital flying the Afghan flag which had just been reinstated in place of that of the ousted Taliban. “People were throwing flowers and money on our car, they were so happy to have the Afghan flag flying again,” he said.


“When we got power, what did we give them in return? Poverty, corruption, abuse.”


Mohammad Omer, Kandahar’s current mayor, insists that if people are leaving the city, it is to return to villages they fled in previous years because now security has improved.


Zulmai Hafez disagrees. He has felt like a marked man since his father went to work for the government three years ago, and is too frightened to return to his home in the Panjwai district outside Kandahar city. He refused to have his picture taken or to have a reporter to his home, instead meeting at the city’s media center.


“It’s the Taliban who control the land, not the government,” Hafez said. He notes that the government administrator for his district sold off half his land, saying he would not be able to protect the entire farm from insurgents. Many believe the previous mayor was murdered because he went after powerful land barons.


Land reform is badly needed, and the mayor is angry about people who steal land, but he offers no solution. Kandahar only gets electricity about half the day. The mayor says it’s up to the Western allies to fix that. But the foreign aid is sharply down. Aid coming to Kandahar province through the U.S. Agency for International Development, the largest donor, has fallen to $ 63 million this year from $ 161 million in 2011, according to U.S. Embassy figures.


The mayor prefers to talk about investing in parks and planting trees. “I can’t resolve the electricity problem, but at least I can provide a place in the city for people to relax,” he said.


The only people thinking long-term appear to be the Taliban.


“The Americans are going and the Taliban need the people’s support, so they are trying to avoid attacks that result in civilian casualties,” said Noor Agha Mujahid, a member of the Taliban shadow government for Kandahar province, where he oversees operations in a rural district. “After 2014 … it will not take a month to take every place back.”


One of the biggest worries is the fate of women who have made strides in business and politics since the ouster of the Taliban.


“What will these women do?” asked Ehsanullah Ehsan, director of a center that trains more than 800 women a year in computers, English and business. It was at his center where Anita Taraky studied before switching to nursing.


“Even if the Taliban don’t come back, even if the international community just leaves, there will be fewer opportunities for women,” he said.


On the outskirts of the city stands one of the grandest projects of post-Taliban Kandahar — the gated community of Ayno Maina with tree-lined cement homes, wi-fi and rooftop satellite dishes.


Khan, the departing businessman, says he bought bought 10 lots for $ 66,000 in Ayno Maina and has yet to sell any of them despite slashing the price,


He recalled that when he first went to the project office it was packed with buyers. “Now it is full of empty houses. No one goes there,” Khan said.


Only about 15,000 of the 40,000 lots have been sold, and 2,400 homes built and occupied, according to Mahmood Karzai, one of the development’s main backers and a brother of President Karzai. He argues, however, that prices are down all over Afghanistan, and that Ayno Maina is still viable, provided his brother gets serious about reform that will attract investors.


“Afghanistan became a game,” he said over lunch at the Ayno Maina office. “The game is to make money and get the hell out of here. That goes for politicians. That goes for contractors.”


He shrugged off allegations that he skimmed money from Ayno Maina, saying the claims were started by competitors in Kabul who assume everyone who is building something in Afghanistan is also stealing money.


He said the money went where it was needed: to Western-style building standards and security.


In downtown Kandahar, a deserted park and Ferris wheel serve as another reminder of thwarted hopes. Built in the mid-2000s, the wheel has been idle for two years according to a guard, Abdullah Jan Samad. It isn’t broken, he said, it just needs electricity. A major U.S.-funded project to get reliable electricity to the city has floundered and generators that were supposed to provide a temporary solution only operate part-time because of fuel shortages.


“The government should be paying for maintenance for the Ferris wheel,” the guard said. “When you build something you should also make sure to maintain it.”


____


Associated Press Writer Mirwais Khan contributed to this report from Kandahar.


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