Jim, John Harbaugh ready for rematch at Super Bowl

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — Jim and John Harbaugh have exchanged a handful of text messages, and plan to leave it at that. No phone conversations necessary while the season's still going. No time for pleasantries, even for the friendly siblings.

There is work to be done to prepare for the Super Bowl, prepare for each other, prepare for a history-making day already being widely hyped as "Harbowl" or "Superbaugh" depending which nickname you prefer.

"It doesn't matter who the coach is, what relationship you have with the person on the other side," 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh said so matter-of-factly Monday afternoon.

Their parents sure aren't picking sides for the Feb. 3 matchup in New Orleans.

These days, the Harbaughs' longtime coaching father, Jack, stays away from game-planning chatter or strategy sessions with his Super Bowl-bound coaching sons. Baltimore's John Harbaugh and little brother Jim have been doing this long enough now to no longer need dad's input.

Yet, they still regularly seek it. And, their father does offer one basic mantra: "Get ahead, stay ahead."

"Probably the greatest advice that I've ever been given and the only advice that I've ever found to be true in all of coaching, I think we mentioned it to both John and Jim ... the coaching advice is, 'Get ahead, stay ahead,'" Jack Harbaugh said.

"If I'm called upon, I'll repeat that same message."

His boys still call home regularly to check in with the man who turned both on to the coaching profession years ago, and the mother who has handled everything behind the scenes for decades in a highly competitive, sports-crazed family — with all the routine sports clichés to show for it.

The Harbaugh brothers will become the first siblings to square off from opposite sidelines when their teams play for the NFL championship at the Superdome.

Not that they're too keen on playing up the storyline that has no chance of going away as hard as they try.

"Well, I think it's a blessing and a curse," Jim Harbaugh said Monday. "A blessing because that is my brother's team. And, also, personally I played for the Ravens. Great respect for their organization. ... The curse part would be the talk of two brothers playing in the Super Bowl and what that takes away from the players that are in the game. Every moment that you're talking about myself or John, that's less time that the players are going to be talked about."

Both men love history, just not the kind with them making it.

"I like reading a lot of history ... I guess it's pretty neat," John Harbaugh offered Monday. "But is it really going to be written about? It's not exactly like Churchill and Roosevelt or anything. It's pretty cool, but that's as far as it goes."

Nice try, guys.

John watched the end of Jim's game from the field in Foxborough, Mass., as Baltimore warmed up for the AFC championship game. Jim called his sister's family from the team plane before takeoff after a win at Atlanta and asked how his big brother's team was doing against New England.

The improbable Super Bowl features a set of brothers known around the NFL as fierce competitors unafraid to make a bold move during the season. Unafraid to upset anyone who stands in their way.

In fact, each one made a major change midseason to get this far — John fired his offensive coordinator, while Jim boosted his offense with a quarterback switch from Alex Smith to Colin Kaepernick.

Leading up to Sunday's games, parents Jack and Jackie said they would wait to decide whether to travel to New Orleans if both teams advanced or stick to what has been working so well — watching from the comfort of their couch in Mequon, Wis.

"We enjoy it very much. We get down in our basement, turn on the television and just have a fantastic day watching outstanding football," Jack said last week. "We share our misery with no one but ourselves. Not only the misery, but the ups and downs, the ins and outs of an outstanding professional game."

And, no, the Harbaughs weren't looking ahead to a potential big trip to the Big Easy.

Jack insists his wife is quick to pull out that old sports cliche: "It's one game at a time. I think it's very appropriate," he said.

Jim figures they won't possibly miss this history-making game.

"I think they'll be there," he said with a smile.

The brothers, separated in age by 15 months, have taken different paths to football's biggest stage — years after their intense games of knee football at the family home. They tried to beat each other at cards, or whatever other game it was at the time. Sometimes, they tried to beat each other up. Sister, Joani Crean, often got in on the fun, too.

The 49-year-old Jim never reached a Super Bowl, falling a last-gasp pass short during a 15-year NFL career as a quarterback. The 50-year-old John never played in the NFL.

Still, both will tell you, "Who's got it better than us? No-body!" — one catchphrase they got from their dad.

"We can't put into words what it means to see John and Jim achieve this incredible milestone," their brother-in-law, Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean, said on Twitter. "We talked to Jim (before) his team plane left. All he wanted to know was how was John doing? How were they playing? One incredible family who puts the care, well-being and love for each other at the forefront like most families do. Again, we are very proud of them. Going to be exciting to watch it unfold."

John worked his way up from the bottom of the coaching ranks, while Jim was the star college quarterback at Michigan, a first-round draft pick and eventual Pro Bowler who made coaching his career once he retired.

John already has the one-up, while Jim's team is the early favorite. John's Ravens beat the 49ers 16-6 on Thanksgiving night 2011, in Jim's rookie season as an NFL coach — though both know that means nothing now.

"I just want everybody to know, that was a four-day deal and every story has been told," John said. "We're not that interesting. There's nothing more to learn. The tape across the middle of the room story, OK, you got it? It's OK. It was just like any other family, really. I really hope the focus is not so much on that. We get it, it's really cool and it's exciting and all that."

Said Jim, "Completely new business."

In spite of his efforts to avoid the topic, Jim did take the opportunity to express how proud he is of John.

"He's a great football coach, a real grasp of all phases — offense, defense, special teams. I think he could coordinate at least two of those phases and do it as well as anyone in the league," Jim said. "I've got half the amount of coaching experience he does. Again, it's not about us. I keep coming back to that. I'm really proud of my brother. I love him. That's the blessing part, that this is happening to him."

And, fittingly for the big brother, John feels the exact same way.

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AP Sports Writer Dave Ginsburg in Baltimore contributed to this story.

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The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

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Bank of Japan Moves to Fight Deflation

TOKYO — The Bank of Japan set an ambitious 2 percent inflation target and pledged to ease monetary policy “decisively” by introducing open-ended asset purchases, following intense pressure from the country’s audacious new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who has made beating deflation a national priority.

In a joint statement Tuesday with the government, the central bank said it was doubling its inflation target to 2 percent and said it would “pursue monetary easing and aim to achieve this target at the earliest possible time.”

The Bank of Japan also said that it intended to purchase assets indefinitely, promising to stick to a program that has allowed the bank to pump funds into the Japanese economy, even with interest rates at virtually zero. The bank’s board voted to keep its benchmark rate at a range of zero to 0.1 percent.

Mr. Abe immediately hailed the bank’s moves, telling the Bank of Japan governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, that the measures were “groundbreaking,” according to Kyodo News. Analysts, however, said the details of the bank’s policy were less impressive than the headlines and said they had expected more.

The central bank, for example, will only begin its open-ended asset purchases in 2014, and estimates that its asset purchase fund will increase by just 10 trillion yen in 2014, remaining unchanged after that. With such a paltry increase, it was unlikely Japan would achieve 2 percent inflation, analysts said. The consumer price index for 2012 fell 0.5 percent, according to government statistics.

The Bank of Japan’s announcement “will likely disappoint those who expected the policy board to answer Abe’s call for a ‘different kind of B.O.J. policy,’ or significantly ramp up its pace of easing,” Izumi Devalier, an economist with HSBC, said in a note to clients.

“This means pressure will remain in place for the B.O.J. to ease policy further, as the 2 percent inflation target remains ever out of reach,” Ms. Devalier and her colleagues said.

Masaaki Kanno, Japan economist for JPMorgan, also called the details of the asset purchase program disappointing. “That said, this is not the end of the game,” he said. “We should expect further easing” including an increase in asset purchases as well as purchases of longer-term assets, once Gov. Shirakawa’s term is up in April and a successor is appointed, Mr. Kanno said.

Since last year, when Mr. Abe was still opposition leader, he has urged the central bank to do more to end deflation, the all-around fall in prices, profit and incomes that has plagued Japan’s economy since the late 1990s. He stepped up the pressure on the bank after a landslide victory by his Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections in December, which catapulted him to office for the second time since a short-lived stint in 2006-07.

Mr. Abe’s call for the Bank of Japan to increase the monetary supply, among other things, has weakened the yen, a boon to the competitiveness of exporters, which make up much of Japan’s growth. Earlier this month, Mr. Abe also announced a 12 trillion yen emergency stimulus, providing even more tailwind for the Japanese economy. That bright outlook has pushed the Nikkei stock index 20 percent higher since mid-November, when Mr. Abe first campaigned on his expansionary platform.

Mr. Abe’s critics, however, warn that the central bank, which will buy up more government bonds as part of its asset purchase program, will become a printing press for profligate government spending — spending that carries great risks for a country whose public debt is already twice the size of its economy. Critics also say that before flooding a broken system with money, Japan must first tackle structural problems that hurt economic efficiency.

Mr. Abe maintains that deflation will undermine any efforts to grow, and that the government and central bank must act together to get prices rising again. But in a nod to critics, the joint statement said the government would also promote “all possible decisive policy actions for reforming the economic structure” and establish “a sustainable fiscal structure.”

“I believe we are firmly on the path toward bold monetary easing,” Mr. Abe told reporters following the bank’s announcement.

Mr. Shirakawa, who has long argued that the bank alone cannot spark inflation or economic growth, called on the government to do its part to bolster the Japanese economy.

“Various actors need to put in considerable effort along with the Bank of Japan,” Mr. Shirakawa told a press conference late Tuesday. “Those efforts are going to have to be quite drastic,” he said.

Market reaction was mixed. The Nikkei index average rose 0.8 percent in anticipation of the bank’s announcement, before giving up its gains to end 0.4 percent lower, at 10,709.93. The index has risen over 20 percent, however, since Mr. Abe started his monetarist push. The dollar briefly rose above 90 yen, near the 2-year high of 90.25 it hit on Monday, but had slipped to 88.67 yen late afternoon in Tokyo.

Yields on 10-year Japanese government bonds were largely unchanged, with a benchmark issue ending trading at 0.730 percent, down 0.005 percentage points from Monday’s close.

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Insurgents Attack Police Unit in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the second brazen attack on the capital in less than a week, five Taliban suicide bombers stormed the headquarters of the traffic police early on Monday, setting off a fierce nine-hour gun battle that raged into the afternoon and claimed the lives of at least three traffic officers.

The attack began around 5 a.m., when insurgents shot and killed officers manning the checkpoint in front of the headquarters, which is on the same road as the Parliament building.

After the firefight began, insurgents wearing suicide vests remotely detonated a huge car bomb and rushed into the compound. Throughout the day, rocket explosions and gunfire erupted in intermittent bursts, as an array of Afghan security forces attempt to dislodge the insurgents.

The battle ended shortly after 2 p.m. with all of the insurgents dead. Only two of the bombers detonated their vests, officials said at the scene. The other three fighters were gunned down by the security forces.

In addition to the three dead officers, six security members of the security forces were wounded in the attack, said Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahman, a deputy minister at the Interior Ministry. At least eight civilians were also wounded, mostly from the bombing.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault, the second it has carried out in less than a week. On Wednesday, heavily armed bombers blew up the gate to an Afghan intelligence facility, killing at least one security officer and injuring numerous civilians.

The consecutive attacks have rattled the relative security Kabul has experienced compared with other areas of the country. The group has promised to continue its fight against government targets in Kabul and elsewhere, creating unease among many Afghans as they prepare for coalition forces to withdraw troops from the country by 2014 or sooner.

“Our target was a special police training unit where foreign instructors and trainers train,” said a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid. “We inflicted heavy casualties to the enemy so far and that is a part of our routine operations against the enemy.”

Unlike the facilities of the security services, which are heavily armed and protected by mountainous blast walls and coils of razor wire, the traffic police headquarters offered a softer target. Traffic police are not typically armed in the streets of Kabul, and the headquarters doesn’t have the same level of security as the intelligence installations.

Still, within half an hour of the blast, the area was cordoned off by an array of Afghan security forces, as onlookers listened to the firefight from beyond the security perimeter. Periodically, debris from rocket-propelled grenades rained down on the street.

Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting.

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Notre Dame hoax tip was emailed: Deadspin.com editor

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The tip that led to the revelation that one of the most widely recounted U.S. sports narratives of the past year was a hoax came to the editors of an online sports blog as many of their news tips do: an unsolicited email.

That email led Deadspin.com assignment editor Timothy Burke on the hunt of a story that exposed the heart-wrenching tale of standout Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o's dead girlfriend as a fabrication, Burke said on CNN on Thursday.

Te’o sprang to national prominence last fall when the senior co-captain was seen heroically leading the Fighting Irish to an underdog victory against the Michigan State Spartans within days of learning his grandmother had died. Moreover, it was widely reported, Te’o's girlfriend had died of leukemia just hours after his grandmother’s death.

From that point, Te’o's narrative was a prominent feature in coverage of the team, which has a dedicated following and whose games are televised nationally each week.

Notre Dame went on to an undefeated regular season, culminating in a berth in the national championship game, which the Fighting Irish lost to the Alabama Crimson Tide on January 7.

“We got an email last week at Deadspin.com that said ‘Hey, there’s something real weird about Lennay Kekua, Manti Te’o's allegedly dead girlfriend. You guys should check it out,’” Burke said.

The email prompted Burke and co-author Jack Dickey to begin searching online for background on Kekua. “So we start Googling the name Lennay Kekua. We can’t find any evidence of this person that wasn’t attached to stories about her being Manti Te’o's dead girlfriend.”

Their investigation led about a week later to a 4,000-word expose, published Wednesday under the headline “Blarney,” that painstakingly debunked the story of Kekua’s existence. The story went viral online.

Within hours of its publication, officials at Notre Dame, one of the most powerful institutions in college football and U.S. collegiate athletics overall, held a hastily organized press conference to assert that Te’o had been duped in a hoax perpetrated by a friend of his.

The girlfriend, who called herself Kekua and claimed to be a Stanford University graduate, was merely an online persona who “ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia,” university spokesman Dennis Brown said in a statement.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said the university learned of the hoax from Te’o on December 26. Te’o answered questions forthrightly and private investigators uncovered several things that pointed to Te’o being a victim in the case, Swarbrick said.

Deadspin’s Burke said he remains skeptical of this being a hoax perpetrated on Te’o rather than by Te’o.

“Ask yourself why and what incentive a person would have to execute such a lengthy, time-consuming and expensive con that would involve multiple people and essentially consume his entire life just to screw around with a guy that he knows?” Burke said on CNN.

Deadspin.com said the woman whose photograph was frequently shown on TV and in news reports about Kekua was actually a young California woman who had never met or communicated with Te’o. The website declined to identify her by name.

On Thursday, TV newsmagazine “Inside Edition” said the woman in the photograph was a 23-year-old marketing professional in Los Angeles named Diane O’Meara. Inside Edition, which is syndicated by CBS Television Distribution, said O’Meara was a former classmate of one of Te’o's friends. It Aredid not give the friend’s name.

In the expose published Wednesday, Deadspin.com said a friend of Te’o's named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was “the man behind” the hoax.

Outside Tuiasosopo’s home in Palmdale, California on Thursday, a member of his family who did not identify himself told reporters, “Please, we have no comment. Please respect that.”

The Te’o hoax is the latest black eye Notre Dame’s legendary football program has suffered in recent years.

In 2011, the school was fined $ 42,000 by an Indiana agency over the death of football videographer Declan Sullivan, 20, who died in October 2010 after a hydraulic lift he was using to record practice toppled over in high winds.

In 2010, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Seeberg, a freshman at nearby St. Mary’s College, killed herself ten days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of sexual battery. Her family began questioning the campus police department’s reluctance to gather evidence and a 15-day delay in interviewing the accused.

After a federal investigation into the matter, the school agreed to revise its policies on sexual misconduct.

(Additional reporting by Dan Burns, Dana Feldman, David Bailey and Mary Wisniewski.; Editing by Vicki Allen, Greg McCune and Andrew Hay)

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Harbaugh brothers take 49ers, Ravens to Super Bowl

This Super Bowl will be filled with firsts — and one significant last.

The Harbaughs, San Francisco's Jim and Baltimore's John, will be the first pair of brothers to coach against each other in the NFL title game.

Quarterbacks Colin Kaepernick of the 49ers and Joe Flacco of the Ravens each will be playing in his first Super Bowl — where success is the ultimate measure of elite QBs.

It'll be Baltimore's first crack at a championship in a dozen years, San Francisco's first in 18. They are a combined 6-0 in Super Bowls (the 49ers own five of those victories), so one club will lose the big game for the first time.

And middle linebacker Ray Lewis, Baltimore's emotional leader and top tackler, will be playing in the final game of his 17-year career before heading into retirement.

"This is our time," Lewis pronounced.

For all of those story lines, none is expected to command as much attention as Harbaugh vs. Harbaugh. The game in New Orleans on Feb. 3 was quickly given all manner of nicknames: The Brother Bowl. The Harbaugh Bowl. The Har-Bowl. The Super-Baugh.

The Harbaughs' sister, Joani Crean, wrote in a text to The Associated Press: "Overwhelmed with pride for John, Jim and their families! They deserve all that has come their way! Team Harbaugh!"

As John prepared to coach the Ravens in the AFC championship game Sunday night, he watched on the stadium's big video screen as Jim's 49ers wrapped up the NFC championship.

John looked into a nearby TV camera, smiled broadly and said: "Hey, Jim, congratulations. You did it. You're a great coach. Love you."

Less than four hours later, the Ravens won, too. Some siblings try to beat each other in backyard games. These guys will do it in the biggest game of all.

Who's a parent to cheer for?

During the 2011 regular season, the Harbaughs became the only brothers to coach against each other in any NFL game (the Ravens beat the 49ers 16-6 on Thanksgiving Day that year).

The NFC West champion 49ers (13-4-1) opened as 5-point favorites, seeking a record-tying sixth Super Bowl title to add to those won by Hall of Fame quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young.

Lewis was the MVP when the AFC North champion Ravens (13-6) beat the New York Giants in 2001.

With Kaepernick's terrific passing — he was 16 of 21 for 233 yards and a touchdown in only his ninth career NFL start — and two TD runs by Frank Gore, San Francisco erased a 17-point deficit to beat the Atlanta Falcons 28-24 Sunday.

Baltimore then fashioned a comeback of its own, scoring the last 21 points to defeat the New England Patriots 28-13, thanks in large part to Flacco's three second-half touchdown tosses, two to Anquan Boldin. Lewis and the rest of Baltimore's defense limited the high-scoring Patriots to one touchdown.

In the often risk-averse NFL, each Harbaugh made a critical change late in the regular season in a bid to boost his team's postseason chances. Clearly, both moves worked.

After 49ers quarterback Alex Smith, the starter in last season's overtime NFC title game loss to the Giants, got a concussion, Jim switched to Kaepernick for Week 11 — and never switched back. Now San Francisco has its first three-game winning streak of the season, at precisely the right time.

Baltimore, meanwhile, was in the midst of a three-game losing streak when John fired offensive coordinator Cam Cameron and promoted quarterbacks coach Jim Caldwell to replace him.

The 50-year-old John is 15 months older than Jim and generally the less demonstrative of the pair, although John certainly did not lack intensity while making his case with officials a couple of times Sunday.

The ever-excitable Jim — who was treated for an irregular heartbeat in November — was up to his usual sideline antics in Atlanta.

He spun around and sent his headset flying when the original call stood after he threw his red challenge flag on a catch by the Falcons. He hopped and yelled at his defense to get off the field after their key fourth-down stop with less than 1½ minutes left. He made an emphatic-as-can-be timeout signal with 13 seconds remaining.

Expect CBS to fill plenty of time during its Super Bowl broadcast with shots of Jim, that trademark red pen dangling in front of his chest, and John, who usually wears a black Ravens hat. That is sure to be a focal point, right up until they meet for a postgame handshake in two weeks' time.

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AP Sports Writer Janie McCauley in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich

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Well: A Check on Physicals

“Go Beyond Your Father’s Annual Physical. Live Longer, Feel Better”

This sales pitch for the Princeton Longevity Center’s “comprehensive exam” promises, for $5,300, to take “your health beyond the annual physical.” But it is far from certain whether this all-day checkup, and others less inclusive, make a meaningful difference to health or merely provide reassurance to the worried well.

Among physicians, researchers and insurers, there is an ongoing debate as to whether regular checkups really reduce the chances of becoming seriously ill or dying of an illness that would have been treatable had it been detected sooner.

No one questions the importance of regular exams for well babies, children and pregnant women, and the protective value of specific exams, like a Pap smear for sexually active women and a colonoscopy for people over 50. But arguments against the annual physical for all adults have been fueled by a growing number of studies that failed to find a medical benefit.

Some experts note that when something seemingly abnormal is picked up during a routine exam, the result is psychological distress for the patient, further testing that may do more harm than good, and increased medical expenses.

“Part of the problem of looking for abnormalities in perfectly well people is that rather a lot of us have them,” Dr. Margaret McCartney, a Scottish physician, wrote in The Daily Mail, a British newspaper. “Most of them won’t do us any harm.”

She cited the medical saga of Brian Mulroney, former prime minister of Canada. A CT scan performed as part of a checkup in 2005 revealed two small lumps in Mr. Mulroney’s lungs. Following surgery, he developed an inflamed pancreas, which landed him in intensive care. He spent six weeks in the hospital, then was readmitted a month later for removal of a cyst on his pancreas caused by the inflammation.

The lumps on his lungs, by the way, were benign. But what if, you may ask, Mr. Mulroney’s lumps had been cancer? Might not the discovery during a routine exam have saved his life?

Logic notwithstanding, the question of benefits versus risks from routine exams can be answered only by well-designed scientific research.

Defining the value of a routine checkup — determining who should get one and how often — is especially important now, because next year the Affordable Care Act will add some 30 million people to the roster of the medically insured, many of whom will be eligible for government-mandated preventive care through an annual exam.

Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who directed a study of annual physicals in 2007, reported that an estimated 44.4 million adults in the United States undergo preventive exams each year. He concluded that if every adult were to receive such an exam, the health care system would be saddled with 145 million more visits every year, consuming 41 percent of all the time primary care doctors spend with patients.

There is already a shortage of such doctors and not nearly enough other health professionals — physician assistants and nurse practitioners — to meet future needs. If you think the wait to see your doctor is too long now, you may want to stock up on some epic novels to keep you occupied in the waiting room in the future.

Few would challenge the axiom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lacking incontrovertible evidence for the annual physical, this logic has long been used to justify it:

¶ If a thorough exam and conversation about your well-being alerts your doctor to a health problem that is best addressed sooner rather than later, isn’t that better than waiting until the problem becomes too troublesome to ignore?

¶ What if you have a potentially fatal ailment, like heart disease or cancer, that may otherwise be undetected until it is well advanced or incurable?

¶ And wouldn’t it help to uncover risk factors like elevated blood sugar or high cholesterol that could prevent an incipient ailment if they are reversed before causing irreparable damage?

Even if there is no direct medical benefit, many doctors say that having their patients visit once a year helps to maintain a meaningful relationship and alert doctors to changes in patients’ lives that could affect health. It is also an opportunity to give patients needed immunizations and to remind them to get their eyes, teeth and skin checked.

But the long-sacrosanct recommendation that everyone should have an annual physical was challenged yet again recently by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen.

The research team, led by Dr. Lasse T. Krogsboll, analyzed the findings of 14 scientifically designed clinical trials of routine checkups that followed participants for up to 22 years. The team found no benefit to the risk of death or serious illness among seemingly healthy people who had general checkups, compared with people who did not. Their findings were published in November in BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal).

In introducing their analysis, the Danish team noted that routine exams consist of “combinations of screening tests, few of which have been adequately studied in randomized trials.” Among possible harms from health checks, they listed “overdiagnosis, overtreatment, distress or injury from invasive follow-up tests, distress due to false positive test results, false reassurance due to false negative test results, adverse psychosocial effects due to labeling, and difficulties with getting insurance.”

Furthermore, they wrote, “general health checks are likely to be expensive and may result in lost opportunities to improve other areas of health care.”

In summarizing their results, the team said, “We did not find an effect on total or cause-specific mortality from general health checks in adult populations unselected for risk factors or disease. For the causes of death most likely to be influenced by health checks, cardiovascular mortality and cancer mortality, there were no reductions either.”

What, then, should people do to monitor their health?

Whenever you see your doctor, for any reason, make sure your blood pressure is checked. If a year or more has elapsed since your last blood test, get a new one.

Keep immunizations up to date, and get the screening tests specifically recommended based on your age, gender and known risk factors, including your family and personal medical history.

And if you develop a symptom, like unexplained pain, shortness of breath, digestive problems, a lump, a skin lesion that doesn’t heal, or unusual fatigue or depression, consult your doctor without delay. Seek further help if the initial diagnosis and treatment fails to bring relief.

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Media Decoder: News Outlets Take to Washington for Inauguration Coverage

If he squints hard enough, President Obama will be able to see CNN from his perch on the inaugural podium on Monday.

The cable news channel has set up an elaborate studio on the National Mall — one of the four locations where its anchors will be leading coverage of Mr. Obama’s second inaugural celebration.

“The goal is to put our anchors in the middle of all the activity,” said Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief. So in the morning, Wolf Blitzer will start out by the Capitol building and Anderson Cooper by the Mall, moving to new spots along the parade route in the afternoon. Other anchors will be at the inaugural balls at night.

The coverage might seem more subdued on other major television networks, reflecting the fact that there is generally less enthusiasm for presidential inaugurations the second time around. Still, the ceremony and the spectacle that accompanies it will take over the networks and news channels beginning with their morning shows, some of which are relocating to Washington for the day.

CBS has built a studio on the Mall beside CNN’s. Its one-year-old morning show, “CBS This Morning,” will be broadcast from there and expand to three hours for the day. NBC’s “Today” show will have all of its hosts in Washington, as well.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” is doing it a bit differently, sending George Stephanopoulos and Josh Elliott to Washington and having the show’s other hosts stay in New York.

The bulk of the festivities will be anchored by the same correspondents who handled election night for their networks. There has been a last-minute change at PBS, though: Judy Woodruff is away from Washington because of a family illness, a spokeswoman said, so the senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown will anchor with Gwen Ifill, instead.

Most Americans will watch the inauguration on television, just as they did in 2009, the first time Mr. Obama was inaugurated. But there will also be a panoply of Web sites live-streaming the event, including that of the Presidential Inauguration Committee.

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Hostages Dead in Bloody Climax to Siege in Algeria

BAMAKO, Mali — A day after the four-day hostage crisis in the Sahara reached a bloody conclusion, government leaders around the world struggled on Sunday to grasp what precisely had happened as Britain called for a “global response” lasting “years, even decades” to counter the deep-rooted presence of Islamist militants in North Africa.

Louafi Larbi/Reuters

A freed Norwegian hostage was escorted to a police station in the town of In Amenas on Saturday, near the gas field complex.

The confrontation at a remote gas field taken over by militants ended Saturday as the Algerian Army carried out a final assault, killing most of the remaining kidnappers and raising the total of hostages killed to at least 23, Algerian officials said.

A senior Algerian official was quoted on Sunday as saying that figure “may be revised upward.”

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron also revised earlier estimates of fatalities, saying on Sunday that three British nationals were killed and three more were believed to have died along with one resident of Britain.

On Saturday, the government said five Britons and one British resident had died or were unaccounted for after the final rescue attempt.

In a televised address from his official country retreat on Sunday, Mr. Cameron said: “We have had successes in recent years in reducing the threat from some parts of the world, but the threat has grown particularly in North Africa.”

“This is a global threat and it will require a global response. It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months. It requires a response that is patient and painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve and that is what we will deliver over these coming years,” he said.

He added: “What we face is an extremist, Islamist, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa.”

The group “wants to destroy our way of life, it believes in killing as many people as it can. We need to work with others to defeat the terrorists and to close down the ungoverned spaces where they thrive with all the means that we have,” he said, reprising a theme he has struck with increasing passion as the attack in Algeria unfolded.

The details of the desert standoff and the final battle for the plant remained murky — as did information about which hostages died and how — with even the White House suggesting late Saturday that it was unclear what had happened. In a brief statement President Obama said his administration would “remain in close touch with the government of Algeria to gain a fuller understanding of what took place.”

The British defense minister, Philip Hammond, called the loss of life “appalling and unacceptable” after reports that up to seven hostages were killed in the final hours of the hostage crisis, and he said that the leaders of the attack would be tracked down. The Algerian government said that 32 militants had been killed since Wednesday, although it cautioned that its casualty counts were provisional. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who appeared with Mr. Hammond at a news conference in London, said he did not yet have reliable information about the fate of the Americans at the facility, although a senior Algerian official said two had been found “safe and sound.”

What little information trickled out was as harrowing as what had come in the days before, when some hostages who had managed to escape told of workers being forced to wear explosives. They also said that there were several summary executions and that some workers had died in the military’s initial rescue attempt.

On Saturday, Algerian officials reported that some bodies found by troops who rushed into the industrial complex were charred beyond recognition, making it difficult to distinguish between the captors and the captured. Two were assumed to be workers because they were handcuffed.

Most of the hundreds of workers at the plant, who come from about 25 countries, appear to have escaped sometime during the four days.

The Algerian government has been relatively silent since the start of the crisis, releasing few details. The government faced withering international criticism for rushing ahead with its first assault on the militants on Thursday even as governments whose citizens were trapped inside the plant pleaded for more time, fearing that rescue attempts might lead to workers dying. The Algerians responded by saying they had a better understanding of how to handle militants after fighting Islamist insurgents for years.

Mr. Cameron said on Sunday:“Now of course people will ask questions about the Algerian response to these events, but I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched a vicious and cowardly attack.”

Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris; Elisabeth Bumiller and John F. Burns from London; Manny Fernandez and Clifford Krauss from Houston; and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

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10 awesome new (and old) things you need to know about in 2013

We’re just three weeks into 2013 and it’s surprising what a difference a year can make. RIM (RIMM) is on the rise as Apple (AAPL) is getting crushed, Samsung (005930) is supposedly generating Apple-like hype, and connected home appliances outshined smartphones at CES. It’s a brave new world indeed, but here are 10 awesome new (and old) things to keep you grounded in 2013 while you put 2012 behind you and try to forget Gangnam Style ever happened.

[More from BGR: Samsung’s latest monster smartphone will reportedly have a 5.8-inch screen]

1. Digg: Digg? In 2013? Yup — it’s back and it’s awesome.

[More from BGR: Paid apps are history]

The old Digg is dead and a fantastic river of curated news can now be found in its place. The site has done away with user submissions and the unending sea of obnoxious comments, leaving behind a platform that is infinitely better than its predecessor.

Topics covered range from technology and business to world events and interesting morsels people are unlikely to dig up on their own.

The redesigned site is fantastic and clean, the iOS app is terrific, and I consistently discover great stories there long before they being to gain steam elsewhere on the web.

http://digg.com

2. Evernote: There are a few Web services that I regularly recommend to friends and family where after I do, I get a note a few weeks later with the question, “How did I ever live with this?” Evernote is among those services.

In a nutshell, Evernote is a Web-based service that lets users create and organize notes that automatically sync across all their computers, smartphones and tablets. Despite its popularity on tech blogs, I still find a lot of people who have never heard of the service.

The beauty of Evernote is that everyone uses it in his or her own unique way. It can be used to house Web page clippings, store ideas as they come to you, keep recipes in order, hold to-do lists, make grocery lists, or perform any number of other functions.

http://evernote.com/

3. BlackBerry 10: Whether it ends up being RIM’s comeback catalyst or its last hurrah, BlackBerry 10 is going to be a big deal in 2013. Investors are excited, BlackBerry fans are excited, and we’re excited.

The show kicks off on January 30th and BGR will be there live to cover all the action as it unfolds.

http://global.blackberry.com/

4. Outgrow.me: Kickstarter and Indiegogo are great crowd-funding sites for entrepreneurs, but they’re also very trendy right now. For every awesome product on each site there are dozens of, well, not-so-awesome products.

Outgrow.me makes it easy to view the best products these two sites have to offer using a great design that is easy to navigate.

As an added bonus, Outgrow.me addresses one of the biggest problems among crowd-funded products. Since a lot of great (and well-funded) products don’t ship on time, the site has an option to only view items that are “orderable” today.

http://outgrow.me/

5. Windows Phone: Look, Microsoft (MSFT) has been giving it the old college try for more than two years now, but things are getting serious in 2013. Maybe.

Windows Phone 8 is a supercharged version of Microsoft’s initial reimagining of the smartphone experience. It’s faster, smoother, more versatile and it supports better hardware.

There are two great flagship Windows Phones on the market right now — Nokia’s Lumia 920 and HTC’s Windows Phone 8X — as well as a number of solid low- and mid-range options.

http://www.windowsphone.com/

6. Jawbone UP: Fitness gadgets are getting trendy now, but I’ve yet to see anything that looks more appealing than Jawbone’s second iteration of the “UP” bracelet.

The simple device is worn on your wrist at all times (it’s waterproof, so you can even shower with it) and it tracks your daily activity including your sleep. It’s paired with a fantastic app that features a gorgeous UI and plenty of great functionality.

UP’s companion app tracks your steps, calorie burn and sleep to create a “Lifeline.” You can also track the food you eat by scanning barcodes, taking pictures or inputting items manually, which helps you keep tabs on your calorie intake.

The kicker for the Jawbone UP over rivals is the fact that it doesn’t include wireless connectivity, believe it or not. Yes, that means you have to take the band off, pop the cap and connect it to your iPhone’s audio jack to sync, but it also means the battery lasts between nine and ten days on a charge.

UP is only compatible with iOS for the time being, but Jawbone says it’s working on an Android app.

http://jawbone.com/up

7. Republic Wireless: Did you know you can get unlimited smartphone service for $ 19 a month? Really, truly unlimited calling, messaging and data for $ 19 a month?

We’ve been testing Republic Wireless’ $ 19 unlimited smartphone service for several weeks now and so far we’re impressed. The service is not for power users — there’s only one smartphone available right now (Motorola’s Defy XT) and you won’t have access to 4G data speeds — but anyone looking for basic smartphone service at a ridiculously low price would be remiss to not give Republic Wireless a look.

http://www.republicwireless.com/

8. HTC: It’s time to get acquainted with the little smartphone vendor that could.

HTC (2498) took a beating in 2012 while Samsung and Apple grew bigger than most could have imagined. HTC might not have billions of marketing dollars to constantly slap consumers in the face with ads, but it has a ridiculously talented team that churns out one gorgeous smartphone after another.

With hardware that is second to none and handsets ranging from affordable low-end phones to premium flagship devices, HTC is a brand to watch in 2013.

http://htc.com/

9. Wirecutter: Founded by former Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, Wirecutter is “a list of great technology.”

The site is basically a gadget buying guide without the stomach-turning, Google-gaming, SEO machine aspect. Instead, it’s simply a collection of technology products the site’s staff enjoys. Imagine that!

Wirecutter is definitely a site worth checking out and this is a good place to start.

http://thewirecutter.com/

10. Skype: Sure, everyone knows about Skype on computers and smartphones. I never use it on either. Instead, there’s another aspect of Skype not everyone knows about: Home phone service.

Using compatible handsets, Skype can be set up to work just like any other VoIP home phone service. The only difference is that Skype is much, much cheaper than comparable offerings. Unlimited calling within the U.S. and Canada can be had for less than $ 2.60 a month plus $ 30 each year for a phone number.

In other words, a year of Skype service costs a little less than two months of Vonage or cable company phone service.

I’ve been using Skype for my home phone since last May and I couldn’t be happier. The quality is excellent, on par with similar offerings from Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, and the price can’t be beat.

I should note, though, that dealing with one of Skype’s retail partners — eBuyNow — was an awful, awful experience. They took forever to get back to me when one of my handsets died and after two months of trying to get a replacement, they just ended up refunding my entire purchase. If you choose Skype for home phone service, buy your handsets elsewhere.

http://skype.com/

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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