Tool Kit: Facebook’s Latest Mobile Interface Expands Features

The only thing constant about Facebook is that it keeps changing. Just when you think you’ve figured out the interface to the world’s biggest social network, the engineers there update it again.

For the 600 million or so people who use their smartphones to stay on top of Facebook friends, recent weeks have been especially anxiety-producing. Recognizing some time ago that for many mobile users their Facebook phone app is their primary or only way of access, the company unveiled a barrage of new features that bring the mobile apps in line with the desktop browser version of Facebook.

Facebook created new versions of its official apps for Android and Apple phones and revamped its mobile-optimized Web site, m.facebook.com, which works for most other smartphones. Facebook says the mobile site actually has more users than the Android and Apple apps combined.

Some new features are easy to spot. Friends’ posts now include a Share option so you can repost their updates, pictures and links to your own timeline. But other features are more subtle, and take some poking around to figure out. I’m here to help.

The most significant change to Facebook’s mobile apps is that the News Feed, the real-time stream of updates from your Facebook friends, now provides the same sorting options as the desktop version: Top Stories and Most Recent. If you go a while without logging in, the app will set the sorting to Top Stories, which floats the updates from the friends with whom you interact the most to the top of the feed. If you’d rather see posts sorted with the newest always on top, tap the gear icon next to News Feed on the app’s main left-hand menu. (It can take a little practice to tap the gear rather than another control.) A menu will pop up that lets you choose your sorting preference.

Your photos now have a Make Profile Picture option, so you don’t need to go back to a full-size computer to turn a photo taken on your phone into your identifying image. With an iPhone, press and hold the picture to bring up the command; in Android phones, it’s an option in the overflow menu.

Facebook has also built its chat function into the mobile apps. Rather than the e-mail-like Message utility, Chat is designed for conversations in which both parties tap back and forth at the same time. To start a chat session, tap the human-silhouette icon in the upper right corner of the app. That will bring up a list of your friends who are available right now to start a chat session, either on their phones (indicated by a phone icon) or on their desktops (indicated by a green dot). There’s a Favorites list you can edit to list only the friends you message most, so you don’t have to pore through your entire list of available friends to find them every time.

Do you upload lots of photos to Facebook from your smartphone? You have two new options. First, you can now select more than one photo by tapping, to upload them together. You can also configure the app to automatically upload every image you shoot to a private album from which you can later share them with a couple of taps. To turn on this feature, called Photo Sync, go to your timeline and tap your Photos icon.

At the bottom right, look for the Synced button. Tap this, and the app will walk you through configuration of Photo Sync. Once you’ve enabled it, tapping Synced will display those photos that have been auto-uploaded from your phone to your account. You can choose at your leisure which ones to share, and they will be posted to your Facebook timeline instantly, rather than requiring you to wait through the upload process for each one separately as you go.

There are several new features for mobile status updates, too. You can tag friends in a post, just as on the desktop version of Facebook. Begin typing a friend’s name as it appears on a Facebook account, and the app will produce a list of friends’ names that match what you’re writing. Select the name, and Facebook will insert a blue link to the friend’s own page and also alert the subject.

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With a Mall Boom in Russia, Property Investors Go Shopping

MOSCOW — Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof.

While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis.

“I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall.

Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid $1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg.

One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall’s seven-acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space.

A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America.

As American malls dodder into old age, gaptoothed with vacancies, Russia’s shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages.

“It’s 1982 all over again in Russia,” said Lee Timmins, the country representative of Hines, a Texas-based real estate group that is opening three outlet malls in Russia, referring to the heyday of the American mall experience. Russians, he said, love malls.

The mall boom illustrates an extraordinarily important theme in Russian economics these days. The growing crowds at malls, and the keen interest in Russian malls on the part of Wall Street banks, are signs that the emerging middle class that made up the street protests against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last winter is becoming a force in business as well as politics.

Investors, who with money at stake are a bellwether of the new trends, are not waiting for the next round of protests; they are already placing bets on the rise of a broad affluent class in Russia.

“Over the past 10 years, Russia has turned into a middle-class country,” Charles Slater, a retail analyst at Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate consulting firm, said in an interview. “What better to do than go to an enclosed, warm environment with many things on offer, whether that be bowling, cinema or food courts, things the customers have not been used to in the past?”

Moscow now has 82 malls, including two of the largest in Europe, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York-based trade association. Both are owned by Ikea Shopping Centers Russia, the branch of the Swedish assemble-it-yourself furniture franchise that manages 14 malls here. In Russia, malls are still novel; the first Western-style suburban mall opened in 2000. They are now changing hands as developers sell to institutional investors, like Morgan Stanley, shedding light for the first time on their eye-popping values.

At the core of the attraction for investors is the rising disposable income of Russians, nudged along by policies favoring the middle class, lest their challenge to President Putin’s rule intensify.

Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post-Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized.

Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers. Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases, a category that includes food, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consulting firm. The country in second place in Europe is Sweden, where retailing accounts for 40 percent of total private spending. Germans, by comparison, spend 28 percent of their salaries shopping, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

Malls, where the secrets of Western capitalism were finally peeled open and laid bare, with fast food, clothes, ice rinks, electronics and appliances wherever the eye falls, have mesmerized shoppers here — much as they did in their early years in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Olga N. Zaitsova, 55, who was in the Mega Belaya Dacha mall with her granddaughter Anastasia, said she came every weekend, drawn by the warm play area for toddlers. “It’s just not comfortable to be outside when it’s so cold,” she said.

When she shops, she said, “now we buy things we want, not things we need.”

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9 Apps to Fast-Track Your New Years’ Resolutions

Whether your goal in 2013 is to lose five pounds, manage your finances, or spend more time with friends and family, there are a growing number of apps that fall into the self-help category and can assist you in accomplishing these resolutions.

At Mashable we’ve tested a lot of them out, but we’re still always hearing about new ones. There are a ton of fitness and health apps to chose from, but you might be pleasantly surprised to know they’re not all about weight loss. A device and app called Tinke monitors your stress levels and how deeply you’re breathing. An app called Fig will remind you to drink more water, skip fried foods and take breaks at work to keep you feeling good. Arianna Huffington also released an app called, “GPS for the Soul” that focuses on wellbeing.

[More from Mashable: Time Machine App Transports You Back to 2012]

Other apps can help you organize your social life, make new friends or save money for a vacation.

We’ve compiled a list of apps that can help you accomplish all sorts of goals this year. Check it out and let us know if we missed any that you plan on using in 2013.

[More from Mashable: It’s Easy to Save Videos From Facebook Poke Permanently]

OurGroceries

If you’re trying to eat out less and cook at home more often, make sure you always have a current grocery list at your fingertips. Mashable wrote about several grocery list apps this year. The standout seems to be OurGroceries for Android and iOS. If you have roommates or a significant other, everyone can download the app and sync lists. That way if you’re making a quick after-work trip to the grocery store you’ll not only be able to see the items you added, but also see what they’ve added, too.

Click here to view this gallery.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, hocus-focus

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Governor to sue NCAA over Penn State sanctions

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Gov. Tom Corbett said Tuesday he plans to sue the NCAA in federal court over stiff sanctions imposed against Penn State University in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal.

The Republican governor scheduled a Wednesday news conference on the Penn State campus in State College to announce the antitrust filing in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg.

The sanctions, which were agreed to by the university in July, included a $60 million fine that would be used nationally to finance child abuse prevention grants. The sanctions also included a four-year bowl game ban for the university's marquee football program, reduced football scholarships and the forfeiture of 112 wins but didn't include a suspension of the football program, the so-called death penalty.

The governor's office announced the news conference late Tuesday afternoon. His spokesman did not respond to repeated calls and emails seeking to confirm a Sports Illustrated story that cited anonymous sources saying a lawsuit was imminent.

Corbett's brief statement did not indicate whether his office coordinated its legal strategy with state Attorney General-elect Kathleen Kane, who is scheduled to be sworn in Jan. 15.

Kane, a Democrat, ran on a vow to investigate why it took state prosecutors nearly three years to charge Sandusky, an assistant under former football coach Joe Paterno. Corbett was the attorney general when that office took over the case in early 2009 and until he became governor in January 2011.

State and congressional lawmakers from Pennsylvania have objected to using the Penn State fine to finance activities in other states. Penn State has already made the first $12 million payment, and an NCAA task force is deciding how it should be spent.

The NCAA, which did not respond to calls seeking comment Tuesday, has said at least a quarter of the money would be spent in Pennsylvania.

Republican U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent called that an "unacceptable and unsatisfactory" response by the NCAA to a request from the state's U.S. House delegation that the whole $60 million be distributed to causes within the state.

Last week, state Sen. Jake Corman, a Republican whose district includes Penn State's main campus, said he plans to seek court action barring any of the first $12 million from being released to groups outside the state.

Sandusky, 68, was convicted in June on charges he sexually abused 10 boys, some on Penn State's campus. He's serving a 30- to 60-year state prison term.

Eight young men testified against him, describing a range of abuse they said went from grooming and manipulation to fondling, oral sex and anal rape when they were boys.

Sandusky did not testify at his trial but has maintained his innocence, acknowledging he showered with boys but insisting he never molested them.

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Study Suggests Lower Mortality Risk for Overweight People

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 ‘co-eds’ ” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today’s medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,’ ” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of “normal” B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

“Fat per se is not as bad as we thought,” said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine.

“What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly,” he said. “Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad.”

He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if “being overweight doesn’t increase your risk of dying,” Dr. Klein said, it “does increase your risk of having diabetes” or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose “physical makeup there is not a single defect,” the Times article said.

This woman who “has never been ill and doesn’t know what fear is” loved sports and didn’t consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

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With a Mall Boom in Russia, Property Investors Go Shopping

MOSCOW — Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof.

While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis.

“I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall.

Instead of bread lines, Russia is known these days for malls. They are booming businesses, drawing investments from sovereign wealth funds and Wall Street banks, most recently Morgan Stanley, which paid $1.1 billion a year ago for a single mall in St. Petersburg.

One mall, called Vegas, rose out of a cucumber field on the edge of Moscow and became, its owners say, larger than the Mall of America if the American mall’s seven-acre amusement park is not counted in the calculation of floor space.

A few offramps away on the Moscow beltway, another mall scored a different kind of victory: the Mega Tyoply Stan shopping center drew 57 million visitors at its peak in 2007, well ahead of the 40 million annual visits reported by the Mall of America.

As American malls dodder into old age, gaptoothed with vacancies, Russia’s shopping centers are just now blossoming into their boom years, nourished by oil exports that are lifting wages.

“It’s 1982 all over again in Russia,” said Lee Timmins, the country representative of Hines, a Texas-based real estate group that is opening three outlet malls in Russia, referring to the heyday of the American mall experience. Russians, he said, love malls.

The mall boom illustrates an extraordinarily important theme in Russian economics these days. The growing crowds at malls, and the keen interest in Russian malls on the part of Wall Street banks, are signs that the emerging middle class that made up the street protests against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last winter is becoming a force in business as well as politics.

Investors, who with money at stake are a bellwether of the new trends, are not waiting for the next round of protests; they are already placing bets on the rise of a broad affluent class in Russia.

“Over the past 10 years, Russia has turned into a middle-class country,” Charles Slater, a retail analyst at Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate consulting firm, said in an interview. “What better to do than go to an enclosed, warm environment with many things on offer, whether that be bowling, cinema or food courts, things the customers have not been used to in the past?”

Moscow now has 82 malls, including two of the largest in Europe, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York-based trade association. Both are owned by Ikea Shopping Centers Russia, the branch of the Swedish assemble-it-yourself furniture franchise that manages 14 malls here. In Russia, malls are still novel; the first Western-style suburban mall opened in 2000. They are now changing hands as developers sell to institutional investors, like Morgan Stanley, shedding light for the first time on their eye-popping values.

At the core of the attraction for investors is the rising disposable income of Russians, nudged along by policies favoring the middle class, lest their challenge to President Putin’s rule intensify.

Russia has a flat 13 percent income tax rate. Most Russians own their homes, a legacy of post-Soviet privatizations, and so pay no mortgage or rent. Health care is socialized.

Not surprisingly, then, Russians have become fanatical shoppers. Russians spend 60 percent of their pretax income on retail purchases, a category that includes food, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consulting firm. The country in second place in Europe is Sweden, where retailing accounts for 40 percent of total private spending. Germans, by comparison, spend 28 percent of their salaries shopping, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

Malls, where the secrets of Western capitalism were finally peeled open and laid bare, with fast food, clothes, ice rinks, electronics and appliances wherever the eye falls, have mesmerized shoppers here — much as they did in their early years in the United States, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Olga N. Zaitsova, 55, who was in the Mega Belaya Dacha mall with her granddaughter Anastasia, said she came every weekend, drawn by the warm play area for toddlers. “It’s just not comfortable to be outside when it’s so cold,” she said.

When she shops, she said, “now we buy things we want, not things we need.”

Read More..

Residents Flee Bangui, Capital of Central African Republic

Sia Kambou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Soldiers from Congo arrived at Central African Republic's capital Bangui Monday.

JOHANNESBURG — As efforts to broker a deal to stop a rebel advance failed, residents of the capital of the Central African Republic were packing up their belongings and fleeing into the country’s vast hinterlands, fearing a major battle between government troops and guerrilla fighters.

Rebels rejected an offer from the country’s president, François Bozizé. It was brokered by the African Union and proposed forming a government of national unity. But the rebels balked, saying that previous agreements with the president had been made and quickly broken.

“Bozizé speaks, but does not keep his word,” said a rebel spokesman, Juma Narkoyo. “That is why we have taken up arms to make our voices heard.”

The rebel coalition, known as Seleka, is made up of several groups of fighters opposed to the government of Mr. Bozizé, who came to power after a brief civil war in 2003 and has had a tenuous grip on the presidency ever since, winning two elections but facing a constant threat of rebellions aimed at toppling him.

The Seleka rebels say that Mr. Bozizé has not lived up to the terms of a peace agreement signed in 2007. Mr. Narkoyo said the rebels had no plans to seize the capital, Bangui, but in the past they have advanced despite claims that they would stay put.

Government officials, meanwhile, said that the rebels were not actually from the Central African Republic, but were instead foreign provocateurs bent on destabilizing one of the most fragile nations in Africa in order to exploit its mineral wealth.

“They are Chadians, Sudanese and Nigerians,” said Louis Oguéré Ngaïkouma, secretary general of Mr. Bozizé’s political party. “It is a conspiracy against the people of the Central African Republic and its president to steal our riches.”

Suspicion of one’s neighbors is no idle thing in this part of Africa, where local wars often become wider conflagrations. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which lies to the south of the Central African Republic, has been caught up in one of the deadliest conflicts of the last half-century as Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese troops fought over the country’s bounty of diamonds, coltan and tin.

War in Sudan, which lies north of the Central African Republic, has also spilled over into its neighbors, especially Chad, which also borders the Central African Republic.

Hugues Kossi, a college student in Bangui, said he feared all-out war in his city.

“I am afraid of combat and stray bullets,” he said. But he said he was also tired of the poverty and misrule of Mr. Bozizé’s government.

“It is bad governance that has led us to this situation,” Mr. Kossi said.

The United States has closed its embassy in Bangui and evacuated its staff members. The French government has said it will not help Mr. Bozizé fight the rebels, but that it has deployed an extra contingent of soldiers from a neighboring country to help protect French citizens.

Christian Panika contributed reporting from Bangui, Central African Republic.

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Redskins win NFC East, Broncos get top seed in AFC

RG3 and the Washington Redskins are heading to the playoffs as NFC East champions.

By winning their seventh straight game, the Redskins rolled to their first division title in 13 years with a 28-18 victory over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night. Next up for Robert Griffin III & Co.: a home playoff matchup next Sunday with the Seahawks — the third straight postseason game for Washington against Seattle.

"It's just a mindset change," the rookie quarterback said. "When you have all these guys coming to work every day, putting it on the line, we knew we couldn't afford to lose one game, we made sure we didn't"

Thanks to Houston's late-season slump, Denver and New England will have byes when the AFC playoffs begin next week.

The Texans fell from first to third in the conference Sunday when they lost 28-16 at Indianapolis, which welcomed back coach Chuck Pagano after nearly three months of treatments for leukemia.

AFC West champion Denver won its 11th straight game, 38-3 over Kansas City to secure the top seed. New England blanked Miami 28-0 for the second spot.

Minnesota edged Green Bay 37-34 to grab the final NFC wild card, sinking the Packers to the third seed. Those teams will meet again next Saturday night at Lambeau Field.

The other NFC matchup will have Seattle (11-5), which beat St. Louis 20-13, at Washington on Sunday at 4:30 p.m. ET.

Cincinnati (10-6) will be at Houston on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. ET, and Indianapolis (11-5) goes to at Baltimore (10-6) on Sunday at 1 p.m. in the AFC wild-card rounds.

The divisional round games will be hosted by Denver on Saturday, Jan. 12, followed by San Francisco (11-4-1) at night. On Sunday, Jan. 13, Atlanta (13-3) will host the early game, followed by New England (12-4).

Peyton Manning threw for three touchdowns as Denver (13-3) routed the Chiefs. New England got the second seed despite having the same record as Houston because it beat the Texans, who lost three of their final four games.

Adrian Peterson had 199 yards against the Packers, finishing with 2,097 — Dickerson's single-season rushing mark in 2,105. But it was rookie kicker Blair Walsh who won it with a 29-yard field goal as time expired.

"Ultimately we got the 'W,'" Peterson said. "I told myself to come into this game focused on one thing, and that's winning."

Green Bay would have been seeded second in the NFC by beating Minnesota.

"The road got a little tougher having to play on opening weekend, but we've got a home game and that's why you win the division," Aaron Rodgers said. "We get to go back home, and the game will be different. They won't have home-crowd advantage, and hopefully that will make a difference."

Baltimore Pro Bowl safety Ed Reed is looking forward to a reunion with Pagano. He wishes it would come a little later in the postseason.

"Chuck's like a dad to me," Reed said "He means a lot to me. I would have much rather seen them in the AFC championship game than the first game."

But Reed will see him next week at Baltimore.

The Ravens had a chance to move up to the AFC's third seed with a win and a New England loss. But Baltimore lost at Cincinnati as both teams played backups for much of the game.

Pagano coached the Ravens' secondary for three seasons and was promoted to coordinator last year. Players and coaches in Baltimore have kept in touch, offering encouragement as he fought through the cancer treatments.

"Going back to Baltimore, obviously there's some familiarity there," Pagano said. "We had four great years there as a family. It's a top-notch organization, you know, really good football club. It's a great challenge and they have a great team and they have great players all over the place."

The Colts were 2-14 last season and chose quarterback Andrew Luck with the top selection in the draft. Luck and offensive coordinator Bruce Arians, who stepped in as interim coach with Pagano sidelined, led the turnaround.

Next week, Pagano goes up against former boss John Harbaugh.

"I love his family, and he's one of my closest personal friends in coaching," Harbaugh said. "What he's been through is phenomenal, but we're all competitors so that gets set aside."

Houston beat Cincinnati in the opening round of last year's playoffs.

"I think it will be good," said Bengals QB Andy Dalton, who grew up in suburban Houston. "We played there last year and know the atmosphere and what it's going to be like. The experience last year will definitely help us."

The defending Super Bowl champion Giants are out of contention. When Chicago beat Detroit 26-24, the Giants (9-7) were eliminated, even though they routed Philadelphia 42-7.

"It hurts," said Eli Manning. "Each year you want to make the playoffs to give yourself an opportunity to win a championship; 9-7 last year was good enough. It wasn't good enough this year and we knew it wouldn't be."

Minnesota's win eliminated Chicago.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Big in 2012, but the Future Is Hazy for Bonds

The big story in the markets this year was not about stocks.

Americans sold off their stock mutual funds, the most popular way to invest in American companies, at the fastest clip since 2008, the year the financial crisis began. That occurred despite the fact that the stock market itself rose steadily; the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index ended the year up 13.4 percent.

Investors have been opting instead for the assumed safety of bonds. Money has been steadily flowing into mutual funds holding bonds of all sorts for the last four years, but the pace accelerated this year. The percentage of household investments in bonds shot up to 26 percent from 14 percent just five years ago, according to Morningstar.

Entering the new year, a growing number of professional investors are betting that the craze for bonds has gone too far, perhaps dangerously so, as has been evident in the headlines from the year-end reports from large investment firms. “Bond PAIN in 2013?” Wells Capital Management’s chief strategist asked. “Caution: Turn Ahead,” BlackRock analysts wrote. “The inflection year,” said Bank of America.

This is not the first time that analysts have forecast an end to the decades-long rally in bond values. But previously many of the voices predicting it were pessimists who believed that investors would sell off their bonds when they lost faith in the American government’s ability to pay back its bonds, forcing the government and many other bond issuers to pay higher interest rates. When interest rates rise, older bonds with lower interest rates are worth less.

While those previous forecasts have proved expensively wrong, this year the forecasters are being joined by many economic optimists who argue that a strengthening American economy is likely to make investors willing to embrace the risks involved in stocks, luring them out of bonds. The question, they say, is only how quickly it will happen.

“Mathematically, it’s next to impossible to get the kind of returns on bonds you’ve seen over the last few years,” said Kate Moore, the chief global equity strategist at Bank of America.

When the turn does ultimately come, it is likely to cause pain for at least some of the people who have been investing in bonds in recent years.

“You don’t want to be the last one out the door when the trends turn,” said Rebecca H. Patterson, the chief investment strategist at Bessemer Trust. “All good things come to an end and we want to make sure we’re in front of it.”

Most of the talk of investors shifting money from bonds into stocks relies first on the assumption that politicians in Washington are able to resolve the current impasse over the so-called fiscal cliff, the automatic spending cuts and tax increases that will go into effect if Congress and President Obama cannot come to an agreement, and the coming debate over the nation’s debt ceiling. If the political discord continues, it could renew investor attraction to the safety of bonds and put off any shift into stocks.

But a number of surveys suggest that professional investors are already starting to prepare for a change. Hedge funds polled by Bank of America said that they had more of their portfolio allocated to stocks than at any time since 2006.

All but one of the 13 bank strategists tracked by Birinyi Associates expects stock markets to rise in 2013. When 2012 began, the same strategists were predicting a downturn in share prices. Even among mutual fund investors, there are signs that the flows out of stocks and into bonds have been slowing down recently.

The preference for bonds has already been costly for retail investors. Over the last year, most types of American bonds have returned less than an investment in the S.&. P. 500. When inflation is factored in, the benchmark 10-year Treasury security is delivering negative returns.

But many investors are still rattled by the 2008 financial crisis and the turbulence in the stock markets since then, which have led to wild swings. Over the last five years, all major types of American bonds have done better than leading stock indexes.

The Federal Reserve has been engaged in an aggressive effort to buy bonds and drive down interest rates. The long term goal of that program is to encourage banks to lend money and to drive investors out of bonds. But in the meantime, falling interest rates have made bonds more attractive. The Fed has said it wants to keep rates low until 2015, though it could let them rise sooner if the economy picks up faster than expected. The 10-year Treasury hovered near 4 percent in recent years but has stayed below 2 percent for much of 2012.

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Afghan Army Deaths on the Rise

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government has hit a grim record in its quest to take over the country’s security from coalition forces: more than 1,000 soldiers died in 2012, a roughly 20 percent increase from 2011.

Though the Afghan Army’s death rates have outstripped those for international forces in recent years, the new figures show the widest margin yet, as more and more Afghan units have taken the field. International forces were reported to have lost about 400 soldiers in 2012, the lowest number since 2008.

The progress of the Afghan National Army in being able to fight the insurgency is crucial to the international coalition’s exit strategy as the formal end of NATO combat operations looms in 2014. Afghan officials say that Afghan forces now plan and lead 80 percent of combat operations across the country. And as the army has filled out its ranks, the number of those killed has risen as well. Since 2008, the number of enlisted soldiers has nearly tripled, to 195,000.

Depending on how one reads the numbers, the latest figures can be both hopeful and troubling. Inasmuch as the uptick in deaths indicates a more active role for the army, the data is encouraging: Afghan-led operations would be expected to result in more Afghan casualties, after all. But for some, the statistics also raise questions about whether the army is ready to take over control of the country’s security.

“These high figures send a message to Afghans as well as the international community that the Afghan security forces are not ready to take over and that we will witness even more severe casualties in the next couple of years,” said Jawid Kohistani, a military analyst based in Kabul. “The only thing preventing the Taliban from taking over a district or a province or carrying out more audacious attacks is the presence of foreign forces who are equipped with modern and advanced technology.”

Progress has been uneven on numerous fronts. Accidents make up a significant number of the Afghan Army deaths. Almost no units can operate without assistance from coalition forces. And defections and low re-enlistment rates are also troubling — the government has to replace about a third of its troops every year.

Even the Defense Ministry acknowledged weaknesses when announcing the updated figures Sunday. Gen. Zahir Azimi, the ministry’s spokesman, said that poor equipment and training left soldiers exposed. Homemade bombs and mines caused about 85 percent of the deaths this year, a figure he said would come down with proper equipment. Intelligence gathering is also a weak spot for the national army.

“We are still heavily relying on foreigners for our intelligence,” he said. “We are hopeful that by the end of 2014 our army is equipped with intelligence capabilities and equipment.”

Among other concerns the government must consider while building the army is how to keep soldiers from being killed by the Taliban. In recent weeks, the Taliban have mounted a campaign to kidnap and kill soldiers who are on leave from their jobs. On Saturday, the Taliban killed a soldier returning from vacation to his base in Laghman Province.

“They take soldiers out of their homes and brutally execute them,” General Azimi said. “Can anyone see even a small bit of respect for human rights?”

But if the general sounded somewhat chastened by the task ahead, commanders on the ground struck a more upbeat note about the future.

“The army is getting better every day and our soldiers will not face any problem next year,” said Gen. Zamarai, commander of the second brigade of the Afghan National Army in Paktika Province, who uses only one name. “As the foreign forces leave, the army is filling the districts and bases, and so far we have managed to provide tight security for the residents of the province.”

Farooq Jan Mangal contributed reporting from Khost Province, Afghanistan.

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