Soldier with new arms determined to be independent

BALTIMORE (AP) — After weeks of round-the-clock medical care, Brendan Marrocco insisted on rolling his own wheelchair into a news conference using his new transplanted arms. Then he brushed his hair to one side.

Such simple tasks would go unnoticed in most patients. But for Marrocco, who lost all four limbs while serving in Iraq, these little actions demonstrate how far he's come only six weeks after getting a double-arm transplant.

Wounded by a roadside bomb in 2009, the former soldier said he could get by without legs, but he hated living without arms.

"Not having arms takes so much away from you. Even your personality, you know. You talk with your hands. You do everything with your hands, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," the 26-year-old New Yorker told reporters Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Doctors don't want him using his new arms too much yet, but his gritty determination to regain independence was one of the chief reasons he was chosen to receive the surgery, which has been performed in the U.S. only seven times.

That's the message Marrocco said he has for other wounded soldiers.

"Just not to give up hope. You know, life always gets better, and you're still alive," he said. "And to be stubborn. There's a lot of people who will say you can't do something. Just be stubborn and do it anyway. Work your ass off and do it."

Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, head of the team that conducted the surgery, said the new arms could eventually provide much of the same function as his original arms and hands. Another double-arm transplant patient can now use chopsticks and tie his shoes.

Lee said Marrocco's recovery has been remarkable, and the transplant is helping to "restore physical and psychological well-being."

Tuesday's news conference was held to mark a milestone in his recovery — the day he was to be discharged from the hospital.

Next comes several years of rehabilitation, including physical therapy that is going to become more difficult as feeling returns to the arms.

Before the surgery, he had been living with his older brother in a specially equipped home on New York's Staten Island that had been built with the help of several charities. Shortly after moving in, he said it was "a relief to not have to rely on other people so much."

The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

"We'll get it back together. We've been through a lot worse than that," his father, Alex Marrocco, said.

For the next few months, Marrocco plans to live with his brother in an apartment near the hospital.

The former infantryman said he can already move the elbow on his left arm and rotate it a little bit, but there hasn't been much movement yet for his right arm, which was transplanted higher up.

Marrocco's mother, Michelle Marrocco, said he can't hug her yet, so he brushes his left arm against her face.

The first time he moved his left arm was a complete surprise, an involuntary motion while friends were visiting him in the hospital, he said.

"I had no idea what was going through my mind. I was with my friends, and it happened by accident," he recalled. "One of my friends said 'Did you do that on purpose?' And I didn't know I did it."

Marrocco's operation also involved a technical feat not tried in previous cases, Lee said in an interview after the news conference.

A small part of Marrocco's left forearm remained just below his elbow, and doctors transplanted a whole new forearm around and on top of it, then rewired nerves to serve the old and new muscles in that arm.

"We wanted to save his joint. In the unlucky event we would lose the transplant, we still wanted him to have the elbow joint," Lee said.

He also explained why leg transplants are not done for people missing those limbs — "it's not very practical." That's because nerves regrow at best about an inch a month, so it would be many years before a transplanted leg was useful.

Even if movement returned, a patient might lack sensation on the soles of the feet, which would be unsafe if the person stepped on sharp objects and couldn't feel the pain.

And unlike prosthetic arms and hands, which many patients find frustrating, the ones for legs are good. That makes the risks of a transplant not worth taking.

"It's premature" until there are better ways to help nerves regrow, Lee said.

Now Marrocco, who was the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War, is looking forward to getting behind the wheel of his black 2006 Dodge Charger and hand-cycling a marathon.

Asked if he could one day throw a football, Dr. Jaimie Shores said sure, but maybe not like Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco.

"Thanks for having faith in me," Marrocco interjected, drawing laughter from the crowd.

His mother said Marrocco has always been "a tough cookie."

"He's not changed that, and he's just taken it and made it an art form," Michelle Marrocco said. "He's never going to stop. He's going to be that boy I knew was going to be a pain in my butt forever. And he's going to show people how to live their lives."

___

Associated Press Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee and AP writer David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md., contributed to this report.

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California residents reflect national divide on immigration

ESCONDIDO, Calif. — Vincent Gazzara wants gun towers along the border and guards with orders to shoot.

"The point is some would have to lose their lives," said the 70-year-old retired administrator, who sings in his church choir. "But when they realized that they can't cross without being shot, they would stop."

Talk about boosting border security, albeit with less extreme measures, is common in Escondido, a working-class city in northern San Diego County, 40 miles from Mexico. But the decades-long patchwork of remedies to halt the flow of illegal immigrants has proved so frustrating that residents like Gazzara expressed qualified support for broad reforms such as those championed by President Obama in his immigration policy speech Tuesday.

They include a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States illegally as children and the possibility of legal status for millions of other undocumented immigrants, provided they pass a background check and meet other criteria.

An estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants live and work in California, embedded in such bulwarks of the state economy as agriculture and the service industry. The state's voters tilt toward Democrats for president, but in some regions elect conservative Republican congressmen — such as Darrell Issa (R-Vista), whose district includes Escondido, and Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). Their support will be key to getting any immigration plan through a fractious House of Representatives.

Immigration reform activists greeted Obama's speech with broad enthusiasm. The president was tackling nothing less than "a defining civil and human rights issue of our time," said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

But the mixed reactions of Californians suggest the fraught terrain legislators must navigate to bring an immigration reform bill to Obama's desk.

"Anyone applying for citizenship should pay a penalty," said Gazzara, the retired administrator. "If you don't respect our laws then you should pay the consequences."

Gazzara was getting a haircut at Del's Barber Shop in Escondido in the company of other self-described conservative Republicans, while immigrant women pushed baby strollers by the American flag that fluttered outside.

Escondido is one of the few cities in the country where immigration enforcement agents monitor and respond to police traffic stops, resulting in hundreds of deportation proceedings.

One passing woman, an illegal immigrant with three children who gave her name only as Maria, said she didn't drive in the city because she feared getting pulled over at a traffic checkpoint.

But she has common ground with the men in the barbershop, and with Obama's proposal, in calling for background checks.

"I tell my friends that everyone should get the opportunity to apply for citizenship, but there must be conditions," she said. "They can't be pushed through really fast. They need to check people's backgrounds thoroughly."

At El Gallo Giro restaurant in Huntington Park, a heavily Latino city, the tables and chairs reflect the colors of the Mexican flag, and the Virgin of Guadalupe has a shrine.

But only one man in the lunchtime crowd showed interest when Obama's speech came on the television Tuesday, interrupting a Spanish-language celebrity talk show.

Felipe Velasquez, 56, who came from Sinaloa, Mexico, said he crossed into the country illegally in the early 1980s. Years later he was among millions of immigrants who received amnesty in the last major overhaul of immigration law.

He applauded Obama's call for broader paths to citizenship. "People come here thinking it means a future. It's a fantasy," Velasquez said. "The only ones who do well are banks and big companies. The rest of us struggle all our lives to get ahead."

Further north in Kern County, a place both heavily Republican and heavily dependent on farm labor, reaction was mixed.

Randy Hubble, 55, a construction worker who was having lunch at Cope's Knotty Pine Cafe in Bakersfield, has clear views on what to do with the country's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants: "Put them on the bus, and put them back where they came from."

The local congressman, McCarthy, is a staunch conservative and the House majority whip, and he will alienate voters like Hubble if he supports Obama's plan.

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Hiroshi Nakajima, Leader of World Health Organization, Dies at 84

Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, a Japanese physician who as leader of the World Health Organization started campaigns to fight malaria and other infectious diseases but whose tenure, from 1988 to 1998, was marred by repeated accusations of mismanagement, died on Saturday in Poitiers, France. He was 84.

He died after a short illness, the organization said.

Besides his efforts to fight infectious diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis and dengue fever, Dr. Nakajima enlarged the organization’s focus on preventive medicine and vaccinations for children, and tried to rally international support to end ritual female genital mutilation. In a statement on Monday, Dr. Margaret Chan, the current W.H.O. director general, praised his efforts to defeat polio.

But he came under frequent criticism. The United States and other Western nations twice opposed his election as director general of the agency, which is part of the United Nations. They argued that he had not infused the agency with a clear sense of direction and had let its budget and bureaucracy balloon.

In 1992, when Washington was fighting Dr. Nakajima’s re-election, Louis W. Sullivan, the secretary of health and human services, wrote, “It appears that W.H.O. is losing its reputation as the world’s leader in health matters at a time when serious global health problems present daunting challenges to us all.”

Dr. Nakajima was again cast in a harsh light when Dr. Jonathan Mann, the widely respected commander of the United Nations’s fight against AIDS, resigned in 1990. In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Mann said he resigned over “issues of principle” and “major disagreements” with Dr. Nakajima, who wanted to de-emphasize AIDS prevention and put more effort into other diseases, like malaria.

Dr. June Osborn, chairwoman of the National Commission on AIDS, called the resignation of Dr. Mann, who died in 1998, “a world tragedy.”

In the 1992 director general election, the United States accused Japan of overly aggressive tactics in promoting Dr. Nakajima’s candidacy. The State Department said Japan had threatened to cut off fish imports from the Maldives and coffee imports from Jamaica if those countries did not support Dr. Nakajima. A spokesman for Japan’s Foreign Ministry denied the accusations.

There were also allegations that Japan had awarded research contracts to 23 of the 31 W.H.O executive board members who recommended Dr. Nakajima’s re-election. A W.H.O. audit found that the contracts — the largest of which was $150,000 — were technically legal but presented “a problem of ethics,” in the words of the board chairman, Jean-François Girard of France.

Dr. Nakajima defeated Dr. Mohammed Abdelmoumene of Algeria, who had been his deputy, in a 93-58 vote. It was the first time in the organization’s history that an incumbent director had been challenged by another W.H.O. official.

In 1997, Dr. Nakajima announced that he would not seek a third term, in part because he had lost support from African nations after he had explained the relative scarcity of Africans in executive positions at the agency by suggesting that Africans had difficulty conceptualizing and writing reports.

The Economist magazine said the remark “was particularly odd coming from Dr. Nakajima, who has himself been accused of quasi-incomprehensibility, even when he speaks Japanese.”

Dr. Nakajima was born in Chiba-shi, Japan, on May 16, 1928. He graduated from Tokyo Medical University in 1955, representing the 10th generation of his family to produce a doctor. After studying psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Paris, he returned to Tokyo Medical University to earn a Ph.D. in medical sciences. He then became research director for Nippon Roche, the Japanese subsidiary of Hoffmann-LaRoche.

Dr. Nakajima joined the W.H.O. in 1974, and worked to improve getting medical supplies to the third world. He helped develop the concept of “essential medicines,” drugs that satisfy the health care needs of most of a population. In 1979, the Western Pacific nations elected him regional director, and he served two terms.

Dr. Nakajima is survived by his wife, the former Martha Ann DeWitt, and two sons.

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His cat, his lunch and a high five: Harper’s day chronicled on Twitter

OTTAWA – One of the cardinal rules of social media: no one cares what you had for lunch. Unless, perhaps, you’re the prime minister.

The people behind Stephen Harper‘s Twitter account are using the first day of Parliament’s winter sitting to provide an intimate look at how the prime minister spends his day.

The posts include a video of Harper’s ride to work, photos of breakfast with his cat Stanley and a lunch that included fruit and a Diet Coke at his desk.

The behind-the-scenes look is the latest move by Harper’s team to bolster his presence on social media platforms.

Digital public affairs analyst Mark Blevis says it’s likely an effort to rebrand Harper in the lead-up to the next election, where he’ll face off against politicians far more adept online.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Soldier who lost 4 limbs has double-arm transplant

On Facebook, he describes himself as a "wounded warrior...very wounded."

Brendan Marrocco was the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War, and doctors revealed Monday that he's received a double-arm transplant.

Those new arms "already move a little," he tweeted a month after the operation.

Marrocco, a 26-year-old New Yorker, was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He had the transplant Dec. 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his father said Monday.

Alex Marrocco said his son does not want to talk with reporters until a news conference Tuesday at the hospital, but the younger Marrocco has repeatedly mentioned the transplant on Twitter and posted photos.

"Ohh yeah today has been one month since my surgery and they already move a little," Brendan Marrocco tweeted Jan. 18.

Responding to a tweet from NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski, he wrote: "dude I can't tell you how exciting this is for me. I feel like I finally get to start over."

The infantryman also received bone marrow from the same dead donor who supplied his new arms. That novel approach is aimed at helping his body accept the new limbs with minimal medication to prevent rejection.

The military sponsors operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Unlike a life-saving heart or liver transplant, limb transplants are aimed at improving quality of life, not extending it. Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs.

"He was the first quad amputee to survive," and there have been four others since then, Alex Marrocco said.

The Marroccos want to thank the donor's family for "making a selfless decision ... making a difference in Brendan's life," the father said.

Brendan Marrocco has been in public many times. During a July 4 visit last year to the Sept. 11 Memorial with other disabled soldiers, he said he had no regrets about his military service.

"I wouldn't change it in any way. ... I feel great. I'm still the same person," he said.

The 13-hour operation was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Johns Hopkins. It was the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant done in the United States.

Lee led three of those earlier operations when he worked at the University of Pittsburgh, including the only above-elbow transplant that had been done at the time, in 2010.

Marrocco's "was the most complicated one" so far, Lee said in an interview Monday. It will take more than a year to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new arms.

"The maximum speed is an inch a month for nerve regeneration," he explained. "We're easily looking at a couple years" until the full extent of recovery is known.

While at Pittsburgh, Lee pioneered the immune-suppression approach used for Marrocco. The surgeon led hand-transplant operations on five patients, giving them marrow from their donors in addition to the new limbs. All five recipients have done well, and four have been able to take just one anti-rejection drug instead of combination treatments most transplant patients receive.

Minimizing anti-rejection drugs is important because they have side effects and raise the risk of cancer over the long term. Those risks have limited the willingness of surgeons and patients to do more hand, arm and even face transplants.

Lee has received funding for his work from AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a cooperative research network of top hospitals and universities around the country that the government formed about five years ago. With government money, he and several other plastic surgeons around the country are preparing to do more face transplants, possibly using the new immune-suppression approach.

Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been fitted with prosthetic legs and had learned to walk on his own.

He had been living with his older brother in a specially equipped home on New York's Staten Island that had been built with the help of several charities. Shortly after moving in, he said it was "a relief to not have to rely on other people so much."

The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

Despite being in a lot of pain for some time after the operation, Marrocco showed a sense of humor, his father said. He had a hoarse voice from the tube that was in his throat during the long surgery and decided he sounded like Al Pacino. He soon started doing movie lines.

"He was making the nurses laugh," Alex Marrocco said.

___

Associated Press Writer Stephanie Nano in New York contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Army regenerative medicine:

http://www.afirm.mil/index.cfm?pageid=home

and http://www.afirm.mil/assets/documents/annual_report_2011.pdf

___

Follow Marilynn Marchione at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .

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Unarmed man killed by deputies was shot in the back, autopsy says

A Culver City man who was fatally shot by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies after a pursuit in November was struck by bullets five times in the back and once each in the right hip and right forearm, also from behind, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Times.

Jose de la Trinidad, a 36-year-old father of two, was killed Nov. 10 by deputies who believed he was reaching for a weapon after a pursuit. But a witness to the shooting said De la Trinidad, who was unarmed, was complying with deputies and had his hands above his head when he was shot.

Multiple law enforcement agencies are investigating the shooting.

De la Trinidad was shot five times in the upper and lower back, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's report dated Nov. 13. The report describes four of those wounds as fatal. He was also shot in the right forearm and right hip, with both shots entering from behind, the report found.

DOCUMENT: Jose de la Trinidad autopsy report

"Here's a man who complied, did what he was supposed to, and was gunned down by trigger-happy deputies," said Arnoldo Casillas, the family's attorney, who provided a copy of the autopsy report to The Times. He said he planned to sue the Sheriff's Department.

A sheriff's official declined to discuss specifics of the autopsy report because of the ongoing investigation. But he emphasized that the report's findings would be included in the department's determination of what happened that night.

"The sheriff and our department extend its condolences to the De la Trinidad" family, said Steve Whitmore, a sheriff's spokesman.

"Deadly force is always a last resort," he said. "The deputies involved were convinced that the public was in danger when they drew their weapons."

On Saturday, relatives of De la Trinidad and about 100 other people marched through the streets of Compton, shouting, "No justice, no peace! No killer police!"

His widow, Rosie de la Trinidad, joined the march with the couple's two young daughters.

"He was doing everything he was supposed to," she said of her husband, fighting back tears. "All we're asking for is justice."

Jose de la Trinidad was shot minutes after leaving his niece's quinceañera with his brother Francisco. He was riding in the passenger seat of his brother's car when deputies tried to pull them over for speeding about 10:20 p.m., authorities said. After a brief car chase, De la Trinidad got out of the car in the 1900 block of East 122nd Street in Compton and was shot by deputies.

The Sheriff's Department maintains that the deputies opened fire only after De la Trinidad appeared to reach for his waist, where he could have been concealing a weapon.

But a woman who witnessed the officer-involved shooting told investigators that De la Trinidad had complied with deputies' orders to stop running and put his hands on his head to surrender when two deputies shot him. The witness said she watched the shooting from her bedroom window across the street.

"I know what I saw," the witness, Estefani — who asked that her last name not be used — said at the time. "His hands were on his head when they started shooting."

According to the deputies' account: De la Trinidad jumped out of the passenger seat. His brother took off again in the car. One of the four deputies on the scene gave chase in his cruiser, leaving De la Trinidad on the sidewalk and three deputies standing in the street with their weapons drawn.

The deputies said De la Trinidad then appeared to reach for his waistband, prompting two of them to fire shots at him. The unarmed man died at the scene.

Unbeknown to the deputies at the time, Estefani watched the scene unfold from her bedroom window. A short while later, she told The Times, two sheriff's deputies canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses came to her door.

The deputies, she said, repeatedly asked her which direction De la Trinidad was facing, which she perceived as an attempt to get her to change her story.

"I told them, 'You're just trying to confuse me,' and then they stopped," she said. Authorities later interviewed Estefani a second time.

Whitmore said the two deputies involved in the shooting were assigned desk duties immediately after the incident but returned to patrol five days later. He said this was standard practice for deputies involved in shootings.

Although such investigations typically take months, Whitmore said the department has given special urgency to this case and hopes to complete its probe in a timely manner.

"We want to have answers about what happened that night soon rather than later," he said. "Even then, we know it doesn't change the grief the family is experiencing."

As with all deputy-involved shootings, De la Trinidad's killing is subject to investigation by the district attorney, the sheriff's homicide and internal affairs bureaus and the Sheriff's Executive Force Review Committee.

wesley.lowery@latimes.com

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Pentagon to Beef Up Cybersecurity Force to Counter Attacks

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving toward a major expansion of its cybersecurity force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries, defense officials said Sunday.

The expansion would increase the Defense Department’s Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900, an American official said. Defense officials acknowledged that a formidable challenge in the growth of the command would be finding, training and holding onto such a large number of qualified people.

The Pentagon “is constantly looking to recruit, train and retain world class cyberpersonnel,” a defense official said Sunday.

“The threat is real and we need to react to it,” said William J. Lynn III, a former deputy defense secretary who worked on the Pentagon’s cybersecurity strategy.

As part of the expansion, officials said the Pentagon was planning three different forces under Cyber Command: “national mission forces” to protect computer systems that support the nation’s power grid and critical infrastructure; “combat mission forces” to plan and execute attacks on adversaries; and “cyber protection forces” to secure the Pentagon’s computer systems.

The move, part of a push by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to bolster the Pentagon’s cyberoperations, was first reported on The Washington Post’s Web site.

In October, Mr. Panetta warned in dire terms that the United States was facing the possibility of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial network and government. He said that “an aggressor nation” or extremist group could cause a national catastrophe, and that he was reacting to increasing assertiveness and technological advances by the nation’s adversaries, which officials identified as China, Russia, Iran and militant groups.

Defense officials said that Mr. Panetta was particularly concerned about a computer attack last August on the state oil company Saudi Aramco, which infected and made useless more than 30,000 computers. In October, American intelligence officials said they were increasingly convinced that the Saudi attacks originated in Iran. They described an emerging shadow war of attacks and counterattacks already under way between the United States and Iran in cyberspace.

Among American officials, suspicion has focused on the “cybercorps” created in 2011 by Iran’s military, partly in response to American and Israeli cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment plan at Natanz. There is no hard evidence, however, that the attacks were sanctioned by the Iranian government.

The attacks emanating from Iran have inflicted only modest damage. Iran’s cyberwarfare capabilities are weaker than those of China and Russia, which intelligence officials believe are the sources of a significant number of attacks on American companies and government agencies.

The expansion of Cyber Command comes as the Pentagon is making cuts elsewhere, including in the size of its conventional armed forces.

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Vine Has a Porn Problem Because Of Course It Does

It’s actually pretty surprising that it took everyone three days to figure out that Twitter’s new cell phone camera-powered video sharing app, Vine, is perfect for porn. Vine has it all. It can record reasonably high quality videos of anything you want, on-the-go, and post it publicly for all the Internet to see. You add hashtags so that people can easily find special interest content. There’s even a little comments section so that you can share your thoughts about the distinctively addictive six-second loops. Heck, we’d be surprised if people didn’t immediately start to post pictures of their genitals doing what genitals do. They probably did, actually. Everyone else was just too busy watching pictures of their friends pets and children to notice.

RELATED: The Chinese Want to Know Why Their News Is on Twitter and They Aren’t

But alas, by Sunday everyone had noticed. Although it had already been mentioned on smaller tech blogs, the Vine porn problem started to become widely known after New York Times reporter Nick Bilton tweeted, “Friend: ‘So are people using Vine for porn yet?’ Me: “‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ Friend: ‘Check the hashtag #porn.” Both: “Holy ****!’” And the thing is, he’s totally right. TechCrunch published a post on the NSFW trick — #NSFW works for porn seekers, too, by the way — broaching the topic of Apple‘s App Store coming down hard on the adult-only content. It’s against the rules, see, and Apple has a history of yanking apps that become magnets for all things naughty. The Verge followed up a few minutes later with the headline, “Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about the get worse.”

RELATED: How Not to Get Censored on Twitter

This got us thinking: These App Store restrictions on pornographic content have been around as long as the App Store. Surely in the past five or so years, the moderators know a porn magnet when they see one. Vine is hardly the first video-sharing app to make it through the approval process, not to mention the many photo-sharing apps. (And Apple’s certainly not afraid of enforcing those rules, as we learned when it yanked the 500px app after it started to become home to “pornographic images and material.”) It’s no anomaly that Vine made through, though. As virtually every new video- or photo-sharing service has shown us since the dawn of the Internet, from Flickr to ChatRoulette, it’s very difficult to keep these sites or apps G-rated. So the companies either learn how to police it well, like Flickr does, or they wither and die, as ChatRoulette did.

RELATED: Twitter’s New Hashtag Project Sounds Risky

So it’s hard to believe that the App Store didn’t consider the fact that people might upload pictures of their penises to Vine. It’s more likely that they did and decided to see how Twitter would deal with it, when it became a problem. After all, Vine is not going to be the last video-sharing app to be built and it certainly won’t be the last porn-friendly app to be built either. So Twitter gets to play guinea pig and navigate the tricky terrain of moderating user-generated content in real time. It’s a good thing they already have a boatload of experience doing that on Twitter! See, look how fast they came up with a solution. A company statement reads:

RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter’s New Censorship Rules

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

Twitter being Twitter — that is, big proponents of the free flow of information — they stop short of defining “inappropriate” in Vine’s terms and conditions. Unlike Twitter, which has been free to operate on the whole of the Internet, however, Vine lives in Apple’s house now. If Twitter’s hands off policy doesn’t do enough to keep smut off the iPhone, Apple will surely pull the plug, and then, well — then we’ll be back to where we were last week.

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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How SAG Stars Got Their Start: Sofia Vergara Credits Her 'Hooker Looks'

Today, she's one of the world's sexiest stars. But Sofia Vergara wasn't quite as celebrated for her curves early in her career.

The Modern Family actress was among a handful of actors who kicked off Sunday's Screen Actors Guild Awards with personal stories about how they got started in the business. Vergara, 40, joked about her famous figure.

"I grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, in a very traditional Catholic home," she said. "My father told me that if I ever did anything artistic, I was going to look like a hooker. I told him, 'With these huge boobs that I inherited from your mother, I already look like a hooker!' "

30 Rock's Jane Krakowski had a little fun with Hollywood's reputation for having no use for aging women. At 12 years old, she said, she played Chevy Chase's niece in National Lampoon's Vacation. Krakowski, 44, added: "Today, I would be cast as his wife. In two years, I will play his mother."

Helen Hunt detailed the crazy variety of her roles – "I've played a waitress, a cuckoo clock, a quarterback and a sex surrogate" – while Alfre Woodard said she was surprised she became an actor at all, since she always had trouble remembering people's names.

Chris Tucker said he became "fascinated with the art" as a 9-year-old when he saw Richard Pryor in Stir Crazy.

For Hal Holbrook, the inspiration was simpler. He was lazy – and acting class didn't give you homework.

How They Officially Joined the Club

Other stars reflected specifically on the moment they got their SAG cards – a momentous moment for many, including Anne Hathaway, who mentioned it at the beginning of her speech in accepting the best supporting actress honor for her role in Les Misérables.

"I got my SAG card when I was 14," she said. "It felt like the beginning of the world. I have loved every single minute of my life as an actor. And I have been the recipient of so much kindness and support from actors in this room and out of it. ... Thank you for this award."

Jennifer Lawrence also mentioned getting a SAG card in her acceptance speech, when she won best actress for Silver Linings Playbook. Like Hathaway, Lawrence – who is now 22 – was 14 at the time.

"I want to thank MTV," she said. "I did an MTV promo for My Super Sweet 16. And I remember getting [the card] in the mail and it being the best day of my entire life because it officially made me a professional actor. Which put me in a category with all of you."

"And now I have this naked statue that means that some of you even voted for me," she added.

Like many actors, Twilight's Peter Facinelli and Modern Family's Ty Burrell both got their SAG cards working on Law & Order.

Facinelli, talking on the red carpet, said he dropped out of college after that. "I ran into [Law & Order creator] Dick Wolf. ... I said, 'I didn't get my diploma because of you, but I got my SAG card because of you." But, Facinelli doesn't regret not finishing school: "I was majoring in theater. It all worked out."

Burrell says he was "unmemorable" on the crime show, which allowed him to play different roles on different episodes. "Nobody noticed that now I was playing an assassin," he joked.

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CDC: Flu seems to level off except in the West

New government figures show that flu cases seem to be leveling off nationwide. Flu activity is declining in most regions although still rising in the West.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitalizations and deaths spiked again last week, especially among the elderly. The CDC says quick treatment with antiviral medicines is important, in particular for the very young or old. The season's first flu case resistant to treatment with Tamiflu was reported Friday.

Eight more children have died from the flu, bringing this season's total pediatric deaths to 37. About 100 children die in an average flu season.

There is still vaccine available although it may be hard to find. The CDC has a website that can help.

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CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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