NHL-League and union resume separate mediation sessions

Jan 4 (Reuters) - The National Hockey League (NHL) and the union representing its locked-out players met separately with a U.S. federal mediator on Friday with a week to go before the deadline to reach a deal and salvage a shortened season.
The two sides met with a mediator in New York but there has been no decision on whether the league and union would hold face-to-face negotiations on Friday, according to a report on the NHL's website.
In addition to meeting separately with the mediator on Thursday, officials from the NHL and NHL Players' Association met together Thursday for small-group discussions on some key issues.
With half of the 2012-13 regular season already lost to the labor dispute, the NHL has set a Jan. 11 deadline for a new deal so that a shortened 48-game campaign could begin eight days later.
The lockout, which the league has said is costing it about $18-$20 million a day, began in mid-September when the previous collective bargaining agreement expired with both sides at odds over how to split the NHL's $3.3 billion in revenue.
The dispute, which follows a lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 campaign, is now centered around the salary cap number for the 2013-14 season, the pension fund and length of player contracts.

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Quadruple Amputee's New Hands

It's the simplest thing, the grasp of one hand in another. But Lindsay Ess will never see it that way, because her hands once belonged to someone else.
Growing up in Texas and Virginia, Lindsay, 29, was always one of the pretty girls. She went to college, did some modeling and started building a career in fashion, with an eye on producing fashion shows.
Then she lost her hands and feet.
Watch the full show in a special edition of "Nightline," "To Hold Again," TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC
When she was 24 years old, Lindsay had just graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University's well-regarded fashion program when she developed a blockage in her small intestine from Crohn's Disease. After having surgery to correct the problem, an infection took over and shut down her entire body. To save her life, doctors put her in a medically-induced coma. When she came out of the coma a month later, still in a haze, Lindsay said she knew something was wrong with her hands and feet.
"I would look down and I would see black, almost like a body that had decomposed," she said.
The infection had turned her extremities into dead tissue. Still sedated, Lindsay said she didn't realize what that meant at first.
"There was a period of time where they didn't tell me that they had to amputate, but somebody from the staff said, 'Oh honey, you know what they are going to do to your hands, right?' That's when I knew," she said.
After having her hands and feet amputated, Lindsay adapted. She learned how to drink from a cup, brush her teeth and even text on her cellphone with her arms, which were amputated just below the elbow.
"The most common questions I get are, 'How do you type,'" she said. "It's just like chicken-pecking."
PHOTOS: Lindsay Ess Gets New Hands
Despite her progress, Lindsay said she faced challenges being independent. Her mother, Judith Aronson, basically moved back into her daughter's life to provide basic care, including bathing, dressing and feeding. Having also lost her feet, Lindsay needed her mother to help put on her prosthetic legs.
"I've accepted the fact that my feet are gone, that's acceptable to me," Lindsay said. "My hands [are] not. It's still not. In my dreams I always have my hands."
Through her amputation recovery, Lindsay discovered a lot of things about herself, including that she felt better emotionally by not focusing on the life that was gone and how much she hated needing so much help but that she also truly depends on it.
"I'm such an independent person," she said. "But I'm also grateful that I have a mother like that, because what could I do?"
Lindsay said she found that her prosthetic arms were a struggle.
"These prosthetics are s---," she said. "I can't do anything with them. I can't do anything behind my head. They are heavy. They are made for men. They are claws, they are not feminine whatsoever."
For the next couple of years, Lindsay exercised diligently as part of the commitment she made to qualify for a hand transplant, which required her to be in shape. But the tough young woman now said she saw her body in a different way now.
"People used to turn and look at me when I walked down the street because of how beautiful I was," Lindsay said. "Now they turn and look at me because I'm in a wheelchair and have no hands and feet. The type of person that I was would be the type of person I would hate now. I used to care way too much about what I looked like. What does it matter what my hair looks like? What does it matter what I'm wearing so much?"
Lindsay had to wait for a donor. Dr. Scott Levin, her orthopedic surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said if was preferable if Lindsay's donor hands were female, and had a size and skin color that matched hers.
Waiting for a donor was the part that Lindsay said she found the most difficult.
"I hate thinking about that," she said. "I think that whoever's hands will be with purpose, not just used to look pretty." "In Lindsay's case, the hookup of the new hand is relying on her nerves growing into the new muscles from the donor," Levin said. "The nerves have to grow into those muscles, takes months, it can take a year."
And there is still the possibility that the surgery can fail.
"Failure means the part that doesn't survive and we have to re-amputate the transplant," Levin said. "That's failure."
For nearly 12 hours, two separate teams of surgeons, one dedicated to the left hand, the other to the right, worked to perform an operation so cutting-edge that it has been done more than 70 times worldwide in the past 15 years.
After the surgery, Lindsay was in a cocoon of bandages. Levin said the initial signs for recovery were good.
"This is more than we could ever hope for," he said. "Her blood pressure is good, all the parameters related to how to blood flow in and out of her new arms. This is, if you will, a picture perfect course so far."
Less than a month after her surgery, Lindsay was out of the ICU and working on a therapy regime. The skin color of her new hands and arms wasn't exactly the same as her upper arms. They still looked like they belonged to someone else.
"The first couple of days I refused to look at them," Lindsay said. "It was kind of like one of those scary movie moments. I'm too scared to look because it's reality [but] I'm so grateful to have them that I just don't really think about it superficially."
Four months after her surgery, in January 2012, Lindsay's doctors said they continued to be amazed at her recovery. They said they didn't expect her to have fine motion control for another 12 to 18 months, but her muscles were reacting well. She could even pick up lightweight objects.
In February, Lindsey was allowed to go home for the first time since the surgery five months before. Levin said the prognosis for both hands couldn't be better. Even so, rejection was still a huge concern.
Tune into a special edition of "Nightline," "To Hold Again," TONIGHT at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC to find out what happens to Lindsay and how she moves forward.

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How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: The Value of Creativity and Imagination [Excerpt]

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright (C) 2013 by Maria Konnikova.
"It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science," Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but "it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition."
Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new.
In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days you'd likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you'd probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, you'd be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.
Dick Fosbury, however, didn't think so. All through high school, he'd been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn't sure why he did it. He didn't care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they thought he would (and his inspirations sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked about his approach, he told Sports Illustrated, "I don't even think about the high jump. It's positive thinking. I just let it happen"). Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympic team--let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American and Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.
With his unprecedented technique, dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978 no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn't anyone thought of replacing it earlier?
Fosbury wasn't even a particularly talented jumper. It was all in the approach. Imagination allows us to see things that aren't so, be it a dead man who is actually alive or a way of jumping that, while backward, couldn't be more forward looking.
Keep Your Distance
One of the most important ways to facilitate imaginative thinking is through distance. In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," a case that comes quite late in the Holmes-Watson partnership, Watson observes:
One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. I remember that during the whole of that memorable day he lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. For my own part I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence appeared to be interminable.
Forcing your mind to take a step back is a tough thing to do. It seems counterintuitive to walk away from a problem that you want to solve. But in reality, the characteristic is not so remarkable either for Holmes or for individuals who are deep thinkers. The fact that it is remarkable for Watson (and that he self-admittedly lacks the skill) goes a long way to explaining why he so often fails when Holmes succeeds.
Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.
Trope posits that the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider. Conversely, as we move closer once more, our thoughts become more concrete, more specific, more practical--and the closer we remain to our egocentric view, the smaller and more limited the picture that confronts us. Our level of construal influences, in turn, how we evaluate a situation and how we ultimately choose to interact with it. It affects our decisions and our ability to solve problems.
In essence, psychological distance accomplishes one major thing: it engages System Holmes. It forces quiet reflection. Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control. Children who use psychological distancing techniques (for example, visualizing marshmallows as puffy clouds) are better able to delay gratification and hold out for a larger later reward. Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity. Individuals who employ distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of their more immersed counterparts. And those who take a distanced view of political questions tend to emerge with evaluations that are better able to stand the test of time.

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Copying common in electronic medical records

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Most doctors copy and paste old, potentially out-of-date information into patients' electronic records, according to a new study looking at a shortcut that some experts fear could lead to miscommunication and medical errors.
"The electronic medical record was meant to make the process of documentation easier, but I think it's perpetuated copying," said lead author Dr. Daryl Thornton, assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Electronic health records have been touted as having the potential to transform patient data from indecipherable scribbles into easy-to-read, searchable, standardized documents that could be shared among hospital staffers and a patient's various other health care providers.
In 2011, the U.S. government started giving financial incentives to hospitals for adopting electronic medical recordkeeping. Those incentives will expire in 2015.
Many electronic recordkeeping systems allow text to be copied and pasted from previous notes and other documents, a shortcut that could help time-crunched doctors but that could also cause mistakes to be passed along or medical records to become indecipherable, critics argue.
To see how much information in patient records came from copying, Thornton's team examined 2,068 electronic patient progress reports created by 62 residents and 11 attending physicians in the intensive care unit of a Cleveland hospital.
Progress notes are typically shared among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff and are meant to document the progression of a patient's tests and treatments.
Using plagiarism-detection software, the researchers analyzed five months' worth of progress notes for 135 patients.
They found that 82 percent of residents' notes and 74 percent of attending physicians' notes included 20 percent or more copied and pasted material from the patients' records.
In their report, published in Critical Care Medicine, Thornton and his colleagues did not examine what motivated physicians and residents to copy and paste, or whether the shortcut affected patient care.
In one case, though, Thornton told Reuters Health, a patient left the ICU and was readmitted a couple of days later. The patient's medical record included so much copied and pasted information, the new team of doctors wasn't able to decipher the original diagnosis. In the end, the new team called the physicians who originally diagnosed the patient.
Nothing about a patient - length of stay, gender, age, race or ethnicity, what brought them into the ICU or how severely ill they were - affected how often a physician copied information into the medical record.
Although residents' notes more often included copied material, attending physicians tended to copy more material between notes. They also tended to copy more of their own assessments from other notes.
Experts suggested that copying signifies a shift in how doctors use notes - away from being a means of communication among fellow healthcare providers and toward being a barrage of data to document billing.
"What tends to get missing is the narrative - what's the patient's story?" said Dr. Michael Barr, senior vice president in the Division of Medical Practice, Professionalism and Quality at the American College of Physicians. Barr was not involved in the current study.
In an unrelated editorial published this week in The Journal of Urology, Dr. Deborah Erickson points out that summarizing a patient's history at the start of notes is longstanding tradition, and it's just as easy to carry forward an error in handwritten or dictated notes as in electronic records.
Erickson worries more that repeatedly copying and pasting large chunks of text, possibly along with images and other records, will result in "a long, rambling note that does not make clear points." Moreover, for a physician's own thinking process, she writes, "It is much better for each day's note to synthesize and interpret the prior data, leaving out old information that is no longer relevant."
"If your communication isn't accurate, timely, complete and factual, then you really could be transmitting bad information forward that then creates this tumbling effect," said Ann Gaffey, president of Healthcare Risk and Safety Strategies, a consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia.
In her own study, Gaffey found copying and pasting to be common in over 50 physician practices that use five different electronic medical record programs.
Part of the problem is that doctors may not have the time to fully learn the new medical recording systems and may resort to short cuts, said Gaffey, who was not involved in the current research.
Ellen Balka, medical communications professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, cautioned that copying might not lead to poor care for patients.
"In general, physicians want to provide good care," Balka, who was not involved in the current study, told Reuters Health. "If they're engaging in a practice like copying, there must be a reason for it.

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Despite repeated sellouts, Nexus 4 sales estimated to total just 375,000 units

Google’s (GOOG) has had trouble keeping latest Nexus-branded smartphone, the LG (066570)-built Nexus 4, in stock as hordes of Android fans would swarm Google’s website each time more units became available. According to new estimates however, the Nexus 4 stock-outs were due entirely to inventory issues rather than immense demand. The xda-developers community has done some calculations based on data gleaned from device serial numbers. They have been able to determine where and when their Nexus 4 handsets were built, and they were also able to estimate the total number of units sold to date: 375,000. While the figure is hardly precise, it appears as though sound logic was used to calculate the figure and it likely represents a good rough sales estimate.

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Microsoft’s huge R&D budget is useless if its best ideas are poorly executed or never released

PC World’s Matt Smith has a lengthy article highlighting all of Microsoft’s (MSFT) coolest research projects to show that, contrary to popular opinion, the company is a fountain of research and innovation. And Microsoft’s R&D team really is working on some cool stuff, including interactive displays that can be projected directly onto your arm and a “Magic Wall” that brings to mind the holodeck from Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship. But as I was looking through all of these cool projects I thought to myself, “What are the chances that Microsoft will release them for public consumption in a timely manner, or that they will be well executed on the first go-round?” Given the company’s recent history the answer is sadly, “Pretty low.”
[More from BGR: Samsung confirms plan to begin inching away from Android]
Look, for example, at the case of tablets. Microsoft had been messing around with tablets for several years before the iPad was ever released but they never caught on in the consumer market because they were always heavy and had poor battery life. An even bigger issue was that Microsoft wanted to make tablets act basically as full PCs that just happened to have touch screen capabilities, when in reality many consumers wanted tablets to act as portable computing devices that they could use for more basic tasks such as surfing the web or playing games.
[More from BGR: ‘iPhone 5S’ to reportedly launch by June with multiple color options and two different display sizes]
By the time Microsoft finally released a good tablet in late 2012, the market had already been well established by Apple’s (AAPL) iPad on the high-end and smaller Android-based tablets on the low-end. The fact that Microsoft decided to price its first tablet like an iPad more than two years after Apple established itself as the world’s top company for tablets only compounded its earlier mistakes.
To use a more forward-looking example, consider the Glass eyewear display that Google (GOOG) has been teasing for months. We know from patent filings that Microsoft has been working on something similar but the company itself hasn’t made a peep about it even as Google has given us some tantalizing demonstrations of the technology’s capabilities. What’s more, we know that Google plans on releasing Glass to developers in the first half of 2013 and we don’t even have any clue whether or not Microsoft’s eyewear project will ever make it out of the lab.
Why Microsoft never seems to get its best ideas ready for mass consumption in a timely manner is something of a mystery. Forbes‘ Roger Kay, for instance, speculates that Microsoft’s brutal employee performance review creates an atmosphere where “employees are afraid to do anything other than play palace politics in a descending spiral of shooting down each other’s projects.” Regardless, Microsoft’s enormous R&D budget hasn’t changed the fact that the company seems to get much less bang for its buck in terms of groundbreaking, innovative consumer technology than Apple and Google.

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Google chairman heading to North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — When he lands in North Korea, even Google's executive chairman will likely have to relinquish his smartphone, leaving him disconnected from the global information network he helped build.
Eric Schmidt is a staunch advocate of global Internet access and the power of Internet connectivity in lifting people out of poverty and political oppression. This month, he plans to travel to the country with the world's most restrictive Internet policies, where locals need government permission to interact with foreigners — in person, by phone or by email — and only a tiny portion of the elite class is connected to the Internet.
The visit may be a sign of Pyongyang's growing desire to engage with the outside world. North Korea's young leader, Kim Jong Un, talks about using science and technology to jumpstart the country's moribund economy, even if it means turning to experts from enemy nations for help.
In recent years, "North Korea has made a lot of investment in science and technology, not just for military purpose but also for the industry and practical reasons," said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at South Korea's Kyungnam University.
But the U.S. government Thursday voiced its opposition to the trip, saying the timing was "unhelpful." Last month, North Korea launched a long-range rocket in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Google's intentions in North Korea are not clear. Two people familiar with the plans told The Associated Press that the trip was a "private, humanitarian mission." They asked not to be named, saying the delegation has not made the trip public. Schmidt will be traveling with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a seasoned envoy, and Kun "Tony" Namkung, a Korea expert with long ties to North Korea.
"Perhaps the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," Victor Cha, an Asia expert who traveled to North Korea with Richardson in 2007, wrote in a blog post for the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
Kim Jong Un "clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life. If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development."
But this trip will probably be less about opening up North Korea's Internet than about discussing information technology, Lim said. North Korea may be more interested in Google services such as email and mapping, as well as software development, than in giving its people Internet access, he said.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that she did not know what Google might be planning in North Korea, but like all U.S. companies it would be subject to restrictions under U.S. law.
Kim Jong Un, who took power a year ago, has stressed the need to build North Korea's economy.
In the early 1970s, communist North Korea had the stronger economy of the two Koreas. But North Korea's economy stagnated in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the regime resisted the shift toward capitalism in the world around it.
By 2011, North Korea's national income per capita languished at about $1,200 while South Korea's was $23,467, according to the Bank of Korea in Seoul.
And as the Internet began connecting the world — a movement South Korea embraced — North Korea reinforced its moat of security. Travelers arriving in Pyongyang are ordered to leave their cellphones at the airport and all devices are checked for satellite communications. Foreigners and locals are required to seek permission before interacting — in person, by phone or by email.
However, leader Kim Jong Un declared Monday that North Korea is in the midst of a modern-day "industrial revolution." He is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory. More than 1.5 million people in North Korea now use cellphones with 3G technology.
But giving citizens open access to the Internet has not been part of the North's strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic Intranet service, only a select few have clearance to freely surf the World Wide Web.
Schmidt speaks frequently about the importance of providing people around the world with Internet access and technology.
As Google's chief executive for a decade until 2011, Schmidt oversaw Google's ascent from a small California startup focused on helping computer users search the Internet to a global technology giant. Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea's neighbors: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic Internet censorship.
After being accused of complying with China's strict Internet regulations, Google pulled its search business from the world's largest Internet market in 2010 by redirecting traffic from mainland China to Hong Kong.
In April, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a former U.S. State Department policy and planning adviser who heads Google's New York-based think tank, will publish a book about the Internet's role in shaping society called "The New Digital Age."
Son Jae-kwon, a visiting scholar at Stanford, compared Schmidt to Chung Ju-yung, the late founder of the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai who strode across the DMZ dividing the two Koreas with a pack of cattle in 1998.
But this time, it's computer technology, not cows.
"Internet is the cattle of the 21st century," Son said. "It is what North Korea needs most."
The Richardson-Schmidt trip comes at a delicate time politically. In December, North Korea defiantly shot a satellite into space on the back of a three-stage rocket, a launch Pyongyang has hailed as a major step in its quest for peaceful exploration of space.
Washington and others, however, decry it as a covert test of long-range ballistic missile technology designed to send a nuclear-tipped warhead as far as California. The U.N. Security Council quickly condemned the launch, and is deliberating whether to further punish Pyongyang for violating bans on developing its nuclear and missile programs.
The visit also follows North Korea's announcement that an American citizen has been jailed in Pyongyang on suspicion of committing "hostile" acts against the state. Richardson will try to address his detainment, the sources said.
State Department spokeswoman Nuland said Schmidt and Richardson would be traveling as private citizens and carrying no messages from Washington.
"We don't think the timing of the visit is helpful and they are well aware of our views," she told a news briefing.
Washington and Pyongyang do not have diplomatic relations. North Korea and the U.S. fought on opposite sides of the three-year Korean War before signing a truce in 1953.
However, North Korea has indicated interest in repairing relations with Washington.
In 2011, a group of North Korean economists and diplomats visited Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
And North Korean-affiliated agencies already use at least one Google product to get state propaganda out to the world: YouTube.

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Apple reportedly not looking to buy Waze after all

Despite earlier rumors that claimed a deal was in the works, CNET and TechCrunch are both reporting that Apple (AAPL) has no plans to acquire Waze. It was previously reported that Apple was considering a buyout of the social navigation startup in an effort to improve its widely-panned Maps application. A second report suggested that negotiations between the two companies were further along than once thought and that Waze was seeking a hefty $750 million payout from Apple. According to MG Siegler of TechCrunch, however, “there is no deal happening, at least not now or anytime soon.”

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Google settles on patents, other antitrust claims

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is pledging to license hundreds of key patents to mobile computing rivals under more reasonable terms and to curb the use of snippets from other websites in Internet search results in a settlement that ends a high-profile antitrust probe.
In a major victory for Google, the Federal Trade Commission unanimously concluded that there isn't enough evidence to support complaints that Google unfairly favors its own services in search results.
Thursday's announcement caps a 19-month antitrust investigation by the FTC over Google Inc.'s business practices.
The outcome "is good for consumers, it is good for competition, it is good for innovation and it is the right thing to do," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said.
Google is still trying to settle a similar antitrust probe in Europe. A resolution to that case is expected to come within the next few weeks.
The U.S. government's wide-ranging investigation ended with Google agreeing to charge "fair and reasonable" prices to license hundreds of patents deemed to be essential for mobile devices. Google makes the Android operating system that runs many phones, and the agreement ensures the key technologies can be used in Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and smartphones running on a Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. Those patents came as part of Google's $12.4 billion acquisition of device maker Motorola Mobility Holdings last May.
To placate regulators, Google also promised that upon request, it will exclude snippets copied from other websites in its summaries of key information, even though the company had insisted the practice is legal under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Despite the fair-use defense, Google already had scaled back on the amount of cribbing, or "scraping," of online content after business review site Yelp Inc. lodged one of the complaints that triggered the FTC investigation.
Under the FTC resolution, Google's rivals will now be able to request that their excerpts are left out of Google's search results without having to fear that links to their sites will be penalized in Google's search rankings.
In another concession, Google pledged to adjust the online advertising system that generates most of its revenue so marketing campaigns can be more easily managed on rival networks.
The FTC's investigation focused on allegations that Google has been abusing its dominance in Internet search.
Microsoft Corp. and other Google rivals say the search company has been highlighting its own services on its influential results page while burying the links to competing sites. Google has fiercely defended its right to recommend the websites that it believes are the most relevant. While the FTC said it uncovered some obvious instance of bias in Google's results during the investigation, the agency's five commissioners unanimously concluded there wasn't enough evidence to take legal action.
"Undoubtedly, Google took aggressive actions to gain advantage over rival search providers," said Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer that the FTC hired to help steer the investigation. "However, the FTC's mission is to protect competition, and not individual competitors."
The FTC's findings vindicated Google, which has depicted its methods as a more convenient way to capsulize key information so users can get the information they desire more quickly and concisely.
"The conclusion is clear: Google's services are good for users and good for competition," David Drummond, Google's top lawyer, wrote in a Thursday blog post.
Throughout the FTC investigation, Google executives also sought to debunk the notion that the company's recommendations are the final word on the Internet. They pointed out that consumers easily could go to Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo or other services to search for information. "Competition is just a click away," became as much of a Google mantra as the company's official motto: "Don't be evil."
The FTC's implicit endorsement of Google's approach to Internet search is a blow for Microsoft and other rivals who had lodged complaints with regulators in hopes of goading the government into taking legal action that would split up or at least hobble the Internet's most powerful company.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a technology trade group, applauded the FTC for its restraint.
"This was a prudent decision by the FTC that shows that antitrust enforcement, in the hands of responsible regulators, is sufficiently adaptable to the realities of the Internet age," said Ed Black, the group's president.
Microsoft didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But FairSearch, a group whose membership includes Microsoft, call the FTC's settlement "disappointing and premature," given that European regulators might be able to force Google to make more extensive changes. "The FTC's settlement is by no means the last word in this case," FairSearch asserted.
Yelp also criticized the FTC's handling of the case, calling "it a missed opportunity to protect innovation in the Internet economy, and the consumers and businesses that rely upon it."
Microsoft and its allies could still try to persuade the U.S. Justice Department to pick up the antitrust probe where the FTC left off. That's what happened in the 1990s the Justice Department took over wide-ranging investigation into Microsoft's dominant position in personal computer software after the FTC backed off.
The attorneys general in at least six states — California, Texas, New York, Ohio, Mississippi and Oklahoma — also have been examining whether Google's business practices throttled online competition. The status of those state inquiries is unclear.
Investors had already been anticipating Google would emerge from the inquiry relatively unscathed.
Google's stock rose 64 cents to $723.89 in afternoon trading Thursday. Microsoft shed 35 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $27.27.

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French panel overturns 75 percent tax on ultrarich

PARIS (AP) — Embattled French President Francois Hollande suffered a fresh setback Saturday when France's highest court threw out a plan to tax the ultrawealthy at a 75 percent rate, saying it was unfair.
In a stinging rebuke to one of Socialist Hollande's flagship campaign promises, the constitutional council ruled Saturday that the way the highly contentious tax was designed was unconstitutional. It was intended to hit incomes over €1 million ($1.32 million).
The largely symbolic measure would have only hit a tiny number of taxpayers and brought in an estimated €100 million to €300 million - an insignificant amount in the context of France's roughtly €85 billion deficit.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault was quick to respond, saying in a statement following the decision the government would resubmit the measure to take the court's concerns into account. The court's ruling took issue not with the size of the tax, but with the way it discriminated between households depending on how incomes were distributed among its members. A household with two earners each making under €1 million would be exempt from the tax, while one with one earner making €1.2 million would have to pay.
The French government approved the tax in its most recent budget, amid criticism by some that it would do little to stem the country's mounting fiscal problems and would drive away the wealthiest citizens. Hollande's popularity, meanwhile, has been tanking as the country's unemployment continued its rise for the 19th straight month.
In recent weeks, Gerard Depardieu — France's most famous actor — announced his intention to turn in his French passport and move to a village in a tax-friendly Belgium.

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