The woman is clearly intoxicated and limp in her chair as Rivera moves her to the floor and assaults her. He is interrupted when the lights go back on and people re-enter the room. Rivera then props the woman back up in her chair and sits down beside her.

The footage is from December 20 but was recently made public after it was leaked to YouTube.

According to ABC.es, the guards who were on duty that night were dismissed after the incident, and the victim of Rivera's assault was given another post.

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Morales told an environmental conference that chicken producers inject the birds with female hormones "and because of that, men who consume them have problems being men." He also suggested eating too much chicken for too long could make men go bald.

Morales' warning may be out of date: Chicken producers in Europe, the United States and many other countries say they abandoned the use of hormones in poultry several decades ago and many if not most Western nations ban them outright.

The president also blasted Coca-Cola, saying, "It is harmful. ... Imagine what it contains."

Morales blamed "the west," a reference to industrial countries such as the U.S., which he said "bring us more and more poison."

The secret ingredient in Coca-Cola is widely rumored to be something Morales himself once grew as leader of a coca-producers union -- a version of the plant with the psychoactive substances removed.

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The past week has been full of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed economic optimism, and this latest news offers some of the strongest support yet for the pollyanna brigade. But there's a mystery here.

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Whitman's relationship with the giant Wall Street firm -- as investor, corporate director and recipient of both insider stock deals and campaign donations -- could pose conflicts of interest if the Republican front-runner is elected governor of California, critics say.

Goldman underwrites millions of dollars worth of California state bonds, is expected to be involved with the financing of a big water bond, and wants to get involved in California's nascent cap-and-trade market. However, if California voters do decide that they'd rather steer clear of the vampire squid's tentacles, they will find (cue fiendish cackle) that it's just not so simple. Democratic candidate (and former governor) Jerry Brown's sister, Kathleen Brown, is a Goldman executive in Los Angeles, report Williams and Marinucci. Steve Poizner, another GOP candidate, once borrowed $500,000 from Goldman when he ran for the state assembly a few years ago.

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Gov. Joe Manchin said crews entered the Upper Big Branch mine, about 30 miles south of Charleston, at 4:55 a.m. EDT and hoped to reach the area where they might find the missing miners sometime before noon.

"They are advancing," Manchin told an early morning news briefing. "They'll move as rapidly as they possibly can."

Rescuers had to wait to enter the mine until crews drilled holes deep into the earth to ventilate lethal carbon monoxide, highly explosive hydrogen, as well as methane gas, which has been blamed for the explosion. The air quality was deemed safe enough for four teams of eight members each to go on what officials were still calling a rescue mission.

Officials and townsfolk alike admitted they didn't expect to find any of the four missing miners alive more than two days after the massive explosion. Poisonous gases have filled the underground tunnels since Monday afternoon's blast

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Maybe it's because Congress is out of session and it is exceedingly difficult to find new and interesting things to say about financial reform that will sate the hunger of the blog-reading masses. Or maybe "Larry Summers" is just a potent keyword for search engine-optimized content delivery. But everyone's got a theory:

Fox Business News' Charlie Gasparino kicked off the gossip on March 26 when he reported that Summers "has been telling associates that he may be looking to leave the administration." Why? Because, according to some unnamed Wall Street executives, he is "unhappy" in his job. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder followed up on Tuesday with the news that "the big rumor was that Rahm Emanuel himself was making a secret list of people who might be potential replacements for Summers," but concluded that he wasn't about to leave, because he's got a lot of stuff on his plate, like riding "herd over the administration's huge infrastructure renewal program."

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It wasn't that long ago when I had newborns -- they're now a tween and teens -- and the unspoken competition between new moms was how well our babies gain weight, how high they plot on the percentile charts and how quickly they outgrow their clothes. Chubby was cute, and -- it's embarrassing to say -- many breastfeeding moms were encouraged by medical personnel to add on some formula if the baby wasn't gaining weight at a remarkable pace.

I was already a pediatrician when I had my first son. I knew better, yet I was still in tears -- like many new moms I found tears weren't hard to come by -- when a well-meaning nurse suggested I might not have enough breast milk, as my baby was on the 25th percentile, and hadn't gained much weight in the previous week. I didn't heed her advice to add formula; I knew that a happy, content baby, who is growing at his own pace, probably needs nothing.

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Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity:

"Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bear cubs to death, the Obama administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear."

A tweet from Sarah Palin:

Rep.Boehner spot-on Obama goal=cram thru job-killing, energy-depleting, burdensome Cap & Tax scheme on heels of Obama's new"pro-drilling"msg

Sound-bite craftsmanship bridges the partisan divide! "Cram-thru job-killing, energy-depleting, burdensome Cap & Tax scheme" is a marvel of compressed negativity. Meanwhile, Cummings' "more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear" is brilliantly nasty, albeit ludicrous overkill. Personally, I think it would be much more efficient to shoot polar bears from airplanes, but what do I know?

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Sure, it's been a long time since films by Kurosawa and Fellini were must-see cultural touchstones, but if you look back honestly at the pseudo-high-culture pretension of that era, it wasn't good for filmmakers or their audiences. Yes, the future (not to say present) of art-house and indie film is a bewildering muddle of mix-and-match formats with melting boundaries: digital download, video-on-demand, simultaneous DVD and theatrical release, and so on. Companies come and go, new release strategies are adopted and just as promptly abandoned, and inevitably some good films disappear into the maelstrom.

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The 15 largest states by population forecast a 3.9 percent gain in tax revenue in fiscal 2011, budget documents show. The 50 states on average may increase collections by about 3.5 percent, the first time in two years the figure is expected to grow, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

The economic picture is by no means rosy -- revenues aren't forecast to return to 2008 levels until as late as 2013 -- but the change in direction goes a long way towards relaxing some of the pressure felt by state legislators as they watched their budgets implode.

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It's a good read, albeit covering some familiar ground. It's no surprise, at this point, that business schools churned out graduates trained to the specifications of J. P. Morgan, or that theoreticians cherry picked models that supported their own ideological predispositions, or that it is simply psychologically difficult to be a non-conformist and buck the conventional wisdom.

It's a grim litany -- not least because at first glance it's hard to imagine the prospect for any change in the fundamental dynamics at play. But near the end of his essay, to be published in the May/June issue of The National Interest, Eichengreen suddenly takes an unexpected turn and proposes that the changes in the tools of the trade may lead to a more realistic appraisal of the world, economically speaking.

Call it the triumph of the empiricist: Today's economists have more access to data and the computing power to process it than ever before. The age of the theorist is over.

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Numerous media outlets are reporting that as of June, News Corp. will start charging for online access to the Times and Sunday Times of London. Not too surprising -- Murdoch's been talking for months about his plans to charge for content at all his newpaper properties, and plenty of other news organizations have plans to wall themselves off as well. But a tweet from Glyn Moody alerts us to a news item reporting that Murdoch is also pulling his U.K. titles out of the Nexis half of the Lexis/Nexis news aggregation database. As Moody describes it, "Rupert invents Black Hole Net publishing: nothing ever comes out."

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Polls show that many Republicans favor tax cuts, even if that means higher deficits. Ever since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the Republican answer to every policy question has been tax cuts. Democrats and the dwindling number of Republican fiscal conservatives think that Republican conservatives are crazy. And they are crazy -- crazy like a fox.

Republican strategy is based on the fact that the American public is deeply confused. Americans may be against big government in the abstract, but they favor more spending on most government programs that are specified by name, except for foreign aid. At the same time, majorities favor cutting taxes and balancing the budget. This might be called the Budgetary Trilemma. When asked whether they favor higher spending, lower taxes or a balanced budget, Americans answer "Yes."

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The timing of the piece's online publication could not be worse. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Producer Price Index, which shows prices for finished goods (not including food and energy) inching up at 0.1 percent rate. If you add food and energy into the mix, falling gas prices actually pushed the index down by 0.6 percent. As Ryan Avent notes, with the help of a nice chart, the chances for deflation seem at least as likely as inflation.

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Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

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Rep. Bart Stupak argued Thursday that the provision in the Senate-passed version has language that would permit the federal government to "directly subsidize abortions."

The Michigan Democrat said he supports health care change, but he said several Democrats who voted for it the House would oppose it next time around in the absence of change. Stupak said on ABC's "Good Morning America" that "we're not going to bypass some principles that we believe strongly about." The administration argues that Obama's bill would retain existing restrictions on federally-financed abortions.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A congressman who has played a key role in the long-running health care bill debate says he and 11 other Democrats will vote against the overhaul bill unless a provision subsidizing abortion is removed.

Rep. Bart Stupak argued Thursday that the provision in the Senate-passed version has language that would permit the federal government to "directly subsidize abortions."

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When I fell into this thing, this cosa nostra of cuisine, it was by accident. I had a background in fine art, and I was seduced by the creative process of cooking and the satisfaction of making things with my hands. Fifteen years later, I've been a baker, a line cook, a sous chef, now a pastry chef, and I can't imagine doing anything else. But back then, I never planned to make a career out of it, and the "foodie" culture we know today was still in its infancy. Back then, people still craved what came out of kitchens more than access into them.

Now, fueled by cooking shows and the Web, we have a culture of cuisine-as-entertainment. We're barraged by food porn, coffee-table cookbooks, and gritty tell-alls of the professional kitchen. Customers are constantly looking for what's new, the next big thing. As a professional, I've seen this culture make certain cooks hungry for stardom, hoping to be on TV shows and in magazines. But I've also seen that interest in cuisine shrink the world, making exotic ingredients more accessible, and push us to keep discovering new flavors and learning new techniques. It's a truly exciting time to be a chef, but it's always taken certain kinds of personalities to excel in cuisine, to have that geeky kind of masochism that drives us to aspire, impossibly, to perfection in both art and athleticism.

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All this scare talk about Democrats using the "nuclear option" or launching a "kamikaze mission" is the crudest kind of partisan propaganda. Using the Senate's reconciliation process to make fiscal changes to a bill already passed was standard operating procedure under President Bush. It's grimly amusing watching Senate Republicans, who spent years telling Democrats to get over the suspect 2000 presidential election, now pitching hissy fits over the prospect of a simple majority vote.

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For example, the following passage, in which Buffett delivers a not-so-implied criticism of your average financial institution CEO, rings true with some heartfelt disgust.

Charlie [Munger] and I believe that a CEO must not delegate risk control. It's simply too important. At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of misjudgments made by a Risk Committee or Chief Risk Officer.

In my view a board of directors of a huge financial institution is derelict if it does not insist that its CEO bear full responsibility for risk control. If he's incapable of handling that job, he should look for other employment. And if he fails at it -- with the government thereupon required to step in with funds or guarantees -- the financial consequences for him and his board should be severe.

It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country's largest financial institutions. Yet they have borne the burden, with 90 percent or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been "bailed-out" is to make a mockery of the term.

The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price -- one not reimbursable by the companies they've damaged nor by insurance. CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.

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The report released Thursday states the 32-year-old actress' menstrual period left her in a weakened state after contracting pneumonia. The report states prescription medications found in Murphy's system were consistent with treatment of a cold or respiratory illness, but contributed to her death.

The actress had been complaining of severe abdominal pain for seven to 10 days before her death. But the report states the actress' husband and mother thought it was related to Murphy's period, which they told investigators was often severe.

Murphy died Dec. 20 and her death has been ruled accidental.

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