U.S. Growth Revised Up, but Year-End Slowdown Is Feared

Even as the government said that the United States economy grew faster than first estimated in the third quarter, economists warned that the rate of expansion could slow sharply before the end of the year as worries mount about the fiscal impasse in Washington.

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

An employee on the assembly line this month at Generac Power Systems in Whitewater, Wis., a maker of residential generators.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30, well above the 2 percent estimate it initially made in late October. But the revision was driven by increased inventory accumulation and a jump in federal spending — factors unlikely to be repeated in the current fourth quarter, economists said.

What’s more, the revised figures show spending by businesses on equipment and software declined by 2.7 percent in the third quarter, the first decrease since the end of the recession in mid-2009 and a sign of just how cautious many companies have become amid the uncertainty in Washington and slowing growth in Asia and Europe.

“It’s a nice headline number,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, of the 2.7 percent rate, “but it exaggerates the underlying momentum in the economy. Sustainable improvements in growth are not driven by inventories.”

The two biggest growth areas in the third quarter — inventory growth and federal spending — “are likely to be minuses in the fourth quarter,” he said. Mr. Gault expects the annual rate to sink to 1 percent this quarter, hurt by a fiscal stalemate in Washington as well as the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy.

To be sure, there were signs of optimism in Thursday’s data. Residential fixed investment rose 14.2 percent, a sign that the housing recovery is gaining steam. Indeed, a separate report Thursday from the National Association of Realtors showed pending home sales rose to a two-and-a-half-year high.

And not all economists took a pessimistic view. “The economy certainly hasn’t taken off, but it’s nowhere close to a stall,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Funds. “The economy is still underperforming its full potential, but once we get past the ‘fiscal cliff’ uncertainty, we could see stronger growth next year.”

The new estimate of growth represents a substantial increase in the level of the second quarter, when the economy grew at a rate of just 1.3 percent. It also marks the fastest rate of expansion since the fourth quarter of 2011, when the economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual pace.

This was the second of the government’s three estimates of quarterly growth. The final figure is scheduled for Dec. 20.

“Over all, it was a disappointing report,” said Michelle Meyer, senior United States economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.  The accumulation of inventories went from subtracting 0.1 percentage points from the initial estimate to adding 0.8 percentage points, she said.

    “A lot of that inventory build was unintentional, which suggests a downside risk for the fourth quarter,” she said.  “Businesses had expected stronger sales and consumer spending and were caught off guard."

    Ms. Meyer said she expected the economy to grow by 1 percent in the fourth quarter and 1 percent in the first quarter of 2013, well below the level needed to bring down the unemployment rate, which stood at 7.9 percent in October.

    On Thursday, the government also reported that first-time unemployment claims dropped by 23,000 to 393,000 last week. But Ms. Meyer cautioned that these figures were much more volatile than usual because of the Thanksgiving holiday as well as Hurricane Sandy.

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Norquist: GOP concern over tax pledge just 'impure thoughts'

Grover Norquist on Wednesday rebuffed claims that his anti-tax crusade is losing steam, calling statements from prominent Republicans hinting at their departure from his anti-tax pledge "impure thoughts."

Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, met with Politico’s Mike Allen to offer his thoughts on the looming “fiscal cliff,” and the growing narrative that Republicans, after years of tying themselves to ATR’s pledge not to raise taxes, may be ready to jump ship.

Most recently, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in a private meeting with the House Republican whip team Tuesday morning that Republicans should take the opportunity to extend President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for 98% of Americans, calling it an “early Christmas present” for taxpayers.

And on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) joined Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in voicing concern over continued adherence to Norquist’s pledge.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) responded to Cole on Wednesday, saying that though Cole is a friend and supporter, he disagrees entirely with his stance. “The goal here is to grow the economy and control spending. You’re not going to grow the economy if you raise tax rates on the top two rates,” Boehner said.

Though Norquist commented that Cole’s recommendation was “an interesting tactic,” he remained firm that his pledge remains viable, saying that anyone suggesting that opposing tax increases is no longer in vogue is “an idiot.”

The pledge, Norquist claimed, “takes weasel words out” of campaign promises to cut taxes, and provides voters a clear picture of a candidate's stance, a stance he said the Republican Party has built its brand upon.

Norquist said that signing the pledge is about informing voters and entrenching a preexisting policy stance, instead of an oath of fealty to ATR and its champion cause.

“They don’t need my permission to raise taxes,” he said, adding that such power lies in the hands of voters.

And he dismissed claims that the pledge’s powers extend beyond the promises tied to its concise wording.

“It doesn’t solve all of the world’s problems; it doesn’t design tax reform,” Norquist said.

But Norquist did design a general road map for Republicans to use in fiscal cliff negotiations.

“You need to have this conversation in public, you need to be online so you can have the moral higher ground,” he said, recommending that the GOP aim for a temporary extension of Bush’s tax cuts, with comprehensive tax reform to follow soon after.

“If the Republicans lose in such a way that they have their fingerprints on the murder weapon, then you have a problem,” he said, adding that public debate over the fiscal cliff would allow Republicans a chance to turn the tide against President Obama and the Democrats, so long as they maintain “credible clarity” in espousing their low-tax vision.

Norquist said he worries about conceding any ground to Democrats on tax increases.

“What the Democrats do is trickle-down taxation,” he said. “They tax the rich and then they screw everybody.”

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Pentagon Cries Poor, Starts $10 Billion Nuclear Weapon Upgrade

The Pentagon is facing its worst cash crunch in more than a decade, with potential cuts of up to a half-trillion dollars over the next decade if Congress doesn’t act soon. Yet the U.S. military still somehow found the money on Tuesday to put a down payment on a $10 billion upgrade of its nuclear weapons in Europe — y’know, just in case there’s another Cold War.

The $178 million, three-year contract with Boeing is for a prototype “tail kit” for the B61 nuclear weapon. The fins and control systems will be similar to the ones on today’s conventional, GPS-guided bombs, potentially making this enhanced version of the B61 the most accurate weapon of mass destruction ever. It’s one part of a bigger package of improvements to the B61 that the Pentagon insists it needs in order to keep this slice of its nuclear arsenal ready for war, if needed. Everything from the spin rocket motors to the electronic neutron generators will be refreshed. Total cost: an estimated $10 billion.

Just about the only thing that won’t change is the weapon’s nuclear “pit,” and who the U.S. military plans on dropping the thing on. “Who’s the target? The Red Army. The Red Army that’s sitting in East Germany, ready to plunge into Europe,” explains. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “No, I’m serious.”

The U.S. has other, bunker-busting nuclear weapons that might be employed if, God forbid, there was ever an atomic showdown with North Korea or Iran. These so-called “B61 mod 12s” are meant to replace the 180 or so earlier models that are currently deployed in Western Europe. And those weapons are meant to assure our allies that if Russia is ever in the mood to invade, America will be there with a capital-B Bomb. “Continued funding support is essential to the long-term safety, security, and effectiveness of our nation’s nuclear deterrent force,” Gen. Robert Kehler, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, told Congress last year.

The B61 was first fielded in 1968. Unless critical components of the weapons are replaced — especially the radioactive tritium gas that makes the nuclear blast more efficient — the B61s might have to be withdrawn from the Continent by the end of the decade. “Old parts mean less-safe nukes. 60 years without an accidental detonation. We have a keen interest in keeping that record going,” says John Noonan, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile officer and a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

A 2008 Secretary of Defense task force report (.pdf) cautions against underestimating the “political value our friends and allies place on these weapons, the political costs of withdrawal, and the psychological impact of their visible presence.” But the same report notes note that U.S. European Command — the Pentagon’s top generals in the region – ”believ[e] there is no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.” After all, America has thousands of additional warheads that could be delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines.

All of which would make the push for the mod 12 upgrades tough to fathom under almost any conditions. But it’s particularly odd now, when the Pentagon is under more fiscal pressure than it’s felt since the 1990s. Just Tuesday, for example, the Chief of Staff of the Army announced plans to pare back the ground force’s spending by likely cutting the number of troops to their lowest levels since before World War II. On January 3, 2013, the Defense Department will automatically lose another 9.4 percent of its budget — more than $500 billion over 10 years — unless Congress reverses the automatic, across-the-board cuts it previously put in place.

In other words: every billion counts. But while the rest of the Defense Department is looking to save money, the costs for the mod 12 program keep going up. In May, the project — which entails upgrading an estimated 400 weapons — had a price tag of $6 billion. By July, that number had grown to $10 billion. That’s not only the equivalent of two-thirds of what the federal government plans to spend on all nuclear weapon enhancements over the next twenty years. “It would be less expensive to build solid-gold replicas of each of the 700-pound B61s, even at near-record gold prices,” as Lewis recently noted in Foreign Policy.

One reason why: the mod 12 project — even though it’s billed as a “life extension program” — isn’t just about replacing the components of the weapons that are decaying or corroding. (Independent experts say that would take a mere billion or two.) When you swap out the B61′s parachute for satellite-guided tail fin assembly, it introduces a new complication, Lewis adds. “An atomic bomb dropped without a parachute will explode before the airplane is safely away. That means [the federal government] must also redesign much of the packaging and components to survive ‘laydown’ — i.e., thudding into the ground and then exploding a few moments later.” An internal Pentagon audit showed 15 of the 29 planned changes for mod 12 are still technologically immature.

But if the improvements aren’t made soon, advocates say, they’ll only get more expensive. “Modernization is expensive because we keep delaying it. Now we’re at a point where, instead of making pragmatic annual investments in lab, stockpile, and delivery modernization — we have to do it all at once,” says Noonan, the former missileer.

Pretty soon, there will be a choice: upgrade these nuclear weapons, or put them out to pasture. What would you do, if you were a cash-strapped Pentagon chief?

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A Minute With: Pop star Ke$ha on new album “Warrior”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop star Ke$ ha made a name for herself with infectious dance-pop hits but the singer-songwriter is stepping out of her Auto-Tune comfort zone on “Warrior”, out this week.

Ke$ ha, 25, stormed the charts with hit songs about drinking, partying and having a good time, such as “TiK ToK” and “Your Love is my Drug” from her 2010 platinum-selling album “Animal”.

Ke$ ha talked with Reuters about the pressures of following up the success of her first album and responding to her critics.

Q: Did you feel additional pressure while working on this album after the success of your debut, “Animal”?

A: “Everybody keeps asking me about pressure, and I think a lot of other people maybe are feeling pressure about this record, but I just want to make a good record. If I sat around trying to make a number one record, I’d just be too consumed with that. I just want to make an awesome, kick-ass record that I love and that my fans love.”

Q: Was there anything that you weren’t happy with on the first album and that you wanted to change for the second?

A: “I just wanted to make sure my entire personality was presented more accurately. I feel like people really got to know the super-wild side of me but then sometimes a more vulnerable side. I didn’t really feel comfortable expressing it. So this time I kind of forced myself to express a little bit more vulnerability, less Auto-Tune, less vocal trickery. It’s a little more raw.”

Q: You received a lot of criticism for your use of Auto-Tune, masking your true singing voice. Was that a valid criticism for you, when many others use it?

A: “I remember having this conversation with my producer, and him saying, ‘We’re using a lot of vocal tricks,’ and I said, ‘People will get to know me as my career goes on, I just want it to sound really weird and cool and clubby right now, and super electronic.’ I made a conscious decision to use Auto-Tune for effect, as ear candy, and vocoders and chop up my words.

“This time around, I have heard so many different people say I can’t sing, it’s quite frankly irritating, so I … made a five-song acoustic EP (‘Deconstructed’, out on December 4) that’s kind of like my middle finger to all those people that said I couldn’t sing, and there’s more of my voice on this record. You know, haters are going to hate, you just have to do what you want to do.”

Q: Talk us through some of the collaborations on “Warrior”. There’s quite a variety, such as with Iggy Pop and Ben Folds.

A: “Ben Folds is a friend of mine. He gave me a giant glitter grand piano that’s in my house, so that one was natural. The Flaming Lips was probably surprising for a lot of people because we’re two super-different genres of music but we had the most fun and we made so many songs, it was super insane. We’re like best friends, we text everyday now, so that kind of came naturally. The one that I really have been working on for years was a collaboration with Iggy Pop. He’s one of my favorite musicians and artists of all time, so that was super exciting for me, because I respect him so much.”

Q: You’ve written tracks for Kelly Clarkson and Britney Spears, and you’ve written all the songs for “Warrior”. What did you want to bring out in your lyrics this time round?

A: “I definitely wanted to maintain the irreverence, because that’s why my fans like me. It’s because I’m super honest, not always PG rated … but I didn’t want to let the haters somehow cramp my style or get the best of me, so I maintain my irreverence … I also really wanted to show the other side of my personality, which kind of is more nerve-wracking to show people, being a real person and the vulnerable side of my personality and voice. So there are tracks on this record that are super vulnerable and were hard even to write. I had to force myself to sit down and write these songs.”

Q: You’ve carved a distinctive image and also just launched your latest collaboration with Baby-G watches. How do you want to evolve your career in the future?

A: “I think that with this record, I really wanted to show that there are no rules or boundaries in art, at all, like I sing and I can use crazy Auto-Tune vocoders and I can rap and I can do a song with Iggy Pop. You can do all these things that make sense. You don’t have to just be one thing, like, you don’t adhere to any sort of stereotype or any boundaries or any rules, so for me it’s really fun to break down these boundaries.”

Q: You came in at the forefront of the electronic dance music explosion in the pop charts two years ago. Why do you think EDM is doing so well?

A: “Dancing is one of the ways we, as adult human beings, still get to play and it’s socially acceptable. Little kids play all the time, but as we grow up, we’re supposed to just not play anymore, so our version of that is going out and dancing, and I think it’s one way people are still visceral and animal-like.”

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Dale Hudson)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? - Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “— for my kid?” “— for my elderly father?” “— just for reading?” “— for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Alleged WikiLeaks source says he was illegally punished in jail

A key pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of giving classified material to the website WikiLeaks, which then made it public, began Tuesday in a case that highlights the government’s resolve to keep war and diplomatic material secret.

Manning, who has been charged on 22 counts, faces life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge. His court-martial is scheduled for February.

A former intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010, Manning is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of logs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

The hearing at a military court at Ft. Meade outside Baltimore is scheduled to run through Sunday. Manning is expected to testify at some point. It would be the first time he has spoken publicly about the case and the conditions of his detainment since his arrest in 2010.

The defense will argue that all charges should be dismissed because Manning was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment,” according to a post on the website of his supporters, the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Manning will get a chance to testify about his treatment. His lawyers argue that he was illegally punished by being put alone in a cell for nine months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. Military judges can dismiss all charges if pretrial punishment is particularly egregious, but that rarely happens, though the time in incarceration can be credited toward the sentencing.

“At this extremely important hearing, Bradley’s lawyer David Coombs ... will present evidence that brig psychiatrists opposed the decision to hold Bradley in solitary, and that brig commanders misled the public when they said that Bradley’s treatment was for ‘Prevention of Injury,' " his supporters said.

Manning has offered to take responsibility by pleading guilty to reduced charges. The military has not ruled on that offer.

Manning was in the brig from July 2010 to April 2011. The military argues the treatment there was proper since he classified as a maximum-security detainee. He was later moved to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where he was reevaluated and given a medium-security classification.

A United Nations investigator called the conditions of Manning's imprisonment cruel, inhuman and degrading, but stopped short of calling it torture.

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Nintendo to Launch $99 'Wii Mini,' But Only in Canada. Why?

The good news: After six years on the market, Wii now has a price of under $100. Bad news: in Canada.

Well: I guess it’s not bad news if you’re Canadian. Wii Mini, announced today by the gamemaker’s northern subsidiary, sports a radically different form factor and color scheme than the original motion-controlled console. It’s a dual-tone matte finish of textured red and black, something that looks like it came from the toy aisle rather than the electronics department. It’s the first version of Wii to not have that cool slot-loading automatic drive; instead, the top pops up and you put the disc on the spindle manually.

Wii, with its innovative motion controls, was a colossal success for Nintendo. Since its launch in 2006, it has sold over 95 million units worldwide, eclipsing sales of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Wii’s massive popularity meant that Nintendo could maintain its launch price of $250 through September 2009. A successor machine, Wii U, which keeps Wii’s motion controllers and adds GamePad, a controller with a built-in touchscreen, launched this month.

Nintendo launched a slight revision of the Wii hardware in 2011 that eliminated the now barely used backward compatibility with the GameCube console. Wii Mini goes a step farther and removes the internet connectivity. So now it’s strictly for playing Wii game discs, of which Nintendo of Canada says 1,300 are available.

So the big question on everyone’s lips is, of course: Why Canada? Is Nintendo unsure of whether consumers will want Wii Mini, and therefore test-marketing it in Canada first?

I think it’s the wrong question. The right question is: Why not the United States?

Two potential reasons spring to mind. Perhaps Wii, bundled with games at $130-150, is just doing too well in the U.S. for Nintendo of America to want to introduce a new model right now. CNET reported on Monday that Nintendo had sold 300,000 Wii systems and 400,000 Wii U last week. Many of those were at discounted rates, some cheaper than the Wii Mini. Perhaps Nintendo of America has every intention of releasing Wii Mini here, but surmised that the old Wii had one more Christmas left in it at prices as high as $150. (It has not yet responded to Wired’s request for comment.)

Or maybe for America, the removal of the Internet functionality was a step too far?

We know two things for sure: One, as of last year 25 percent of Netflix subscribers used Wii to access the streaming video service. Two, Netflix isn’t nearly as big a deal in Canada: The Globe and Mail reported in October that growth has “plateaued,” it doesn’t have nearly as much content as the U.S. version does, and extra charges for bandwidth in Canada can make streaming video a very expensive proposition.

“The problem in Canada is… they have almost third-world access to the internet,” said Netflix’s chief content officer in September, as reported by GigaOm.

So perhaps it’s the case that Nintendo of Canada doesn’t mind nearly as much that Wii Mini has no connectivity.

By removing GameCube compatibility, removing all the networking hardware and replacing the cool slot-loading disc drive with an uncool but presumably much cheaper hinged-door, Nintendo has surely lowered the Wii’s cost of goods to rock bottom with the Mini. With well over 1000 games (and, you know, ten or eleven fantastic ones), a super-cheap Wii could continue to live on and on as a bargain console. With Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 still hovering around $250, it’s doubtful that Microsoft or Sony would ever bother creating models this inexpensive, so Mini could be the only option for families looking for dirt-cheap TV gaming.

In Canada.

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‘Two and a Half Men’ actor not expected on set

NEW YORK (AP) — The teenage actor who stars in “Two and a Half Men” and called the CBS comedy “filth” may have some time before he faces the show’s producers.

Angus T. Jones wasn’t expected at rehearsal Tuesday because he is not going to be in the episode they are filming, according to a person close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because producers were not commenting publicly.

Jones, 19, has been on the show, which used to feature bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen and remains heavy with sexual innuendo, since he was 10 but says in a video posted online by a Christian church that he doesn’t want to be on it anymore.

“Please stop watching it,” Jones said. “Please stop filling your head with filth.”

The person familiar with the production schedule said Jones does not appear in either of the two episodes filming before the end of the year, so he wouldn’t be expected back at work until after the New Year.

His character has been largely absent because he has joined the Army.

CBS and producer Warner Bros. Television have not commented.

“Two and a Half Men” survived a wild publicity ride less than two years ago, when Sheen was fired for his drug use and publicly complained about the network and the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre.

Jones plays Jake, the son of Jon Cryer’s uptight divorced chiropractor character, Alan, and the nephew of Sheen’s hedonistic philandering music jingle writer, Charlie. Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher, who plays billionaire Walden.

In the video posted by Forerunner Chronicles in Seale, Ala., Jones describes a search for a spiritual home. He says the type of entertainment he’s involved in adversely affects the brain and “there’s no playing around when it comes to eternity.”

“You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like that,” he said. “I know I can’t. I’m not OK with what I’m learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show.”

The show was moved from Monday to Thursday this season, and its average viewership has dropped from 20 million an episode to 14.5 million, although last year’s numbers were somewhat inflated by the intense interest in Kutcher’s debut. It is the third most popular comedy on television behind CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” and ABC’s “Modern Family.”

The actors on “Two and a Half Men” have contracts that run through the end of the season.

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Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

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Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

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