Hillary Clinton Hospitalized for Blood Clot

Hillary Clinton was hospitalized in New York on Sunday after doctors discovered a blood clot.

Pics: From the White House to the Altar: Chelsea Clinton Through the Years

The 65-year-old Secretary of State's spokesman said the clot was found during a follow-up exam related to the concussion she sustained earlier this month when she fainted due to dehydration; Clinton was suffering from a stomach virus and has been sidelined from work for the last three weeks.

Clinton is expected to remain at New York Presbyterian Hospital for the next two days so physicians can treat her with anti-coagulants and keep an eye on her.

Video: Grammys Flashback '97 -- Hillary Clinton! 

Philippe Reines, deputy assistant secretary of state, said in a statement, "In the course of a follow-up exam today, Secretary Clinton's doctors discovered a blood clot had formed, stemming from the concussion she sustained several weeks ago. She is being treated with anti-coagulants and is at New York Presbyterian Hospital so that they can monitor the medication over the next 48 hours. Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion. They will determine if any further action is required."

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Hillary Clinton admitted to hospital with blood clot following concussion

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was admitted to a New York hospital Sunday after the discovery of a blood clot stemming from the concussion she sustained earlier this month.

Clinton’s doctors discovered the clot Sunday while performing a follow-up exam, her spokesman, Philippe Reines, said. He would not elaborate on the location of the clot but said Clinton is being treated with anti-coagulants and would remain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital for at least the next 48 hours so doctors can monitor the medication.

“Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” Reines said in a statement. “They will determine if any further action is required.”

Clinton, 65, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. The concussion was diagnosed Dec. 13 and Clinton was forced to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East that had been planned for the next week.

The seriousness of a blood clot “depends on where it is,” said Dr. Gholam Motamedi, a neurologist at Georgetown University Medical Center who was not involved in Clinton’s care.

Clots in the legs are a common risk after someone has been bedridden, as Clinton may have been for a time after her concussion. Those are “no big deal” and are treated with six months of blood thinners to allow them to dissolve on their own and to prevent further clots from forming, he said.

A clot in a lung or the brain is more serious. Lung clots, called pulmonary embolisms, can be deadly, and a clot in the brain can cause a stroke, Motamedi said.

Keeping Clinton in the hospital for a couple of days could allow doctors to perform more tests to determine why the clot formed, and to rule out a heart problem or other condition that may have led to it, he said.

Clinton was forced to cancel Dec. 20 testimony before Congress about a scathing report into the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The report found that serious failures of leadership and management in two State Department bureaus were to blame for insufficient security at the facility. Clinton took responsibility for the incident before the report was released, but she was not blamed.

Some conservative commentators suggested Clinton was faking the seriousness of her illness and concussion to avoid testifying, although State Department officials vehemently denied that was the case.

Lawmakers at the hearings — including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who has been nominated by President Barack Obama to succeed Clinton — offered her their best wishes.

Last Thursday, before the discovery of the blood clot, Reines said Clinton was expected to return to work this week.

The former first lady and senator, who had always planned to step down as America’s top diplomat in January, is known for her grueling travel schedule. She is the most traveled secretary of state in history, having visited 112 countries while in the job.

Clinton is considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, although she has not announced plans to run.

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Week brings startup launches, social media advice for 2013

Jared Kleinert, a South Florida entrepreneur, plans to soon launch Synergist, a platform that allow social entrepreneurs to meet potential co-founders online, collaborate and crowdfund their new projects. He also just launched AliveNDead, a blog about risk-taking, and he interns for a Silicon Valley startup.

And when he’s not doing all that, he’s going to class — he’s a junior at Spanish River High School in Boca Raton.

Lester Mapp is CEO and founder of the new Miami-based startup called designed by m. His team has just designed a sleek, ultra-thin aluminum iPhone bumper and launched the project on Kickstarter. After just a few days, Mapp is already more than a third of the way to his $20,000 fund-raising goal.

Read about both these entrepreneurs on The Starting Gate blog, where there’s also a post on the most pressing issues facing small businesses in the coming year — taxes, healthcare, lending and a skilled worker shortage, for starters.

And as you are ringing in the New Year, you may be resolving to beef up your business’ social media strategy. Susan Linning's guest post offers five top tips for boosting your social media effectiveness. Among them: Go beyond retweets and make your posts original, fun and personal (but not too personal.) Use visuals, too. Find this and other news, views and tools for entrepreneurs on the blog, which is at the bottom of MiamiHerald.com /business.

Follow me on Twitter @ndahlberg and Happy New Year to all.

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Former Miami Beach resident may be next Israeli ambassador to U.S.

Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and who has family ties to two former Miami Beach mayors, may soon become the next Israeli ambassador to the United States, according to reports in an Israeli newspaper.

The daily Makor Rishon reported late Friday that the current ambassador, Michael Oren, plans to step down from his post in the spring of 2013 and would be replaced by Dermer.

Dermer was nicknamed “Bibi’s Brain’’ in a 2011 Tablet profile that compared his relationship with Netanyahu to that of Karl Rove and former President George W. Bush.

Dermer, a Florida-born conservative, reportedly planned Republican Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel last summer during the U.S. presidential campaign.

He has been Netanyahu’s senior adviser since 2009.

The Prime Minister’s Bureau and the Prime Minister’s Office declined comment on the newspaper’s report, according to Israeli media.

Family members in Miami Beach contacted by The Miami Herald also declined to comment.

Dermer is the brother of former Miami Beach Mayor David Dermer, whose first campaign he managed, and the son of former mayor Jay Dermer.

His father was a mayor in the 1960’s and his older brother David was mayor from 2001-2007.

Just two weeks before Ron’s bar mitzvah, his father died of a heart attack. Growing up in Miami Beach, he attended a Jewish day school.

Ron Dermer and his younger sister Esther moved to Israel in the late ’90s after completing their studies. He earned a degree in finance and management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University.

For three years, he wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post and, along with former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, co-authored the book, “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.’’

He and his wife Rhonda have three children: Mayor, Zev and Ezra.

Dermer had to give up his U.S. citizenship in 2005 when he was appointed Minister for Economic Affairs to the Israeli Embassy.

In a 2011 interview with The Tablet, Dermer said he still thinks of himself as an American.

“When I think about Israel, I always ask myself, I call it the WWAD question: ‘What would America do?’”

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NYPD recruits sworn in at graduation ceremony

They came from all corners of the globe to join their brothers in blue.

The NYPD recruits sworn in at a graduation ceremony in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center today were born in countries like Nigeria, South Korea, China, Albania, Pakistan, and Somalia — and speak 59 languages.

Others came from less exotic locales like Brooklyn and Queens.

The new class of 1,159 cops was made up of 16 percent women. The racial breakdown is 53 percent white, 25 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black and 9 percent Asian.

Nearly all of them — 99 percent — have a college degree.

Police union president Patrick Lynch and his son, Patrick, at today's NYPD graduation ceremony.

One graduate from Rockland County wore the shield of her father, who was killed trying to help people escape from the World Trade Center on 9-11.

Erin Coughlin, 27, was proud to honor the memory of Sgt. John Coughlin, who had served in the elite Emergency Services Unit.

“It’s an absolute honor. It was surreal — I knew he was looking down on me,” said Coughlin, 27, beaming. “I took the same oath he did. I held it together until we had to salute.”

Her mother Patty was also moved. “I’m glad she got his shield,” she said. “It’s amazing that I was at the graduation for him, and now her.”

The graduating class included the son of police union president Patrick Lynch. “It’s something I always looked forward to,” said 21-year-old Patrick Lynch.

His father said he was “extremely proud” to see the shield on his son’s chest.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly praised Lynch and three other cops during the graduation for making a good collar in Queens while driving home from the police academy in September.

The four spotted a young man beating up another man in Bayside on Sept. 13, and intervened to stop the attack.

Lynch was one of many new cops who has the NYPD in his blood.

“Growing up, I had a lot to look up to,” said Officer Adam Torres, 25, whose father Felix Torres, 46, is retired.

“For many of you, this moment was a long time coming,” said Kelly. “Some of you dreamed of wearing this uniform from the time you were children.”

Kelly also hailed the recruits’ life-saving work during Hurricane Sandy.

Newly minted officer John Lattanzio was praised for walking through waist-deep water to rescue people in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn — carrying one person out on his shoulders — even though his own home was flooded.

The new rookies will protect half a million visitors to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

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Resources for South Florida small businesses

•  Florida Small Business Development Centers. Counseling and training at centers in South Florida and around the state, www.floridasbdc.org.

•  SCORE Workshops, online training and free coaching at local branches, www.score.org, miamidade.score.org, browardscore.org, southbroward.score.org

• Florida Women’s Business Center. Provides training, mentoring and resources to women entrepreneurs, http://www.flwbc.org.

• The Commonwealth Institute. Helps women entrepreneurs, CEOs and corporate executives build businesses through peer mentoring programs and annually honors top women-led businesses in Florida, www.commonwealthinstitute.org.

The Hispanic Business Initiative Fund of Florida. Nonprofit, with a Miami office, provides free bilingual seminars, workshops and technical assistance to Hispanic entrepreneurs launching or expanding businesses in Florida. www.HBIFflorida.org.

•  Barry University, Barry Institute for Community and Economic Development. Counseling, workshops and training for Miami-Dade small businesses through the Entrepreneurial Institute, www.barry.edu/biced.

•  Broward College. Offers a 24-credit entrepreneurship certificate, www.broward.edu. For noncredit business courses, including training through its Entrepreneurial Institute, http://www.broward.edu/ce.

•  Florida International University, Pino Global Entrepreneurship Center. Workshops, webinars and more, entrepreneurship.fiu.edu.

•  Miami Dade College. Offers a 12-credit entrepreneurship certificate program, www.mdc.edu/business. For noncredit classes, www.mdc.edu/ce. The Meek Entrepreneurial Education Center offers many programs, www.mdc.edu/north/eec.

•  University of Miami, The Launch Pad. Workshops, networking, resources and coaching, www.thelaunchpad.org.

•  Southern Florida Minority Supplier Development Council. Connects large businesses with minority businesses across South Florida, www.sfmsdc.org.

•  Startup Florida. Programs and training, plus register your company in this Startup America initiative, www.startupfl.org.

•  Partners for Self-Employment. Offers training, technical assistance and loans in Miami-Dade and Broward. www.partnersforselfemployment.com

•  Miami Bayside Foundation. Provides loans of $10,000 to $50,000 to minority-owned businesses in the city of Miami. www.miamibaysidefoundation.org..

•  MetroBroward. Nonprofit offers financing, incubation and training for businesses in low- to moderate-income areas of Broward, www.metrobroward.org.

• ACCION USA. Provides microloans up to $50,000 and financial education, with South Florida offices and programs, www.accionusa.org.

ClearPoint Credit Counseling Solutions. Nonprofit offers one-on-one, over the phone or Internet credit counseling to entrepreneurs and consumers with poor credit. 305-463-6739, ext 1019 or www.clearpointccs.org .

•  Incubate Miami. Start-up businesses in technology can get mentorship, office space and now early-stage funding, www.incubatemiami.com.

• The Technology Business Incubator at the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University. Offers mentors, investor connections and business services, http://www.research-park.org

•  South Florida Urban Ministries’ ASSETS Business Development. Nonprofit offers small business development program including one-on-one business coaching and consulting in areas of start-up, marketing, finance and more, www.sflum.org.

• United Way Center for Financial Stability. Center offers a wide array of tools and resources to help families and individuals achieve financial independence. www.unitedwaymiami.org/WhatWeDo/CFS.

•  The Startup Forum. Organization’s mission is to foster the development of vibrant regional startup communities, www.startupforum.net.

•  StartupDigest. Begun in Silicon Valley as a place to find events for entrepreneurs, this has spread to other cities, including Miami, www.startupdigest.com

If your organization should be on this list, email ndahlberg@miamiherald.com

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Drug overuse in cattle imperils human health

KANSAS CITY, Mo. --
Two children seriously injured in the Joplin, Mo., tornado in May 2011 showed up at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City suffering from antibiotic-resistant infections from dirt and debris in their wounds.

Physicians tried different drugs, but at first nothing seemed to work.

Blame the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, according to the doctors familiar with their cases.

“These kids had some really highly resistant bacteria that they clearly had not picked up in a hospital,” said Jason Newland, director of the Children Mercy’s antibiotic stewardship program.

Newland and other doctors believe those infections are part of the price we are paying for a half-century of overusing antibiotics in cattle and other meat animals in the United States.

“If you look at tonnage, 80 percent of the total of all the antibiotics we use in the States is used in meat animals,” Newland said.

As in humans, bacteria growing inside animals that are given antibiotics can develop a resistance to the medicines, Newland explained. That resistant bacteria can then be transferred to the soil through animal waste.

During severe storms, such as the EF5 tornado which killed 161 people in Joplin, that contaminated soil can end up in open wounds, and even modern medicine is challenged in combating the serious infections that can occur.

“We are increasingly treating kids with antibiotic-resistant infections who were at the last antibiotic we could possibly use on them,” Newland said. “In the next 20 years, will we see antibiotics resistant to everything?”

A yearlong investigation by The Kansas City Star found a multimillion-dollar-a-year pharmaceutical arms race in the beef industry is not just about curing sick cows.

It’s also about fattening cattle cheaply and quickly, driven in part by efforts to maximize profits, according to food safety advocates. In fact, the same number of cattle today are producing twice as much meat as they did in the 1950s because of genetics, drugs and more efficient processing.

Despite decades of warnings, the federal government has failed to pass meaningful regulation of animal drug use, failed to adequately monitor the harmful residues they leave behind, and failed to stop the consumption of meat contaminated with such substances.

Consider:

•  Last year, an Arizona lab discovered a strain of antibiotic resistant MRSA in meat that can infect humans. MRSA is the potentially fatal staph infection that sometimes races through hospitals.

•  Mexico rejected contaminated meat that U.S. rules allow Americans to eat. A shipment of U.S. beef in 2008 contained high levels of copper, a byproduct of industry and antibiotics, which can damage kidneys. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which hasn’t set allowable amounts of copper in meat, couldn’t stop it from distribution in the United States.

•  Until it tightened monitoring this year, the government couldn’t even stop the sale of meat containing arsenic, one of the residues found in cattle treated with antibiotics. High levels of the poison can cause vascular disease and hypertension in humans. Many U.S. veterinarians who specialize in treating cattle said in a recent survey that they were concerned about the overuse and improper use of antibiotics and other drugs. Some blamed salesmen intent on making more money. Based on sales data alone, the amount of drugs used in livestock is increasing, and beef samples are showing greater numbers of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

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Analysis: For tech investors, it’s hard to know when to bolt

(Reuters) – When Hewlett-Packard Co agreed to buy British software company Autonomy in August last year for $ 11.1 billion, two well-known investors made diametrically different bets on how the big deal would play out.

To short seller Jim Chanos, who had been raising red flags on Autonomy for years and had started shorting shares of HP in 2011, the deal was another nail in the coffin of the Silicon Valley tech giant, according to a source familiar with his thinking.

But to activist investor Ralph Whitworth, co-founder of Relational Investors LLC, it was time to commit to HP and the turnaround story the company was trying to sell to Wall Street. His fund bought more than 17.5 million HP shares after the deal was announced, and Whitworth received a seat on the company’s board. This year, Relational roughly doubled its stake in HP.

In the wake of HP’s decision to take an $ 8.8 billion write-down on the deal because of alleged accounting irregularities at Autonomy, it appears Chanos – whose call to short Enron before the energy company collapsed in a corporate scandal may be his most famous trade – was more astute.

HP’s shares are down 36 percent since Relational, which declined to comment, built its stake in the third quarter of 2011.

BARRIERS TO ENTRY

Relational’s big move into HP is a reminder that even smart investors can get things wrong in the fast-evolving technology sector, where once hot global names like Research in Motion and Yahoo can quickly become yesterday’s news.

It is a world where a company may effectively erect barriers to entry in a market only to have them torn down by a rival with a new whizz-bang product – just as Apple‘s iPhone broke the dominance that Research in Motion’s BlackBerry had enjoyed.

One warning sign that a tech company may be on the verge of losing its edge is when it makes acquisitions outside of its main area of expertise to move into new product lines. Savvy tech investors also say be wary of companies that experience a succession of management changes, or when a successful core business starts looking tired.

The pace of change in the technology sector is much faster than in other industries, said Kaushik Roy, an analyst at Hercules Technology Growth Capital. “It attracts new talent and capital, many startups are formed, which can be extremely disruptive to incumbents,” Roy said. “In other words, yesterday’s winners can rapidly become today’s losers and vice versa.”

In the case of HP, the company not only has had four CEOs since 1999, it has been striving to find another niche to dominate as demand for one of its core products – computer printers – wanes and as its PC business stumbles.

Or consider online search pioneer Yahoo, which has gone through six chief executives and is struggling to keep pace with Google.

Josh Spencer, a portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, said frequent turnover in the executive suite at Yahoo was a warning sign to him. Spencer said he does not own Yahoo shares and has not in the recent past.

RED FLAGS

While a company may view an acquisition as a fresh start – that is what HP was trying to say about Autonomy – some investors see it as a warning the core business is struggling.

Spencer noted that the technology industry’s most successful companies – Apple and Samsung – generally have not made acquisitions and instead developed new products internally.

For Margaret Patel, managing director at Wells Capital Management, one of the first red flags she saw at HP was when former CEO Carly Fiorina bought Compaq for roughly $ 25 billion in 2002.

“I felt then that the acquisition was too large and expensive, and personal computers were not their core strength,” said Patel, who has since avoided investing in HP.

Of course, timing can be everything even if an investor is eventually proven right. Patel missed out on a 137 percent gain in HP’s stock price from the time of the Compaq deal up until the end of 2010.

PREMIUM VALUATIONS

A few money managers see a flashing yellow light in the big sell-off of Apple shares in the past few months.

Apple, the most valuable U.S. company, has shed nearly 30 percent of its value in the last three months.

Since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs – the driving force behind Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad – DoubleLine co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach has been recommending that investors short the company’s shares because “the product innovator isn’t there anymore.”

Gundlach said he began shorting Apple’s stock at around $ 610 and maintains that it could drop to $ 425. He declined to comment on Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs over a year ago and is seen by many as less visionary and innovative than Jobs.

Christian Bertelsen, chief investment officer at Global Financial Private Capital, with assets under management of $ 1.7 billion, said his firm began paring back its exposure to Apple this fall because he felt the expectations for the company’s new iPhone5 had gotten overheated.

He said his firm dramatically took down its exposure to Apple shares when the stock hit $ 670 a share. “For us, the light bulb went off this fall,” he said. Mind you, Apple’s shares still remain up about 25 percent for the whole year.

And then there’s Research in Motion. Once a leader in smartphones, it’s now in danger of becoming irrelevant.

“They saw the move towards all touch-screen phones and didn’t move with it,” said Stuart Jeffrey, an analyst at Nomura Securities who noted how the BlackBerry 10 touch-screen phone will debut on January 30, 2013, six years after Apple released its first iPhone in 2007.

Robert Stimpson, a portfolio manager at Oak Associates Funds whose fund does not own any shares of Research in Motion, said the company’s BlackBerry phones are on a downward slope and it will be tough for the company to regain its lost luster.

“The end of the road is a long, lonely journey,” Stimpson said of Research in Motion. “I think they will fight the good fight for many years, probably unsuccessfully.”

(Reporting by Nicola Leske and Sam Forgione in New York; Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Tiffany Wu, Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Olympian Aly Raisman Visits Newtown, CT Gym

Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman is doing her country proud once again. The gymnast visited young athletes in Newtown, CT to spread the holiday cheer in their time of despair.

"Went to a gymnastics club that lost 8 young gymnasts #SandyHook so heartbreaking," she tweeted. "No words to describe how happy it makes me to see these brave kids smile."

RELATED: Celebs Tweet Reactions to CT School Shooting

Raisman is just the latest celebrity to travel to the grieving city. New York Giants player Victor Cruz offered his condolences to a family who lost their young son in the tragic shooting rampage on December 14. Singer Paul Simon lent his voice at the funeral of a Sandy Hook teacher.

VIDEO: McKayla Maroney Makes 'Unimpressive' Acting Debut

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Man dead after train push horror in Queens

Kendall Rodriguez

The scene tonight where a man died after allegedly being pushed in front of an oncoming train.

A man was killed tonight after a woman pushed him into the path of an oncoming train in Queens, police sources said.

The tragedy occurred at the elevated 40th Street station, near Queens Boulevard, in Sunnyside at around 8 p.m., sources added.

The woman ran down to the street and fled. It's unclear if she knew the victim.

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