Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

___

Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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Wall St Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."

Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.

"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."

With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.

Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.

"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.

"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."

Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.

BEWARE OF THE WITCH

This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.

"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.

RETHINKING APPLE

Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.

Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.

On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.

"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.

But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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A Political Pendulum in a Disgruntled Japan

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan of the Democratic Party campaigning last month outside a Tokyo train station to maintain his seat in Parliament.

KANAZAWA, Japan — The lesson of Japan’s last major national election was that the nation’s growing hunger for change had seemed to reach a threshold, a craving that became more intense after the Fukushima disaster exposed the failures of a collusive political system that protected the nuclear industry.

Now, just three years after that election and less than two years after the nuclear crisis, voters appear poised to hand power back to the Liberal Democratic Party, which they kicked out in the historic vote in 2009 that ended its virtually uninterrupted hold on power for half a century.

It is still possible that other parties could win enough votes in the lower house election on Sunday to force a coalition government. Polls show up to half of the voters are undecided, itself a sign that the hopes generated three years ago for reform have faded. But forecasts of vote tallies by major newspapers have been unanimous in predicting a resounding victory for the Liberal Democrats, whom many Japanese blame for creating the country’s deep economic and political problems.

News reports regularly feature photos of a smiling Shinzo Abe, a nationalistic former prime minister who, as party chief, now appears likely to get a second chance at running the nation.

Those searching for an answer to how Japan could reinstall its old guard need look no further than the predominantly rural election district that includes Kanazawa, a small city on the frigid Sea of Japan. On a recent evening, about 100 supporters of the local Liberal Democratic candidate braved a hailstorm to gather in a community center surrounded by barren rice paddies.

They sat politely listening in stockinged feet as the candidate, Hiroshi Hase, explained that his party was much more reform-minded than before 2009, when this district voted for the opposition despite the Liberal Democrats’ still-formidable rural vote-gathering machine. Then, after bowing deeply, he laid out a party platform that in some ways sounded unchanged from decades past, emphasizing increased public works spending — the sort of vote-buying move that many Japanese say helped create the nation’s huge debt problems.

When the speech ended, members of the audience stood to yell “Fight!” while punching their fists into the air.

But some people later said they were disappointed at the lack of bold measures to end Japan’s long malaise. Still, Toru Kondo, 49, a furniture maker, said he would vote for the Liberal Democrats to show his disgust with the incumbent Democrats. He voted for the Democrats in the last election in this former Liberal Democratic stronghold, only to feel betrayed by their failure to deliver on promises to end Japan’s long economic and political stagnation.

“Personally, I’m about 51 percent in favor of the Liberal Democratic Party, and 49 percent against it,” he said. “I know the party created Japan’s problems, but it seems the only choice.”

Experts say that sentiment is shared widely across Japan, where disgruntled voters seem determined to punish the Democrats not just for failing to rein in Japan’s powerful central bureaucracies, but also for mishandling the nuclear crisis.

At the same time, most voters have not viewed as credible alternatives a host of new parties that have sprung up with offers of more radical reform. Voters were captivated earlier this year by the brash and decisive young mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, who became for a time Japan’s most popular politician with promises to break the central ministries’ stifling grip.

But even his new party’s fortunes faltered after he decided against running for Parliament, precluding his becoming prime minister, and instead joined forces with Shintaro Ishihara, the octogenarian, ultranationalist former governor of Tokyo. And an antinuclear party that tried to capitalize on Japanese foreboding after the Fukushima disaster made little headway.

Mr. Kondo and more than a dozen other voters said in interviews here that they were leery of supporting yet another untried newcomer. “So long as a third political pole fails to form, the only way to throw out the Democratic Party is to go back to the Liberal Democratic Party,” said Takao Iwami, an author of books on politics.

What exactly that would mean for Japan is somewhat unclear, as the Liberal Democrats follow the well-worn path of trying to focus on what their audiences want to hear, and as the challenges facing Japan shift with China’s ascendance. Despite Mr. Hase’s emphasis on the old-style economics of construction projects, the party is offering at least one important economic change: saying it would tackle the high value of the yen, which has crippled Japanese exports and accelerated an industrial hollowing-out.

And while Mr. Abe, the party leader, is one of the country’s most vocal nationalists, it is unclear how he would handle a dispute with China, Japan’s largest overseas market, over islands in the East China Sea. In his last term as prime minister, Mr. Abe was considered a fence-mender, making Beijing his first official stop after taking office in an effort to end hard feelings over the previous prime minister’s visits to a shrine where war criminals from World War II are honored. But Mr. Abe has campaigned on building a stronger military to check China’s growing assertiveness.

Some experts say the wild swings in public support for the country’s leading parties are at least partly a result of the decades of virtual one-party rule. Large parties, like the Liberal Democrats, have tried to offer something for everyone, rather than offering an ideology to build loyalty.

“We are still seeing the creative destruction of the old postwar, one-party system,” said Gerald L. Curtis, a professor of Japanese politics at Columbia University.

The lack of voter passion has perhaps been captured best by one of the dominant images of the campaign: photos of former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, of the governing party, who is running to maintain his parliamentary seat in a Tokyo suburb. They show him standing on a white box bearing a slogan that is the Japanese equivalent of “no nukes,” appealing desperately to passing commuters who mostly ignore him.

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Angry Birds beats Samsung in viral marketing as mobile interest surged in 2012

This past year has shown us how effective leading smartphone and mobile app companies have become at leveraging viral videos. In Ad Age’s top-10 viral videos list for 2012, Samsung (005930) and Rovio each hog two spots. The Angry Birds Space video racked up 109 million views and the Angry Birds Star Wars hit the 41 million view mark. Meanwhile, Samsung managed to get 79 million views for its Galaxy S III video and 42 million views for the LeBron’s Day clip. It’s notable that Rovio’s Angry Birds clips were far cheaper to produce, with no major stars or lavish video production gimmickry.

The smartphone/mobile app industry thus held four of the top-10 viral video slots in 2012 — the rest of the list is a motley crew of names ranging from Invisible Children and Red Bull to Intel and M&M. It is telling that the smartphone/mobile app cluster is the only industry or cultural phenomenon that generated more than one spot on the list. Popular interest in mobile content continues surging.

It might also be a sign of the times that Apple (AAPL) did not hit the top-10. Samsung’s ultra-aggressive promotional efforts have started bearing fruit. What was once a boring, stale copycat brand in 2008 has suddenly started gripping the imaginations of consumers in a completely new way.

But perhaps even more interesting is that a mobile app company with less than 100 million euros in sales in 2011 managed to beat the mighty Samsung marketing machine in 2012. Rovio is in the vanguard of spreading mobile gaming into demographic niches that have never been all that interested in technology or gaming.

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The X Factor Reveals Season 2 Finalists

TV Watch

The X Factor

12/13/2012 at 09:10 PM EST

Carly Rose Sonenclar, Emblem3, Tate Stevens and Fifth Harmony

Ray Mickshaw/FOX (4)

Sparks will fly at the finale!

On Thursday, The X Factor revealed its top three acts, who will perform next week in the final night of competition – in hopes of taking home the $5 million recording contract.

Simon Cowell said it would take a miracle to get his girl group, Fifth Harmony, to the finale after they performed Shontelle's "Impossible" and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" on Wednesday. Keep reading to find out if their dream came true ...

Apparently, miracles do happen! Fifth Harmony was the first act to be sent through to the finale.

They will compete against departing judge L.A. Reid's country singer, Tate Stevens, and Britney Spears's only remaining contestant, Carly Rose Sonenclar.

That means Simon's promising boy band, Emblem3, are out of the running for the big prize.

"This is the way it goes on competitions," Simon said. "I'm gutted really for them ... But it happens."

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S&P 500 ends six-day winning streak on "cliff" anxiety

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 ended its six-day winning streak on Thursday, retreating as worries intensified that Washington's "fiscal cliff" negotiations were dragging on with little progress.

Anxiety about the drawn-out talks between Democrats and Republicans was enough to offset encouraging data on retail sales and jobless claims on Thursday.

There is concern that tax hikes and spending cuts, set to begin in 2013 if a deal is not reached in Washington, will hurt growth. The stock market has taken the heated rhetoric in stride of late, but downbeat remarks from Republican House Speaker John Boehner prompted some selling on Thursday.

Boehner accused President Barack Obama of "slow walking" the economy off the fiscal cliff. He is scheduled to meet with Obama later on Thursday.

"There is no conviction here and Boehner's comments - as harsh as they were - were realistic," said Jason Weisberg, managing director at Seaport Securities Corp., in New York.

"The fiscal cliff is already built in. That being said, people don't like to be told the apocalypse is coming over and over and over again. The real players in this market have already closed their books."

After coming close to a 1 percent decline for the day, the S&P 500 pared losses late in the session. The index had posted six straight sessions of gains through Wednesday's close, and at one point on Wednesday, the S&P touched its highest intraday level since October 22.

While the Federal Reserve's announcement on Wednesday of a new round of economic stimulus bolstered stocks, Chairman Ben Bernanke's comments that monetary policy would not be sufficient to offset the impact of the fiscal cliff weighed on sentiment.

Apple's stock , down 1.7 percent at $529.69, was among the biggest drags on the Nasdaq in Thursday's session, while International Business Machines , down 0.5 percent at $191.99, was among the biggest weights on the Dow. A U.S. jury found that Apple's iPhone infringed three patents owned by MobileMedia Ideas.

Among the day's biggest gainers, Best Buy Co shares shot up 15.9 percent to $14.12 after a report that the company's founder is expected to offer to buy the consumer electronics retailer by the end of the week.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> tumbled 74.73 points, or 0.56 percent, to 13,170.72 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 9.03 points, or 0.63 percent, to 1,419.45. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> slid 21.65 points, or 0.72 percent, to end at 2,992.16.

Energy and information technology sectors were the S&P 500's weakest performers, with the S&P energy index <.gspe> down 0.9 percent.

In the energy sector, shares of Nabors Industries Ltd dropped 4.7 percent to $13.85 after Jefferies cut the drilling company's rating. Shares of U.S. refining company Phillips 66 lost 1.6 percent to $52.21.

The day's economic data sent some positive signals on the economy, with weekly claims for jobless benefits dropping to nearly the lowest level since February 2008, and retail sales rising in November after an October decline, improving the picture for consumer spending.

In Europe, European Union finance ministers reached agreement to make the European Central Bank the bloc's top banking supervisor, which could boost confidence in EU leaders' ability to confront the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis.

After the bell, shares of Adobe Systems Inc rose 5.8 percent to $37.60 after the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software posted a better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit. The stock ended the regular session at $35.53, down 1.2 percent.

Volume was roughly 6.16 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the year-to-date average daily closing volume of 6.52 billion.

Decliners outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by a ratio of about 7 to 3, and on the Nasdaq, more than five stocks fell for every three that rose.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)

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Prosecutor Says Morsi Aides Interfered

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A demonstrator in Cairo on Thursday tried to remove part of a wall near the palace where President Mohamed Morsi resides.

CAIRO — A prosecutor in Cairo is accusing aides to President Mohamed Morsi of applying political pressure to an investigation into the bloody street fighting last week outside the presidential palace, in order to corroborate Islamists’ claims about a conspiracy that paid thugs to use violence against them.

The complaints by the prosecutor, Mustafa Khater, have raised some of the most serious questions to date about the Morsi government’s commitment to the impartial rule of law, as well as about its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group whose political arm the president once led.

Since the clashes last week, accounts have appeared of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters detaining and abusing dozens of opponents, whom they captured and kept tied up overnight by the gates of the palace. A spokesman for Mr. Morsi said the president was not responsible for those events and had ordered an investigation.

If Mr. Khater’s accusations, detailed in a memorandum to senior judicial authorities that circulated widely on Thursday, are borne out, they would suggest that the president’s chief of staff was directly involved in what happened to the captives.

The events resonate against the backdrop of the political battle raging in Egypt over a draft constitution and the referendum on it that is scheduled for Saturday.

Mr. Morsi’s allies argue that the new charter will usher in a government of institutions and laws, but critics say it will provide too little protection for individual freedom. They see ominous hints of authoritarianism in Mr. Morsi’s attempt three weeks ago to claim unchecked powers until the referendum, saying that he was putting himself above the law for a short time to keep his political opponents from using the courts to block the referendum.

Mr. Morsi’s first use of those broadened powers was to replace the country’s chief prosecutor, arguing that he had protected corrupt former officials and cronies from the overthrown government of Hosni Mubarak.

The local Cairo prosecutor’s accusations on Thursday suggest that Mr. Morsi may have merely replaced one politicized national chief prosecutor with another.

A spokesman for Mr. Morsi denied on Thursday that the president had meddled in the investigation of the events outside the palace.

“The presidency does not interfere or comment on the judiciary,” the spokesman, Khaled al-Qazzaz, said in an e-mail.

Defense lawyers confirmed elements of Mr. Khater’s account. During last Wednesday’s street fight, thousands of Islamist supporters of the president battled similar numbers of his opponents for hours with thrown rocks and occasional gunshots, and Islamists captured and detained dozens of their opponents. It is unclear how many of the captors belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood or more hard-line groups. But videos, corroborated by the accounts of victims, indicated that the vigilante jailers tried to bully their prisoners into confessing that they were paid to use violence as part of a conspiracy against the president.

Mr. Khater wrote that around dawn the next day, he received a phone call from Mr. Morsi’s newly appointed public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, who said that “49 thugs” had been arrested and detained outside a gate to the palace. Mr. Khater said that when he arrived at the scene, the president’s chief of staff, Refaa al-Tahtawi, displayed guns, knives and other implements along with a document stating that the Islamists had confiscated the weapons from the captives.

All 49 captives had been beaten, he wrote. They said that members of the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to coerce them into confessing that they had taken money to commit violence. But prosecutors found no evidence that they had done so.

Even so, Mr. Morsi declared in a televised speech later that night that prosecutors had obtained confessions.

Still, officials from the chief prosecutor’s office requested a “firm” response in the case, Mr. Khater wrote, and the officials later pressed Mr. Khater to at least order the detention of a group of poor and unemployed prisoners.

When Mr. Khater nonetheless released them all, Mr. Abdullah “reprimanded him,” according to the memorandum, and the following day ordered him transferred to the obscure town of Beni Suef in Upper Egypt.

“The transfer was in fact a punishment for a violation that I haven’t committed, and constitutes an explicit threat to the entire team working on the case,” Mr. Khater wrote.

On Thursday, the transfer was canceled and Mr. Khater was restored to his former position in Cairo without explanation.

Mr. Khater, Mr. Tahtawi and Mr. Abdullah could not be reached for comment.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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‘Dishonored’ tops a diverse year in video games

The video game universe in 2012 is a study in extremes.

At one end, you have the old guard striving to produce mass-appeal blockbusters. At the other end, you have a thriving community of independent game developers scrambling to find an audience for their idiosyncratic visions. Can’t we all just get along?

Turns out, we can. For while some industry leaders are worried (and not without cause) about “disruptive” trends — social-media games, free-to-play models, the switch from disc-based media to digital delivery — video games are blossoming creatively. This fall, during the height of the pre-holiday game release calendar, I found myself bouncing among games as diverse as the bombastic “Halo 4,” the artsy “The Unfinished Swan” and the quick-hit trivia game “SongPop.”

Some of my favorite games this year have benefited from both sides working together. The smaller studios get exposure on huge platforms like Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. The big publishers seem more willing to invite a little quirkiness into their big-budget behemoths. Gamers win.

1. “Dishonored” (Bethesda Softworks, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Arkane Studios’ revenge drama combined a witty plot, crisp gameplay and an uncommonly distinctive milieu, setting a supernaturally gifted assassin loose in a gloriously decadent, steampunk-influenced city.

2. “Mass Effect 3″ (Electronic Arts, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): No 2012 game was more ambitious than BioWare’s sweeping space opera. Yes, the ending was a little bumpy, but the fearless Commander Shepard’s last journey across the cosmos provided dozens of thrilling moments.

3. “The Walking Dead” (Telltale Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, iOS): This moving adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comics dodged the predictable zombie bloodbath in favor of a finely tuned character study of two survivors: Lee, an escaped convict, and Clementine, the 8-year-old girl he’s committed to protect.

4. “Journey” (Thatgamecompany, for the PlayStation 3): A nameless figure trudges across a desert toward a glowing light. Simple enough, but gorgeous visuals, haunting music and the need to communicate, wordlessly, with companions you meet along the way translate into something that’s almost profound.

5. “Borderlands 2″ (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Gearbox Software’s gleeful mash-up of first-person shooting, role-playing and loot-collecting conventions gets bigger and badder, but what stuck with me most were the often hilarious encounters with the damaged citizens of the godforsaken planet Pandora.

6. “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): A strategy classic returns, as the forces of Earth fight back against an extraterrestrial invasion. It’s a battle of wits rather than reflexes, a stimulating change of pace from the typical alien gorefest.

7. “Fez” (Polytron, for the Xbox 360): A two-dimensional dude named Gomez finds his world has suddenly burst into a third dimension in this gem from indie developer Phil Fish. As Gomez explores, the world of “Fez” continually deepens, opening up mysteries that only the most dedicated players will be able to solve.

8. “Spec Ops: The Line” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): This harrowing tale from German studio Yager Development transplants “Apocalypse Now” to a war-torn Dubai. It’s a bracing critique, not just of war but of the rah-rah jingoism of contemporary military shooters.

9. “Assassin’s Creed III” (Ubisoft, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): A centuries-old conspiracy takes root in Colonial America in this beautifully realized, refreshingly irreverent installment of Ubisoft’s alternate history franchise.

10. “ZombiU” (Ubisoft, for the Wii U): The best launch game for Nintendo’s new console turns the Wii U’s GamePad into an effective tool for finding and hunting down the undead.

Runners-up: “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” ”Darksiders II,” ”Dust: An Elysian Tail,” ”Far Cry 3,” ”Halo 4,” ”Mark of the Ninja,” ”Need for Speed: Most Wanted,” ”Paper Mario: Sticker Star,” ”Papo & Yo,” ”The Unfinished Swan.”

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Tevin Hunte Is 'So Happy' After His Voice Elimination

TV Watch

The Voice

By Jessica Herndon and Julia Haskins

12/12/2012 at 07:45 PM EST

Team Cee Lo's Trevin Hunte was eliminated on Tuesday's episode of The Voice, but the soulful singer isn't letting the end of this journey hold him back.

"I feel like the best person on the planet Earth. I am so happy and excited to be honest," Hunte told PEOPLE after the show. I feel like a weight has been lifted. Being away from family and friends and what you're used to was definitely a hard thing for me."

Hunte is looking forward to his mom's cooking and seeing his friends back home, and he won't waste a second wondering what if he'd made it further.

"I have no regrets. I am glad that I took a leap of faith and auditioned," he said. "I auditioned for American Idol and told my family I didn't have the strength to do it again. But I am definitely happy and excited that I made it this far."

And he still has a long way to go. "I'm only 18," he said. "I'm just really excited."

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Congress examines science behind HGH test for NFL

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.

Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.

The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.

Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."

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