N.Y.U. and Others Offer Shorter Courses Through Medical School

Training to become a doctor takes so long that just the time invested has become, to many, emblematic of the gravity and prestige of the profession.

But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four.

Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer.

Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in.

“We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine.

At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints.

But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students.

“You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted.

The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future.

The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology.

The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.

That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment.

“The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education.

The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals.

Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.

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How Party of Budget Restraint Shifted to ‘No New Taxes,’ Ever

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner could not sell a tax increase in his proposal on the fiscal crisis last week, even on incomes of $1 million.

WASHINGTON — On a Saturday afternoon in October 1990, Senator Pete V. Domenici turned from a conversation on the Senate floor, caught the eye of a clerk by raising his right hand and voted in favor of a huge and contentious bill to reduce federal deficits. Then he put his hand back into his pocket and returned to the conversation.

It was the end of an era, although no one knew it then. It was the last time any Congressional Republican has voted for higher income taxes.

The conservative revolt against that 1990 legislation — and against President George Bush, who violated his own “Read my lips” vow not to increase taxes — was a seminal moment for Republicans. The party of balanced budgets became the party that opposed tax increases.

When conservatives sank Speaker John A. Boehner’s plan last week to acquiesce on tax increases for the most affluent Americans as part of a potential broader deal with the Obama administration to avert tax increases for everyone else, several said that 1990 accord was a reason. They regard Mr. Bush’s broken promise as a major reason he was not re-elected, and they say the budget agreement proved that such compromises do not restrain the growth of government.

But the 1990 legislation also highlights a basic challenge now facing the party, which the chaos within the House caucus helped bring into public view on Thursday night.

Republicans continue to embrace the no-new-taxes stand as a centerpiece of the party’s identity, even in the face of public opinion that strongly supports tax increases on high incomes. And some Republicans fear that the party’s commitment to prevent tax increases more and more is coming at the expense of those other, older kinds of fiscal responsibility.

“Republicans used to be interested in not running continual rivers of red ink,” said former Representative William Frenzel, a Minnesota Republican who as the ranking member of the House Budget Committee in 1990 helped to negotiate the deficit deal. “If that meant raising taxes a little bit, we always raised taxes a little bit. But nowadays taxes are like leprosy and they can’t be used for anything, and so Republicans have denied themselves any bargaining power.”

The resulting debate has created perhaps the greatest test of the tax stand in the last two decades. Republicans who are willing to accept tax increases as part of a broader deal are pitted against a conservative wing, restocked by the Tea Party wave of 2010, that insists that opposition to tax increases is particularly important at times like these, when the temptation is greatest to avoid spending cuts by asking Americans for just a little more. Many in the antitax camp come from deeply conservative districts and were re-elected by wide margins.

They were not even swayed by Grover Norquist, the activist and arbiter of antitax orthodoxy, who has pushed politicians for the last 25 years to promise that they will not vote to raise taxes, a pledge a vast majority of Congressional Republicans have signed. Mr. Norquist said Mr. Boehner’s proposal was not a tax increase, but he could not convince the generation of politicians he helped create.

“We know that our big problem is too much spending,” Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, said on Fox News last week, explaining his opposition to Mr. Boehner’s plan. “We know that President Reagan fell into the trap and President George H.W. Bush fell in the trap of ‘Here, just raise taxes on somebody, and we’ll come along with the cuts later.’”

The Republican Party’s embrace of tax cuts is often traced to the 1970s, when conservative thinkers began to argue that cuts were not just politically advantageous but also fiscally responsible. The economist Arthur Laffer advanced the theory that cuts could even be self-financing, because they could generate enough economic activity to increase revenue.

Others said that cutting taxes would force the government to cut spending too, an idea colorfully described as “starving the beast.”

But the movement did not truly take hold until the early 1990s. Some Congressional scholars argue that opposition to tax increases offered a new kind of ideological glue after the cold war. Others cite changes in the political landscape, including the rise of advocacy groups like Mr. Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, and the purification of Congressional districts through gerrymandering, which led House members to fear primaries more than general elections. And the electoral success of the political strategy — many voters are swayed by promises of a lower tax bill — became its own justification.

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.

The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.

Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.

Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.

Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.

Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.

Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.

The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

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Midge Turk Richardson, Ex-Nun Who Edited Seventeen Magazine, Dies at 82

Midge Turk Richardson, who spent 18 years as a nun before spending 18 years as the editor of Seventeen magazine, a redoubt of worldly concerns like clothes, makeup and dating, died last weekend at her home in Manhattan. She was 82.

Mrs. Richardson, whose body was found by family members on Monday, apparently died in her sleep sometime during the weekend, her stepson Kevin Richardson said.

A former Roman Catholic nun, Mrs. Richardson left her order in 1966, a journey she recounted in a memoir, “The Buried Life,” published in 1971. In secular life, she became a member of New York’s social set, and was married for three decades to Ham Richardson, a tennis star who later ran his own investment concern, with homes on Park Avenue and in Bridgehampton, on Long Island.

At Seventeen, which she edited from 1975 until her retirement in 1993, Mrs. Richardson was known for introducing frank discussions of delicate subjects — including sex, anorexia and suicide — from which the magazine, aimed at teenage girls and long considered a bastion of wholesomeness, had traditionally shied away.

Under Mrs. Richardson’s stewardship, certain aspects of the magazine remained comfortably familiar. “Secrets of Staying Thin,” promised one cover, from 1980; “Those Dreamy Summer Romances,” proclaimed another that year.

But other cover lines betrayed her resolve to address modern readers’ concerns: “Teen Suicide: The Danger Signals,” “What You Must Know About Herpes.”

In 1982, Mrs. Richardson instituted a regular column, “Sex and Your Body,” which explored subjects like gynecological health, sexual relations and birth control.

“We’ve been talking about it for years and trying to figure out how to go at it in a tasteful manner,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1983. “We don’t want to be frightening to a young girl, or permissive. But the demands of the time finally brought us around to it.”

All this was a far cry from her life as Sister Agnes Marie, and from the quiet routine of her days in the convent, where she had lived from the ages of 18 to 36.

Agnes Theresa Turk, known as Midge because of her petite stature, was born in Los Angeles on March 26, 1930, the youngest daughter of a Roman Catholic family. As a girl, she worked as an extra in more than a hundred Hollywood films, sometimes appearing opposite Shirley Temple.

At 18, wanting a life of service, she forsook her lively home, her active social life and her boyfriend to enter the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a teaching order with a motherhouse in the Hollywood hills.

Sister Agnes Marie, as she was known in religion, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Immaculate Heart College, run by her order. She embarked on a career as an educator, teaching English, French and drama in local parochial schools and later becoming the principal of a Catholic high school in a blighted, largely Latino section of Los Angeles.

She loved the life, but by the mid-1960s she had become depressed and exhausted — frustrated, she wrote, by what she saw as the failure of diocesan hierarchy to meet the needs of the impoverished community she served. She suffered two bouts of temporary blindness, brought on, her doctors told her, by strain.

In 1966, after much soul-searching, Sister Agnes Marie asked to be released from her vows. (In 1970, Anita Caspary, the mother superior of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, led an exodus of 300 nuns from the order in response to what they described as the failure of the diocese to lift outmoded restrictions on nuns’ lives.)

At 36, Agnes Turk found herself on her own for the first time. Carrying a single suitcase, she made for New York: it was one place, she reasoned, that offered career opportunities for women. She found a job as an assistant to a dean at New York University, sleeping on the floor of her tiny Greenwich Village apartment because she could not afford furniture.

She learned to navigate an alien social world. Once, preparing for a date, she washed her hair only to realize she did not own a hair dryer. She stuck her head pragmatically in the oven, emerging with singed hair.

After working as the college editor of Glamour magazine and at Scholastic Publications, she joined Seventeen as executive editor, becoming editor in chief in 1985.

Mrs. Richardson’s husband, whom she married in 1974, died in 2006. The No. 1-ranked tennis player in the United States in 1956 and 1958, he won 17 national titles and played on seven Davis Cup teams.

Besides her stepson Kevin, survivors include another stepson, Ken Richardson; a stepdaughter, Kit Sawers; two sisters, Gwendolyn Tighe and Marie Smith; and five step-grandchildren.

Mrs. Richardson was also the author of a children’s biography of a friend, the photographer Gordon Parks.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1970, she described the forces that led her first to take the veil and later to relinquish it:

“I entered the convent not so much because I believed in the church as that I believed in helping people,” she said. “I’d never had any great thing about dressing up in those clothes and jangling my rosary beads.”

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The Saturday Profile: In Cindy From Marzahn, an Offbeat Comedian of the People

WHEN a career counselor in the East German town of Luckenwalde asked Ilka Bessin what she wanted to be when she grew up, the teenager answered that she had always wanted to be a clown. “Cook” was also a creative job, the counselor suggested, and a lot more realistic.

It was still a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Ms. Bessin (pronounced bess-EEN) ended up an apprentice chef at a state-owned enterprise, preparing breakfast and lunch every day for more than 1,000 workers. She never could have guessed that two decades later she would be a comedy superstar in a reunified Germany, making millions of her compatriots laugh in clubs and theaters across the land, with television stations fighting over her appearances.

Audiences know Ms. Bessin, 41, as Cindy from Marzahn, her louder, ruder and more profane alter ego. With her curly peroxide wig and swathes of hot-pink eye shadow, Cindy hails from the notorious East Berlin neighborhood of Marzahn, synonymous with the enormous Communist high-rise housing estates.

An overweight 6-foot-2-inch Valkyrie of a woman in a pink velour sweatsuit, Cindy plays up the worst stereotypes of Germany’s contemporary version of the welfare queen. She wakes up at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and begins drinking. Her dream man, Enrico, stands 4-foot-10, weighs 375 pounds and works as a bouncer.

“No neck, no hair and no brain,” she says approvingly.

IN October, Ms. Bessin was named Germany’s female comedian of the year for the fourth time in a row. The daily newspaper Tagesspiegel recently called her “a phenomenon,” under the headline “Princess of the Plattenbau,” the prefabricated housing blocs built in the former East. She hosts her own television series and recently began appearing on “Wetten Dass,” the long-running variety show whose name translates loosely as “Wanna Bet?”

Yet when asked in a recent interview how it felt to be an established star, Ms. Bessin quickly replied, “As far as I’m concerned, I’m really not there yet.” Quieter than Cindy and extremely considerate, Ms. Bessin is hardly recognizable out of costume, just one of the facts that helps keep her grounded.

“I drink absolutely no Champagne, and I don’t fit in Jean Paul Gaultier’s clothes,” she said, with a toned-down version of the self-deprecation she shares with Cindy.

Germany may have more money than its neighbors on the whole, but the middle class is shrinking and much of its recent gains in economic competitiveness came from labor-market changes that cut jobless benefits and pressured people to work, sometimes for as little as an additional $1.30 an hour. Cindy brought the low-paying jobs and the secondhand stores onstage, with songs as well as monologues.

It was a language Ms. Bessin spoke fluently, having herself lived on Hartz IV welfare payments for several years. “You sleep a lot, because you don’t see the point in getting up, and you eat what’s around you,” Ms. Bessin recalled. “You go to the employment office because you have appointments, but generally you go home even more demoralized.”

Out of the crucible of humiliation emerged Cindy, crass and cagey, driven by appetites. She hides a bratwurst in a banana peel and asks the audience for chocolate, then eats what they throw onstage. “I have Alzheimer’s bulimia,” Cindy likes to say, stomach bulging under her pink sweatshirt, tiara perched atop her wig. “I eat everything in sight and then forget to throw up.”

Critics call her act offensive, lowbrow and worse, mixing high-minded attacks on her with patronizing depictions of her supposedly benighted fans. Those fans answer by buying her concert videos and turning out to her shows in droves, where they scream and applaud like mad, many wearing their own tiaras and pink sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “Alzheimer’s bulimia” on the front.

Cindy regales them with tales of her time as a member of the Socialist Children’s Television Ballet or her efforts to get adopted by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Her performances are marathons with musical numbers. Fans often bring her presents and handmade cards. She is a star but also a hero, one of them, one who made it.

“I win,” Cindy sings in one of her songs, “although I’m not a winner.”

Ms. Bessin said in the interview that her act was not about East and West, which are outdated concepts in her view. Cindy happened to come from the East because Ms. Bessin did too. Her memory of the end of Communism was typically understated. “My mother was in the living room. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She said, ‘The Wall fell,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, O.K.,’ and went back to washing dishes.”

Over the next decade she worked a dozen jobs at hotels and restaurants, including Planet Hollywood Berlin, and even did a stint on a cruise ship. She was working as a restaurant manager in 2001 and went on sick leave. When she came back she had been fired and her job had been given to someone else.

A long, demoralizing stretch on welfare followed. Between her hundreds of job applications Ms. Bessin said she ate, lay in bed and watched television, gaining weight and losing motivation. She was slowly sliding into a growing German underclass best known to the rest of the country from talk shows about paternity tests and plastic surgery. Unbeknown to Ms. Bessin, she was researching a character that had not yet found her outlet. Ms. Bessin’s break was not just lucky, it was accidental. In 2004, she called up the Quatsch Comedy Club in Berlin looking for a job as a waitress. After listening to her for a while the man on the other end of the line announced that he was not the person responsible for hiring service personnel. He was in charge of booking the acts.

“Do you have any interest in doing stand-up?” she recalled him asking. He told her about a talent competition the club was hosting. She agreed and began writing a few minutes of material. When she read through her jokes at rehearsal, people told her there was no way her act was going to work.

She decided she had nothing to lose; the wig and the costume were like a disguise and a suit of armor all at once. “No one is going to recognize me anyway, I thought,” Ms. Bessin said. On stage during the actual performance, the crowd responded immediately. Ms. Bessin talks about the similarities between her stage persona and herself, saying Cindy is “80 percent me,” but she talks about the character in the third person. Donning the costume unlocks something impish and ferocious in Ms. Bessin. She won the grueling competition, and eventually earned an appearance on the popular late-night show “TV total” in March 2006.

More offers to perform quickly followed. In 2007, Ms. Bessin won the German Comedy Prize for newcomer of the year. She has a comedy showcase, “Cindy and the Young Wild Ones,” on the private television network RTL.

The set for her first comedy special, “Schizophrenic: I Wanted to Be a Princess,” was a Communist housing bloc. The second, “Not Every Prince Comes on Horseback,” was a pink fairy castle, a home fit for Barbie.

The former welfare queen stood onstage, soaking up the audience’s applause, surrounded by men with guts, a few of them bald, but all wearing skimpy shorts and shaking pink and black pom-poms. Maybe none of them was Enrico, but it was certainly a dream come true.

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Red Hat shares up on acquisition and 3Q results

Red Hat Inc.‘s shares jumped Friday on the software company‘s solid third-quarter results and plans to acquire cloud-based software company ManageIQ.

THE SPARK: Red Hat said late Thursday that it would buy privately held ManageIQ for $ 104 million in cash.

The Raleigh, N.C., company also reported that it earned 29 cents per share for its fiscal third quarter on an adjusted basis, up a penny from the prior year and in line with analyst expectations. Its revenue for the period increased 18 percent to $ 343.6 million, which beats the $ 338 million that analysts polled by FactSet had forecast.

THE BIG PICTURE: ManageIQ’s software helps businesses deploy and manage private clouds. Red Hat said the deal will expand the reach of its public-private cloud setups for its customers. The acquisition is expected to have no material impact to Red Hat’s revenue for its fiscal year ending in February.

THE ANALYSIS: Stifel Nicolaus analyst Brad R. Reback said that the company has been able to maintain momentum even in a difficult environment and he thinks the latest deal offers an interesting longer-term angle for its business. He thinks the company is well positioned to generate at least 15 to 20 percent billings growth in the future. He reiterated a “Buy” rating and a $ 65 price target on its shares.

SHARE ACTION: Shares gained $ 2.25, or more than 4 percent, to $ 54.86 in afternoon trading. Shares have traded between $ 39.19 and $ 62.75 in the past 52 weeks.

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.

The actor's divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.

Kutcher's filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.

Kutcher currently stars on CBS' "Two and a Half Men."

Messages sent to Kutcher's and Moore's publicists were not immediately returned Friday.

Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations' efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.

Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.

Kutcher has been dating former "That '70s Show" co-star Mila Kunis.

The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.

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Alabama to End Isolation of Inmates With H.I.V.

Jamie Martin/Associated Press

The H.I.V. ward of an Alabama women's prison in 2008. The state was ordered to stop segregating inmates with the virus.

A federal judge on Friday ordered Alabama to stop isolating prisoners with H.I.V.

Alabama is one of two states, along with South Carolina, where H.I.V.-positive inmates are housed in separate prisons, away from other inmates, in an attempt to reduce medical costs and stop the spread of the virus, which causes AIDS.

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama ruled in favor of a group of inmates who argued in a class-action lawsuit that they had been stigmatized and denied equal access to educational programs. The judge called the state’s policy “an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of H.I.V.” but “an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease.”

After the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, many states, including New York, quarantined H.I.V.-positive prisoners to prevent the virus from spreading through sexual contact or through blood when inmates tattooed one another. But most states ended the practice voluntarily as powerful antiretroviral drugs reduced the risk of transmission.

In Alabama, inmates are tested for H.I.V. when they enter prison. About 250 of the state’s 26,400 inmates have tested positive. They are housed in special dormitories at two prisons: one for men and one for women. No inmates have developed AIDS, the state says.

H.I.V.-positive inmates are treated differently from those with other viruses like hepatitis B and C, which are far more infectious, according to the World Health Organization. Inmates with H.I.V. are barred from eating in the cafeteria, working around food, enrolling in certain educational programs or transferring to prisons near their families.

Prisoners have been trying to overturn the policy for more than two decades. In 1995, a federal court upheld Alabama’s policy. Inmates filed the latest lawsuit last year.

“Today’s decision is historic,” said Margaret Winter, the associate director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the inmates. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with H.I.V. and their families.”

Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said the state is “not prejudiced against H.I.V.-positive inmates” and has “worked hard over the years to improve their health care, living conditions and their activities.”

“We will continue our review of the court’s opinion and determine our next course of action in a timely manner,” he wrote.

During a monthlong trial in September, lawyers for the department argued that the policy improved the treatment of H.I.V.-positive inmates. Fewer doctors are needed if specialists in H.I.V. focus on 2 of the 29 state’s prisons.

The state spends an average of $22,000 per year on treating individual H.I.V.-positive inmates. The total is more than the cost of medicine for all other inmates, said Bill Lunsford, a lawyer for the Corrections Department.

South Carolina has also faced legal scrutiny. In 2010, the Justice Department notified the state that it was investigating the policy and might sue to overturn it.

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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