U.S. emergency rooms have been overwhelmed with flu patients, turning away some of them and others with non-life-threatening conditions for lack of space.
Forty-one states are battling widespread influenza outbreaks, including Illinois, where six people -- all older than 50 -- have died, according to the state's Department of Public Health.
At least 18 children in the country have died during this flu season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The proportion of people seeing their doctor for flu-like symptoms jumped to 5.6 percent from 2.8 percent in the past month, according to the CDC.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reported a 20 percent increase in flu patients every day. Northwestern Memorial was one of eight hospitals on bypass Monday and Tuesday, meaning it asked ambulances to take patients elsewhere if they could do so safely.
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Most of the hospitals have resumed normal operations, but could return to the bypass status if the influx of patients becomes too great.
"Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an extraordinarily busy hospital, and oftentimes during our busier months, in the summer, we will sometimes have to go on bypass," Northwestern Memorial's Dr. David Zich said. "We don't like it, the community doesn't like it, but sometimes it is necessary."
A tent outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa., was set up to tend to the overflowing number of flu cases.
A hospital in Ohio is requiring patients with the flu to wear masks to protect those who are not infected.
State health officials in Indiana have reported seven deaths. Five of the deaths occurred in people older than 65 and two younger than 18. The state will release another report later today.
Doctors are especially concerned about the elderly and children, where the flu can be deadly.
"Our office in the last two weeks has exploded with children," Dr. Gayle Smith, a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., said
It is the earliest flu season in a decade and, ABC News Chief Medical Editor Dr. Besser says, it's not too late to protect yourself from the outbreak.
"You have to think about an anti-viral, especially if you're elderly, a young child, a pregnant woman," Besser said.
"They're the people that are going to die from this. Tens of thousands of people die in a bad flu season. We're not taking it serious enough."
DAMASCUS/ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Forty-eight Iranians freed by Syrian rebels in exchange for more than 2,000 civilian prisoners held by the Syrian government arrived in central Damascus on Wednesday, a Reuters witness reported.
The Syrian government has not referred to the prisoner swap and the whereabouts of the civilian prisoners was not immediately known.
Opposition groups accuse it of detaining tens of thousands of political prisoners during his 12 years in office and say those numbers have spiked sharply during the 21-month-old civil war.
The Syrian rebel al-Baraa brigade seized the Iranians in early August and initially threatened to kill them, saying they were members of Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent to fight for President Bashar al-Assad.
The Islamic Republic, one of his staunchest allies, denied this, saying they were Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims visiting shrines, and it asked Turkey and Qatar to use their connections with Syrian insurgents to help secure their release.
The freed Iranians arrived at a Damascus hotel in six small buses, looking tired but in good health, each carrying a white flower, and they were welcomed by Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Reza Sheibani. They did not speak to reporters.
Bulent Yildirim, head of the Turkish humanitarian aid agency IHH which helped broker the deal, told Reuters by telephone from Damascus shortly beforehand that the reciprocal release of 2,130 civilian prisoners - most of them Syrian but also including Turks and other foreign citizens - had begun.
Syrian government forces have struck local deals with rebel groups to trade prisoners but the release announced on Wednesday was the first time non-Syrians were freed in an exchange.
The Damascus government has periodically freed hundreds of prisoners during the conflict but always stressed such detainees "do not have blood on their hands."
Given the number of political prisoners held during the course of Assad's rule, missing persons became a key issue when street protests against him first erupted in March 2011.
Turkey is one of Assad's fiercest critics, a strong backer of his opponents and proponent of international intervention. It has denounced Iran's stance during the Syrian uprising, which has killed around 60,000 people according to a U.N. estimate.
Turkey, Gulf Arab states, the United States and European allies support the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels, while Shi'ite Iran supports Assad, whose Alawite minority is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.
A pro-government newspaper said on December 31 that Syrian forces arrested four Turkish fighter pilots who were trying to sneak into a military airport with an armed group in the northern province of Aleppo.
The Damascus-based al-Watan newspaper said the arrests at the Koers military base, 24 km (15 miles) east of Aleppo city, proved "scandalous Turkish involvement" in Syria's crisis.
TURKEY, QATAR INTERVENE
The al-Baraa brigade, part of the umbrella rebel organization, the Free Syrian Army, said in October it would start killing the Iranians unless Assad freed Syrian opposition detainees and stopped shelling civilian areas.
But Qatar, following a request from Iran, urged the rebels not to carry out the threat.
Insurgents fighting to topple Assad accuse Iran of sending fighters from the Revolutionary Guards to help his forces crush the revolt, a charge the Islamic Republic denies.
The rebels now control wide areas of northern and eastern Syria, most of its border crossings with Turkey and a crescent of suburbs around the capital Damascus.
But Assad's government is still firmly entrenched in the capital and controls most of the densely populated southwest, the Mediterranean coast and the main north-south highway.
The IHH has been involved in previous negotiations in recent months to release prisoners, including two Turkish journalists and Syrian citizens, held in Syria.
The humanitarian group came to prominence in May 2010 when Israeli marines stormed its Mavi Marmara aid ship to enforce a naval blockade of the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip and killed nine Turks in clashes with activists on board.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut and Marcus George in Dubai; Writing by Nick Tattersall)
HONG KONG: Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers failed in an unprecedented bid on Wednesday to impeach the city's embattled Beijing-backed leader, after they accused him of breaking housing laws and urged him to quit.
The city's first impeachment motion, which accused Leung Chun-ying of lying, dereliction of duty and serious breaches of the law in a row stemming from illegal structures at his luxury home, was denied after eight hours of debate.
The 27 pro-democracy lawmakers who signed the joint motion -- which they said was a symbolic move -- voted in favour, while 37 voted against in the 70-seat legislature which is dominated by pro-Beijing members.
Wednesday's vote followed a protest on New Year's Day in which tens of thousands took to the streets to urge Leung to quit and to press for greater democracy, 15 years after the city returned to Chinese rule.
The former British colony maintains a semi-autonomous status, with its own legal and judicial system, but cannot choose its leader through the popular vote.
Leung took office in July after he was picked by a 1,200-strong election committee dominated by pro-Beijing elites, amid rising anger over what many perceive to be China's meddling in local affairs.
China has said the chief executive could be directly elected in 2017 at the earliest, with the legislature following by 2020.
Unauthorised structures are a politically sensitive issue in the space-starved city of seven million and demonstrators have used the scandal to press for universal suffrage in choosing Hong Kong's leader.
Leung secured the chief executive role after criticising his rival Henry Tang over illegal structures at Tang's home.
But he has since acknowledged and apologised for structures at his own home which were built without planning permission.
Maverick lawmaker "Long Hair" Leung Kwok-hung, wearing a T-shirt reading "We topple a tyrant", accused the new leader of lying about his own structures during campaigning when he presented the impeachment motion earlier on Wednesday.
"He has used dishonest ways to win the election," he said.
Chief Secretary Carrie Lam, second in command in Leung's administration, said the motion was unnecessary and urged lawmakers to work together on policy and livelihood issues.
But Democratic Party chairwoman Emily Lau said the motion was a symbolic gesture to show the deepening public mistrust toward Leung, claiming the leader had "cheated his way to power".
"This is the first time we have a motion in the legislature to impeach a cheating chief executive," she said.
If the motion had been passed, the city's highest court would have had to initiate an investigation. At least two-thirds of the legislature would need to endorse a guilty finding before Leung could be removed from office.
Earlier, rival protesters traded barbs outside the legislature and security personnel had to step in at one point when an angry pro-government supporter charged towards the rival group, TV footage showed.
Leung's popularity ratings have fallen since the controversy, with discontent over issues including sky-high property prices and anti-Beijing sentiment remaining high.
LAS VEGAS--Call it a minor upgrade, but that's what G-Technology has to offer this year at CES.
The storage vendor, which is now part of Western Digital, announced at CES 2013 that it now ships all of its popular G-Technology G-Drive Mini and G-RAID Mini external storage products with high-speed 1TB, 2.5-inch 7,200rpm hard drives.
Thanks to this, the G-Drive Mini, a compact single-volume external drive, now offers up to 136MBps performance speed. The drive offers both USB 3.0 and FireWire 8000 connection types and is bus-powered. It's preformatted for Mac and is now available in a 1TB model that costs $200.
The G-RAID Mini is a dual-volume external hard drive that offers RAID 0 (default) and RAID 1. RAID 0 is tuned for high-speed performance and maximum storage space, while the RAID 1 guards the data against a single drive failure at the expense of 50 percent of storage space. This drive also supports both USB 3.0 and FireWire. It's now available in a 2TB capacity and costs $450.
Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Costa Concordia disaster, in which 32 people were killed when the cruise ship ran aground off the Italian island of Giglio, the captain of the ship told an Italian newspaper that he "was painted worse than bin Laden."
82 Photos
Luxury cruise ship runs aground
Francesco Schettino said in an interview with the Turin newspaper La Stampa that he is tormented by the disaster.
"It is sincere pain from the bottom of my heart," he said.
The 950-foot-long Costa Concordia struck rocks and capsized on January 13 last year. Thirty-two people aboard were killed and hundreds injured in the panicked evacuation.
Prosecutors have accused Shettino of sailing the luxury liner too close to shore. He faces multiple charges of manslaughter and of abandoning ship during the evacuation of the 4,200 passengers and crew on board.
Italian media have referred to Schettino as "Captain Coward,"
He complained to the paper that the press' characterization of him and his actions "ridicules not just 30 years of my work, my experience in the whole world, but also the image of our country, which has been exposed to the criticism, often unjust, of the entire planet."
The Costa Concordia cruise ship is seen on its side near the Italian island of Giglio, January 7, 2013.
/ FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images
Schettino - who told the paper that he did not intentionally abandon ship, but slipped and fell into a lifeboat when the Concordia listed to its side - says he may have made a mistake by sailing too close to land, but he was not given exact information, and should not be the only one to get the blame.
In fact, eight others (including the ship's first officer and four other crew members, and three members of a crisis unit set up by the cruise ship's owner) also face possible criminal charges following the Italian prosecutors' investigation, which concluded last month.
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Costa Concordia: Salvaging a shipwreck
Last Thursday at a Naples courtroom, Schettino brought a case against Costa Cruises, the ship's operator, for wrongful dismissal.
Efforts by salvage crews to right the ship are underway.
Jodi Arias is a woman that many can't keep their eyes off of--a soft-spoken, small-framed 32-year-old who last year won a jailhouse Christmas caroling contest. But she is also an admitted killer who is now on trial in Arizona for the 2008 murder of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.
Sitting in a Maricopa County court, Arias, whose trial resumes today, cries every time prosecutors describe what she admits she did -- stab her one-time boyfriend Travis Alexander 27 times, slit his throat and shoot him in the head.
Arias grew up in the small city of Yreka, Calif. She dropped out of high school, but received her GED while in jail a few years ago. She was an aspiring photographer; her MySpace page includes several albums of pictures, one of which was called "In loving memory of Travis Alexander."
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"Jodi wanted nothing but to please Travis," defense attorney Jennifer Wilmot said in her opening statements, but added that there was another reality – that Arias was Alexander's "dirty little secret."
Arias' attorneys want the jury to believe she killed Alexander in June of 2008 in self defense, that he abused her, and she feared for her life when she attacked him in the shower of his Mesa, Ariz., home.
Alexander's family and friends say Arias was a stalker who killed him in cold blood. They say the 30-year-old was a successful businessman who overcame all the odds. His parents were drug addicts, and he grew up occasionally homeless until he converted to Mormonism and turned his life around.
Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events in the Arizona Murder Case
"He actually had everything going for him," said Dave Hall, one of Alexander's friends. "A beautiful home, a beautiful car, a great income."
Alexander kept a blog, and in a haunting last entry, just two weeks before his murder, he wrote about trying to find a wife.
"This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview," he wrote. "Desperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer penned up inside of her."
Alexander did date a killer. It's now up to the jury to decide if she killed in self defense.
Tunis (Reuters) - Tunisia has freed, for lack of evidence, a Tunisian man who had been suspected of involvement in an Islamist militant attack in Libya last year in which the U.S. ambassador was killed, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
Ali Harzi was one of two Tunisians named in October by the Daily Beast website as having been detained in Turkey over the violence in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other American officials were killed.
"The judge decided to free Harzi and he is free now," lawyer Anouar Awled Ali told Reuters. "The release came in response to our request to free him for lack of evidence and after he underwent the hearing with American investigators as a witness in the case."
A Tunisian justice ministry spokesman confirmed the release of Harzi but declined to elaborate.
A month ago, Harzi refused to be interviewed by visiting U.S. FBI investigators over the September 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
The Daily Beast reported that shortly after the attacks began, Harzi posted an update on an unspecified social media site about the fighting.
It said Harzi was on his way to Syria when he was detained in Turkey at the behest of U.S. authorities, and that he was affiliated with a militant group in North Africa.
(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
SRINAGAR, India: Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers on Tuesday near the tense disputed border between the nuclear-armed neighbours in Kashmir and one of the bodies was badly mutilated, the Indian army said.
The firefight broke out at about noon on Tuesday (0630 GMT) after an Indian patrol discovered Pakistani troops about half a kilometre (1,600 feet) inside Indian territory, an army spokesman told AFP.
A ceasefire has been in place along the Line of Control that divides the countries since 2003, but it is periodically violated by both sides and Pakistan said Indian troops killed a Pakistani soldier on Sunday.
Relations had been slowly improving over the last few years following a rupture in their slow-moving peace process after the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, which were blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants.
"There was a firefight with Pakistani troops," army spokesman Rajesh Kalia told AFP from the mountainous Himalayan region.
"We lost two soldiers and one of them has been badly mutilated," he added, declining to give more details on the injuries.
"The intruders were regular (Pakistani) soldiers and they were 400-500 metres (1,300-1,600 feet) inside our territory," he said of the clash in Mendhar sector, 173 kilometres (107 miles) west by road from the city of Jammu.
In Islamabad, a Pakistan military spokesman denied what he called an "Indian allegation of unprovoked firing". He declined to elaborate.
On Sunday, Pakistan said Indian troops had crossed the Line of Control and stormed a military post. It said one Pakistani soldier was killed and another injured.
It lodged a formal protest with India on Monday over what it called an unprovoked attack.
India denied crossing the line, saying it had retaliated with small arms fire after Pakistani mortars hit a village home.
A foreign ministry spokesman said Indian troops had undertaken "controlled retaliation" on Sunday after "unprovoked firing" which damaged a civilian home.
The deaths are set to undermine recent efforts to improve relations, such as opening up trade and offering more lenient visa regimes which have been a feature of talks between senior political leaders from both sides.
Muslim-majority Kashmir is a Himalayan region which India and Pakistan both claim in full but rule in part. It was the cause of two of three wars between the neighbours since independence from Britain in 1947.
Lexar's Professional XQD USB 3.0 Reader for reading XQD flash memory cards
(Credit: Lexar)
Nikon photography pros will be happy to know there's a major new supplier of XQD flash-memory cards: Lexar.
Lexar's 64GB XQD flash memory card
(Credit: Lexar)
They might not be so happy about the price for the new high-end format: a 1100X 64GB model costs $580, and a 32GB costs $300. At the CES show today, the Micron subsidiary also announced a $45 USB 3.0 card reader for the new format.
Nikon's flagship D4 SLR uses the XQD cards, which before were available only from Sony. Lexar's 1100X models guarantee a 168MB/sec read speed, though write speeds are somewhat lower.
XQD is one of two formats vying to be the replacement for the venerable CompactFlash. Perversely, the CompactFlash Association is overseeing standardization of both. Nikon signed up for XQD, which is based on the PCI Express data-transfer technology, but Canon signed up for CFast 2.0, which uses the Serial ATA data-transfer technology.
Having two high-end flash card formats means the market is fragmented, making it harder for photographers to switch between camera models or use multiple brands. It also means shipment volumes of either format will be lower than if there were a unified standard, which typically translates into lower availability and higher cost.
Lexar's top rival, SanDisk, is making CFast 2.0 cards but not XQD cards.
Meanwhile, SD card is the victor of the mainstream flash-card market.
That victory doesn't mean SD is immune from stratospherically priced options for buyers who need to keep up with 3D video or other high-throughput demands, though.
Also at CES, Lexar also announced new high-performance SD cards. The Lexar Professional 600x SDXC UHS-I card comes in a 256GB size that costs $1,000.
Lexar's 256GB Professional 600x SDXC UHS-I flash memory card
CENTENNIAL, Colo. Nearly six months after the Colorado movie theater massacre, prosecutors began laying out their case Monday against the former neuroscience graduate student accused in the rampage.
23 Photos
The Aurora shooting victims
Investigators say James Holmes wore body armor and a gas mask when he tossed two gas canisters and then opened fire during the midnight showing of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises," killing 12 people and wounding dozens.
Whatever details emerge at the preliminary hearing, they will do so in a nation that has changed dramatically since the July 20 attack that pushed the problems of gun violence and mental illness into the forefront before receding.
That debate reignited last month when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn., spawning calls for better psychiatric care, tougher gun laws and the arming of teachers.
The preliminary hearing, which is expected to last all week, will allow the judge to determine whether the prosecution's case is strong enough to warrant a trial.
CBS News senior legal analyst Andrew Cohen reports the prosecution has a low burden to meet at the hearing, but notes that the proceeding allows the defense an early chance to evaluate the strength of the state's case and to question law enforcement officials.
"It's likely to be dramatic and in many ways heartbreaking," Cohen told CBS Radio News. "The public will hear details for the first time about what police believe went on inside that theater. We could hear 911 tapes. There will likely be photos and video, and Holmes will be at the defense table through it all."
Holmes is charged with more than 160 counts, including murder and attempted murder.
Legal analysts say that evidence appears to be so strong that Holmes may well accept a plea agreement before trial.
In such cases, the preliminary hearing can set the stage for a deal by letting each side assess the other's strengths and weaknesses, said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
They "are often the first step to resolving the case, a mini-trial so both sides can see the writing on the wall," she said.
In general, plea agreements help prosecutors avoid costly trials, give the accused a lesser sentence like life in prison rather than the death penalty, and spare the victims and their families from the trauma of going through a lengthy trial.
At this stage, prosecutors must only meet a "probable cause" standard — much lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for a guilty verdict, said Mimi Wesson, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.
Many of the survivors and family members of the dead are expected to attend the hearing, and court officials expect an overflow crowd of reporters and spectators.
Play Video
Aurora movie theater massacre pre-trial to begin
Chantel Blunk, whose husband, Jonathan Blunk, died in the attack, flew from Reno, Nev., to attend the hearing. She wanted to be there for the late father of their children and the other victims, CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports.
"No matter what this guy did to everybody, you know, we're still going there and representing the people that were lost, that were hurt, and that he is not going to win," Blunk told Bojorquez. "You know, it's not about his name or remembering him. It's about the people that were taken away."
The hearing is the first extensive public disclosure of the evidence against Holmes. Three days after the shooting, District Judge William Sylvester forbade attorneys and investigators from discussing the case publicly, and many court documents have been filed under seal.
Play Video
Prosecutors: Holmes threatened university prof.
Play Video
Psychiatrist who treated Holmes testifies
It took this long to get to the preliminary hearing because lawyers have been debating what physical evidence should be made available to one side or the other, whether a psychiatrist who met with Holmes is barred from testimony by doctor-patient privilege, who was responsible for leaks to the media, and other issues.
Police say Holmes, now 25, had stockpiled weapons, ammunition, explosives and body armor. He was a first-year student in a Ph.D. neuroscience program at the University of Colorado, Denver, but he failed a year-end exam and withdrew in June, authorities have said.
The shootings happened six weeks later.
Federal authorities have said Holmes entered the theater with a ticket and is believed to have propped open a door, slipped out to his car and returned with his weapons. Police arrested him outside the theater shortly after the shootings ended.
Holmes' mental health could be a significant issue — and possibly a contentious one — in the preliminary hearing.
His attorneys have told the judge Holmes is mentally ill, but they have not said whether they plan to employ an insanity defense. He had seen a university psychiatrist, and his lawyers have said he tried to call the psychiatrist nine minutes before the killing began.
Defense lawyers have said they plan to call at least two people, described as "lay witnesses," who could testify about Holmes' mental health. Prosecutors asked Sylvester to block the witnesses, but he refused.
