France Details Plan to Shrink Banking Risk

PARIS — François Hollande began his campaign for the French presidency in January with the declaration that he and his Socialist party were prepared to break from policies that they said had contributed to the financial crisis, notably promising a separation of investment banking from consumer banks.

“My real adversary has no name, no face, no party; it will never be a candidate, even though it governs,” he told supporters at Le Bourget, near Paris. “It is the world of finance.”

Of course, 11 months is a long time in politics. The banking overhaul bill rolled out Wednesday by Mr. Hollande’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, was a far cry from the tough talk of January. Les Échos, a French financial daily, summed up the general reaction in a Page One headline: “Hollande’s signature bank law project is on the rails.”

Gone is the strict separation of investment banking from the consumer, or retail, business and its insured deposit base, with banks required simply to “ring-fence” trading for their own books in separately capitalized subsidiaries that remain within the organization. And loopholes in proposed bans on high-frequency trading and agricultural commodity speculation have left those measures essentially toothless.

The banking bill fell well short of a proposal put forth by Erkki Liikanen, the governor of the Bank of Finland, that all banks on the European Union quarantine their risky trading activities. It also fell short of the strictest version of the so-called Volcker plan in the United States, which would prohibit lenders from engaging in proprietary trading altogether.

But French bankers and officials including the Bank of France governor, Christian Noyer, had argued forcefully that Mr. Hollande’s original plans would have put the country’s financial firms at a competitive disadvantage to foreign rivals. Expectations for the bill had been ratcheted down in recent months.

“This isn’t reform for the sake of the banking lobby,” Mr. Moscovici said after he presented the proposal to the cabinet. “It preserves the French universal banking model that has stood the test of time.” The bill represents, he said, a campaign promise Mr. Hollande has kept.

The French Banking Federation said in a statement that the bill would “create new constraints and additional charges at an inopportune moment, when the banks must make considerable efforts to adapt to the Basel III capital rules.”

But analysts played down the significance of the measures, and shares of the biggest French banks — BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole and Société Générale — rose in Paris on Wednesday.

“It’s all mirrors and smoke,” Christophe Nijdam, a banking analyst at AlphaValue in Paris, said. “In blunt terms, this is not banking reform.”

As evidence, Mr. Nijdam estimated the proposal would require BNP, the largest French lender, to segregate activities that represented just 0.5 percent of its net banking income. In contrast, he said, the Liikanen proposal would require BNP to segregate activities that represented an estimated 13 percent of that income. The difference is important, because if the riskier activities were separated, their financing costs would rise, reducing profitability.

The bill also calls for the creation of a guarantee fund, paid for by a levy on financial institutions, that could be called on to help pay for any banking disaster.

It also gives the government greater reach. The existing Prudential Supervisory Authority would be given the power to wind up any faltering banks. A new agency, the Financial Stability Council, would be charged with anticipating systemic risks to the banking sector, and have the power to order banks to raise capital or take other measures when they encountered difficulties.

Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels, said the new resolution authority might turn out to be the most important element in the bill. “France has long had a tradition that banks don’t fail,” he said, “and this represents a significant step away from that.”

The banking bill was adopted by the cabinet but must still obtain parliamentary approval. It must also be brought into conformity with emerging European Union rules.

“I was always skeptical that France could do it alone,” Mr. Véron said, adding that it was “not suitable” for the government to be pushing for integration at the E.U. level through a banking union while pushing for a different policy at the domestic level.

On a day when Mr. Hollande was making headlines on a state visit to Algeria, it also fell to Mr. Moscovici to warn that further pension overhauls might be necessary — a revelation that carries political risk for the government.

Mr. Moscovici told RTL radio that changes to the retirement system would have to be considered, despite fixes made in 2010 by Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Hollande’s conservative predecessor. Mr. Sarkozy’s changes, including an increase in the retirement age by two years, to 62, were to have kept the system solvent until 2018. But a new study by a government body, the Conseil d’Orientation des Retraites, estimates the retirement plans would have a combined deficit of €18.8 billion, or $23.8 billion, in 2017, up from €15 billion last year.

The study, first reported this week in Le Monde, proposed several means of addressing the gap, including an increase in payroll deductions, a reduction in the average pension, or adding six months to the retirement age.

Mr. Moscovici also sought to play down suggestions of policy differences among members of Mr. Hollande’s government, saying it was natural that ministers would express themselves differently even though they agreed on overall direction.

Referring to the recent dispute with ArcelorMittal, in which Mr. Hollande’s governmentthreatened to take over one of the company’s steel plants, Mr. Moscovici said that temporary nationalization could be “useful” when strategic interests were in play, but could not be an end in itself. He spoke after the industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, told Le Monde that “temporary nationalization is the solution of the future.”

“Temporary nationalization is a part of the future, not the entire future,” Mr. Moscovici said.

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Google launches ‘scan and match’ music service

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Google is turning on a “scan and match” service for Google Music users to store copies of their songs online, offering for free what Apple charges $ 25 a year for.

The service, which launched Tuesday, cuts uploading time for those who want to save their music libraries online. It scans a user’s computer and gives them online access to the songs it finds, as long as they match the songs on its servers. Otherwise, it will upload songs to a user’s online locker.

The service is similar to Apple Inc.‘s iTunes Match, which includes online storage for 25,000 songs. Google Inc. allows storage for 20,000 songs and allows users to re-download the songs only at the same quality as they were at previously. Apple upgrades songs to iTunes quality.

Amazon runs a similar matching and uploading service called Cloud Player. It costs $ 25 a year for 250,000 songs. A free version is limited to 250 songs.

Google is still a fledgling entrant into music sales since debuting its store in November 2011, though it expects to benefit from the hundreds of millions of devices that use its Android operating system on mobile devices.

According to the NPD Group, Apple accounted for 64 percent of U.S. music sales online, followed by Amazon at 16 percent. Google has no more than 5 percent, according to NPD. Other services make up the rest.

Google had sold songs at a discount at the start, but that is less so the case now. For example, it was selling the top-ranked Bruno Mars song “Locked Out of Heaven” for $ 1.29 on Wednesday, the same as iTunes, and above the 99 cents on Amazon. But its album price was lower at $ 10.49 versus $ 10.99 at both iTunes and Amazon.

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Cruz: Meeting Pinto family was "toughest by far"

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) — For much of his hour-long visit with the family of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Connecticut school shootings, Victor Cruz talked about football, life and young Jack, the child who idolized him.

Tears were shed. Feelings were shared. Cleats and gloves worn by Cruz to honor Jack Pinto at Sunday's game against Atlanta were given to his family.

The New York Giants wide receiver somberly recounted Wednesday his meeting with Pinto's parents and brother in Newtown, Conn.

He struggled in his retelling only when asked about the family's decision to bury the child in the receiver's No. 80 Giants jersey. The father of an infant girl, Cruz stopped for a moment, and his eyes became watery.

"You never go through some circumstances like this and circumstances where a kid faces or a family faces something of this magnitude at their school," Cruz said. "This definitely was the toughest by far."

Jack Pinto was buried on Monday and Cruz telephoned the family to ask whether he could visit them Tuesday.

The family disclosed after Friday's massacre that Cruz was Jack's favorite player. The boy was one of 20 first-graders and six adults killed in the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Cruz drove to Newtown with his girlfriend, Elaina Watley, and their daughter, Kennedy.

"I had no expectations. I was a little nervous," Cruz said. "I just didn't know how I was going to be received. You never know when they are going through something like that. You never know how it is going to go down."

Seeing the family outside the home along with some local children made Cruz feel better.

"They were still pretty emotional, crying and stuff like that," Cruz said. "I saw how affected they were by just my presence alone. I got out and gave them the cleats and the gloves and they appreciated it. The older brother (Ben) was still emotional, so I gave them to him."

Cruz had written "Jack Pinto, My Hero" and "R.I.P. Jack Pinto" on his cleats before the Giants' loss to the Falcons Sunday in Atlanta.

The 26-year-old player best known for his salsa dances after touchdowns, signed autographs for the children before heading inside.

"I didn't want to go in there and make a speech," Cruz said. "I just wanted to go and spend some time with them and be someone they could talk to, and be someone they can vent to, talk about how much of a fans they are of the team, or different times they watched the Super Bowl."

Cruz spent that part of the visit sitting in the chair where Jack's father, Dean, sat when he watched the Giants' Super Bowl win over the New England Patriots in February.

It was a day Jack got to see his favorite team win a championship.

"It was just an emotional time," Cruz said. "I spent a little bit of time with them. We got to smile a little bit, which was good for them. It was a time where I just wanted to be a positive voice, a positive light in the tunnel where it can really be negative, so it was a good time. They are a great family and they're really united at this time and it was good to see."

Cruz said it was strange thinking about a child being buried in his jersey. He did not know how to react. Should he thank the family?

"It leaves you kind of blank," Cruz said. "I am definitely honored by it. I am definitely humbled by it, and it's definitely an unfortunate but humbling experience for me."

The visit also gave Cruz time to reflect, especially looking at his daughter.

"Ever since it happened I've kind of been spending more time with her, just cherishing the little moments, the little time you get with her because you never know when that can be taken from you," he said.

Giants coach Tom Coughlin said he was incredibly proud of Cruz for visiting with the Pinto family.

"Hopefully some of their grief might at least temporarily be suspended in being able to embrace Victor Cruz," Coughlin said, adding what he did speaking volumes of what he has inside.

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice said what Cruz did took heart.

"You've got to be able to put yourself in that family's situation to understand at least what they're going through," Rice said in a conference call with the New York media about Sunday's game against the Giants. "That's what it's about. That's something that you don't just say, 'I'm going to do it.' You do it from the heart, from within and what he did was amazing."

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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F.D.A. and States Meet About Regulation of Drug Compounders

Mary Calvert/Reuters

Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, testified on the fungal meningitis outbreak before Congress in November. Dr. Hamburg addressed the need for greater federal oversight of large compounding pharmacies, which mix up batches of drugs on their own, often for much lower prices than major manufacturers charge.

SILVER SPRING, Md. – The Food and Drug Administration conferred with public health officials from 50 states on Wednesday about how best to strengthen rules governing compounding pharmacies in the wake of a national meningitis outbreak caused by a tainted pain medication produced by a Massachusetts pharmacy.

It was the first public discussion of what should be done about the practice of compounding, or tailor-making medicine for individual patients, since the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, last month testified in Congress about the need for greater federal oversight of large compounding pharmacies. So far, 620 people in 19 states have been sickened in the outbreak, and 39 of them have died.

Pharmacies fall primarily under state law, and the F.D.A. convened the meeting to get specifics from states on gaps in the regulatory net and how they see the federal role. Large-scale compounding has expanded dramatically since the early 1990s, driven by changes in the health care system, including the rise of hospital outsourcing.

“It is very clear that the health care system has evolved and the role of the compounding pharmacies has really shifted,” Dr. Hamburg said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. She said the laws have not kept pace. “We need legislation that reflects the current environment and the known gaps in our state and federal oversight systems.”

Under current law, compounders are not required to give the F.D.A. access to their books, and about half of all the court orders the agency obtained over the past decade were for pharmacy compounders, though compounders are only a small part of the agency’s regulatory responsibilities.

The F.D.A.'s critics argue that the agency already has all the legal authority it needs to police compounders. They say many compounders have been operating as major manufacturers, shipping to states across the country, and that the F.D.A. should be using its jurisdiction over manufacturers to regulate those companies’ activities.

“There should be one uniform federal standard that is enforced by one agency – the F.D.A.,” said Michael Carome, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a nonprofit consumer organization, who has been a critic of the agency’s approach. “They have been lax in enforcing that standard.”

But Dr. Hamburg contends that the distinction is not so simple. Lumping large compounders in with manufacturers would mean they would have to file new drug applications for every product they make, a costly and time-consuming process that is not always necessary for the products they make, which may include IV feeding tube bags. Dr. Hamburg has proposed creating a new federal oversight category for large-scale compounders, separate from manufacturers.

“What concerns me is the idea that we could assert full authority over some of these facilities as though they were manufacturers, as though there were an on-off, black-white option,” Dr. Hamburg said. “That is a heavy-handed way to regulate a set of activities that can make a huge positive difference in providing necessary health care to people.”

Large-scale compounders play an important role in the health care supply chain when they produce quality products, F.D.A. officials say. They fill gaps during shortages and supply hospitals with products that can be made more safely and cost-effectively in bulk than in individual hospitals. Officials said they wanted to make sure the products made by such suppliers were safe, but were also concerned about disrupting that supply.

Carmen Catizone, head of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, said states are not equipped to regulate the large-scale compounders and that the F.D.A. needs to find a middle path for regulating them.

“Either hospitals are not going to like the solution, or the manufacturers aren’t going to like the fact that these guys get a shorter path,” he said. “But something’s got to give.”

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Challenging France to Do Business Differently

Pool photo by Bertrand Langlois

President Francois Hollande, at the Élysée Palace this week, turned to the prominent industrialist Louis Gallois for advice on how to put corporate France on a more competitive footing with the rest of Europe.

PARIS — Louis Gallois, one of France’s most influential industrialists, knew he was about to make waves for the country’s Socialist president.

It was late October, and President François Hollande, faced with an alarming deterioration in the economy, had turned to Mr. Gallois for advice on how to put corporate France on a more competitive footing with the rest of Europe.

Mr. Gallois didn’t sugar-coat the message. His report called for a “competitiveness shock” that would require politicians to curb the “cult of regulation” he said was choking business in France.

The report said that unless France relaxed its notoriously rigid labor market, the country would continue on an industrial decline that had destroyed more than 750,000 jobs in a decade and helped shrink France’s share of exports to the European Union to 9.3 percent, from 12.7 percent, during that period. The report also called for cuts to a broad range of business taxes used to pay for big government and France’s expensive social safety net.

But some wonder whether those measures, even if they can be adopted, would suffice. For them, there is a larger question: Can France be fixed?

While the European crisis has made the French acutely aware of the need to modernize the economy, the country may be running short on time. And there are mixed signals on whether the Hollande government is willing to heed the advice.

As details of the report leaked, the French news media went into a frenzy over whether their country — so resistant to change that the government still controls the price of a baguette of bread — was prepared for such upheaval.

Mr. Hollande quickly provided an answer: a competitiveness “pact” between business and government would better suit French society.

As Mr. Hollande’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, hastened to explain, “A shock causes trauma, whereas a pact reassures.”

But many observers say reassurance may no longer be an option.

Even the Germans are alarmed: Behind closed doors, Chancellor Angela Merkel and officials in her entourage are said to be worried that a failure by Mr. Hollande to improve competitiveness could ricochet back to the weakening German economy, further stalling what had long been twin engines of growth for Europe.

“The concern is not just that France could be the next candidate affected by turbulence” from the euro crisis, said Lars P. Feld, an economics professor at the University of Freiburg and an adviser to the German government. “The fear is that it doesn’t manage to cope with the loss of competitiveness and therefore produces little growth or perhaps even stagnation for the next few years,” Mr. Feld said. “And that after that, it could become the new sick man of Europe.”

France still has much working in its favor. Second only to Germany as Europe’s biggest economy, and the fifth-largest in the world, France is a wealthy country with a high savings rate, large foreign direct investment and world-class research and development capabilities.

And the interest rate on French 10-year bonds is only about 2 percent. That is much closer to Germany’s rate than to those of the euro zone’s staggering giants, Italy and Spain, which are above 4 percent and 5 percent respectively, as they struggle to clean up their economies.

Yet, last week the French central bank warned that growth would shrink 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2012, after stagnating for most of the year. Last month Moody’s Investors Service followed Standard & Poor’s in stripping France of its triple-A credit rating, saying the government was failing to ignite competitiveness fast enough.

Meanwhile, an ambitious effort Mr. Hollande began shortly after his election in May to cut the deficit to 3 percent next year from 4.5 percent through tax increases and spending cuts may dampen growth further and ratchet up unemployment, which recently neared 11 percent, twice the rate in Germany.

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India Ink: Indians Outraged Over Rape on Moving Bus in New Delhi

The police said the men were looking for some fun. They had been drinking, having a party, and decided to go on a joy ride. They began circling the capital in a private bus, the police said, when they spotted a couple looking for a ride home. They waved the man and woman onboard and charged them each 36 cents.

And then, the police said, the men beat the couple with an iron rod and repeatedly raped the woman as the bus circled the city. The woman suffered severe injuries to her head and intestines and required multiple operations, local news media reported, indicators of an assault so savage that India’s capital on Tuesday was shaking with public outrage. Protesters encircled a local police station and blocked a major highway. India’s Parliament erupted in angry protests and condemnation.

“A terrible, terrible atrocity has happened,” Renuka Chowdhary, a member of Parliament, said Tuesday during a raucous session in the upper house. “I am not going to allow this incident to become another statistic.”

Sushma Swaraj, the leader of the opposition in the lower house, demanded that the death penalty be imposed for rapists. “She will live her whole life as a living corpse if she survives,” Ms. Swaraj said of the victim. “Why should there not be the death penalty in such a case?”

The attack is the latest grisly sexual assault in northern India, many of them occurring in the national capital, now often described in the media as India’s rape capital. Horrific cases of violence against women seem to happen with disturbing regularity. In one highly publicized case in October, a 16-year-old girl in the neighboring state of Haryana was raped repeatedly by a group of eight men, perhaps more, who filmed the assault on their cellphones and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. But the family came forward after the videos circulated and her father killed himself by drinking pesticide.

The latest attack occurred on Sunday evening, in the southern rim of the capital. The woman, a 23-year-old medical student, had been out with a male friend; Indian news media reported that they had seen a film together. It was about 9:10 p.m., and the police said the couple were trying to find a ride to a city neighborhood known as Palam. A bus pulled over, and they boarded.

New Delhi has a mix of public and private buses serving more than seven million people every day. The police said the man and woman were tricked into believing that the bus was part of the city’s public fleet: one of the suspects was posing as a conductor, calling out for passengers. Instead, the bus was part of a fleet owned by a private charter company. One of the suspects worked for the company by day, driving a bus for a private school.

As the bus began moving, three young men confronted the couple and began harassing the woman, the police said. Her friend tried to intervene, but they beat him with an iron rod and then repeatedly raped the woman, the police said.

Eventually, the two were stripped of their clothing and thrown out of the bus onto a national highway on the southern outskirts of the capital.

In a briefing on Tuesday afternoon, the Delhi police commissioner, Neeraj Kumar, said the suspects had taken the bus after an evening of drinking and eating. “The idea was to have fun,” he said.

The police said they had arrested four of the six suspects in the case, based on evidence from closed-circuit surveillance cameras. The commissioner said the courts would be asked to “fast track” the case, while prosecutors are expected to seek the maximum sentence of life in prison.

The woman is being treated at Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, and regained consciousness on Tuesday, local media reported. She is communicating through writing.

Across New Delhi on Tuesday, women’s groups and students organized protests to demand better security, at one point shutting down the city’s outer ring road, a major route. Several hundred other protesters gathered around the police station where the complaint was filed, holding placards and chanting slogans.

“This is an expression of our horror and anger and discontent at how things are,” said Komal, a doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University who asked to be identified only by her first name. “The government has to take responsibility.”

She said she regularly took buses and often felt unsafe traveling in the capital region. Being sexually harassed is an “everyday experience,” she said. Women are constantly followed by men and groped while on public transportation, she said.

Anupama Ramakrishnan, 33, who is studying sociology at Delhi University, blamed what she called “a deeply held sense of patriarchy” for the attack.

“This is not about sexuality,” she said. “It is about power and violence.”

New Delhi has one of the highest reported rates of crime against women in India, though most experts believe that the official numbers barely hint at the real scale of the problem. Nearly 600 rapes were reported last year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, more than the reports from Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore combined. This year, the capital has already recorded more than 600 rapes and may set a record.

In northern India, reports of rape are often followed by questions about the victim’s behavior, and even accusations that she provoked the assault. On Tuesday, some of India’s most prominent activists and social commentators took to Twitter to voice their opinions.

“Security in mobility for a woman is the first right she needs to be guaranteed!” wrote Kiran Bedi, once one of India’s highest-ranking female police officers. “Failure to ensure this is clear failure of governance!”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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New Android botnet discovered across all major networks

A new Android spam botnet has been discovered across all major networks that sends thousands of text messages without a user’s permission, TheNextWeb reported. The threat, which is known at SpamSoldier, was detected on December 3rd by Lookout Security in cooperation with an unnamed carrier partner. The malware is said to spread through a collection of infected phones that send text messages, which usually advertise free versions of popular paid games like Grand Theft Auto and Angry Birds Space, to hundreds of users each day.

[More from BGR: Facebook’s Instagram monetization plan: License users’ photos without paying for them]

Once a user clicks on the link to download the game, his or her phone instead downloads the malicious app. When the app is downloaded, SpamSoilder removes its icon from the app drawer, installs a free version of the game in question and immediately starts sending spam messages.

[More from BGR: How not to fix Apple Maps]

The security firm notes that the threat isn’t widespread, however it has been spotted on all major carriers in the U.S. and has potential to do serious damage if something isn’t done soon to stop it.

This article was originally published by BGR

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A&M's Johnny Football is AP's Player of the Year

Johnny Manziel ran for almost 1,700 yards and 30 touchdowns as a dual-threat quarterback his senior year of high school at Kerrville Tivy.

Who would have thought he'd be even more impressive at Texas A&M when pitted against the defenses of the Southeastern Conference?

On Tuesday, Manziel picked up another major award for his spectacular debut season. He was voted The Associated Press Player of the Year. As with the Heisman Trophy and Davey O'Brien Award that Manziel already won, the QB nicknamed Johnny Football is the first freshman to collect the AP award.

Manziel's 31 votes were more than twice that of second place finisher Manti Te'o, Notre Dame's start linebacker. He is the third straight Heisman-winning quarterback to receive the honor, following Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton.

Manziel erased initial doubts about his ability when he ran for 60 yards and a score in his first game against Florida.

"I knew I could run the ball, I did it a lot in high school," Manziel said in an interview with the AP. "It is just something that you don't get a chance to see in the spring. Quarterbacks aren't live in the spring. You don't get to tackle. You don't get to evade some of the sacks that you would in normal game situations. So I feel like when I was able to avoid getting tackled, it opened some people's eyes a little bit more."

The 6-foot-1 Manziel threw for 3,419 yards and 24 touchdowns and ran for 1,181 yards and 19 more scores to help the Aggies win 10 games for the first time since 1998 — and in their inaugural SEC year, too.

Ryan Tannehill, Manziel's predecessor now with the Dolphins after being drafted eighth overall this season, saw promise from the young quarterback last year when he was redshirted. But even he is surprised at how quickly things came together for Manziel.

"It's pretty wild. I always thought he had that playmaking ability, that something special where if somebody came free, he can make something exciting happen," Tannehill said. "I wasn't really sure if, I don't think anyone was sure if he was going to be able to carry that throughout an SEC season, and he's shocked the world and he did it."

After Manziel sat out as a redshirt in 2011, Texas A&M's scheduled season-opener against Louisiana Tech this year was postponed because of Hurricane Isaac. That left him to get his first taste of live defense in almost two years against Florida.

He responded well, helping the Aggies race to a 17-7 lead early using both his arm and his feet. The Gators shut down Manziel and A&M's offense in the second half and Texas A&M lost 20-17.

But Manziel's performance was enough for Texas A&M's coaching staff to realize that his scrambling ability was going to be a big part of what the Aggies could do this season.

"The first half really showed that I was a little bit more mobile than we had seen throughout the spring," Manziel said. "Me and (then-offensive coordinator) Kliff Kingsbury sat down and really said: 'Hey we can do some things with my feet as well as throwing the ball.' And it added a little bit of a new dimension."

Manziel knew that the biggest adjustment from playing in high school to college would be the speed of the game. Exactly how quick players in the SEC were was still a jolt to the quarterback.

"The whole first drive I was just seeing how fast they really flew to the ball and I felt like they just moved a whole lot faster," he said of the Florida game. "It was different than what I was used to, different than what I was used to in high school. So it was just having to learn quick and adjust on the fly."

He did just that and started piling up highlight reel material by deftly avoiding would-be tacklers to help the Aggies run off five consecutive wins after that.

His storybook ride hit a roadblock when he threw a season-high three interceptions in a 24-19 loss to LSU. But Manziel used it as a learning experience, taking to heart some advice he received from Kingsbury.

"He just told me to have a plan every time, before every snap," Manziel said. "Make sure you have a plan on what you want to do and where you want to go with the ball."

"I feel like as the year went on, I just learned the offense more and knew exactly where I wanted to go, instead of maybe evading the blitz and just taking off running for the first down instead of hitting a hot route or throwing it underneath to an open guy and doing things a lot simpler and cleaner."

The Aggies and Manziel rebounded from the loss to LSU by winning their last five games, highlighted by their stunning 29-24 upset of top-ranked Alabama on Nov. 10.

By the time Manziel wrapped up a 253-yard passing and 92-yard rushing performance to lead Texas A&M to the victory in Tuscaloosa, you could hardly call him a freshman anymore.

"You keep growing and growing every week," he said. "By the time I played Alabama I had a much better grasp of the game than I did in the first one."

The 4,600 yards of total offense Manziel gained in 12 games broke the SEC record for total yards in a season. The record was previously held by 2010 Heisman winner Newton, who needed 14 games to pile up 4,327 yards. The output also made him the first freshman, first player in the SEC and fifth player overall to throw for 3,000 yards and run for 1,000 in a season.

Manziel, who turned 20 two days before taking home the Heisman, has been so busy he hasn't had a second to step back and digest the historical significance of his accomplishments this season.

He's far more concerned with helping the Aggies extend their winning streak to six games with a win over Oklahoma on Jan. 4 in the Cotton Bowl.

"I think it will happen after the bowl game and after the season is completely over," he said. "I'm just ready for it to die down a little bit and get back into a practice routine where we get better and hopefully do what we want to do in the bowl game."

He'll have to do it without his mentor Kingsbury, who left A&M last week to become coach at Texas Tech, where he starred at quarterback not that long ago. Manziel said is happy Kingsbury got to return to his alma matter, but is still adjusting to the idea of playing without him.

"I'm the happiest guy on the face of the earth for him," Manziel said, speaking from California where he appeared on the "Tonight Show" Monday evening. "I think he deserves it with how hard he's worked this year to get us where we were. It's bittersweet though, because I'd like him to be here for the entire time that I'm here."

Manziel is eager to get back on the field for the Cotton Bowl and is focused on helping the offense pick up where it left off in the regular-season finale.

"Even though Kliff Kingsbury's not here anymore, we just need to continue to get better and do what we do," Manziel said. "Push tempo, go fast and be the high-flying offense that we have been all year."

_____

AP Sports Writer Steven Wine contributed to this story from Miami.

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More Young Americans Are Homeless

SEATTLE — Duane Taylor was studying the humanities in community college and living in his own place when he lost his job in a round of layoffs. Then he found, and lost, a second job. And a third.

Now, with what he calls “lowered standards” and a tenuous new position at a Jack in the Box restaurant, Mr. Taylor, 24, does not make enough to rent an apartment or share one. He sleeps on a mat in a homeless shelter, except when his sister lets him crash on her couch.

“At any time I could lose my job, my security,” said Mr. Taylor, explaining how he was always the last hired and the first fired. “I’d like to be able to support myself. That’s my only goal.”

Across the country, tens of thousands of underemployed and jobless young people, many with college credits or work histories, are struggling to house themselves in the wake of the recession, which has left workers between the ages of 18 and 24 with the highest unemployment rate of all adults.

Those who can move back home with their parents — the so-called boomerang set — are the lucky ones. But that is not an option for those whose families have been hit hard by the economy, including Mr. Taylor, whose mother is barely scraping by while working in a laundromat. Without a stable home address, they are an elusive group that mostly couch surfs or sleeps hidden away in cars or other private places, hoping to avoid the lasting stigma of public homelessness during what they hope will be a temporary predicament.

These young adults are the new face of a national homeless population, one that poverty experts and case workers say is growing. Yet the problem is mostly invisible. Most cities and states, focusing on homeless families, have not made special efforts to identify young adults, who tend to shy away from ordinary shelters out of fear of being victimized by an older, chronically homeless population. The unemployment rate and the number of young adults who cannot afford college “point to the fact there is a dramatic increase in homelessness” in that age group, said Barbara Poppe, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

The Obama administration has begun an initiative with nine communities, most of them big cities, to seek out those between 18 and 24 who are without a consistent home address. New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Boston are among the cities included in the effort.

“One of our first approaches is getting a more confident estimate,” said Ms. Poppe, whose agency is coordinating the initiative.

Those who provide services to the poor in many cities say the economic recovery has not relieved the problem. “Years ago, you didn’t see what looked like people of college age sitting and waiting to talk to a crisis worker because they are homeless on the street,” said Andrae Bailey, the executive director of the Community Food and Outreach Center, one of the largest charitable organizations in Florida. “Now that’s a normal thing.”

Los Angeles first attempted a count of young adults living on the street in 2011. It found 3,600, but the city had shelter capacity for only 17 percent of them.

“The rest are left to their own devices,” said Michael Arnold, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. “And when you start adding in those who are couch surfing and staying with friends, that number increases exponentially.”

Boston also attempted counts in 2010 and 2011. The homeless young adult population seeking shelter grew 3 percentage points to 12 percent of the 6,000 homeless people served over that period.

“It’s a significant enough jump to know that it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” said Jim Greene, director of emergency shelters for the Boston Public Health Commission.

In Washington, D.C., Lance Fuller, a 26-year-old with a degree in journalism, spent the end of last month packing up a one-bedroom apartment he can no longer afford after being laid off. Mr. Fuller said he had been unable to keep a job for more than eight months since graduating from the University of Florida in 2010.

“Thankfully, I have a girlfriend who is willing to let me stay with her until I get back on my feet again,” said Mr. Fuller, who writes a blog, Voices of a Lost Generation. “It’s really hard for people in my generation not to feel completely defeated by this economy.”

Mr. Taylor, the fast-food worker in Seattle, said he felt lucky when he could find a coveted space at Roots, a shelter for young adults in a church basement. Such shelters are rare.

For generations, services for the homeless were directed to two groups: dependent children and older people. There was scant attention focused on what experts now call “transitional age youth” — young adults whose needs are distinct.

“I see them coming back day after day, more defeated, more tired out, wondering, ‘When will it be my turn?’ ” said Kristine Cunningham, executive director of Roots. “And it’s heartbreaking. This is the age when you want to show the world you have value.”

They need more than just clean clothes and shelter to move into a secure adulthood, experts say. “They want a way out,” said Ms. Poppe, whose agency is also gathering evidence on what kinds of programs and outreach work best. “They want an opportunity to develop skills so they are marketable in the long term.”

“A more individualized approach seems to work,” she added.

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Observatory: Fossils of New Species Discovered in England

University of Leicester

A view of Pauline avibella, a shrmplike marine creature, from a computer-generated model.

A tiny, fossilized crustacean that lived 425 million years ago has been discovered, remarkably intact, in a rock formation in Herefordshire, England. Paleontologists say it represents a new genus and species, belonging to a class of shrimplike marine creatures called ostracods.

Despite their age, the two specimens were well preserved. They included the shell and the soft parts of the animal, including its body, limbs, eyes, gills and alimentary system.

“It gives us a really special insight into the biology of these animals,” said David Siveter of the University of Leicester in England. He and colleagues from the University of Oxford, Imperial College and Yale discuss the findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The researchers determined that the animal had large eyes and seven pairs of limbs, with the front two pairs adapted for swimming.

It probably used these limbs to swim near the water’s bottom rather than in the water column, Dr. Siveter said.

Analyzing the fragile fossil posed a challenge. “We couldn’t grab it from the rock because it’s so delicate and small,” Dr. Siveter said. “And we couldn’t X-ray it because there wasn’t enough density contrast between the rock and the fossil.”

So the researchers used physical tomography, grinding minute slices off the fossils and capturing an image of each new section. The process, permitted by international guidelines for establishing new species, destroys the fossils themselves but yields detailed data to produce a computer-generated model.

The crustacean is named Pauline avibella, after Dr. Siveter’s deceased wife, Pauline.

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