Dick Clark New Year's Eve Love Story - Same Couple Dancing Since 1972

By Dahvi Shira

12/30/2012 at 02:45 PM EST

This New Year's Eve will be just like any other for Kathy and Louie Novoa, except without their dear friend Dick Clark, who passed away in April.

The pair met on American Bandstand and have since taken part in every one of his New Year's Rockin' Eves since they began on the Queen Mary in 1972.

"To be there from the very first one he did and to still be a part of it, I think, wow, I can't believe it," Louie tells PEOPLE. "I still have the original invitation to the very first one."

As for being a part of Rockin' Eve for the first time since Clark's death, Kathy says, "It's very sad and heartbreaking to know he started this tradition and was so important in so many homes. Everybody watches Dick Clark's New Year's Eve. It's very hard [with him gone], but it's also great knowing that it's still going on. That's what he would want."

Kathy and Louie Novoa with Dick Clark in 1976

Courtesy Louie Novoa

Now officially a couple for 36 years, Louie says that starting the New Year with a kiss is his favorite tradition on the show, which kicks off at 8 p.m. ET/PT this year on ABC.

"Kathy and I started doing it, and right after that, Dick's wife Kari [Wigton] goes, 'Why don't we follow up with that?' " he says. "It became a tradition. We had a lot of clips of that. That's what we're going to miss. We always looked forward to that."

The happy pair, who declined to provide their age, would only joke about it.

"People ask us, 'How old are you? You don't look that old,' " Louie explained with a chuckle. "I say, 'We've been around for a while. We are [old].' We really are. You can tell on the dance floor. We're out there dancing with the kids. We call them kids because we try to blend in with them. We still have it though."

Although Louie says they miss Clark "every day," he is a big fan of his replacement, Ryan Seacrest.

"He's incredible," he says. "He's awesome. He does a great job and he has the same personality as Dick Clark. He gets along with everybody."

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

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Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Fiscal deal stalls as clock ticks to deadline

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts to prevent the economy from tumbling over a "fiscal cliff" stalled on Sunday as Democrats and Republicans remained at loggerheads over a deal that would prevent taxes for all Americans from rising on New Year's Day.

One hour before they had hoped to present a plan, Democratic and Republican leaders said were still unable to reach a compromise that would stop the automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that could push the economy into recession.

"There are still serious differences between the two sides," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said.

A sticking point appeared to be a Republican proposal floated late on Saturday, which would slow the growth of Social Security retirement benefits in an effort to narrow trillion-dollar budget deficits. Many Democrats, including Reid, have said Social Security should not be touched.

With negotiations at an apparent standstill on Capitol Hill, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said he would now try to hammer out an agreement with Vice President Joe Biden.

"I'm willing to get this done, but I need a dance partner," McConnell said.

Any agreement needs to be rushed through both chambers of Congress before midnight on Monday. Even if the two sides reach an agreement, procedural barriers in the Senate and the House of Representatives make quick action difficult.

If the politicians cannot agree, then tax increases and across-the-board government spending cuts will begin on January 1. That would take $600 billion out of the economy, push unemployment up and curb federal spending.

Another major disagreement was over tax hikes on the wealthy, an increase sought by President Barack Obama but opposed by Republicans, particularly fiscal conservatives in the House of Representatives.

Republicans aim to pair any tax increase with spending cuts to benefit programs that are projected to grow ever more expensive as the population ages in coming decades.

But their proposal to slow the growth of Social Security benefits by changing the way they are measured against inflation met fierce resistance from Democrats. Obama included the proposal, known as "chained CPI," in an earlier proposal, but many of his fellow Democrats remain opposed.

"POISON PILL"

"We consider it a poison pill - they know we can't accept it. It is a big step back from where we were on Friday," a Senate Democratic aide said.

Obama made a rare appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" to pressure lawmakers into forging a deal.

Senators appearing on other Sunday morning shows expressed optimism that an agreement could be reached.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham conceded that an agreement would end up raising income taxes on the wealthy, thus sparing the rest of the country from the looming income tax hikes.

"President Obama is going to get tax rate increases. The president won," Graham tweeted, echoing earlier comments he made on "Fox News Sunday." He told the show that the chances of a bipartisan deal before the New Year's deadline were "exceedingly good."

Obama has alternatively offered Republicans a deal to increase income taxes for households earning over $250,000 a year, and over $400,000 a year.

A White House aide said the president and his staff had been in touch with congressional leaders through the weekend.

Any deal on taxes in the Senate might meet resistance in the House from conservative Republicans.

On NBC, Obama warned of the fallout in financial markets if the two sides did not reach an agreement.

"If people start seeing that on January 1st this problem still hasn't been solved, that we haven't seen the kind of deficit reduction that we could have, had the Republicans been willing to take the deal that I gave them ... then obviously that's going to have an adverse reaction in the markets," Obama said, adding that he had offered Republicans significant compromises that had been rejected repeatedly.

He said he would avoid tax increases for most Americans, even if the talks fall apart.

"If Republicans do in fact decide to block it, so that taxes on middle class families do in fact go up on January 1st, then we'll come back with a new Congress on January 4th and the first bill that will be introduced on the floor will be to cut taxes on middle class families," Obama said.

John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, rejected Obama's accusations that Republicans were not being amenable to compromise.

"The president's comments today are ironic, as a recurring theme of our negotiations was his unwillingness to agree to anything that would require him to stand up to his own party," Boehner, who has had trouble convincing his Republican colleagues to support his own proposals, said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, Rachelle Younglai, David Lawder, Fred Barbash and Richard Cowan. Writing by Andy Sullivan, Editing by Alistair Bell and Jackie Frank)

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E.U. May ‘Unravel’ if U.K. Quits, Official Says

LONDON — Almost 40 years after Britain joined the forerunner of today’s European Union, the debate over the country’s future in the Union has quickened with a warning from a top E.U. official that any moves to renegotiate the terms of British membership could wreck the bloc.

Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, the body that groups the 27 E.U. member states, said that the European Union had benefited tremendously from British membership and that Britain’s departure would be like seeing “a friend walk off into the desert.”

But Mr. Van Rompuy also suggested that the strategy developed by Prime Minister David Cameron to restore dwindling public support for keeping Britain inside the bloc was likely to fail.

In an interview published Friday in The Guardian, a British daily, Mr. Van Rompuy said that renegotiation could undermine the one part of the European Union that Mr. Cameron says he values most: the single market under which around 500 million Europeans can do business without barriers.

“If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they most like, and opt out of those that they least like, the Union in general, and the single market in particular, would soon unravel,” he said.

The intervention from Mr. Van Rompuy highlights the fact that other nations are likely to resent a process under which Britain seeks to retain the parts of E.U. membership that it likes, while rejecting the rest. In order to renegotiate British membership terms, all other member states would have to agree on the changes.

And, if that sort of discussion begins, other countries may make demands too, including some that could weaken the single market which seeks to establish a level playing field on trading issues.

“All member states can, and do, have particular requests and needs that are always taken into consideration as part of our deliberations,” Mr. Van Rompuy said in the interview. “I do not expect any member state to seek to undermine the fundamentals of our cooperative system in Europe.”

Mr. Cameron argues that, to persuade euro-skeptical British voters to stay in the European Union, the country should loosen its political and social policy ties to the Union and refocus them around Europe’s single economic market. He wants to renegotiate the terms of British membership and seek approval for the result of that negotiation from the public, possibly in a referendum.

Britain formally joined in the process of European integration in 1973, when it acceded to the European Economic Community. Two years later, after a change of government and negotiations on the terms of membership, it held a referendum in which around two-thirds of those who voted elected to stay.

One theory in Britain is that the euro debt crisis presents a new opportunity to re-fashion the process of European integration because the 17 countries that use the single currency may need to rewrite the Union’s governing treaties in order to become more closely integrated. That could give Britain the chance to negotiate its looser relationship simultaneously as part of a grand bargain.

Mr. Van Rompuy suggested, however, that such a rewriting of the treaties might not happen because it might not be necessary.

“The treaties allow a considerable degree of flexibility and much can be done without needing to amend them,” he told The Guardian. “It is perfectly possible to write all kinds of provisions into the treaties, but amending them is a lengthy and cumbersome procedure needing the unanimous agreement of every single member government and ratification.”

Mr. Van Rompuy’s comments come at a sensitive moment, ahead of a widely anticipated speech by Mr. Cameron, expected in mid-January, during which he might make the promise of a referendum explicit. Many of his own lawmakers now want Mr. Cameron to promise a straight “in or out” vote, though he has so far resisted.

The political mood within Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party has hardened against engagement with Europe, partly because of the rise in popular support for the U.K. Independence Party, which has campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union and for tighter immigration controls.

UKIP is expected to do well in the next elections to the European Parliament in 2014, which will be held under a proportional electoral system that favors smaller parties. The party is unlikely to win many, or even any, seats in British parliamentary elections, expected the following year, because these will be fought under a first-past-the post system that tends to favor mainstream parties.

The smaller party could, though, take enough votes from the Conservative Party to deprive it of the seats it will need to form the next government.

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Phaedra Parks Is Pregnant with Baby No. 2

TV Watch

By Jennifer Garcia

12/28/2012 at 03:00 PM EST

It's a very special holiday season for The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Phaedra Parks and her husband Apollo Nida!

The reality star couple tell PEOPLE exclusively they're expecting a second child together next year.

Parks showed off her growing baby bump while on the beach in the Bahamas, where she's vacationing with her family and friends.

The Atlanta entertainment lawyer married Nida, a certified personal trainer, in 2009 and the couple welcomed son Ayden a year later.

The pair recently released their first fitness DVD, Phine Body on Amazon.com.

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

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Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Wall Street extends losses, Dow slides 1 percent

When Mommy is away, Dad and son will play. And if your dad works in the video production business, that playtime gets filmed, turned into a time-lapse video and instantly goes viral. Emio Tomeoni, 30, of Kansas City, Mo., works odd hours and often finds...

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Iran’s Only Female Cabinet Minister Dismissed

Iran’s president on Thursday dismissed his health minister, the only woman to serve in the cabinet since the 1979 Islamic revolution, after she publicly criticized the government’s response to acute shortages of medicine imports, an indirect consequence of the Western sanctions imposed on the country.

Accounts in the state-run news media of the dismissal of the minister, Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, did not provide an explanation for it. Iran’s Press TV Web site said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had appointed a caretaker health minister, Mohammad Hassan Tariqat-Monfared, and had told him in a presidential decree that the reduction of people’s health care expenses was among “the main priorities of this important ministry.”

Dr. Vahid-Dastjerdi, a gynecologist, was appointed in 2009 and is considered an advocate of women’s rights in Iranian society. She spoke out last month, apparently angering the president, by saying that an allocation in the budget of foreign currency needed to purchase medicines abroad was inadequate.

“I have heard that luxury cars have been imported with subsidized dollars, but I don’t know what happened to the dollars that were supposed to be allocated for importing medicine,” Dr. Vahid-Dastjerdi said on state television, according to a translation of her remarks reported by Reuters.

Absent such an allocation, she said, it was necessary to impose a large increase in the price of medicines, which would add to the inflationary pressures already afflicting the economy because of a plunge in value this year of the Iranian currency, the rial. Mr. Ahmadinejad opposed the price increase.

Many economists have attributed the rial’s depreciation to Iran’s increased isolation, a consequence of the penalties imposed by the United States and European Union to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium for its disputed nuclear energy program. Some of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s critics in Iran have also blamed the currency problems on what they call his economic mismanagement.

The medicine shortage in Iran has become an urgent problem because many Western-made drugs are increasingly hard to obtain. Under the sanctions, a broad Western ban on many financial transactions with Iran has dissuaded many foreign companies from doing business with the country, even though medicines are among items exempted from the sanctions.

Recently, the president of the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences, Seyed Alireza Marandi, bitterly complained about the medical impact of the sanctions in a letter to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Dr. Marandi called the sanctions brutal measures that had increased mortality rates “as a result of the unavailability of essential drugs and shortages of medical supplies and equipment,” according to a report by the Fars News Agency.

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Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone Adopt a Dog Together

People Pets

By Amy Jamieson

12/27/2012 at 03:45 PM EST

Andrew Garfield and his new dog Ren

X17online

It's true love for Emma Stone and her beau Andrew Garfield!

The pair have fallen hard for a 2-year-old golden retriever they met just before Christmas at an L.A. rescue.

"She was one of the dogs they first saw, but they weren't sure," a source tells PEOPLE of the pup the pair visited last week at the Spot! Dog Rescue of Los Angeles. "They left and they couldn't stop thinking about her, so they came back for her. And it's true love."

The couple of more than a year initially brought the dog home as a foster pet on Saturday, but officially adopted the purebred on Christmas Eve. The pup, who they've named Ren, came from a high-kill Downey, Calif., shelter where she was surrendered by her previous owner. On Monday, Garfield was spotted showing off their adorable addition on a stroll through the Hollywood Hills.

"She won the doggie lottery," adds the source, who describes the already house-trained pup as "a typical golden puppy. Very, very sweet and loving. They totally fell in love with her."

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

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Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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