Danny Puff

GWANDA, Zimbabwe (AP) In Zimbabwe as well as most parts of southern Africa, mopane worms are a staple part of the diet in rural areas and are considered a delicacy in the cities. They can be eaten dry, as crunchy as potato chips, or cooked and drenched in sauce. I decided to document the harvesting, preparation, sale and consumption of the worms, and found the preparation somewhat stomach-turning. But the worms can be mighty tasty and they're very nutritious. Here's everything you always wanted to know about mopane worms but were afraid to ask.

THE MOPANE WORM

The worm is the large caterpillar of the Gonimbrasia belina species, commonly called the emperor moth. It is known as a mopane worm because it is found chomping the leaves of mopane trees after it hatches in summer. It has also burrowed its way into literature, finding its way, for example, into the pages of Alexander McCall Smith's series about The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, set in neighboring Botswana. At least one of the characters munches on dried mopane worms.

THE HARVEST

After six weeks of rain, the mopane worms can be seen clinging to, and feeding on, the leaves of the mopane trees in rural Gwanda, an arid cattle-ranching area in southern Zimbabwe. Amanda Ncube normally fetches firewood to sell and looks after the family cattle, but when it's worm-harvesting season she joins other women and a few men in collecting the worms, which are as long as the width of two hands and as thick as a cigar. She slowly plucks them from the lower branches before climbing partway up the tree to shake off the higher ones. The more stubborn ones that cling to the leaves and branches are pried loose with a long stick. The worms excrete a brown liquid once they make contact with a human hand, leaving the pickers' hands wet and slippery. As they harvest the worms, the women and men move from one tree to another until their buckets are full. A thick slimy green fluid comes out as Ncube carefully squeezes out the entrails from a mopane worm she has just plucked from a tree. While some worms are prepared on site, other harvesters wait until they are back home where they squeeze out the entrails of the worms before leaving them to dry for a few days in the hot African sun. During harvest season, the porches of mud-walled homes are covered with thousands of worms, laid out to dry.

THE MARKET

At the local market, mopane worms are quite popular with residents who buy a cup or two of them and eat them immediately. The market is abuzz with activity, with most stalls strategically displaying the delicacy so people cannot miss them. Vendors offer free samples. The mopani worms are graded according to size and the area where they were harvested. Picky buyers ask about their provenance before buying, favoring worms from one district over another because, to the connoisseurs, worms from one area taste different from those from another.

HIGH PROTEIN

The mopane worm is a healthful and cheap source of nutrition.

A Zimbabwean nutritionist, Marlon Chidemo, says the worms are high in healthy nutrients and contain three times the amount of protein as beef. He says eating worms is less taxing on the environment than consuming beef because it takes far fewer leaves to produce worms than it does feed to produce the same amount of beef.

WORMY BUSINESS

Dried mopane worms have become a multimillion-dollar industry, even exported to countries like South Africa and Botswana. They can be found in African restaurants in Paris.

PREPARATION

Once they've been dried out, they can be eaten straight away. They can also be cooked in a spicy or peanut butter sauce and served with pap, a maize porridge.

Having grown up eating the mopane worms, I have never had the opportunity to see how they harvest and prepare them until now. While the process is rather disgusting, the worm can be a pleasure to eat as a starter or a side dish. The taste is reminiscent of salty potato chips. Malawi's first President Hastings Kamuzu Banda preferred his just like that, simply dried and then eaten as a snack like chips. Banda was known for carrying around pocketsful of worms that he would also offer to children.

A RECIPE

Here is a Congolese recipe that AP's special Africa correspondent Michelle Faul describes as "one of the tastiest" for mopane worms.

Mopani Worms for four people.

Ingredients: 500 grams dried mopane worms; three tomatoes, diced or 1 can of tomatoes; two onions, diced; 1/2 teaspoon turmeric; three fresh green chilies, finely chopped; three cloves of garlic, finely chopped; tablespoon of fresh ginger, finely chopped. Soak dried worms in water for 3-4 hours to reconstitute. Fry onions in groundnut oil on medium heat until translucent. Add turmeric, chilies, garlic and ginger. Fry for about five minutes. Add tomatoes and cook on low for about 20 minutes until spices are well blended. Add drained worms and cook until they have softened a bit but still are a little crunchy. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with pap, called sadza in Zimbabwe. Enjoy.

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LONDON (AP) British regulators have fined Sony 250,000 pounds ($396,100) for failing to prevent a 2011 cyberattack on its PlayStation Network which put millions of users' personal information including names, addresses, birth dates and account passwords at risk.

Britain's Information Commissioner's Office said Thursday that security measures in place at the time "were simply not good enough." It said the attack could have been prevented if software had been up to date, while passwords were also not secure.

David Smith, deputy commissioner and director of data protection, acknowledged that the fine for a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act" was "clearly substantial" but said that the office makes "no apologies" for that.

"There's no disguising that this is a business that should have known better," he said in a statement. "It is a company that trades on its technical expertise, and there's no doubt in my mind that they had access to both the technical knowledge and the resources to keep this information safe."

Smith called the case "one of the most serious ever reported" to the data regulator.

Sony, which has previously apologized for the data breach, said Thursday it "strongly disagrees" with the ruling and plans to appeal.

David Wilson, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd., said the company noted that the ICO recognized that Sony was the victim of a criminal attack and that there is no evidence payment card details were accessed.

"Criminal attacks on electronic networks are a real and growing aspect of 21st century life and Sony continually works to strengthen our systems, building in multiple layers of defense and working to make our networks safe, secure and resilient," he said in a statement.

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Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd

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WASHINGTON (AP) President Barack Obama has saluted the outgoing Timothy Geithner as one of the best U.S. Treasury secretaries ever. He's surely been among the most contentious.

Not since the Great Depression had an administration inherited so many grave financial threats at once. To many, Geithner deserves credit for helping steady the banking system and helping restore investor confidence. Yet his toughest critics say Geithner's policies consistently favored big banks over ordinary struggling Americans.

When Geithner became Treasury secretary in January 2009, the economy had sunk into a deep recession. Unemployment was surging. Stock prices were sinking. The financial system was teetering.

Geithner, whose last day in office is Friday, was an administration point man on all these issues. Here's a look at some of the crises the Treasury confronted on his watch:

BANK BAILOUTS

In the bleakest days of the financial crisis in 2008, the Bush administration got Congress to approve a $700 billion government bailout fund: the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

By the time Geithner took office, billions had been handed out to the biggest banks. Many were considered at risk of failing because of their huge investments in subprime mortgages that were souring.

Opponents charged that TARP, a taxpayer-funded bailout, let banks evade responsibility for reckless gambles. Geithner countered that the banking system had to be stabilized. The bailout was deemed necessary to get credit, the essential lubricant for an economy, flowing again.

In the end, the banking system was bolstered with the help of TARP and a separate Geithner initiative requiring the largest banks to undergo "stress tests." The tests calmed investors by showing that the banks could withstand an even worse downturn.

TARP distributed $245 billion to banks. So far, it's brought back $268 billion for a return of $23 billion.

Critics argue that under Geithner, the government failed to ensure that banks would use their TARP money to lend more to businesses and homeowners.

Geithner's approach won't prevent future crises, opponents further argue. They say big banks still feel free to make risky bets because of an implicit guarantee: that if their gambles fail, the government will save them, and the banks' executives won't be held accountable.

"Secretary Geithner protected the interest of the largest financial institutions, and we will pay a very heavy price for that," said Neil Barofsky, who was the government's top watchdog for TARP.

Many private economists are less critical. They say Geithner achieved the fundamental goal of stabilizing the U.S. financial system without damaging the economy.

"The effort was a success and vitally necessary for ending the Great Recession and starting a recovery," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

AIG BAILOUT

Geithner and the administration endured intense criticism for giving bailout aid outside the banking system to American International Group.

The insurance giant represented everything the public detested about the government bailouts: Its rescue was the costliest at $182 billion. It spent $440,000 on spa treatments for executives only days after its rescue. It gave millions in bonuses to top executives, including those who'd made the risky bets that had unraveled AIG.

Geithner, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before heading Treasury, was involved in the decision to save AIG in September 2008 and oversaw its bailout as Treasury secretary. Some of the rescue money went to fully repay banks that had invested in AIG. Critics called this a giveaway to banks that should have had to accept less than full payment.

Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have said that letting AIG fail would have threatened the entire U.S. financial system, in part because of AIG's outsize role in selling credit default swaps. These swaps were insurance-like guarantees on mortgage bonds. They required AIG to pay billions once the housing market went bust.

Supporters note that the government ended up profiting on its investment. AIG has repaid all the bailout money, and the government made $22.7 billion more than it provided.

AUTO BAILOUTS

Government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler became a political issue in 2012. Republican Mitt Romney opposed rescuing the two companies. Obama countered that the bailout saved jobs at automakers, parts companies and other businesses. Both companies are now selling more cars, hiring workers and earning profits.

But unlike with the bank and AIG bailouts, the government is expected to lose money on the auto bailouts up to $24 billion out of the $80 billion it provided.

The auto industry rescue was begun under the Bush administration but expanded under Obama. Administration officials have said the effort saved more than 1 million jobs and came as the economy was enduring a severe crisis. Geithner was involved in crafting the auto bailout and selling it to Congress.

Private economists generally view the auto bailout favorably. "There are certainly those who argue that it could have been done in a less expensive manner, but the auto bailouts did save U.S. jobs," said David Wyss, an economics professor at Brown University.

HOUSING CRISIS

The Bush administration took control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. The two have continued under government control in what became the costliest of the bailouts.

The government has given $187 billion to Fannie and Freddie and been repaid $55 billion for a net cost so far of $132 billion. The money was supplied so the two can continue to play a key role: buying or guaranteeing mortgages and packaging them into bonds to be resold to investors. This system expands the availability of mortgages.

The future of Fannie and Freddie remains hazy. Geithner's Treasury proposed several options for their future but didn't push any.

Under Geithner, Treasury compiled a mixed record of helping homeowners at risk. Of $50 billion in TARP money earmarked to reduce foreclosures, only $6 billion has been tapped. As of November, 1.1 million homeowners have received permanent loan modifications through the administration's main foreclosure-prevention program. An additional 1.5 million have been helped by the Federal Housing Administration.

The administration's initial program to ease mortgage payments for the most troubled homeowners became a source of derision. Homeowners called it a bureaucratic mess. Treasury officials countered that the administration had inherited a foreclosure crisis for which it had to devise solutions on the fly.

Critics say Geithner should have taken a harder line in forcing mortgage servicers to modify home loans. They also say he should have pushed hard to let struggling homeowners reduce their loan principal.

But Geithner's supporters say he had to deal with congressional Republicans who felt the government shouldn't be helping people escape their debts.

FINANCIAL REGULATION

In 2010, Congress passed what the Obama administration hailed as the stiffest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression. The legislation, named for Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, both Democrats, contained proposals crafted by Geithner.

It authorized the government to break up companies considered a risk to the financial system. It created an agency to safeguard consumers. And it aimed to tighten scrutiny of complex financial instruments that had previously escaped regulatory oversight and had fueled the crisis.

Geithner said the bill would reduce the risk of another crisis. But critics saw the legislation as flawed. Republicans said it created obstacles to the smooth operation of financial markets. And liberals said Geithner didn't go far enough to try to curb the worst abuses. They complained that he caved to pressure from banks to weaken the reforms.

The argument will likely continue long after Geithner's exit. Since taking control of the House in the 2010 election, Republicans have sought to dismantle Dodd-Frank.

Democrats are pushing for studies of how much benefit large banks enjoy from being deemed "too big to fail." Many Democrats want to require struggling financial firms to be dismantled rather than having taxpayers save them.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) Stung by the overwhelmingly negative reaction to removing the name of original "Saturday Night Live" cast member Gilda Radner from a cancer support group's title, a Wisconsin chapter is borrowing one of the comedian's catch phrases for its next announcement: Never mind.

Gilda's Club Madison will remain just that, group leaders told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The board voted last week to keep the name after an avalanche of criticism in November when it announced it was switching to the more generic Cancer Support Community Southwest Wisconsin, in part out of concern that young people today were unfamiliar with Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989.

"It really struck a chord with folks and all of us agreed we want people to come to Gilda's and get the help that they need," said Wayne Harris, chairman of the board for the Madison chapter. "If this is what it takes to make that happen, we're all as a group happy to make it happen."

The intention of changing to a broader name was honorable, Harris said. "In retrospect, we probably should have thought that through or understood it more," he said.

Anger over the name change, which was supposed to take effect this month, came from members of the local Gilda's Club chapter, fans of Radner who saw it as a slight to a woman who confronted cancer with dignity and humor, leaders of other clubs who reaffirmed their commitment to keeping the name, as well as Radner's husband, actor Gene Wilder.

"We started receiving emails right away," said Lannia Stenz, director of the Madison chapter. "For the most part it was simply asking 'Why did you do this? Please reconsider.' It was really, truly passionate feedback. We had some people who were angry but at the base of everything it was the love of Gilda and her story."

Reaction to the news led to a flurry of positive comments Wednesday on the Gilda's Club Facebook page and on Twitter.

"At the end of the day it's a good win," said LauraJane Hyde, who runs the Gilda's Club chapter in Chicago. "Gilda's roots were improv. As she would have said, 'Make mistakes work for you.'"

Ron Nief, a professor at Beloit College in southern Wisconsin who has made a career out of studying how generations view the world differently, said he was glad to know that Radner still resonates with people and has not been forgotten.

But Nief also said he thought the decision to keep the name was more about securing future donations and less about honoring Radner.

"They are an organization that does very good work and in order to do it they have to raise money and the name is related to their ability to raise funds," Nief said.

Stenz, leader of the Madison chapter, said the potential loss of donations "was not as much of a factor in our decision to retain the name." She said it was driven more by feedback from its board, Gilda's Club members and people in the community.

Stenz and Harris said the goal of the name change was always about making clear the group's mission, not to remove Radner's memory.

"We were just talking about changing the name that we went by legally," Harris said. While Radner would have still been a part of the organization, "in the end, they want to see Gilda's name out front," he said.

Paintings and drawings of Radner line the walls of the Madison-area chapter, which is located in the suburb of Middleton. One depicts her on top of Madison's state Capitol. Another imagines her sitting along the shores of Lake Mendota on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

The meeting rooms are named after her "Saturday Night Live" characters, including New York-street smart reporter Roseanne Roseannadana; speech-impeded talk show host Baba Wawa, a parody of Barbara Walters; and out-of-sync editorialist Emily Litella who would say, "Never mind," after being told of her confusion.

Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1986. She sought support from The Wellness Community in California, and in 1991, her friends and family started Gilda's Club on the East Coast to honor her legacy. The name was inspired by something Radner said after her diagnosis: "Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to."

Gilda's Club Worldwide merged with The Wellness Community in 2009, and the joint headquarters in Washington changed its name to the Cancer Support Community. Local chapters were given the choice of keeping their names or changing it. Of the 53 chapters worldwide, 23 are known as Gilda's Club.

Together, the chapters deliver $40 million a year in free care to about 1 million cancer patients and their families, said Linda House, executive vice president of the national Cancer Support Community. The Madison chapter has about 2,200 members.

Stenz said she hoped the Madison community that Gilda's Club serves will embrace its decision to keep the name.

As far as lessons learned from the experience, Harris had a simple takeaway: "We're not changing our name again."

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PARK CITY, Utah (AP) The Sundance Film Festival isn't home to many shoot-em-up movies, but action-oriented actors at the festival are facing questions about Hollywood's role in American gun violence.

Guy Pearce, Alexander Skarsgard, Kristen Bell and director Roger Corman were among those discussing the issue at the annual independent-film showcase.

Pearce is in Park City, Utah, to support the family drama "Breathe In," but he's pulled plenty of imaginary triggers in violent films such as "Lockdown" and "Lawless." He says Hollywood may make guns seem more appealing to the broader culture, but there are vast variations in films' approach to violence.

"Hollywood probably does play a role," Pearce said. "It's a broad spectrum though. There are films that use guns flippantly, then there are films that use guns in a way that would make you never want to look at a gun ever again because of the effect that it's had on the other people in the story at the time. So to sort of just say Hollywood and guns, it's a broad palette that you're dealing with, I think. But I'm sure it does have an effect. As does video games, as do stories on the news. All sorts of things probably seep into the consciousness."

Skarsgard, who blasted away aliens in "Battleship," agreed that Hollywood has some responsibility for how it depicts violence on-screen.

"When (NRA executive director) Wayne LaPierre blames it on Hollywood and says guns have nothing to do with it, there is a reason," he said. "I mean, I'm from Sweden. . We do have violent video games in Sweden. My teenage brother plays them. He watches Hollywood movies. We do have insane people in Sweden and in Canada. But we don't have 30,000 gun deaths a year.

"Yes, there's only 10 million people in Sweden as opposed to over 300 (million) in the United States. But the numbers just don't add up. There are over 300 million weapons in this country. And they help. They do kill people."

Bell, who stars in in the dramatic competition film "The Lifeguard," said the issue is far more complicated than simply blaming Hollywood.

"There's a lot of things that are emphasized in our entertainment industry as plot points or interesting shorelines, but none of them seem to be as affecting the American public as the gun control," she said. "So I don't necessarily know that it's blamable on Hollywood, though I think there's a certain responsibility and we need to re-examine everything that we do."

Bell's co-star, Mamie Gummer, said she's often "perturbed" by on-screen violence.

"I really hate Quentin Tarantino's movies generally, and I thought 'Django Unchained' especially was really tough to bear in light of everything," she said. "Just the deep romanticizing of it, the fetishizing of it is creepy to me. Or maybe it's lost on me. I don't enjoy it."

Bell doesn't mind seeing violent films but advocates for greater awareness of mental illness and for stricter gun control.

"It's such a paradoxical issue. Because those movies don't bother me at all. And it doesn't bother me when I see people shoot guns. Yet I'm fully for more gun control in reality," she said. "Because I'm smart enough to recognize what's reality and what's not. And I think that's an issue that needs to be addressed... A lot of the people that are picking up guns have an inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. And I think that's probably though I do support gun control, a tighter gun control than we have now that's an issue that deserves to be addressed because that's probably the root of it."

Ellen Page, who co-stars with Skarsgard in "The East," noted that gun restrictions are much more pervasive in her home country, Canada.

"You can't buy some crazy assault rifle that is made for the military to kill people. And like that to me is just like a no-brainer," she said. "Why should that just be out and be able to be purchased? That does not make me feel safe as a person."

Corman also cited Canada's response to movie violence.

"Canada sees the same motion pictures that we do. They play the same video games that we do. They see the same television that we do. Their crime rate and specifically their murder rate is a tiny fraction of ours," he said. The only difference is they have strong gun control laws and we (don't). I wish somebody would ask the head of the NRA how he explains that."

Skarsgard suggested it may be time to revisit the Second Amendment.

"The whole Second Amendment discussion is ridiculous to me. Because that was written over 200 years ago, and it was a militia to have muskets to fight off Brits," he said. "The Brits aren't coming. It's 2013. Things have changed. And for someone to mail-order an assault rifle is crazy to me. They don't belong anywhere but the military to me. You don't need that to protect your home or shoot deer, you know."

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AP Entertainment Writer Ryan Pearson is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ryanwrd .

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AP Movie Writer David Germain contributed to this report.

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BEIJING (AP) Nearly 40 minutes have been chopped from the Hollywood film "Cloud Atlas" for Chinese audiences, deleting both gay and straight love scenes to satisfy local censors despite a movie-going public that increasingly chafes at censorship.

It premiered Tuesday in Beijing in a red-carpet ceremony with actor Hugo Weaving and China's own Zhou Xun, but won't start running in Chinese theaters until next Thursday. The filmmaker's Chinese partners have slashed that version from the U.S. runtime of 172 minutes to a pared-down 134 to expunge the "passionate" episodes.

"The 172-minute version can be downloaded online ... so I am sure some people will prefer that to going to the cinema," said movie fan Kong Kong, 27, who lives in Shanghai.

Chinese citizens have recently become more outspoken, especially on social media, with complaints about censorship of imported films as well as the home-grown movie industry and news media, much of it imposed over elements that might make China look bad. Awkward cuts by the censors to the most recent James Bond offering "Skyfall," which opened here Monday, prompted calls for a review of the film censorship system.

"Even these kinds of movies are getting censored, for what?" wrote Wei Xinhong, deputy editor in chief at Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing Bureau, on his Twitter-like Sina Weibo. "What kind of era do we live in today! Still want to control people's minds?"

He said he was left confused after watching China's version of the 007 movie, which deleted a bloody scene showing a French hitman killing a Chinese security guard. It also changed the subtitles of Bond's conversation with a young woman in the Chinese territory of Macau about her past references to her as a teenage prostitute morphed into a mention of her membership in the mafia.

The "Cloud Atlas" filmmakers say they are confident their movie will retain its "integrity" despite being 38 minutes lighter.

Executive producer Philip Lee said Thursday that the filmmakers knew they would have to "follow the censorship requirements" to have the movie shown in China. He said he hadn't yet seen the censored version that will come out next week, but that he was confident that the Chinese distributor, Dreams of Dragon Pictures, had made the right changes.

"We have very strong belief in our partner Dreams of the Dragon Pictures," Lee said. "They have been extremely helpful and collaborative and I am sure they will protect the integrity of the film makers, our creativity and vision."

A woman surnamed Su in charge of propaganda for Dreams of the Dragon Pictures refused to comment Thursday. Phone calls to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television rang unanswered.

China allows only 34 foreign films to be shown in its movie theaters each year and 14 of those have to be in 3D or IMAX format. However, pirated DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters are widely available in China, sometimes the result of recording films as they are shown in American or European movie theaters.

"I'm kind of surprised that the directors or the film's producers would accept such a hefty edit on this," Florian Fettweis of Beijing-based media consultancy CMM-I said of "Cloud Atlas." Usually if Hollywood movies encounter heavy censorship, the makers change their mind about showing it in China, he said.

Fettweis said that happened with the 2008 Batman movie "The Dark Knight."

"Commonly big Hollywood directors are the ones who don't accept edits to their films," said Fettweis.

China's authoritarian government strictly controls print media, television, radio and the Internet. China doesn't have a classification system, so all movies shown at its cinemas are open to adults and children of any age. This has led to calls for a tiered classification that would give clearer guidelines to filmmakers and allow some films to be less heavily censored.

There are two strands to the Chinese censorship prudishness and political sensitivities, said Steve Tsang, an expert on contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham in Britain.

The censoring of gay love scenes in "Cloud Atlas" falls into the first category while cuts to "Skyfall" are in the second, broadly defined as anything that portrays China or the Chinese in a negative light. "Shooting a Chinese officer in uniform, they don't want to encourage that," said Tsang.

The screen time of a pirate played by Hong Kong actor Chow Yun Fat in the 2007 "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" was slashed in half by censors for "vilifying and defacing the Chinese," according to the official Xinhua News Agency at the time.

The changes made to Skyfall were widely reported in state-run media. Xinhua quoted Shi Chuan, a professor from Shanghai University's film department, as saying: "Movie regulators should respect the producers' original ideas, rather than chopping scenes arbitrarily." He renewed calls for the establishment of laws and norms for movie censors to follow.

Cinema-goers who saw the censored version were confused by the cuts, which also deleted a character's line about having been tortured by Chinese security agents.

"Now I know why I was so confused when I watched it, and not able to connect each scene," a movie goer, Gao Yuan, who works for a cultural publishing company in Beijing, said on her Sina Weibo. "It's not worth watching any good movies if they cut them like this. Maybe just don't import it."

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AP researchers Fu Ting in Shanghai and Flora Ji in Beijing and contributed to this report.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Whitney Houston's mother has told People magazine that she questions her skills as a parent and wonders if she could have saved her superstar daughter from the drug use that played a role in her death.

"Was I a good mother?" Cissy Houston, 79, was quoted as telling the celebrity magazine in an advance excerpt released on Wednesday from the magazine's Friday edition.

"I still wonder if I could have saved her somehow. But there's no book written on how to be a parent. You do the best you can."

Whitney Houston drowned accidentally in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub on February 11, 2012, after taking cocaine and after a well-chronicled battle with drug addiction. She was 48.

Cissy Houston, a singer in her own right, talked to People about her daughter's personal life and career while promoting her upcoming memoir, "Remembering Whitney."

In the memoir, Cissy Houston says she was not aware of the early "partying" days of her daughter, known to the family as "Nippy."

"I had no idea about Nippy's 'partying.' And the truth is, back then I didn't really want to know about it," she writes, according to excerpts released to People.

Cissy Houston also discussed her daughter's ex-husband Bobby Brown, who has had his own substance abuse problems and run-ins with the law. "He didn't help her, that's for damn sure," Houston told the celebrity magazine of Brown.

The Grammy-winning singer left behind her only child, Bobbi Kristina, 19, who was hospitalized twice with anxiety after her mother's death.

Last fall, Cissy, Bobbi Kristina, the singer's brother and sister-in-law starred in a 14-episode reality show for cable channel Lifetime about their struggle to cope after Houston's death called "The Houstons: On Our Own."

Houston told the magazine she was "worried" about granddaughter Bobbi Kristina and "trying to make sure she doesn't (follow the same path)" as her famous mother.

Cissy Houston's interview with People, and excerpts from her memoir, can be found in the issue which reaches newsstands on January 25.

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Claudia Parsons)

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WASHINGTON (AP) Art Liscano knows he's an endangered species in the job market: He's a meter reader in Fresno, Calif. For 26 years, he's driven from house to house, checking how much electricity Pacific Gas & Electric customers have used.

But PG&E doesn't need many people like Liscano making rounds anymore. Every day, the utility replaces 1,200 old-fashioned meters with digital versions that can collect information without human help, generate more accurate power bills, even send an alert if the power goes out.

"I can see why technology is taking over," says Liscano, 66, who earns $67,000 a year. "We can see the writing on the wall." His department employed 50 full-time meter readers just six years ago. Now, it has six.

From giant corporations to university libraries to start-up businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition they can't win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier to use.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Second in a three-part series on the loss of middle-class jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, and the role of technology.

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To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.

Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.

"Everything that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."

Google and Toyota are rolling out cars that can drive themselves. The Pentagon deploys robots to find roadside explosives in Afghanistan and wages war from the air with drone aircraft. North Carolina State University this month introduced a high-tech library where robots "bookBots" retrieve books when students request them, instead of humans. The library's 1.5 million books are no longer displayed on shelves; they're kept in 18,000 metal bins that require one-ninth the space.

The advance of technology is producing wondrous products and services that once were unthinkable. But it's also taking a toll on people because they so easily can be replaced.

In the U.S., more than 1.1 million secretaries vanished from the job market between 2000 and 2010, their job security shattered by software that lets bosses field calls themselves and arrange their own meetings and trips. Over the same period, the number of telephone operators plunged by 64 percent, word processors and typists by 63 percent, travel agents by 46 percent and bookkeepers by 26 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.

In Europe, technology is shaking up human resources departments across the continent. "Nowadays, employees are expected to do a lot of what we used to think of as HR from behind their own computer," says Ron van Baden, a negotiator with the Dutch labor union federation FNV. "It used to be that you could walk into the employee affairs office with a question about your pension, or the terms of your contract. That's all gone and automated."

Two-thirds of the 7.6 million middle-class jobs that vanished in Europe were the victims of technology, estimates economist Maarten Goos at Belgium's University of Leuven.

Does technology also create jobs? Of course. But at nowhere near the rate that it's killing them off at least for the foreseeable future.

Here's a look at three technological factors reshaping the economies and job markets in developed countries:

BIG DATA

At the heart of the biggest technological changes today is what computer scientists call "Big Data." Computers thrive on information, and they're feasting on an unprecedented amount of it from the Internet, from Twitter messages and other social media sources, from the barcodes and sensors being slapped on everything from boxes of Huggies diapers to stamping machines in car plants.

According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more information now crosses the Internet every second than the entire Internet stored 20 years ago. Every hour, they note, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. collects 50 million filing cabinets' worth of information from its dealings with customers.

No human could make sense of so much data. But computers can. They can sift through mountains of information and deliver valuable insights to decision-makers in businesses and government agencies. For instance, Wal-Mart's analysis of Twitter traffic helped convince it to increase the amount of "Avengers" merchandise it offered when the superhero movie came out last year and to introduce a private-label corn chip in the American Southwest.

Google's automated car can only drive by itself by tapping into Google's vast collection of maps and using information pouring in from special sensors to negotiate traffic.

"What's different to me is the raw amount of data out there because of the Web, because of these devices, because we're attaching sensors to things," says McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business and the co-author of "Race Against the Machine."

"The fuel of science is data," he says. "We have so much more of that rocket fuel."

So far, public attention has focused on the potential threats to privacy as companies use technology to gather clues about their customers' buying habits and lifestyles.

"What is less visible," says software entrepreneur Martin Ford, "is that organizations are collecting huge amounts of data about their internal operations and about what their employees are doing." The computers can use that information to "figure out how to do a great many jobs" that humans do now.

Gary Mintchell, editor in chief of Automation World, recalls starting work in manufacturing years ago as a "grunge, white-collar worker." He'd walk around the factory floor with a clipboard, recording information from machines, then go back to an office and enter the data by hand onto a spreadsheet.

Now that grunge work is conducted by powerful "operations management" software systems developed by businesses such as General Electric Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va. These systems continuously collect, analyze and summarize in digestible form information about all aspects of factory operations energy consumption, labor costs, quality problems, customer orders.

And the guys wandering the factory floor with clipboards? They're gone.

THE CLOUD

In the old days say, five years ago businesses that had to track lots of information needed to install servers in their offices and hire technical staff to run them. "Cloud computing" has changed everything.

Now, companies can store information on the Internet perhaps through Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine and grab it when they need it. And they don't need to hire experts to do it.

Cloud computing "is a catch-all term for the ability to rent as much computer power as you need without having to buy it, without having to know a lot about it," McAfee says. "It really has opened up very high-powered computing to the masses."

Small businesses, which have no budget for a big technology department, are especially eager to take advantage of the cheap computer power offered in the cloud.

Hilliard's Beer in Seattle, founded in October 2011, bought software from the German company SAP that allows it to use cloud computing to track sales and inventory and to produce the reports that federal regulators require.

"It automates a lot of the stuff that we do," owner Ryan Hilliard says. "I know what it takes to run a server. I didn't want to hire an IT guy."

And the brewery keeps finding new ways to use the beefed-up computing power. For example, it's now tracking what happens to the kegs it delivers to restaurants and retrieving them sooner for reuse. "Kegs are a pretty big expense for a small brewery," Hilliard says.

Automated Insights in Durham, N.C., draws on the computing power of the cloud to produce automated sports stories, such as customized weekly summaries for fantasy football leagues. "We're able to create over 1,000 pieces of content per second at a very cost-effective rate," says founder Robbie Allen. He says his startup would not have been possible without cloud computing.

SMARTER MACHINES

Though many are still working out the kinks, software is making machines and devices smarter every year. They can learn your habits, recognize your voice, do the things that travel agents, secretaries and interpreters have traditionally done.

Microsoft has unveiled a system that can translate what you say into Mandarin and play it back in your voice. The Google Now personal assistant can tell you if there's a traffic jam on your regular route home and suggest an alternative. Talk to Apple's Siri and she can reschedule an appointment. IBM's Watson supercomputer can field an awkwardly worded question, figure out what you're trying to ask, retrieve the answer and spit it out fast enough to beat human champions on the TV quiz show "Jeopardy!" Computers with that much brainpower increasingly will invade traditional office work.

Besides becoming more powerful and creative, machines and their software are becoming easier to use. That has made consumers increasingly comfortable relying on them to transact business. As well as eliminated jobs of bank tellers, ticket agents and checkout cashiers.

People who used to say "Let me talk to a person. I don't want to deal with this machine" are now using check-in kiosks at airports and self-checkout lanes at supermarkets and drugstores, says Jeff Connally, CEO of CMIT Solutions, a technology consultancy.

The most important change in technology, he says, is "the profound simplification of the user interface."

Four years ago, the Darien, Conn., public library bought self-service check-out machines from 3M Co. Now, with customers scanning books themselves, the library is processing more books than ever while shaving 15 percent from staff hours by using fewer part-time workers.

So machines are getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession, have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five years, yet continue to operate just as well.

How is that happening?

Reduced aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers.

When the Great Recession struck, the Seattle police department didn't have money to replace retiring officers. So it turned to technology a new software system that lets police officers file crime-scene reports from laptops in their patrol cars.

The software was nothing fancy, just a collection of forms and pull-down menus, but the impact was huge. The shift from paper eliminated the need for two dozen transcribers and filing staff at police headquarters, and freed desk-bound officers to return to the streets.

"A sergeant used to read them, sign them, an officer would photocopy them and another drive them to headquarters," says Dick Reed, an assistant chief overseeing technology. "Think of the time, think of the salary. You're paying an officer to make photocopies."

Thanks to the software, the department has been able to maintain the number of cops on the street at 600.

The software, from Versaterm, a Canadian company, is being used by police in dozens of cities, including Denver, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas.

In South Korea, Standard Chartered is expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three, compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. The bank has closed a dozen full-service branches, replacing them with the smart branches, and expects to have 30 more by the end of this year. Customers do most of their banking on computer screens, and can connect with Standard Chartered specialists elsewhere by video-conference if they need help.

Comerica, a bank based in Dallas, is using new video-conferencing equipment that lets cash-management experts make pitches to potential corporate clients from their desks. Those experts, based in Livonia, Mich., used to board planes and visit prospects in person. Now, they get Comerica colleagues in various cities to pay visits to local companies and conference them in.

"The technology for delivering (high quality) video over a public Internet connection was unavailable 12 or 18 months ago," says Paul Obermeyer, Comerica's chief information officer. "Now, we're able to generate more revenue with the same employee base."

The networking equipment also allows video to be delivered to smart phones, so the experts can make pitches on the run, too.

The British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year. The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future" program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.

Like many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew four people. The hard work at the Eindhoven-based company is carried out by an old industrial robot that Vander Kooij fashioned into a 3D printer. Using plastic recycled from old refrigerators, the machine "prints" furniture ranging in price from a $300 chair to a $3,000 lamp the way an ordinary printer uses ink to print documents. Many analysts expect 3D printing to revolutionize manufacturing, allowing small firms like Vander Kooij's to make niche products without hiring many people.

Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with cars and planes that can get around by themselves.

"A pilotless airliner is going to come; it's just a question of when," James Albaugh, retired CEO of Boeing Commercial Airlines, said in 2011, according to IEEE Spectrum magazine. "You'll see it in freighters first, over water probably, landing very close to the shore."

Unmanned trains already have arrived. The United Arab Emirates introduced the world's longest automated rail system 32 miles in Dubai in 2009.

And the trains on several Japanese rail lines run by themselves. Tokyo's Yurikamome Line, which skirts Tokyo Bay, is completely automated. The line named for the black-headed sea gull that is Tokyo's official bird employs only about 60 employees at its 16 stations. "Certainly, using the automated systems does reduce the number of staff we need," says Katsuya Hagane, the manager in charge of operations at New Transit Yurikamome.

Driverless cars will have a revolutionary impact on traffic one day and the job market. In the United States alone, 3.1 million people drive trucks for a living, 573,000 drive buses, 342,000 drive taxis or limousines. All those jobs will be threatened by automated vehicles.

Phone companies and gas and electric utilities are using technology to reduce their payrolls. Since 2007, for instance, telecommunications giant Verizon has increased its annual revenue 19 percent while employing 17 percent fewer workers. The smaller work force partly reflects the shift toward cellphones and away from landlines, which require considerably more maintenance. But even the landlines need less human attention because Verizon is rapidly replacing old-fashioned copper lines with lower-maintenance, fiber-optic cables.

Verizon also makes it easier for customers to deal with problems themselves without calling a repairman. From their homes, consumers can open Verizon's In-home Agent software on their computers. The system can determine why a cable TV box isn't working or why the Internet connection is down and fix the problem in minutes. The program has been downloaded more than 2 million times, Verizon says.

And then there are the meter readers like PG&E's Liscano. Their future looks grim.

Southern California Edison finished its digital meter installation program late last year. All but 20,000 of its 5.3 million customers have their power usage beamed directly to the utility.

Nearly all of the 972 meter readers in Southern California Edison's territory accepted retirement packages or were transferred within the company, says Pat Lavin of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But 92 workers are being laid off this month.

"Trying to keep it from happening would have been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of technology."

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NEXT: Will smart machines create a world without work?

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Bernard Condon and Jonathan Fahey reported from New York. AP Business Writers Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington, Youkyung Lee in Seoul, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo contributed to this report. You can reach the writers on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BernardFCondon and www.twitter.com/PaulWisemanAP. Join in a Twitter chat about this story on Thursday, Jan. 24, at noon E.S.T. using the hashtag (hash)TheGreatReset.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Second in a three-part series on the loss of middle-class jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, and the role of technology.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At least one of President Barack Obama's national security picks is likely to win approval easily from the U.S. Senate: his nominee for Secretary of State, John Kerry, whose confirmation hearing will be conducted by a committee he has led for four years.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. EST on Thursday.

Obama nominated the Massachusetts senator to succeed Hillary Clinton as the country's top diplomat last month, after Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, withdrew from consideration amid scathing Republican criticism of her handling of a September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

As the replacement for a potential nominee seen as controversial, the five-term U.S. senator and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee is expected to sail through the confirmation process. He could start his new job early next month.

While voicing deep concerns about Rice and Chuck Hagel and John Brennan, Obama's nominees to be Secretary of Defense and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, senators have expressed few worries about Kerry.

"He has this nomination in part because of his good relations with the Senate and the fact that he can sail through the Senate, that's why he is there rather than Susan Rice," said James Mann, author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Senate aides said this week they did not foresee last-minute obstacles to Kerry's confirmation.

The Massachusetts Democrat is likely to face questions about Benghazi at the hearing, a day after Clinton spent more than 5-1/2 hours testifying on Capitol Hill about the incident.

Clinton will introduce Kerry as his hearing begins.

Republican Senator John McCain, who was one of the loudest critics of Rice, joked about Kerry's hearing. He said this week the Foreign Relations Committee looked forward to "interrogating" Kerry.

"We will bring back, for the only time, waterboarding to get the truth out of him," McCain quipped to a news conference.

SYRIA, IRAN, ARMS CONTROL

But Kerry, who has been seen as a dutiful Obama supporter, can expect some pointed questions. He opposed the Iraq War and has served as a special emissary for Obama in delicate areas like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he traveled in 2009 to help convince President Hamid Karzai to agree to a runoff election.

As a senator, Kerry visited Damascus repeatedly prior to the outbreak of Syria's devastating civil war and was a proponent of U.S. re-engagement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Republicans are expected to grill Kerry about how Washington can deal with everything from a possible power vacuum to Assad's potential use of chemical weapons.

Republicans likely will quiz Kerry about his approach to Iran. Hardliners have criticized him for failing to seek tougher sanctions to discourage the Islamic Republic from pursuing its nuclear program.

Mann, the author of "The Obamians," a 2012 book on Obama's international policy, said Kerry may also be queried on arms control after helping pass the New START treaty during Obama's first term. Some Republicans were concerned that the nuclear arms control deal did not demand enough of Russia.

But none of that is not expected to derail his nomination.

The Yale-educated son of a foreign service officer, Kerry, 69, has been a specialist in foreign affairs for years. In the 1960s, he differed from most of his well-heeled peers by enlisting in the U.S. Navy and serving two tours of duty in the Vietnam War.

He broke from - and enraged - the military establishment by becoming a prominent anti-war demonstrator after returning home. Bitter personal attacks over that role helped cost him the presidency in 2004.

But such concerns now seem a relic of the distant past.

Several Senate Republicans suggested their longtime colleague Kerry as a more desirable alternative as they expressed doubts about Rice last year.

And Kerry, one of the richest members of the Senate thanks to his second wife's fortune, already cleared up one concern.

He and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have agreed to divest nearly 100 separate investments in the United States and abroad if he becomes the country's top diplomat.

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Cynthia Osterman)

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) The New Mexico teen accused of killing his family and plotting to gun down Wal-Mart shoppers spent much of the day after the early morning slayings at his church, wandering the campus as dozens of Sunday school teachers were being trained on how to deal with a shooter, a security official said.

But it wasn't until hours later, former police officer and Calvary Albuquerque security chief Vince Harrison said, that he knew something had gone terribly wrong.

Harrison, who led the safety training Saturday morning, said he was called back to the church Saturday evening after 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego told a pastor he found his family dead in their home.

"When I met Nehemiah, I knew something wasn't right," Harrison said Wednesday. "I could feel it, I could see it in his eyes and I could see it in his behavior and his demeanor so the red flags went up and that's when I called the sheriff's department."

Harrison, who had known the Griego family for about 10 years, said he drove the teen back to the family's rural southwest Albuquerque home to meet authorities, interviewing him along the way.

"He went into detail of where they were, where the guns were and he was very matter-of-fact, really cold so I knew something wasn't right," Harrison said.

After finding the bodies, sheriff's officials say, they took the teen to headquarters. During questioning, they say he confessed to shooting his mother and three younger siblings in their beds shortly after 1 a.m., then waiting in a bathroom with a military-style semi-automatic rifle to ambush his father upon his return from an overnight shift at a homeless shelter.

They say he also told them he had reloaded the family's rifles and taken them with him in the family van with plans to randomly shoot more people.

"That sends chills down my spine," Harrison said. "But obviously God had a different plan."

Harrison said several people spotted Griego at the church Saturday, but thought nothing of it until his arrest. He said officials then reviewed security video and found the teen had spent much of the day there.

He said he doesn't know why Griego decided to come to the church, but that it was like a second home for the boy, who was schooled at his house.

"It was a familiar place to him," Harrison said. "I think if he did have in his mindset to do something foolish and start shooting people there also, I think his demeanor was tamed a little bit because he saw people there he knew."

Sheriff Dan Houston said Tuesday there was no indication Griego intended to harm anyone at the church. The sheriff also said Griego and his girlfriend had spent much of the day together.

A prayer vigil was held at the church Wednesday night for victims Greg Griego, 51, his wife, Sarah Griego, 40, and three of their children a 9-year-old boy, Zephania Griego, and daughters Jael Griego, 5, and Angelina Griego, 2.

Before the start of the vigil, members of the crowd shared hugs and handshakes as photographs of the victims were displayed on large digital screens at the front of the church. An estimated 2,000 people attended and nearly every seat was filled before the start of the hour-long service.

"Our hearts break, Lord," Pastor Skip Heitzig told the crowd. "We, often in times like these, scratch our heads and wonder why. We are at a loss for words and we are certainly at a loss for explanation."

Heitzig shared stories about Greg Griego and his family, saying Greg was always ready to "get his hands dirty" and was dedicated to helping others find God. He also urged the crowd to remember that forgiveness and restoration two tenets dear to Greg Griego will be important as the community moves forward.

Relatives in a statement Tuesday night said they were heartbroken, and remembered the teen as a bright and talented musician who played guitar, drums and bass with the church choir. He also was a champion wrestler who dreamed of following his family's long tradition of military service, and a boy who accompanied his pastor father on rescue missions to Mexico, they said.

"We have not been able to comprehend what led to this incredibly sad situation. However, we are deeply concerned about the portrayal in some media of Nehemiah as some kind of a monster."

The statement, emailed by the boy's uncle, Eric Griego, called on the media and the public not to use 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego "as a pawn for ratings or to score political points."

"He is a troubled young man who made a terrible decision that will haunt him and his family forever," the statement said.

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Follow Susan Montoya Bryan on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/susanmbryanNM

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