The number of new AIDS cases rose almost 13 percent in the January to October period, compared with the same period the previous year, while the number of people infected with HIV aged 50 and above leapt more than 20 percent, the official Xinhua news agency said.

A total of 492,191 people were living with HIV/AIDS as of the end of October, including 68,802 new cases this year, the news agency said, citing the Health Ministry.

Of new HIV cases within the 10 month period, 84.9 percent contracted the virus through sexual intercourse, with transmission rates amongst men-who-have-sex-with-men rising sharply, it added.

Li, at a meeting with non-governmental groups working on HIV/AIDS, said the government would let them play a more active role in battling the disease.

"You have a greater understanding of what sufferers want ... the government will continue to offer support and pay even greater attention to and listen more closely to the voices of civil society groups and you will be given greater space to play your role," state television cited him as saying.

It also showed pictures of Li shaking hands with sufferers, in a country where discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS is rampant, even in the health-care community.

China's government was initially slow to acknowledge the problem of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s and had sought to cover it up when hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers in rural Henan province became infected through botched blood-selling schemes.

Li, who takes over from Wen Jiabao as premier at the annual meeting of parliament in March, worked in Henan from 1998 to 2004, and was criticized by activists for helping to cover up the extent of the crisis there.

Beijing has since stepped up the fight, spending more on prevention programs, launching schemes to give universal access to anti-retroviral drugs to contain the disease, and introducing policies to curb discrimination.

But in a country where taboos surrounding sex remain strong and discussion of the topic is largely limited, people with HIV/AIDS say they are often stigmatized, and activists frequently complain of official harassment.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)

The paintings, which the Philippine government claims it owns, disappeared around the time Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was forced from power a quarter century ago.

The ex-aide, Vilma Bautista, 74, a New York resident, was charged on Tuesday with conspiracy and other crimes. She pleaded not guilty in Manhattan state court and was released on $175,000 bond.

"Unfortunately, our client is in the middle of a dispute between the Philippine government and the Marcos family that has been going on for years," attorney Fran Hoffinger said after the arraignment. "This is a civil dispute. It does not belong in criminal court."

Bautista is accused of secretly keeping and, with the help of two nephews, selling "Le Bassin aux Nympheas," one of Monet's "Water Lilies" series, to a London gallery in 2010 for $32 million, according to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. The nephews also were charged in the case.

Other paintings Bautista is accused of secretly keeping are Monet's "L'Eglise et La Seine a Vetheuil," Alfred Sisley's "Langland Bay," and Albert Marquet's "Le Cypres de Djenan Sidi Said."

Imelda Marcos, known for her extravagant lifestyle and thousands of shoes, is not expected to face charges in the case, prosecutors said. Ferdinand Marcos died in 1989.

The Philippine government filed corruption charges against the strongman and his wife in 1987, seeking tens of billions of dollars in damages for plundering the nation's wealth, including illegal expensive works of art, clothes and jewelry.

(This story has corrected spelling of Philippine in paragraphs one and two; spelling of painting title in paragraph five)

(Reporting By Karen Freifeld; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Cynthia Osterman)

The season ended with a celebratory final image of fresh-faced champion Brad Keselowski, drunk on the combination of his sponsor's beer and the joy of giving team owner Roger Penske his first championship. And the days since Sunday's finale have been a coming out party for the 28-year-old from suburban Detroit, who is all over the television dial smoothly shilling for NASCAR.

It's a reprieve from the bad news: ESPN's ratings from the race at Homestead-Miami Speedway were down 25 percent from last year's race, the most-viewed in network history. Ratings were down or flat for all 10 Chase for the Sprint Cup championship races this season.

Why? Because the racing in 2012 was mostly forgettable, something chairman Brian France has tasked his entire competition department with fixing.

"The missing and final piece, which we're working on now, is to improve on the quality of racing," France said before Sunday's finale. "Everyone knows a stated goal of ours is to have the closest, most competitive, tightest racing that we can. And that's what we're testing now."

So in one sense, NASCAR couldn't wait to get out of Homestead and officially close a 2012 season that opened with perhaps the most bizarre Daytona 500 in history.

Heavy rains washed out NASCAR's marquee event for the first time in 54 runnings, pushing the race into a prime-time Monday night slot. Then, a freak crash between Juan Pablo Montoya and a truck loaded with jet fuel ignited afuel fire and a nearly two-hour delay.

While track workers tried to clean the mess with Tide laundry detergent, Keselowski grabbed worldwide attention with both thumbs by tweeting updates from his car.

The TV ratings were good, the buzz surrounding NASCAR was better but it wasn't sustainable as the Sprint Cup Series quickly fell into a stretch of nearly unwatchable racing. California ran caution-free until rain brought out the yellow that eventually stopped the race. Texas had two debris cautions until the race went green 234 laps to the finish.

Bristol had just one multi-car crash and featured a 219-lap green-flag run. Kansas in the spring had three cautions, two for debris and one for a single-car spin and the race ended with a 75-lap green-flag run.

With Richmond and Talladega looming, fans believed action-packed racing was ahead. Instead, Richmond was a bland affair until Carl Edwards was accused of jumping a late restart and Talladega exposed the disconnect between drivers and fans. Sure, there was the usual late-race multi-car accident, and Tony Stewart's tongue-in-cheek assessment of the racing proved there's no middle ground in racin' vs. wreckin'.

"It's not fair to these fans for them to not see more wrecks than that and more torn-up cars," he sarcastically said after the May race. "We still had over half the cars running at the end, and it shouldn't be that way."

When NASCAR returned to Daytona in July, promoter Bruton Smith was calling for mandatory cautions to spice up the racing and France was adamantly opposed to the need for gimmicks. But, France revealed that he'd dispatched senior vice president of racing operations Steve O'Donnell to North Carolina to repurpose NASCAR's research and development center and zero in on the correct rules package for the debut of the new car next year.

Hours before the race, AJ Allmendinger was suspended for failing a random drug test. Nothing diverts attention like a scandal, and Allmendinger's woes and his job with straight-laced Penske Racing dominated the news for the next month.

When Penske finally cut him loose, the free agency watch began. Matt Kenseth had announced in June he was leaving Roush Fenway Racing, and although it was a poorly kept secret he was taking Joey Logano's ride at Joe Gibbs Racing, it wasn't officially confirmed until the end of the summer.

So the industry watched and waited to see if Logano would get Allmendinger's seat over Sam Hornish Jr., a Penske loyalist who has done anything at The Captain's beck and call. When Logano did get the job, and it was revealed the hiring was at Keselowski's urging, it should have been a clear sign that something special had developed between team owner and driver.

Otherwise, how would Keselowski have such pull?

"He's passionate about the sport, and he wants me to be involved, as he has the rest of the team, and I think that we've stepped it up," Penske said. "I'd have to say that Brad has not only pushed me as an individual, he's pushed the team in a positive direction, and he's delivering."

Keselowski delivered as soon as the Chase opened, stealing a win from Johnson at Chicagoland and hanging with the five-time champion and Denny Hamlin round-for-round all the way to Homestead. The title fights were at Texas, where Keselowski had to line up for three late restarts, winning the first two but losing to Johnson on the last one to go down seven points headed into Phoenix.

It was one of Johnson's best tracks and a place where Keselowski was unproven. But he was better than Johnson for two-thirds of the race, and then a blown tire sent Johnson into the wall. It put Keselowski in great shape headed into the finale, but not before Jeff Gordon intentionally wrecked Clint Bowyer to trigger a garage-area melee and prove the season-long theme that the sideshows tend to overshadow the actual racing.

Gordon was fined $100,000 and could have been suspended for last week's finale. Even after holding off Bowyer to win Sunday's race, he was dealing with the aftermath of Phoenix.

"It's like our whole season wrapped up in one week," he said. "You can try all you want to move past the moment, but man, it just ate me up inside all week. I just kept going back and forth from being disappointed, being angry, feeling that I had a right. I didn't have a right."

He looked around at his race team, grateful they stood behind him all season and after the Bowyer incident, and grateful they'll be with him next year.

"I think it started in our team meeting before the race, I apologized to those guys for some of the things that transpired that they had to get involved with that wasn't their doing last week, and I put them in that position, and I apologized to them and I thanked them at the same time for having my back," Gordon said. "We've had to have one another's backs because we've all made mistakes this year. And so to be able to celebrate with them in victory lane was very special, very meaningful, and gives a tremendous amount of momentum to go into 2013 with the new race car."

It's all about next season.

The head of the U.N. telecoms group pushed back against the American assertions, defending the accord as necessary to help expand online services to poorer nations and add more voices to shape the direction of modern communications technology.

Hamadoun Toure's remarks highlighted the wide gaps and hard-fought positions during the past 10 days of global talks in Dubai.

The negotiations essentially pitted the West's desire to preserve the unregulated nature of the Net against developing countries yearning for better Web access and strong-arm states such as Iran and China that closely filter cyberspace.

The final break late Thursday was not over specific regulations in the U.N. group's first telecoms review since before the Internet was a global force. Instead, it came down to an ideological split over the nature of the Internet and who is responsible for its growth and governance.

More than 20 countries joined the U.S. on Friday in refusing to sign the protocols by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, claiming it opens the door to greater government controls of the Net and could be used by authoritarian states to justify further crackdowns on cyberspace.

Rival countries including Iran, China and African states insist the governments should have a greater sway over Internet affairs and seek to break a perceived Western grip on information technology. They also favor greater international help to bring reliable online links to the world's least developed regions.

The ITU which dates to the age of the telegraph in the mid-19th century has no technical powers to change how the Internet operates or force countries to follow its nonbinding accords, which also dealt with issues such as mobile phone roaming rates and international emergency numbers.

But the U.S. and its backers worry that the new treaty could alter the tone of debates on the Internet. Instead of viewing it as a freeform network, they claim, it could increasingly been seen as a commodity that needs clear lines of oversight.

"A free and open Internet with limited restrictions has been critical to its development into one of the greatest tools for empowering people to connect and share information globally," said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who represents part of Silicon Valley, in a statement from Washington.

"But there are countries and groups who wish to exert greater control over the Internet in order to restrict or censor it for political or cultural reasons," she added. "We need to stand firm against those kinds of threats if we want the Internet to continue as a vibrant engine for innovation, human rights, cultural and economic growth."

In a testament to the contentious atmosphere at the Dubai negotiations, the pages of reservations and comments by various countries were far longer than the treaty itself.

In the end, it was supported by 89 countries in the 193-member U.N. telecoms union. Fifty-five did not sign, including the U.S.-led bloc of more than 20 nations, and others needing home country approval. The remainder did not have high-ranking envoys in Dubai.

Toure, the group's secretary-general, said he was "very much surprised" by the U.S.-led snub after days of difficult negotiations that dropped or softened wording that troubled the West.

Yet it fell short of American-led demands that all references to the Internet even indirect or couched in general language be omitted.

Even an issue such as unsolicited email "spam" brought division. Efforts to try to address blanket electronic message barrages was seen by American envoys and others as something governments could use as possible U.N. cover for increased surveillance on email traffic.

"Fundamental divides were exposed," said Lynn St. Amour, CEO and president of the Internet Society, an industry group.

Toure framed it as clash of "two societies" of the Internet age: Citizens of wealthy countries able to access the Net and 4.5 billion others in poor nations on the other side of the so-called digital divide.

"We are defending here the right to communicate as a basic human right. That's something very important in the ITU. We so remind our members constantly of that obligation," he told reporters.

He also said there was no specific endorsement of "Internet control or Internet governance." The U.S. and backers said the general acknowledgment of a government stake in 21st century telecommunications was just as troubling as any specific wording.

"Internet policy should not be determined by member states, but by citizens, communities and broader society ... the private sector and civil society," the head of the U.S. delegation, Terry Kramer, told the gathering late Thursday, "That has not happened here."

On Friday, Toure said it was impossible and illogical to ignore the Net.

"If the word Internet was used frequently here in Dubai, it is simply a reflection of the reality of the modern world," said Toure, a Russian-trained engineer from Mali. "Telecommunication networks are not just used for making voice calls, so our two worlds are linked."

Overshadowed by the Internet showdowns were other details in the pact. They include agreements that could lower mobile phone roaming charges, pledges to invest more communications infrastructure in poorer countries, efforts for greater communication technology for the disabled and a move to create a common emergency number for mobile phones and other devices.

Either the 911 or 112 number will be picked in later talks.

It's unclear whether countries that rejected the pact could benefit from possible changes such as lower roaming rates when the accord takes effect in 2015.

"Some really good stuff" in the accord, said a Twitter post by .nxt, a website following Internet policy. But it said the disputes over possible Internet controls forced the U.S and others "to bail" out on the deal.

Drummers wearing gorilla masks warmed up the crowd packed into Brooklyn's Barclays Center as black-clad women swung their long tresses in rhythm.

Mick Jagger pranced, shimmied and howled his way through the 2-1/2 hour show, pausing to reminisce about the band's history and its first New York concert at Carnegie Hall in 1964.

For a group whose early years were punctuated by quarrels and occasional brushes with the law, the biggest controversy ahead of Saturday's show was the price of seats - up to $800, and as much as 10 times that amount on websites offering last-minute tickets.

In those days, milk was cheaper and "tickets to the Rolling Stones was - well, I'm not going to go there," Jagger acknowledged.

The band's last major tour was in 2007 and the latest reunion almost didn't happen, owing in part to a spat between Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards over comments Richards made about the singer in a 2010 autobiography.

Richards joked in a recent interview: "We can't get divorced - we're doing it for the kids."

A tribute video opened Saturday's proceedings featuring celebrities heaping praise on the band.

"They're great songs to do bad things to," said actor Johnny Depp. "Just how skinny they all are... It really, really pisses me off," said actress Cate Blanchett.

The Stones - average age 68 - ripped through 20 hits that began with "Get Off of My Cloud" and closed with "Sympathy for the Devil" and an encore of "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Jumping Jack Flash" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction".

Women in the crowd opened their arms wide as Jagger, wearing a silver sequined jacket, strutted along the horseshoe-shaped stage for "I Wanna Be Your Man", a Beatles tune. The band was then joined by R&B singer Mary J. Blige for "Gimme Shelter".

"People say 'why do you keep doing this?'" Jagger told the crowd. He thanked fans for buying records and "generally being amazing for the last 50 years."

The Stones started their brief diamond jubilee tour in London and are due to play twice in Newark, New Jersey.

Fans said it could be the last chance for New Yorkers to see the band live.

"It's the only concert I wanted to see before I die," said Lucy Webley, 33.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)