The package will start at 0300 GMT on Jan. 9 with factboxes on the four teams in Group A - Angola, Cape Verde Islands, Morocco and hosts South Africa.

It will be followed on Jan. 10 by Group B teams (DR Congo, Ghana, Mali, Niger), on Jan. 11 by Group C (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zambia) and on Jan. 12 by Group D (Algeria, Ivory Coast, Togo, Tunisia).

On Jan. 13 there will be a feature on top strikers in the competition and a list of the top goal-scorers in previous editions.

On Jan. 14 we will move full squad lists and a feature on which European teams many of the players represent in club football.

On Jan. 15 there will be a feature on how far the Nations Cup has come since it was launched more than half a century ago.

On Jan. 16 we will move a feature on the wide array of coaching styles and approaches to the game among the 16 finalists plus a list of previous winning coaches.

On Jan. 17 there will be a tournament preview, a list of past winners and a list of previous hosts.

The Nations Cup starts on Jan. 19 and finishes on Feb. 10. (Editing by Tony Jimenez)

The photos were taken during the rock band's 1964 visit to the U.S., when color film was expensive and most images of the group were in black and white.

The collection of 65 slides contains many stage shots, including George Harrison with his legendary red Rickenbacker guitar and close-up portraits from a Las Vegas Sahara Hotel press conference and Las Vegas Convention Centre gig.

The images were taken by Dr. Robert Beck, who died in 2002 and left them in an archive of photographs and slides in his Hollywood home.

Omega Auctions said Sunday the images will be sold March 22 exactly 50 years after The Beatles released their first album.

But defense and experience win championships and few know the road to the Super Bowl better than longtime quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.

The wild-card weekend kicks off on Saturday with the Cincinnati Bengals visiting the Houston Texans, followed by NFC North rivals the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings renewing hostilities on Lambeau Field's famous frozen tundra.

Sunday's games will be a rookie quarterback showcase. Luck, the number one overall pick in last year's draft, will lead the resurgent Indianapolis Colts against the Baltimore Ravens, with Griffin, selected number two by the Washington Redskins, going against the Seattle Seahawks and their brilliant first-year quarterback Wilson.

More intriguing, however, is the possibility of a clash of the generations in the divisional playoffs the following weekend when Manning and the AFC top seeded Denver Broncos join the action along with Brady and the number two seeded New England Patriots.

In the NFC, the top-seeded Atlanta Falcons and number two San Francisco 49ers await their conference's wild-card winners.

OLD GUARD

While NFL fans have been mesmerized by the dynamic talents of Griffin, Luck and Wilson, the old guard of Brady, Manning and the Packers' Aaron Rodgers have trophy cases that contain Super Bowl rings and most valuable player awards.

Rodgers and Manning finished the regular season with the top two quarterback ratings, generating plenty of MVP buzz. They were followed by Griffin and Wilson.

Luck completed his first campaign by grabbing the single-season rookie passing yards record as the Colts went from last place to the playoffs in one year.

Wilson tied Manning's single-season rookie record with 26 touchdown passes, leading an explosive Seattle offence that became to first in 62 years to register back-to-back 50 point games.

While the spotlight will be focused on the trio of rookies, the pressure will be on two other quarterbacks.

The apprenticeship and honeymoon is over for Atlanta's Matt Ryan, the third overall pick in the 2008 draft, and the Ravens' Joe Flacco, taken 18th overall in that same draft class. The two must prove they are finally ready to deliver a championship.

Texans veteran play caller Matt Schaub will also be under the microscope while San Francisco's second year man Colin Kaepernick maybe the one true wild card, after taking over first string duties mid-season from Alex Smith.

In Minnesota, the Vikings' offense does not revolve so much around quarterback Christian Ponder as bruising running back Adrian Peterson, who rushed for a staggering 2,097 yards, falling just nine yards shy of Eric Dickerson's single-season record.

TOP RUSHERS

The wild-card weekend will also feature the NFL's top three rushers with Peterson, Redskins' powerhouse rookie Alfred Morris (1,613 yards) who averaged over 100 yards a game and the Seahawks' Marshawn Lynch (1,590).

Along with Lynch and quarterback Wilson, the Seahawks enter the postseason with the league's top ranked defense, allowing just 15.3 points a game. They are followed closely by their West division rivals the 49ers.

With six wins in their last seven games, including five straight to close out the campaign, the NFC Seahawks carry considerable momentum, but no team is hotter than the AFC Broncos, who have reeled off 11 consecutive wins.

The Seahawks were the NFL's best home team, winning all eight home dates, but must do something they have not done since 1983 - win a playoff game on the road.

Atlanta, the NFC's number one seed, went 7-1 at home and will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs while second seeded San Francisco was nearly as dominant, going 6-1-1 on its own turf.

"It's about consistency when you get into this opportunity," Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said on the team's website. "You've got to bring what you've got. Don't show up without your stuff on that day.

"We know how to do that. Now we have to see if we can bring it to life and not get distracted by the fact it's the playoffs."

(Reporting by Steve Keating in Toronto, editing by Gene Cherry)

The creation of the al-Watan ('Homeland') Party is part of a political landscape that was dominated by a variety of Islamist parties in the last election a year ago, but is still evolving.

The polls, due to begin in about two months, will be defined by competition between the Islamists, many of them from the Muslim Brotherhood that propelled Mohamed Mursi to the presidency, and secular-minded critics who have closed ranks in opposition to him.

Al-Watan's founders include the former leader of the Nour Party, a hardline Salafi Islamist group that came second to the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in the last election.

The last parliament, in which the FJP and the Nour Party together won some 70 percent of the seats, was dissolved in June by a court ruling that found the election law had been flawed.

One of al-Watan's founders, Emad Abdel Ghaffour, was Nour Party leader until he quit last week following internal disputes over the role of clerics in decision-making and bickering over internal elections.

He unveiled the new party on Tuesday at a news conference alongside Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a popular Salafi preacher who said an Islamist party that he plans to set up would enter an electoral alliance with al-Watan.

Abu Ismail was a front-runner for the presidency until he was disqualified on the grounds that his mother had held U.S. citizenship.

Salafi Islamists had kept out of politics until the uprising that overthrew Mubarak, but have emerged as a potent force since his political demise. Their stated aim is the application of Islamic law, or sharia.

(Editing by Tom Perry; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

The following shows the probable impact on taxpayers if Congress does not act on Monday, or does not come back later and undo these tax increases, based on data from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

INDIVIDUAL TAXES

If midnight passes with no deal, lower individual tax rates enacted in 2001 on a temporary basis under former President George W. Bush will expire on December 31.

The income tax brackets will rise to 15, 28, 31, 36, and 39.6 percent from the current 10, 15, 25, 28, 33 and 35 percent for nearly 160 million taxpayers.

The poorest fifth of taxpayers, about 40 million households, will see an average tax increase of about $412.

The most affluent fifth, about 23 million taxpayers, will typically pay about $14,173 more in income tax.

The wealthiest 1 percent, about 1.1 million taxpayers, will see an average tax hike of about $120,000.

PAYROLL TAX

About 160 million workers will pay higher Social Security payroll taxes. The rate goes up to 6.2 percent on January 31 when the current, temporary 4.2 percent rate expires. The lower rate was extended in 2012 to give workers a little extra in their paychecks as a way to boost the economy. Unlike some of the other tax measures, there appears to be little interest from Republicans or Democrats in continuing the lower rate.

INVESTMENT TAXES

The capital gains tax rate will rise to 20 percent from 15 percent for most taxpayers who have income from gains on their investments. The tax rate on dividends will rise to the top income tax rate, 39.6 percent, from the current 15 percent dividend tax rate.

ESTATE TAX

The estate tax will rise to 55 percent from 35 percent. The value of assets exempted also drops to $1 million per person from its current $5 million per person.

ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX

About 27 million Americans could be required to pay the alternative minimum tax (AMT), a tax that initially was intended to make sure the wealthy paid some tax. The AMT fix that Congress has enacted annually had resulted in only 4 million Americans paying the AMT.

UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

About 2.1 million long-term unemployed Americans will see their extended jobless benefits cut off as of January 1, according to the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy groups.

EXTENSIONS OF TAX BREAKS

A mix of tax breaks for individuals and businesses worth tens of billions of dollars annually, including the research and development tax credit for business, will lapse. These include deductions for payments of state and local taxes and tax benefits for college tuition.

MEDICARE PAYMENTS TO DOCTORS

Doctors treating elderly and disabled patients who make up the Medicare population will see a double-digit cut to in rates paid by the federal government health care program. Medicare patients could have a tougher time finding doctors who will treat them.

(Editing by Fred Barbash and Jackie Frank)

President Barack Obama canceled a trip he had planned to make next Wednesday to Portland, Maine to press his case for tax hikes for the wealthy. His weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday focused on Newtown, the site of Friday's school shootings, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults before taking his own life.

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio canceled the standard Republican radio response to Obama "so that President Obama can speak for the entire nation at this time of mourning," he said in a statement issued late Friday.

The moratorium on cliff pronouncements masked a growing recognition that the two sides could remain deadlocked at the end of the year on the key sticking point - whether to leave low tax rates in place except for high earners, as Obama wants, or extend them for all taxpayers, as Boehner wants.

With multiple polls showing that the public supports Obama's position, Republicans in the U.S. Senate prodded their counterparts in the House to make a face-saving retreat, in a fashion that would allow Obama's proposal to pass the Republican-controlled House while simultaneously letting Republicans cast a vote against it.

Republicans could then shift the debate onto territory they consider more favorable to them, cutting government spending to reduce the deficit.

"Just about everyone is throwing stuff on the wall to see if anything sticks," one Republican aide said with reference to various proposals being discussed on how to proceed. Alluding to public opinion polls, the aide added: "We know if there is no deal, we will get blamed."

"We could win the argument on spending cuts," said a Republican senator who asked not to be identified. "We aren't winning the argument on taxes."

However, Republican leaders in both chambers are leery about seeming to cave on taxes. "There's concern that if we did that, Obama would simply declare victory and walk away and not address spending," said one aide. "We don't trust these guys."

Some of the prodding was coming from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Don Stewart, a McConnell spokesman, said the minority leader in the Democratic-controlled Senate hasn't embraced any single plan, but has discussed and circulated measures offered by fellow Senate Republicans.

"Senator McConnell does not advocate raising taxes on anybody or anything," Stewart said.

"We're focused on getting a balanced plan from the White House that will begin to solve the problem of our debt and deficit to improve the economy and create American jobs," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

"Right now, all the president is offering is massive tax hikes with little or no spending cuts and reforms," Steel said.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor scheduled "possible legislation related to expiring provisions of law," a reference to the expiring tax cuts, for the end of the week, portending a weekend session.

Cantor has said the House would meet through the Christmas holidays and beyond.

Hopes expressed after the November6 general election of some "grand bargain" on deficit reduction have all but disappeared, at least for this year. This is partly because time is running out and partly result of growing warnings from Democrats in Congress that they would not support big changes in the Medicare program, the government-run health insurance program for seniors that is a major contributor to the government's debt.

House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California ruled out one frequently mentioned proposal - raising the age of eligibility for Medicare, in a December 12 CBS television interview.

Asked if she was drawing a "red line," around that idea, Pelosi said her comments were "something that says, 'don't go there,' because it doesn't produce money.

(Reporting by Thomas Ferraro and Kim Dixon; Editing by Fred Barbash and David Brunnstrom)

The National Rifle Association explained its unusual absence "out of respect for the families and as a matter of common decency" after Friday's shooting that left dead 20 children, all ages 6 or 7.

The group typically outspoken about its positions even after shooting deaths went all but silent since the rampage. As it faced public scrutiny online and in person, the group left many wondering how if at all it would respond to one of the most shocking slayings in the nation's history.

"The National Rifle Association of America is made up of 4 million moms and dads, sons and daughters, and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown," the organization said in a statement. "The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."

The group said it would have a news conference to answer questions Friday, the one-week anniversary of the shootings.

Almost immediately after it became clear the extent of carnage, the group's Facebook page disappeared. It posted no tweets. It made no mention of the shooting on its website. None of its leaders hit the media circuit Sunday to promote its support of the Second Amendment right to bear arms as the nation mourns the latest shooting victims and opens a new debate over gun restrictions. On Monday, the NRA offered no rebuttal as 300 antigun protesters marched to its Capitol Hill office.

Yet on Tuesday, the NRA re-emerged, albeit more slowly than normal and with its somber statement.

After previous mass shootings such as in Oregon and Wisconsin the group was quick to both send its condolences and defend gun owners' constitutional rights, popular among millions of Americans. There's no indication that the National Rifle Association is prepared to weaken its ardent opposition to gun restrictions but it did hint it was open to being part of a dialogue that already has begun.

Its deep-pocketed efforts to oppose gun control laws have proven resilient. Firearms are in a third or more of U.S. households and suspicion runs deep of an overbearing government whenever it proposes expanding federal authority. The argument of gun-rights advocates that firearm ownership is a bedrock freedom as well as a necessary option for self-defense has proved persuasive enough to dampen political enthusiasm for substantial change.

Seldom had the NRA gone so long after a fatal shooting without a public presence. It resumed tweeting just one day after a gunman killed two people and then himself at an Oregon shopping mall last Tuesday, and one day after six people were fatally shot at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August.

The Connecticut shootings occurred three days after the incident in Oregon.

Since the Connecticut shootings, the NRA has been taunted and criticized at length, vitriol that may have prompted the shuttering of its Facebook page just a day after the association boasted about reaching 1.7 million supporters on the social media network.

Twitter users have been relentless, protesting the organization with hashtags like NoWayNRA.

The NRA has not responded to them. Its last tweets, sent Friday, offered a chance to win an auto flashlight.

Offline, some 300 protesters gathered outside the NRA's lobbying headquarters on Capitol Hill on Monday chanting, "Shame on the NRA" and waving signs declaring "Kill the 2nd Amendment, Not Children" and "Protect Children, Not Guns."

"I had to be here," said Gayle Fleming, 65, a real estate agent from Arlington, Va., saying she was attending her first antigun rally. "These were 20 babies. I will be at every rally, will sign every letter, call every congressman going forward."

Retired attorney Kathleen Buffon of Chevy Chase, Md., reflected on earlier mass shootings, saying: "All of the other ones, they've been terrible. This is the last straw. These were children."

"The NRA has had a stranglehold on Congress," she added as she marched toward the NRA's unmarked office. "It's time to call them out."

The group's reach on Capitol Hill is wide as it wields its deep pockets to defeat lawmakers, many of them Democrats, who push for restrictions on gun ownership.

The NRA outspent its chief opponent by a 73-1 margin to lobby the outgoing Congress, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which tracks such spending. It spent more than 4,000 times its biggest opponents during the 2012 election.

In all, the group spent at least $24 million this election cycle $16.8 million through its political action committee and nearly $7.5 million through its affiliated Institute for Legislative Action. Its chief foil, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, spent just $5,816.

On direct lobbying, the NRA also was mismatched. Through July 1, the NRA spent $4.4 million to lobby Congress to the Brady Campaign's $60,000.

In the 700-page tome that explores the lives of families with children with conditions ranging from autism to deafness, Solomon says having a child is an act of production rather than reproduction that "abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger."

Though the book focuses on how families cope with more extreme forms of difference, Solomon, 49, believes that encountering unexpected traits in one's child is a universal part of parenthood.

"I have yet to meet anyone as a parent who has not from time to time looked at their child and said, Where did you come from?'" he said in an interview.

The book seems to have struck a chord. "Far From the Tree" is a top selling book and has garnered praise from critics.

Writing for The New Yorker, Nathan Heller called it "a careful, subtle, and surprising book," while the New York Times Book Review wrote, "This is a book that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart."

The book, which includes 10 years' worth of interviews with families and relevant research, is divided into chapters that are devoted to conditions such as dwarfism, transgender and schizophrenia.

Solomon said what unites the diverse collection of conditions covered in his book is that each one often results in isolation for the child and confusion and resentment for parents.

"Intellectually, the difficult part was trying to understand the ways in which these very differences had something in common, and coming up with the underlying idea of the book, which is that these individual differences are isolating, but taken together they're unifying," he said.

Solomon uses his own experience growing up as a dyslexic homosexual, two qualities that set him apart from his parents and were viewed as flaws by most, to frame the travails of the families in his book. He cautions against viewing the conditions he writes about solely as problems that need to be fixed or eliminated.

"We have to recognize that this thing (homosexuality) so universally described as an illness just 50 years ago could now largely be accepted as an identity ... We should be awake to the idea that what seems obviously to be an illness today may seem very different 50 years from now," he said.

Solomon noted the strong deaf culture that has grown among deaf people, and predicted that transgendered people and high-functioning autistic people would both gain increased acceptance over the next several decades.

Regardless of whether a trait is viewed as an illness or an identity, he believes that the goal should be to improve the life conditions and minimize suffering for the types of families featured in "Far From the Tree."

Solomon said the happiest families he interviewed were ones that were able to move past anger and frustration about their child's condition to accept their child and find meaning in challenges.

"The families that had looked at these experiences and acknowledged how unbelievably difficult they are and how painful they can be but nonetheless have found meaning of the experience were the ones that were doing better," he said.

"I was amazed by the way that for many of these families that experiencing difficulty had intensified rather than undermined parental love."

(Reporting By Andrea Burzynski; editing by Patricia Reaney and Mohammad Zargham)

[More from BGR: ]

I want a new console just as much as any other gamer. Theres a reason people areon thoseconsoles and . Six years is unusually long for a console to still be kicking around.

[More from BGR: ]

According to the well-informed Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, the game blog that first broke news on the , Microsoftsis on the mark and "Sony appears to inspire less confidencedue to the on-and-off troubles of the PlayStation 3 and the struggles of the Vita vs. how much lost confidence is due to any problems looming for "

Totilo says confidence is high that the next Xbox will be out in time for next Christmas and confidence is low that the PS4 will be right there on store shelves next to it.

The on-and-off troubles of the PlayStation 3 Totilo is referring to is the anchor thats weighed the console down since launch: tougher development due to the Cell processor and less available RAM -- 256MB vs. 512MB in the Xbox 360.

In the months before the PS3s launch in 2006, Sony said the console would be the most powerful console ever created, and here we are six years later and multi-platform games on the console consistently end up being buggier and uglier than on the Xbox 360 in many cases. Cases in point: Skyrim, Mass Effect and .

Sonys in a rut right now. It has the chops to build beautiful and powerful hardware thats a developers dream (ex: ), but at the same time, its always launching after the competition nowadays.

If Sonys learned any lessons in the last half a decade, it better apply them to the PS4. The console needs to offer next-level processing and graphics. It needs to be backward-compatible with PS3 games and play Blu-ray discs. It should be small and quiet. It should have a strong online platform, support a greater array of apps and most importantly be easy for developers to program for.

Game exclusives will always be important, but now that games are million-dollar productions, multi-platform will be where developers hope to reap back their costs.

With Microsoft said to be preparing an Xbox 720 and an , Sony cant make the mistake of launching late or pricing the console too high. A launch in spring of 2014 would mean Sony will miss Black Friday and Cyber Monday, thethat . Ceding sales and market share to Microsoft and Nintendo by launching late would be disastrous.

The PS3 screwed up too many times. At this point, the PS4 needs to be perfect out of the door.

This article was

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The year that almost was left us with a string of hideous story lines.

From the ongoing repulsiveness of the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State to Lance Armstrong being stripped of his Tour de France titles for injecting himself with everything but the kitchen sink.

There was the New Orleans Saints' cash-for-hits bounty scandal, and Commissioner Roger Goodell being slapped down by his predecessor for the way he handled the whole thing. And the sad, sad plights that emerge almost every day from ex-football players who took far too many blows to the head while playing America's most popular sport.

Those were the top four in The Associated Press' annual survey of the year's sport stories.

Thanks a lot, 2012.

Your legacy is pain and misery if we allow it to be.

This year could be a turning point on so many vital fronts.

Maybe when we reflect back years from now, we'll remember 2012 as a time when we decided sexual abuse was no longer an embarrassing problem to be swept under the rug, that doping was a scourge we needed to address no matter who it took down, that football players must be taken care of physically and emotionally if our national sport is to survive.

If we could pick one figure who we hope will epitomize this year more than any other, it would be Cy Young Award-winning pitcher R.A. Dickey. A journeyman who became a star in his late 30s after taking up the knuckleball. A victim of childhood sexual abuse who summoned the courage to talk about his plight in a candid autobiography. Someone who triumphed in the end after all the pain.

"One of the hopes I have for the book is that people will be able to draw something from it that might be able to help them," Dickey said during spring training after it was published, "whether it's to talk about it more, to not be afraid, to be open with what's happened, that there are people available that will love you no matter what."

That would be a worthy legacy for 2012.

Of course, it's terrible what happened at Penn State, which was voted the top sports story for the second year in a row. But who knows how many kids will be saved in the years to come because the next time a child is raped in the shower by a dirty old man, the police will surely be called. Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly spoke hopefully of the guilty verdict against Jerry Sandusky persuading "other victims of abuse to come forward."

And that's a good thing.

Of course, it's shocking to learn of the lengths Armstrong was willing to go to away from his bike, all to make sure he climbed to the top step of the podium on the Champs-Elysees year after year. But who knows how many future cyclists will decide it's not worth the risk of getting caught or having to deal with the inner turmoil of knowing they are a cheat. "Our mission is to protect clean athletes by preserving the integrity of competition not only for today's athletes but also the athletes of tomorrow," U.S. anti-doping chief Travis Tygart wrote in the voluminous case file against Armstrong.

And that's a good thing.

Of course, the Saints scandal exposed the dirty little secret in the NFL that apparently wasn't much of a secret to those who play the game, the idea that money changes hands when someone doles out a hit that leave the other guys crumpled on the turf. While former commissioner Paul Tagliabue overturned the punishments against four players, he doled out enough blame that one can only hope this is the last time we hear of anyone using the word "bounty" or intentionally trying to hurt someone.

And that's a good thing.

Of course, it's heartbreaking to see former greats of the gridiron, like the late Alex Karras, withering away in their golden years, unable to recognize friends and loved ones because the game they played turned their brains into mush. But everyone from the NFL to Pop Warner leagues finally seem to be addressing this wrenching issue, providing a glimmer of hope that future generations will be better protected. "He is interested in making the game of football safer," Karras' actress-wife, Susan Clark, told the AP a few months before he died, "and hoping that other families of retired players will have a healthier and happier retirement."

And that's a good thing.

Oh, sure, there were some triumphant tales from these last 12 months.

The London Olympics were a sight to behold. Michael Phelps went out in splash of glory, Usain Bolt blazed down the track, Gabby Douglas and Missy Franklin stole our hearts.

LeBron James finally claimed a ring after a season that even his critics had to concede was one of the most dazzling in NBA history. The San Francisco Giants kept us up late at night, winning baseball playoff games in the most unfathomable of ways. Quarterback Peyton Manning made an inspiring comeback from career-threatening injuries, leading Denver to a division title.

All were events worth celebrating.

But they're unlikely to have the far-reaching impact of those that made us cringe.

Now, if we can do better, maybe 2012 won't be such a bad year after all.

___

Paul Newberry is a national writer for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or www.twitter.com/pnewberry1963