KYOTO, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese author Haruki Murakami made his first public appearance in his homeland in 18 years on Monday, describing his newest novel, which was an instant-best seller, as a story that takes place in the real world, unlike many of his other novels.

"Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" has attracted positive reviews, with readers spotting familiar Murakami themes such as people bonding through pain.

Publisher Bungeishunju made the rare decision to print 1 million copies within a week of its April release in Japan.

The novel is about a lonely 36-year-old engineer named Tsukuru Tazaki, who embarks on trips in Japan and Finland to overcome his most painful experience - broken friendships.

"Usually things are divided into the real and unreal, but I was wondering how it will be if I bring all of that into the stage of the real world," Murakami told an audience of about 500 fans in Kyoto.

"People get hurt and close their minds, but as time passes, they gradually open up, and they grow as they repeat that. This novel is about growth."

The fans who won a lottery to attend the event were surprised that the 64-year-old, whose fiction is often surreal and who has made a handful of speeches overseas in recent years but none in Japan, was actually speaking to the public.

"I am a fan of his novels but I have never seen him in person nor heard his voice. Is he a normal person?" Hiroko Yamada, 40, asked as she waited for the event to start.

Murakami said he decided to speak in public to honor his friend Hayao Kawai, a psychologist who died in 2007.

"It's not like I get purple dots all over myself when I am in front of many people. I like to go around on the bus and the subway and live a normal life," he joked.

"I want you to think of me like an endangered species - it's fine to look at me from far away, but be careful because I may bite if you come near and talk to me or touch me."

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Carrie Underwood has assumed the title of "Sunday Night Football's" resident country-music singer.

"American Idol" winner Underwood has been tapped to replace Faith Hill as the singer of the opening theme song, "Waiting All Day for Sunday Night," NBC said Tuesday.

Underwood will make her "Sunday Night Football" premiere on September 8, as NBC kicks off its first "SNF" broadcast of the 2013 NFL season with a faceoff between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants.

"I am thrilled to be a part of NBC's 'Sunday Night Football' and am so honored they asked me," Underwood said. "I have always loved football season, and it is so exciting to now become part of it every Sunday night!"

"Sunday Night Football" producer Fred Gaudelli added, "Carrie Underwood was our first and only choice to perform the 'Sunday Night Football' opening. She's one of America's most popular entertainers and the perfect fit for our show."

Hill announced that she was leaving the hugely popular sports show in April, noting on Twitter, "Amazing 2 have been part of SNF - an honor. I've just let everyone there know it's time 2 let someone else rock the open."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will travel on Thursday to Austin, Texas, the first stop in a new series of day trips designed to draw attention to policies and programs that help spur the economy, and build support for his economic policies, the White House said on Sunday.

In Austin, Obama will visit a high school and a technology company, and will talk with entrepreneurs and workers about proposals he made earlier this year to boost jobs and training.

Despite often saying that his top priority is creating more jobs, Obama's proposals have been overshadowed by debates over reforms to gun and immigration laws as well as efforts to reduce the deficit.

Unemployment in the United States fell to 7.5 percent last month, the lowest level since Obama took office.

"Things are getting better, but our economic recovery is not as strong as it could be and far too many middle class families are still struggling," said Josh Earnest, Obama's deputy press secretary.

"There are things Washington could be doing right now to help American businesses, schools and workers," he said, explaining the tours are designed to engage Americans and push Congress to act.

In February, Obama said he wanted to invest in manufacturing "hubs" around the country, spend $50 billion on roads, bridges and other infrastructure, and raise the minimum wage to $9 per hour from the current $7.25.

Most of the proposals require Congressional approval, but there have been few signs of broad support for the measures on Capitol Hill.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Humans are increasingly exposed toin their daily lives, but little is known about how these lifelike machines influence human emotions.

Feeling bad for bots

In two new studies, researchers sought to measure how people responded to robots on an emotional and neurological level. In the first study, volunteers were shownbeing treated affectionately or violently. In the affectionate video, humans hugged and tickled the robot, and in the violent video, they hit or dropped him. []

Scientists assessed people's levels of physiological excitation after watching the videos by recording their skin conductance, a measure of how well the skin conducts electricity. When a person is experiencing strong emotions, they sweat more, increasing skin conductance.

The volunteers reported feeling more negative emotions while watching the robot being abused. Meanwhile, the volunteers' skin conductance levels increased, showing they were more distressed.

In the second study, researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualize brain activity in the participants as they watched videos of humans and robots interacting. Again, participants were shown videos of a human, a robot, and, this time, an inanimate object being treated with affection or abuse.

In one video, for example, a man appears to beat up a woman, strangle her with a string and attempt to suffocate her with a plastic bag. In another, a person does the same things to the robot dinosaur.

Affectionate treatment of the robot and the human led to similar patterns of neural activity in regions in the brain's , where emotions are processed, fMRI scans showed. But the watchers' brains lit up more while seeing abusive treatment of the human than abuse of the robot, suggesting greater empathy for the human.

"We think that, in general, the robot stimuli elicit the same emotional processing as the human stimuli," said lead study author Astrid Rosenthal-von der Ptten of the University of Duisburg Essen, in Germany. Rosenthal-von der Ptten suspects that people still have greater empathy for humans than robots, as evidenced by the stronger effect of watching violence toward the human than the robot.

Still, the study only assessed people's immediate reactions to the emotional cues, Rosenthal-von der Ptten said. "We don't know what happens after the short term," she said.

Human-robot interactions

That humans would show empathy for the robot is not surprising, because the bot looked and behaved like an animal, roboticist Alexander Reben, founder of the company BlabDroid, LLC and a research affiliate at MIT, told LiveScience. Reben, who was not involved in the recent study, himself builds small cardboard robots that tap into the human affinity for cute creatures.

Some people find the idea of humans empathizing with robots concerning. But Reben compared trends in robot development with breeding dogs for companionship. "We have been doing this for millennia," he said. "I think we're doing the same thing with robots."

Humans have been known to show empathy for robots in a variety of contexts. For instance,on the battlefield. Other research suggests that humans feel more empathy for , but not if they're too humanlike.

As robots become more and more ubiquitous, understandingwill take on increasing importance, Rosenthal-von der Ptten said.

The new research will be presented in June at the International Communication Association Conference in London.

Follow Tanya Lewis onand .Follow us , & . Original article on.

(Reuters) - Barely a week after Margaret Thatcher's funeral in London, her ghost is stalking the corridors of power.

At his press conference on Tuesday in Washington, President Barack Obama was asked about Guantnamo Bay prisoners refusing to eat. In doing so, the veteran CBS reporter Bill Plante, who asked the question, exposed a running sore in the Obama administration. He also invited direct comparison between Obama and Lady Thatcher - who faced a similar dilemma in 1981.

As a candidate in 2008, Obama, a distinguished Harvard-educated legal scholar known in the Senate for his common sense and humanity, promised to quickly close the prison for 166 terrorist suspects in the U.S. naval base at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba. The existence of a U.S. detention center that ignores the basic legal right of habeas corpus and the failure to bring prisoners to trial after so many years "erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles," he said. He went on to repeat his pledge, yet five years on, Gitmo is still open for business.

The president's embarrassment can be blamed, in part, on his navet. For a while after his inauguration in 2009 he appeared to be under the impression he had been elected the most powerful man on earth. It has taken four painful years for him to realize that the division of government guaranteed by the Constitution prevents him from doing not only what he wishes but what a majority of Americans have mandated.

Under the guise of saving money, Congress has stymied the president's plan to try those believed guilty of terrorist offenses on U.S. soil and to release the 86 innocents who have been held without trial for years. Despite their insistence that they believe in America's system of justice, it appears that many congressmen have little faith in it.

About a month ago the Gitmo detainees started taking matters into their own hands. Using passive resistance methods championed by Mahatma Gandhi, they decided en masse to stop eating.

This is not the first hunger strike at Gitmo, but it is the largest and most concerted. Of the 166 Gitmo inmates, 100 are refusing food. These include many of the 86 detainees who, according to a task force of CIA, FBI and Pentagon officials, are not terrorist risks and should be let free without charges, as well as some of the 46 the task force said were dangerous and should be detained indefinitely.

This time, the prisoners insist, they are going to get a result. America must decide whether to try them, free them or allow them to die.

Obama's dilemma is that he is responsible for holding the prisoners, yet he dearly wants to bring to a swift end one of the most troubling episodes in the history of U.S. justice. But a quick fix is not in his gift. Unless he can find a solution, he is condemned to spend the next few weeks watching 100 prisoners trying to starve themselves to death. When he told the White House press corps, "I don't want these individuals to die," he meant every word, for the majority of them are blameless and would die under American supervision in barely legal captivity.

What has Thatcher to do with Obama's predicament? In 1981 she faced a similar problem with imprisoned Irish republican terrorists, many of them tried and convicted of acts of vicious terrorism and mass murder. Looking for an issue with which to embarrass the British government, the killers went on a hunger strike over whether they should be termed "political" prisoners or common criminals.

Using the intransigence that was her stock-in-trade, Thatcher refused to compromise. After six grueling months, the fasting was called off. By then, 10 IRA terrorists had starved to death. Thatcher appeared to have won her point. It seemed the rule of law had been restored and the terrorists roundly defeated.

Obama has little to learn from Thatcher's obstinacy. There may be terrorists among those now on hunger strike at Gitmo, but about half are already deemed free to leave - if only the administration could find a country to take them. The hunger strikers are not bringing pressure to bear on Congress, which is capable, if it wished, of quickly resolving many issues involved. Instead, the president, pinned between his own base, the obstructive members of Congress and 100 men willing to commit suicide, is feeling the heat.

He must know, however, that Thatcher's example, painted at the time as another display of the Iron Lady's indomitable resolution, was politically ruinous. The Irish deaths dragged on for months, with weeping mothers making last-minute interventions to prevent their sons from killing themselves. Each death was met with violent demonstrations by thousands on the streets of Northern Ireland.

Some now suggest that, rather than bolster British rule, the Irish hunger strikers helped advance the republican cause.

The process of trying to save those who are determined to starve themselves to death is not pretty. Nor is the emaciated state of those in their final days of life. Keeping someone from death by force-feeding them is disgusting and barely ethical. The strikers know, as did the Irish terrorists, that it is by attracting publicity, however horrifying, that they may find a solution to their woes.

By trying to kill themselves in the full glare of the press, they are humanizing a problem that many in Washington had hoped would be quietly forgotten. The worse the physical condition of those refusing food, the more pressure will be put on the administration to end the misery.

When the first death is followed by a second, then a third and a fourth, you would have to be a Thatcher to defy the public's anguished reaction to such needless, pointless death.

The asymmetric warfare used by terrorist organizations like al Qaeda has brought to the fore suicide as a weapon of maximum impact. The September 11 hijackers, armed with promises about the carnal delights of the life hereafter, were prepared to kill themselves. The Irish terrorists, whose murderous attacks on civilians were cowardly, found some sense of valor in taking their own lives in a British jail. Little wonder, then, that suicide has become the weapon of choice for last-ditch terrorists. It makes soft targets indefensible and normal life difficult and instant martyrs out of those who volunteer to die.

By preventing justice from being done at Gitmo, members of Congress are undermining the American values of democracy and decency they affect to admire and that terrorists so despise. Denying prisoners a trial draws attention to the torturous techniques employed by allied forces to obtain "intelligence" during George W. Bush's "war on terror," fans the embers of resentment against us and subverts America's reputation for fairness and justice.

Obama's problem is trying to separate in the public mind the 86 wholly innocent detainees slated for release, who simply demand justice, and the handful of terrorists who would rather commit suicide than spend their lives in a maximum security prison in the United States.

By advocating on behalf of the Gitmo detainees, the president runs the risk of being painted as soft on terrorism. But by failing to address the Gitmo issue, he shows the full extent of his impotence. Elected twice on a clear program of reform, he is being held hostage by a Congress that thinks a majority in the House and a third of senators is enough to ignore the public will and bring government to a standstill.

The Gitmo prisoners are the latest victims caught in the cross fire of a broken system of government. One thing is certain: Thatcher would not have put up with it for a second.

(Nicholas Wapshott is a Reuters columnist but his opinions are his own.)

(Nicholas Wapshott is the former New York bureau chief of The Times of London. Previously, he was editor of the Saturday Times of London, and founding editor of The Times Magazine. He is a regular broadcaster on MSNBC, PBS, and FOX News. He is the author of "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage" (2007). His "Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics" was published by W.W.Norton in October.)

(Nicholas Wapshott)

Experts aren't sure what's behind the increase. Could it be that children are growing up in households so clean that it leaves them more sensitive to things that can trigger allergies?Or are mom and dad paying closer attention to rashes and reactions, and more likely to call it an allergy?

"We don't really have the answer," said Dr. Lara Akinbami of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the senior author of the new report released Thursday.

The CDC survey suggests that about 1 in 20 U.S. children have food allergies. That's a 50 percent increase from the late 1990s. For eczema and other skin allergies, it's 1 in 8 children, an increase of 69 percent. It found no increase, however, in hay fever or other respiratory allergies.

Already familiar with the trend in food allergies are school nurses, who have grown busier with allergy-related duties, like banishing peanuts at school parties or stocking emergency allergy medicine.

Sally Schoessler started as school nurse in 1992 in New York state, and didn't encounter a child with a food allergy for a few years. But by the time she left school nursing in 2005, "there were children in the majority of classrooms" with the disorder, said Schoessler, who now works at the National Association of School Nurses in Silver Spring, Md.

Food allergies tend to be most feared; severe cases may cause anaphylactic shock or even death from eating, say, a peanut. But many food allergies are milder and something children grow out of. Skin conditions like eczema, too, can be mild and temporary.

It's been difficult getting exact numbers for children's allergies, and the new report isn't precise. It uses annual surveys of thousands of adults interviewed in person. The report compares answers from 1997-1999 to those from 2009-2011.

Parents were asked if in the previous year their child had any kind of food or digestive allergy, any eczema or skin allergy, or any kind of respiratory allergy like hay fever.

The researchers did not ask if a doctor had made the diagnosis or check medical records. So some parents may have been stating a personal opinion, and not necessarily a correct one.

"We see a lot of kids in clinic that really aren't" allergic to the foods their parents worry about, said Dr. Morton Galina, a pediatric allergist at Atlanta's Emory School of Medicine.

For example, hives are sometimes blamed on a certain food when a virus was the actual cause, he added.

But experts also said they believe there is a real and unexplained increase going on, too.

One of the more popular theories is "the hygiene hypothesis," which says that exposure to germs and parasites in early childhood somehow prevents the body from developing certain allergies.

The hypothesis argues that there is a downside to America's culture of disinfection and overuse of antibiotics. The argument has been bolstered by a range of laboratory and observational studies, including some that have found lower rates of eczema and food allergies in foreign-born children in the U.S.

There could be other explanations, though. Big cities have higher childhood allergy rates, so maybe some air pollutant is the unrecognized trigger, said Dr. Peter Lio, a Northwestern University pediatric dermatologist who specializes in eczema.

Some suspect the change has something to do with the evolution in how foods are grown and produced, like the crossbreeding of wheat or the use of antibiotics in cattle. But Lio said tests haven't supported that.

Emory's Galina said the new CDC statistics may reflect a recent "sea change" in the recommendations for when young children should first eat certain foods.

In families with a history of eczema or food allergies, parents were advised to wait for years before introducing their young children to foods tied to severe allergies, like peanuts, milks and eggs. But professional associations changed that advice a few years ago after research suggested that allergies were more likely in those kids when the foods were delayed.

The old advice "was exactly the wrong thing to do," and could have contributed to some of the increased cases, Galina said.

The CDC report also found:

Food and respiratory allergies are more common in higher-income families than the poor,

Eczema and skin allergies are most common among the poor.

More black children have the skin problems, 17 percent, compared to 12 percent of white children and about 10 percent of Hispanic children.

The mother of a 13-year-old girl, who is black, runs an eczema support group in suburban Washington, D.C. Renee Dantzler says roughly half the families in her group are African-American. Eczema is an itchy skin condition, which often occurs on the arms or behind the knees. The cause isn't always clear.

Her daughter, Jasmine, started getting rashes at 6 months and got much worse when she was 4.

"Her whole body would flare. If she ate something, you would kind of hold your breath," Dantzler said. "And she's allergic to every grass and tree God made."

Her daughter took to wearing long sleeves and pants, even in hot weather, so people wouldn't see her skin scarred and whitened in spots from scratching. She began to improve about four years ago with steroid creams and other treatments and has gradually become less self-conscious about her skin, Dantzler said.

She's now on a school track team, which means wearing shorts.

"She's the only one on the team with long socks," her mom said.

___

Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

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But amid the debates over morality and choice, there stood yesterday, one small victory. A federal judge ordered that , otherwise known as emergency contraception, must be made available over-the-counter, to all ages, without a prescription, or any other restrictions, starting within the next 30 days.

The FDA still has the option of appealing that ruling, though whether or not they will is up for debate.

Yes, the world of "Defiance" features familiar sci-fi touchstones, but it's taken an ambitious approach to how you can experience them: Through both a weekly TV series and an online-only video game.

Five years in the making, the joint project is the most high-profile and big-budget attempt at ongoing "transmedia" entertainment, promising characters and storylines that crisscross between the Syfy network show and Trion Worlds game.

Set in 2046 on a "terraformed" Earth where humans live alongside seven alien species, the series premiering Monday displays a space Western vibe with bar brawls, interspecies politics and love, plus actors familiar to genre fans like Julie Benz and Jaime Murray. The already-released game, a multiplayer third-person shooter, has plenty of guns to upgrade, quests for supplies, and boss battles in which players cooperate to bring down giant monsters.

Though they can be experienced separately, somebody who both plays the game and watches the show will gain an extra layer of insight to each, promises actor Grant Bowler, who appears in both. Bowler said he was impressed and a bit wary of that idea when he signed on to play lead Joshua "Jeb" Nolan, who becomes "lawkeeper" of the city of St. Louis, renamed Defiance by survivors.

"I thought 'Gee, this thing is either going to change the business model of how we make television, and add a new one, or we're going to go screaming down in flames,'" he said. "But either is -- funnily enough -- fine with me."

It's a strategy fraught with challenges. Time and again, games based on successful series or movies have flopped, as have movies or series based on hit games.

"When you take the synthesis of the game and the show together, you're at a whole new level of excitement, you're at a whole new level of difficulty," Bowler said in an interview. "You also increase your chances of blowing it exponentially. Because it's not like one plus one. It's more you're cubing the level of difficulty. Which is why nobody has ever attempted to do it in as integrated a way as we've done it before."

Bowler began his work on the project by doing motion-capture performance for the game-makers. They asked how his character would act before he'd had a chance to consult with a show-runner or writer, "which is odd for an actor. You're used to having a director ... Here it was the lunatics were running the asylum."

Since then, each company created new positions in order to pass information along to the other and bring their production schedules into harmony.

There still were "a lot of occasions" in which ideas put forth by one company were shot down by the other for technical reasons, Bowler said. And at least at first, there's no "interactive" storytelling in which players' choices or actions cause substantive show changes from week to week: Choose Your Own Adventure TV.

"The nature of incorporating ... two very, very different delivery systems is incredibly problematic," Bowler said. "How you would do it in a more immediate, spontaneous way, I don't know. I think maybe our experience, what we're attempting to do, will move us closer to being able to see that idea."

___

Online:

http://www.defiance.com

____

Follow Ryan Pearson at http://www.twitter.com/ryanwrd

The decision confirmed to Reuters by Italy's tax agency on Tuesday relates to payments the agency says should have been made when the designers sold their D&G and Dolce & Gabbana brands to their own Luxembourg-based holding company GADO in 2004.

The authorities ruled that the designers engineered the transaction to avoid paying taxes in Italy, where corporate tax rates are among the world's highest.

Dolce and Gabbana, known for their Sicily-inspired style, were not available for comment on Tuesday, though they have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

"GADO operated as an 'ad hoc' safe, an operation to carry out illicit international fiscal planning aimed at saving taxes," the Tax Commission said in its February ruling, which was filed on March 20 and first surfaced in the Italian media on Saturday.

The designers can ask to have the fine suspended until they exhaust the appeal process.

"The fact is that I didn't do anything!" Gabbana said on Twitter on Saturday.

Fans of the designers voiced their support on Twitter, some encouraging them to leave Italy, others urging them to fight to clear their names.

Dolce and Gabbana are also facing a separate criminal trial in Milan relating to the same case. Neither have yet appeared in court and the trial is expected to continue for months.

Italian authorities have intensified efforts to collect taxes in recent years, targeting groups such as jeweler Bulgari to check whether they have complied with fiscal rules.

Previous tax cases involving celebrities in Italy have led to out-of-court settlements.

In 2000 the late opera singer Luciano Pavarotti paid more than $12 million in back taxes, while former MotoGP world champion Valentino Rossi agreed to pay $51 million to Italy's tax agency in 2008 after a lengthy investigation.

Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona recently denied that he owes Italian authorities 38 million euros in unpaid taxes.

(Reporting by Antonella Ciancio; Editing by David Goodman)