NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) - No subject is taboo for country singer LeAnn Rimes as she digs deep into her soul on her new album "Spitfire."

The 30-year-old Grammy Award winner and former child star who had a hit song at age 13, said she wrote the deepest lyrics she has ever written on the album.

Some of the songs are about her relationship with husband, actor Eddie Cibrian. Their affair, which began more than four years ago while they were both married to other people, caused a scandal that was played out in tabloid magazines.

Other songs are about dealing with difficult times.

"There is every emotion a human being could experience on this record. I'm most proud that I can evoke these emotions in everyone," Rimes told Reuters.

"After 20 years of making music, it's a completely different place to be singing and writing from," she said. "These songs are my emotional truth."

In the title track, Rimes suggests if she could "untie" her tongue she would "use it like a whip, and watch you run," and refuses to get stuck in the "muck and mire" of "a dirty little liar." she writes: "You make me want to spit fire."

In "What Have I Done," with harmonies provided by bluegrass great Alison Krauss, a woman wonders what she has done and asks for understanding from her "first love, but not her last."

"I wrote What Have I Done' about five years ago, before everything happened," Rimes said, in a reference to Cibrian, who starred in TV series "CSI: Miami."

"I wrote it about a friend and her relationship, but I think I was really writing it about myself. Another song, Borrowed,' was really the anchor for how the rest of the album unfolded."

"Borrowed" is written from the perspective of a woman who begs her lover to hold her tight because she knows he is only borrowed for the brief moments they have together.

WEATHERING HARD TIMES

Rimes said because Cibrian is also in the entertainment business he understands where she is coming from and is very supportive of her endeavors.

"It's amazing to have that support and understanding of what it is to tell a story and be an artist, and he's never said, You can't say that," she said.

The singer, who is stepmother to Cibrian's sons, Mason, 10, and Jake, 6, admits it takes effort to make it all work. The boys spend half their time with their mother, Brandi Glanville, who stars in the TV show "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills."

"It's not easy to go back and forth between two homes," she explained. "The way our relationship has unfolded has been really beautiful. We go through definite moments of ups and downs, as any blended family would, but they are very loving kids."

While performing the songs in concert, Rimes, who sought treatment for anxiety and stress last year, said she has found kindred spirits and fans who have thanked her for having the courage to write about things they have gone through themselves.

"I realized that just because I'm in the public eye and people are writing about it all the time as though I'm the only one, I'm not," Rimes said. "I'm human, like everybody else."

She has no regrets about writing such personal songs, she said.

"For the last four-and-a-half years people have written whatever they wanted to in order to sell magazines. It was completely the opposite of what I was really living. My life in the tabloids was far worse than anything I've ever lived," she explained.

Listening to the new album is "almost like being a fly on the wall for this conversation I'm having with myself," Rimes said. She expressed hope that fans will understand she is human and a woman who had a moment of confusion on so many different levels, and went on to write about it.

"On the other side of it I'm happy, still confused at times, but I am real. I hope now people can see the reality in my music and the humanity that's there, very much in the forefront on this record. I hope to always write from this place," she said.

(editing by Patricia Reaney and Gunna Dickson)

1. Eulogio Fonseca Arreola, 26, a street vendor who sells cell-phone accessories with his sister and family. "They went out to have fun. They are not criminals," sister Isabel Fonseca said.

2. Jennifer Robles Gonzalez, 23, a single mother of a 6-year-old boy. Her family said she posted a message on Facebook after 8:30 a.m. Sunday saying she was dancing at the bar less than two hours before the kidnapping allegedly took place.

3. Josue Piedra Moreno, 29, street food vendor who told his mother, Leticia Moreno, he was going out to a club with his brother, Aaron Piedra Moreno.

4. Aaron Piedra Moreno, 20, street food vendor

5. Guadalupe Karen Morales Vargas, 24

6. Alan Omar Athiencia Barranco, 26

7. Said Sanchez Garcia, 19, who helped his mom sell purses and cleaning items in a street market. He was last seen late Saturday when he came home for a sweater before going out to another nightclub and then the bar.

8. Jerzy Ortiz Ponce, 16, went to the party with his friend, Said Sanchez.

9. Gabriela Tellez Zamudio, 34,

10. Rafael Rojas, no age available, married and a merchant in Tepito.

11. Victim unidentified

"I chose my opponent for September 14th and it's Canelo Alvarez," Mayweather said Wednesday night on Twitter. "I'm giving the fans what they want. It will be at the MGM Grand."

Alvarez sent a tweet in Spanish announcing the fight.

The 36-year-old Mayweather is unbeaten in 44 fights, the last a unanimous 12-round decision over Robert Guerrero on May 4 at the MGM Grand in defense of his 147-pound title.

Alvarez is 42-0-1. The 22-year-old fighter unified the 154-pounds titles April 20 in San Antonio with a unanimous victory over Austin Trout.

The fight will be contested at 152 pounds and offers a rare bout between two unbeaten fighters in their primes.

"Floyd has said from Day 1 that he wants to give fans the best fight out there and here it is," Mayweather's co-manager, Leonard Ellerbe, told the AP. "We have the two biggest stars in the sport and they're fighting each other Sept. 14."

The bout will be the second in Mayweather's six-fight, 30-month contract with Showtime that could pay him more than $200 million.

No decision has been made regarding dates of the NFL Draft in 2015 and beyond, the NFL said in a statement on Tuesday.

Teams were told that a variety of alternatives were being explored for future drafts, including continuing at Radio City, moving to another New York location or other cities.

The change in the date of the 2014 Draft will not impact any other parts of the offseason schedule for teams, the NFL said.

(Reporting by Larry Fine in New York; Editing by Frank Pingue)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Hot off their acclaimed foreign film "Kon-Tiki," directors Joachim Rnning and Espen Sandberg are in final negotiations for the coveted job to direct "Pirates of the Caribbean 5" for Disney, TheWrap has learned.

Johnny Depp is set to reprise his beloved, Oscar-nominated role of Capt. Jack Sparrow in the sequel, which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Jeff Nathanson wrote the last draft of the script.

Rnning and Sandberg recently dropped out of Legendary's "Spectral" as it became apparent the "Pirates" job was theirs to lose. They beat out director Fredrik Bond ("The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman") for the sought-after gig.

Rnning and Sandberg are talented filmmakers who were pursued by several studios following the success of "Kon-Tiki," which was nominated for this year's Foreign Language Oscar and also set on the water. Disney is likely excited to be working with two up-and-coming filmmakers who are capable of delivering epic visuals.

On the other hand, while "Pirates of the Caribbean 5" is sure to be a guaranteed box office hit, the big-budget blockbuster seems beneath Rnning and Sandberg's potential. Do we really want our best foreign filmmakers coming to America to churn out mindless sequels? It would've been nice to see the "Kon-Tiki" duo launch their own franchise or try their hand at original material, but the lure of Disney dollars proved impossible to resist.

Rnning and Sandberg are repped by UTA.

But that's still a big improvement over its previous showing at the worlds in La Molina, Spain, two years ago when the team returned home with a just one podium finish.

Robert Joncas, Canada's high performance director, says he's satisfied with the results.

Joncas says the team will be aiming for five medals again next year at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

On the men's side, Spencer O'Brien and Mark McMorris won gold and silver, respectively, in the slopestyle event during the first weekend of competition.

For the women, Maelle Ricker won gold and Dominique Maltais took silver in the snowboard cross competition on Saturday.

Ricker, a 34-year-old from Squamish, B.C., is the only Canadian snowboarder guaranteed a spot in Sochi.

Joncas says there's room for improvement as the group gears up for the Olympics, but the building blocks are there.

"We're still very satisfied," he said.

On Sunday, the eight Canadians in the running in the parallel slalom finished off the podium.

In the women's competition, Russia's Ekaterina Zavialova won gold, beating out Patrizia Kummer of Switzerland in the final at the Stoneham Mountain Resort. Germany's Amelie Kober grabbed bronze.

In the men's, the Slovenian Rok Marguc won gold, Justin Reiter of the United States took silver and Roland Fischnaller of Italy got the bronze.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. scientists say a dramatic result last year suggesting that a cancer drug already approved by U.S. regulators could quickly clear out Alzheimer's plaques in mice was too good to be true.

The study, published last year in the journal Science, showed the skin cancer drug bexarotene cut the amount of an Alzheimer's-linked protein called beta amyloid by half in three days. It also reversed Alzheimer's symptoms, restoring a sense of smell in treated mice and allowing them to resume nest building activities.

The news sent patients clamoring for the drug, and some doctors began prescribing it, even though it had not been tested in people with Alzheimer's. But researchers at several U.S. centers reported in the same journal on Thursday that they were unable to reproduce the most dramatic aspects of the findings in their own labs.

Gary Landreth and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the scientists behind the original research, say the drug still has merit, noting that the latest studies confirmed other aspects of the research showing the drug cleared out soluble forms of beta amyloid from the brain.

Scientists say the controversy is a stark reminder of the need for studies to be replicated by other labs, and it underscores the desperation of Alzheimer's sufferers to find effective treatments for the fatal, brain-wasting disease that affects 5 million Americans and 38 million people worldwide.

'VERY DRAMATIC'

"I was a fan of the original study," said Dr. Samuel Gandy, associate director of the Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in New York, who was not involved in any of the studies.

"It was very dramatic. It cut plaque loads by three-quarters over less than a week. No one had ever seen anything like it before."

Gandy has had several patients asking for the treatment. Although U.S. doctors are free to prescribe any treatment approved by the FDA, Gandy said the drug has substantial liver toxicity and requires very careful monitoring.

"I have universally declined and advised others to decline."

There is no cure or effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease, a progressive form of dementia steadily destroys brain cells, and several large companies have failed in late-stage clinical trials, with the most recent being Baxter International's drug Gammagard earlier this month.

Sangram Sisodia, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago, said he and his colleagues were curious about the initial report in 2012.

"It was hot stuff. It was the new miracle drug for Alzheimer's. Even Doctor Oz proclaimed such," said Sisodia, referring to a popular FOX TV show hosted by Dr. Mehmet Oz.

"People were clamoring for this drug after he went on TV and was pushing it."

Sisodia said he and fellow Alzheimer's colleagues, who included Dr. Rudolph Tanzi of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Dr. David Holtzman of Washington University School of Medicine, wanted to see if the stunning results could be replicated in their own labs, a standard part of the scientific process.

Researchers failed to see any effects on Alzheimer's plaques in three strains of mice that were treated with bexarotene.

"There is absolutely no reduction in amyloid levels in the brains of mice treated with this compound," said Sisodia of his group's efforts, which were published as a technical comment in the journal Science. Teams at the University of Florida and researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium published similar findings in the same journal.

TEMPEST IN TEAPOT

Landreth, who has formed a company to study the compound, says the teams are all focusing on the dramatic changes in solid forms of beta amyloid reported in the study, which, despite the press it got, was not the study's main finding.

"We concluded that plaques didn't matter and said so explicitly. As we look at the comments we just don't get it," he said. Landreth can't fully explain why the teams were unable to confirm the findings on plaque.

Even so, he said the latest studies do confirm some of his main findings which suggest the treatment significantly reduces the amount of soluble forms of beta amyloid that float in interstitial fluid that bathes brain cells.

Some studies have suggested that this soluble form of beta amyloid is the more toxic form of the protein, and removing it could offer significant benefits to patients.

A fourth study by a team at the University of Pittsburgh appears to back up his assertion.

The team was able to verify that the drug bexarotene significantly improves cognitive deficits in mice with gene mutations linked to human Alzheimer's. And it confirmed that the compound decreased small bits of toxic beta amyloid in the fluid that surrounds brain cells. But it, too, failed to show a reduction in amyloid plaques.

"We believe these findings make a solid case for continued exploration of bexarotene as a therapeutic treatment for Alzheimer's disease," Dr. Rada Koldamova, who led the study, also published in Science, said in a statement.

Landreth says the current "scientific tempest in a teapot" does not deter his plans to study bexarotene in people.

His company, called ReXceptor Inc., plans to start early stage trials in a group of six healthy adults within the next few months. The team hopes to prove the drug works by flushing soluble bits of the toxic protein out of the brain.

"We should have an outcome by Christmas," Landreth said.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawmakers introduced fresh legislation on Thursday seeking to address the problem of sexual assault in the military and summoned the nation's top commanders to testify about the crisis, which has become an embarrassment to the armed forces.

The White House and Congress have demanded changes since seeing a damning report of a steep rise in the number of assaults on members of the military and a spate of high-profile sex-related incidents.

Most recently, a military official said on Wednesday that an Army sergeant was accused of videotaping female cadets in the showers at the Military Academy at West Point. The revelation came just hours after military leaders told a Senate panel they were making prevention of sexual harassment and sexual assault a top priority.

"This is a crime. It is a violent and vicious crime and the military needs to treat it as such," said Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican and co-chairman of the House Military Sexual Assault Prevention Caucus, a co-sponsor of the new bill.

The measure introduced by Democratic and Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives would mandate, at minimum, a dishonorable discharge for anyone found guilty of sexual assault or attempted assault. It would make it impossible for a commander to change a guilty conviction.

MILITARY CHIEFS TO TESTIFY

With several bills making their way through Congress, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced that it would hold a rare full-committee hearing on the legislation on June 4, with witnesses including General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the heads of all four service branches.

Most of the panel's hearings on legislation involve only subcommittees, not the full membership. Another exception was the consideration of legislation - now law - that allowed homosexuals to serve openly in the military.

The Pentagon reported that complaints of unwanted sexual conduct shot up by more than a third to 26,000 in 2012. The steep rise in cases comes just as the military moves ahead with plans to integrate women into front-line combat roles.

The bill introduced on Thursday is not as sweeping as one introduced last week by Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand that would take responsibility for prosecution sexual assault cases away from the chain of command, making it easier for victims to seek justice.

The latest measure is more in line with the preferences of the military chiefs. Dempsey and other commanders have warned of a crisis of confidence in the growing ranks of women soldiers, but Pentagon leaders say that Gillibrand's approach risks weakening commanders' authority.

Senate aides said next month's Armed Services hearing would play a large part in determining the scope of a final legislation, adding that the flurry of bills - there have been several others introduced in both chambers - is a strong sign that something will be done to address the issue this year.

"I don't think anyone's absolutely confident of what is going to be the most effective reform that we can implement and so that's why I see it as productive to have more than one," said Republican Senator Susan Collins.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dozens of tea party groups and other conservative organizations of the kind subjected to improper scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service operated with small budgets and rarely displayed overt partisan activities, according to an Associated Press review of public tax filings by 93 such activist groups. A few groups built million-dollar operations and political ties that could have been legitimate grounds for IRS investigation, tax law experts said.

The AP reviewed 990 tax returns for nonprofit groups that were made publicly available and posted on both the Guidestar and the Foundation Center websites, searching between 2009 and 2011 under the terms "tea party," ''patriot" and other terms frequently used by tea party groups. Several tea party groups also made their tax returns available to the AP. The returns detailed revenues and expenses for the groups, as well as other details. Donors' identifies, however, are shielded from disclosure under federal tax code provisions.

Only 21 of the 93 groups reported annual gross receipts higher than $25,000 between 2009 and 2011, according to the AP review. The $25,000 figure is a threshold for the IRS because an organization's financial strength and revenue sources are important factors in determining its tax-exempt status. Nonprofit groups reporting less than $25,000 a year are allowed to file a short-form, postcard tax return instead of a detailed filing one indication of a low-budget operation.

The median income for all the groups was just $16,700 a year. That figure includes several tea party organizations that boasted million-dollar budgets and a cluster of others with more than $100,000 in annual revenues. The well-funded activist groups were led by the Georgia-based Tea Party Patriots Inc., the nation's biggest tea party group, which started out with more than $700,000 in annual revenues in 2009 and grew to $20.2 million annually in 2012.

Facing IRS delays in tax-exempt status since late 2010, the Tea Party Patriots also set up a separate "super" political action committee last January, a sign of the group's growing campaign involvement. Overt political ties and activity are red flags for IRS scrutiny, tax law experts said, and returns from several groups hint in that direction, including voter turnout efforts and rallies. But while the tax returns of many of the groups reflected interests in fiscal responsibility and other pet conservative issues, there was little clear evidence of direct campaign ties.

Some tax law experts said that if IRS officials had considered finances and political involvement in their oversight of the wave of applications by tea party groups in recent years, the agency could have quickly determined whether low-budget groups qualified for tax-exempt status. The agency's blunder, said former top IRS official Marcus S. Owens, was seizing on every activist group that appeared to have a tea party or "patriot" background.

"The big boys who suddenly look like they won the lottery are the ones who should expect a knock on the door," said Owens, who headed the IRS' oversight of tax exempt groups in the 1990s. He added: "The agency should have applied better filters than looking for every tea party group under the rug."

The tea party tax filings showed that many of the groups reported low expenses. The median yearly expense for the 93 groups was $12,770. That figure also included high-spending groups like the Tea Party Patriots, which showed $17.6 million in expenses in 2011.

The contrast between many of the low-budget tea party groups and the few with big bank accounts was most striking in their spending.

Many tea party groups showed minor payments for basic operations travel costs, office supplies, insurance, meals and items for rallies.

The Faulkner County Tea Party of Conway, Ark., which earned $7,847 in 2010, listed $570 for senior citizen transportation and $873 for a website and communications. The First Coast Tea Party Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., noted $14 for cookbook expenses and $101 for Christmas ornaments. The Laurens County Tea Party of Laurens, S.C., which took in $2,400 in income in 2010 and is seeking tax-exempt status, listed $204 for buying T-shirts for members.

Those low-budget expenses also rarely showed evidence of direct political activity. The Faulkner County Tea Party described itself as "nonpartisan," promoting "fiscal responsibility, conservative principles and values in government, at all levels." The group paid $912 for a "meeting facility expense" and $180 in advertising in 2012. Even during the 2010 campaign, the group spent just $162 on a voter guide,

On the high end, Tea Party Patriots lavished $5.7 million in payments to three direct mail contractors and $1.8 million on fundraising and nearly $1.4 million on telemarketing in 2012. The group paid nearly $700,000 to Campaign Headquarters, an Iowa operation that advertises its voter contact phone and GOTV operations. In January, the activist group set up the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund super PAC, promising to seek unlimited contributions.

Unlike nonprofits regulated by the IRS, super PACs are monitored by the Federal Election Commission. Following the lead of multimillion-dollar campaign operations like GOP strategist Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Democratic-leaning Priorities USA, large and small tea party groups have pressed for tax-exempt status over the last four years.

Some tea party groups have applied as educational groups under the 501(c)(3) tax code, while many others have sought 501(c)(4) status as social welfare groups. Under IRS rules, (c)(4) groups can be involved in politics if it is not their primary purpose, but (c)(3) groups are banned from most direct political involvement. Under federal law, both tax-exempt nonprofits can seek unlimited donations and do not have to disclose the identities of their donors.

An inspector general's report on the IRS' handling of tea party groups noted that auditors were poorly trained in distinguishing between the nonprofit classifications. "It led to inappropriate enforcement of the tax laws," said Jay Sekulow, a lawyer representing nearly two dozen tea party groups with the IRS.

The Houston-based King Street Patriots organization has been waiting since July 2010 for a decision on its tax-exempt status for itself and an allied group, True the Vote, a leading national conservative group aimed at confronting vote fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht of Richmond, Texas, an official of both groups, complained that she and her husband are not only wrangling with the IRS but have fielded inquiries from other federal agencies.

Engelbrecht said the couple has been contacted in recent months by the FBI's domestic terrorism unit, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Her patriots group is well-financed, listing $140,000 in revenue and $130,000 in expenses in its 2010 tax filings. True the Vote listed $64,000 in income and $38,000 in expenses the same year. The 2010 filings were the only recent returns that are publicly available.

The group was at the forefront of conservative efforts to target vote fraud in the 2012 election and said it trained as many as 1 million election monitors. Engelbrecht said her group was nonpartisan, but top Democratic Party election lawyers and activists closely monitored the group's Election Day activities and accused it of close ties with Republican Party vote-suppression efforts.

Engelbrecht said she worries that tea party groups were being targeted by the government.

"I'm very concerned," she said, about a "coordinated effort by the federal government to single out private citizens."

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ovarian cancer rates in the U.S. began to decline faster in 2002 around the time many older women went off hormone replacement therapy, according to a new study.

That year, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) found that estrogen or estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy, prescribed for the symptoms of menopause, was linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, stroke and heart attack.

In a new analysis using census data, researchers found that ovarian cancer rates were falling by about one percent each year before 2002, then dropped by more than two percent per year.

The findings don't mean there's a cause-effect relationship between ovarian cancer and the hormone treatments, lead author Hannah Yang of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, told Reuters Health by email.

But the association is compelling, she said.

"Understanding exposures, such as (hormone therapy), within at-risk populations is useful for overall cancer prevention and control strategies, particularly for tumors that are difficult to treat, such as ovarian cancer," Yang said.

She and her colleagues used cancer incidence in North America data combined with census data to compare the yearly percent change in ovarian cancers from 1995 to 2002 and from 2003 to 2008. They found a significant change in the rate for women over 50, but not for younger women, according to results in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Overall, for women over 50, rates decreased by 21 percent from 1995 to 2008, from 38 cases out of 100,000 women to 30 out of 100,000.

There were more than 22,000 cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in 2012, with 15,500 deaths, Yang said.

"Therefore, a two percent annual decline equates to a significantly reduced number of new cases and deaths related to ovarian cancer," she said.

MOUNTING EVIDENCE'

"I think that there is mounting evidence that hormone replacement therapy, estrogen alone and combined with progestin, increases risks of ovarian cancer," Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told Reuters Health.

"But unless a woman has a family history of ovarian cancer, it will still be a relatively small part of the benefit risk equation," said Manson, who was not involved in the study but was a principal investigator for the WHI.

"Compared to the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, severity of symptoms, the risk of other adverse events, or quality of life benefits, it's really going to factor in a limited way as far as making the decision," she said.

The new results come on the heels of research into the risks of stopping hormone therapy while menopause symptoms are still disruptive (see Reuters Health story of May 1, 2013 here: http://reut.rs/10s8Anv).

"The paper does not provide definitive information that (hormonal therapy) accelerates or promotes the growth of ovarian cancer, but it does provide an additional reason for women to be cautious about their choice to consider taking it," Dr. D. Lawrence Wickerham, who helps run a National Institutes of Health-funded cancer research project in Pittsburgh, told Reuters Health by email.

"Women who are already taking (hormone therapy) should be diligent about obtaining their follow-up examinations and may wish to discuss with their health care provider whether or not to continue the therapy," said Wickerham, who was not involved in the study.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/10w06fv Journal of Clinical Oncology, online May 6, 2013.