Newtown residents ready to step out of media glare

Reporters from around the world converged on Newtown following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Eric …

NEWTOWN, Conn.--It's time to go home.

That's what many residents here have been saying about the media since Monday, when funerals began for more than two dozen adults and children killed in last week's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

"There are people who should be able to get to these funerals," Janice Butler of Newtown told Yahoo News on Wednesday, standing a few hundred yards from the entrance to the school where Friday's shootings took place. "But some of them can't because you all are here."

At the Newtown General Store, when a member of the media thanked a store employee for a breakfast sandwich, she replied, smiling, "Thank you for leaving."

In the first days after the tragedy, most reporters here were respectful of the town's 27,000 residents, sharing in their shock and grief while trying to cover it. And most residents and shop owners seemed to understand that it was a major news story of deep interest to many readers and viewers.

Figs Restaurant welcomed TV host Geraldo Rivera for two meals late Saturday afternoon. By Tuesday, though, the restaurant had stationed one of the cooks in the parking lot, barring media from parking there.

[Related: Harsh reality of reporting tragedies]

Also Saturday, a Newtown teacher offered use of his bathroom and WiFi to several reporters. And the back dining room of the Iron Bridge bar in Sandy Hook became an ABC News bureau on Sunday, where network staff watched President Barack Obama's speech at the interfaith vigil at Newtown High School.

But on Monday, the Newtown Bee posted a note on its Facebook page, imploring its colleagues and journalists in the media to leave families of the dead alone. "PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THE VICTIMS," the note said.

"We acknowledge it is your right to try and make contact," the paper added on Facebook, "But we beg you to do what is right and let them grieve and ready their funeral plans in peace."

Several local residents visited the page, adding their voices to the chorus of criticism.

"We want our town, our lives back," Dennis Brinkmann wrote. "You did your job, now leave us be."

"Journalists should be reporters not voyeurs," wrote another.

A sign at the entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 18, 2012. (Dylan Stableford/Yah …

"We did turn to you when it was unfolding, because we needed to know what was going on, but now leave," Dorene Doran wrote. "We need to give these families time to themselves. Don't worry they will seek you out if they want to talk to you."

"As I drove down Main Street today I was upset at the number of cameras just aimed at the door to the funeral home," Gail Lovorn wrote, suggesting the community erect a screen to block the view. "The last thing these families need is to see their family and friends in these tender moments broadcast for the world to see."

On Tuesday night, a man walking up Church Hill Road carried a sign that read: "Dear Media, GTFO!"

There are signs that the media swarm is beginning to ease.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who arrived Saturday, left Newtown after his broadcast on Tuesday night. Most of the satellite trucks that lined the center of Sandy Hook, steps from a makeshift memorial and less than a half mile from Sandy Hook Elementary, were gone on Wednesday. The parking lot at Treadwell Park, where nearly close to 100 satellite trucks were parked on Saturday, sat empty, too.

The Starbucks next to Saint Rose of Lima Church on Church Hill Road served as a makeshift international media center since the funerals began. On Wednesday, it was filled with residents heading to services for 7-year-old victim Daniel Barden--no media in sight.

But not everyone in Newtown wants to see the media gone.

"Please, please don't leave," a Sandy Hook resident named Dennis told Connecticut Public Radio's Colin McEnroe on Wednesday. "Because I know that people on the outside are feeling the same thing that the people on the inside are feeling. And it's ... it's just helplessness. So the more information they can get--as long as it's correct information--it might help them a little bit. It might, you know?"

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Dictator father looms over SKorea's new president

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — When Park Geun-hye last lived in the presidential Blue House more than 30 years ago, she was a young, stand-in first lady, serving after the assassination of her mother and before the killing of her dictator father.

After defeating Moon Jae-in in elections Wednesday, she will return to her childhood home as the first female president of a country where women continue to face widespread sexism, huge income gaps with men doing the same work and few opportunities to rise to the top in business, politics and other fields.

Her presidency will shatter the bias that women are less capable of thriving in male-oriented South Korean politics, said Lim Woo-youn, a researcher at the Chungcheongnam-do Women's Policy Development Institute in central South Korea.

Her biggest challenge after she takes office in February, however, may be the still-fresh divisions that linger from the 18 years that her father, President Park Chung-hee, ruled South Korea.

Many, including the older conservative voters who form her political base, see Park Chung-hee as a hero, the man whose strong hand guided the country from the devastation of the Korean War to an economic force that lifted millions from crushing poverty. His critics remember the brutal way he dealt with opponents to his unchecked rule, the claims of torture, execution and vote rigging.

"There's still a sentiment that rejects Park Geun-hye" because of her father's brutality, said Lee Cheol-hee, a political analyst and head of Dumon Political Strategy Institute, a think tank. Park must appear sincere when she tries to "heal the past" as president, Lee said. She needs to convince people that she's sympathetic to the pain caused by her father's rule.

Park laid out a fairly moderate platform in her campaign to replace unpopular President Lee Myung-bak, a member of her conservative party.

She has vowed to reach out to North Korea and ease the current government's hard line, fight widespread government corruption, strengthen social welfare, help small companies, close growing gaps between rich and poor, ease heavy household debt and curb the power of big corporations so powerful they threaten to eclipse national laws.

But despite her history-making win and her efforts to forge her own path, many see in her only the embodiment of her father, who grabbed power in a 1961 coup and ruled with ruthless efficiency until his spy chief shot him dead at a 1979 drinking party.

Critics have long seized on what they see as Park's queen-like aura in an attempt to link her with her father. Park herself points to the embodiment of female imperial rule, Elizabeth I of England, as her role model.

"We have known Park Geun-hye as an imperial candidate, and no one can argue with her decisions," said Yoon Yeo-joon, a key member of the camp of her liberal opponent, Moon Jae-in.

Much of Park's public persona has been built on her close association with her father's rule. She has created an image as a selfless daughter of Korea, never married, who served first her father as his first lady and then the people as a female lawmaker in South Korea's tough political world.

Her website describes a young Park losing sleep in the Blue House and praying for rain during a devastating drought. Even her choice of college major — electronic engineering, which the website describes as "rare for women" — is put down to self-sacrifice, an effort to help the country increase exports by concentrating on developing electronic industries.

Her "dreams of living a normal life" were crushed on Aug. 15, 1974, she says, when a Korean resident of Japan, claiming orders from North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, shot and killed her mother in a botched assassination attempt against her father. At 22, she rushed home from Paris, where she was studying, and for the next five years stood by her father's side as acting first lady.

Violence came again in 1979 when her father was murdered. Park was said to have thought first of Korea: "Is the frontline well?" were her first words when learning of the shooting, according to her website, recognition that instability in Seoul could mean trouble on the Koreas' tense border.

She entered parliament in 1998 and was a major figure in conservative politics in 2006 when a convicted criminal slashed her face as she was shaking hands with voters, opening up a gash that needed 60 stitches during surgery.

Park lost narrowly in 2007 presidential primaries to Lee.

Her father was a staunch anti-communist, but Park has shown a willingness to work with North Korea. She met privately with former leader Kim Jong Il during a visit to Pyongyang in 2002 and has vowed to ease Lee's hard-line policy to Pyongyang.

That might be difficult, however, with a belligerent Pyongyang fresh off the surprising success of a rocket launch that the South, the United States and others say was a cover for testing long-range missile technology. North Korea's state media has repeatedly said that her presidential ambitions are an attempt to bring back her father's dictatorship.

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Associated Press writers Sam Kim and Youkyung Lee contributed to this report. Follow Klug on Twitter: (at)APklug.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donating $500 million in stock to Silicon Valley charity

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday he is donating nearly $ 500 million in stock to a Silicon Valley charity with the aim of funding health and education issues.

Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, valued at $ 498.8 million based on their Tuesday closing price. The beneficiary is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a non-profit that works with donors to allocate their gifts.

This is Zuckerberg’s largest donation to date. He pledged $ 100 million in Facebook stock to Newark, New Jersey, public schools in 2010, before his company went public earlier this year. Later in 2010, he joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett to get the country’s richest people to donate most of their wealth. His wife, Priscilla Chan, joined with him.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Zuckerberg, 28, said he’s “proud of the work” done by the foundation that his Newark donation launched, called Startup: Education, which has helped open charter schools, high schools and others.

With the latest contribution, he added, “we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next.” He did not give further details on what plans there may be for funds.

“Mark’s generous gift will change lives and inspire others in Silicon Valley and around the globe to give back and make the world a better place,” said Emmett D. Carson, CEO of the foundation.

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Cassadee Pope wins Season 3 of 'The Voice'

NEW YORK (AP) — Cassadee Pope, who was country singer Blake Shelton's protege on the third season of NBC's "The Voice," has won the show's competition.

The 23-year-old singer is stepping out into a solo career after performing with a band called Hey Monday. Her victory over Scottish native Terry McDermott and long-bearded Nicholas David was announced at the end of a two-hour show Tuesday.

"The Voice" has grown into a hit for NBC and was the key factor in the network's surprising success this fall.

The show's status was affirmed by the stream of hitmakers who performed on the finale. They included Rihanna, Bruno Mars, the Killers, Smokey Robinson and Peter Frampton.

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Experts: Kids are resilient in coping with trauma

WASHINGTON (AP) — They might not want to talk about the gunshots or the screams. But their toys might start getting into imaginary shootouts.

Last week's school shooting in Connecticut raises the question: What will be the psychological fallout for the children who survived?

For people of any age, regaining a sense of security after surviving violence can take a long time. They're at risk for lingering anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.

But after the grief and fear fades, psychiatrists say most of Newtown's young survivors probably will cope without long-term emotional problems.

"Kids do tend to be highly resilient," said Dr. Matthew Biel, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.

And one way that younger children try to make sense of trauma is through play. Youngsters may pull out action figures or stuffed animals and re-enact what they witnessed, perhaps multiple times.

"That's the way they gain mastery over a situation that's overwhelming," Biel explained, saying it becomes a concern only if the child is clearly distressed while playing.

Nor is it unusual for children to chase each other playing cops-and-robbers, but now parents might see some also pretending they're dead, added Dr. Melissa Brymer of the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

Among the challenges will be spotting which children are struggling enough that they may need professional help.

Newtown's tragedy is particularly heart-wrenching because of what such young children grappled with — like the six first-graders who apparently had to run past their teacher's body to escape to safety.

There's little scientific research specifically on PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, in children exposed to a burst of violence, and even less to tell if a younger child will have a harder time healing than an older one.

Overall, scientists say studies of natural disasters and wars suggest most children eventually recover from traumatic experiences while a smaller proportion develop long-term disorders such as PTSD. Brymer says in her studies of school shootings, that fraction can range from 10 percent to a quarter of survivors, depending on what they actually experienced. A broader 2007 study found 13 percent of U.S. children exposed to different types of trauma reported some symptoms of PTSD, although less than 1 percent had enough for an official diagnosis.

Violence isn't all that rare in childhood. In many parts of the world — and in inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S., too — children witness it repeatedly. They don't become inured to it, Biel said, and more exposure means a greater chance of lasting psychological harm.

In Newtown, most at risk for longer-term problems are those who saw someone killed, said Dr. Carol North of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who has researched survivors of mass shootings.

Friday's shootings were mostly in two classrooms of Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has about 450 students through fourth-grade.

But those who weren't as close to the danger may be at extra risk, too, if this wasn't their first trauma or they already had problems such as anxiety disorders that increase their vulnerability, she said.

Right after a traumatic event, it's normal to have nightmares or trouble sleeping, to stick close to loved ones, and to be nervous or moody, Biel said.

To help, parents will have to follow their child's lead. Grilling a child about a traumatic experience isn't good, he stressed. Some children will ask a lot of questions, seeking reassurance, he said. Others will be quiet, thinking about the experience and maybe drawing or writing about it, or acting it out at playtime. Younger children may regress, becoming clingy or having tantrums.

Before second grade, their brains also are at a developmental stage some refer to as magical thinking, when it's difficult to distinguish reality and fantasy. Parents may have to help them understand that a friend who died isn't in pain or lonely but also isn't coming back, Brymer said.

When problem behaviors or signs of distress continue for several weeks, Brymer says it's time for an evaluation by a counselor or pediatrician.

Besides a supportive family, what helps? North advises getting children back into routines, together with their friends, and easing them back into a school setting. Studies of survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks found "the power of the support of the people who went through it with you is huge," she said.

Children as young as first-graders can benefit from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Georgetown's Biel said. They can calm themselves with breathing techniques. They also can learn to identify and label their feelings — anger, frustration, worry — and how to balance, say, a worried thought with a brave one.

Finally, avoid watching TV coverage of the shooting, as children may think it's happening all over again, Biel added. He found that children who watched the 9/11 clips of planes hitting the World Trade Center thought they were seeing dozens of separate attacks.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

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Biden to head gun policy push after Newtown shootings

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden will lead an effort to craft policies to reduce gun violence in a plan President Barack Obama was to lay out Wednesday amid calls for action after the massacre of 26 people including 20 children in a Connecticut elementary school.

Obama was not expected to unveil policy decisions but outline how his administration will proceed, White House aides said. The move could signal that he will make the issue a second-term priority and add momentum to a national debate over tighter gun control laws.

Obama has turned to Biden in the past to take a role in high-profile initiatives, including efforts on a deficit-reduction compromise with congressional Republicans in 2011. The vice president will join Obama for the announcement in the White House briefing room at 11:45 a.m. EST (1645 GMT).

Biden's mission - to coordinate a strategy among government agencies in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings - comes days after the mass murder that has generated a national outcry for greater efforts to stem gun violence.

Friday's massacre was the fourth shooting rampage to claim multiple lives in the United States this year.

The president demanded changes to the way the United States deals with gun violence at a memorial service in Newtown on Sunday. Obama said he would "use whatever power this office" holds to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Gun control has been a low priority for most U.S. politicians due to the widespread popularity of guns in America and the clout of the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun industry lobby.

The constitutional right to bear arms is seen by many Americans as set in stone, and even after mass shootings, politicians have tiptoed around specific steps to limit access to lethal weapons.

Even so, the horror of the Newtown killings, in which a 20-year-old man killed 6- and 7-year-old children and their teachers in their classrooms before taking his own life, has provoked an apparent change of heart in some politicians.

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a longtime gun rights advocate, said he is now open to more regulation of military-style rifles like the one used in Newtown. Obama spoke with him on Tuesday, the White House said.

The White House spelled out some gun control measures on Tuesday that Obama would support.

Spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would back U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein's effort to reinstate an assault weapons ban. The president also would favor any law to close a loophole related to gun-show sales, he said.

Efforts to limit high-capacity gun ammunition clips would be another option, Carney said.

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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Gunmen kill 5 female polio workers in Pakistan

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — Gunmen shot dead five women working on U.N.-backed polio vaccination efforts in two different Pakistani cities on Tuesday, officials said, a major setback for a campaign that international health officials consider vital to contain the crippling disease but which Taliban insurgents say is a cover for espionage.

Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio is endemic. Militants however accuse health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and claim the vaccine makes children sterile. Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the U.S. stops drone strikes in the country.

Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake vaccination program to help the CIA track down al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest.

The Taliban have targeted previous anti-polio campaigns, but this has been a particularly deadly week. The government is in the middle of a three-day vaccination drive targeting high risk areas of the country as part of an effort to immunize millions of children under the age of five.

The women who were killed Tuesday — three of whom were teenagers — were all shot in the head at close range. Four of them were gunned down in the southern port city of Karachi, and the fifth in a village outside the northwest city of Peshawar. Two men who were working alongside the women were also critically wounded in Karachi.

The attacks in Karachi were well-coordinated and occurred within 15 minutes in three different areas of the city that are far apart, said police spokesman Imran Shoukat. In each case, the gunmen used 9 millimeter pistols. Two of the women were teenagers, aged 18 and 19, and the other two were in their 40s, he said.

Two of the women were killed while they were in a house giving children polio drops, said Shoukat. The other two were traveling between houses when they were attacked, he said.

On Monday another person working on the anti-polio campaign, a male volunteer, was gunned down in Karachi. Taliban militants also killed three soldiers in an ambush of an army convoy escorting a vaccination team in the northwest.

Officials in Karachi responded to the attacks by suspending the vaccination campaign in the city, said Sagheer Ahmed, the health minister for surrounding Sindh province. The campaign started on Monday and was supposed to run through Wednesday, he said.

Immunization was suspended in Karachi in July as well after a local volunteer was shot to death and two U.N. staff were wounded.

Janbaz Afridi, a senior health official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the fifth woman was killed, said the shootings would not stop the local government from continuing its vaccination program in the province and the neighboring tribal region, the main sanctuary for Taliban militants in the country.

"These incidents are depressing and may cause difficulties in the anti-polio drive, but people should not lose heart," said Afridi. "The government is very serious, and we are determined to eliminate polio despite all odds and difficult conditions."

The shootings in Karachi all took place in areas mainly populated by ethnic Pashtuns, said Ahmed, the health minister. The Taliban are a Pashtun-dominated movement, and many militants are reported to be hiding in these communities in the city.

Rukhsana Bibi, whose 18-year-old daughter Madiha was killed in Karachi, seemed to blame the organizers of the vaccination campaign for her death.

"Why are you doing this by coming here?" said Bibi, standing next to her daughter's body at the hospital. "This is a prohibited area. Taliban are here."

Madiha was the only source of income for the family, which includes seven other children, said Bibi, whose husband is too sick to work.

The woman who was killed in the northwest was also a teenager and was shot by gunmen on a motorcycle as she was working with her sister in the village of Shinkai Hindkian, said Afridi, the local health official. She was rushed to the hospital after the attack but eventually died from her injuries, said Afridi.

Another official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said the woman was shot by her cousin because of a family dispute. He said she was working on the anti-polio campaign at the time, but he claimed the two things were unrelated.

Polio usually infects children living in unsanitary conditions, attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. A total of 56 polio cases were reported in Pakistan during 2012, said Ahmed, the Sindh health minister.

Despite the obstacles, the government has teamed up with U.N. agencies to give oral polio drops to 34 million children under the age of five. Clerics and tribal elders have been recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers

Also Tuesday, two men on a motorcycle hurled hand grenades at the main gate of an army recruiting center in the northwestern town of Risalpur, wounding 10 people, including civilians and security personnel, said senior police official Ghulam Mohammed.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest in a string of assaults in recent days that illustrate the continued challenge Pakistan faces from militants despite multiple military operations against the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters.

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Abbot reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writer Jamal Khan contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Iran leader gets the clicks with Facebook rumor

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Facebook page purportedly created by Iran‘s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attracted nearly 10,000 followers on Tuesday although the site’s content and style raise serious questions about its authenticity.

Iranian authorities had no immediate comment on the site, which apparently went online last week but only recently gained prominence among social media watchers. Despite the possibility that it is a hoax, the page has generated at least 170 comments — laudatory and derogatory, and nearly all in Farsi — that highlight the deep political divisions in Iran and possibly opposition fervor from expatriate Iranians.

One post compared Khamenei to a celebrated ruler of ancient Persia, Cyrus the Great, who significantly expanded the Persian empire 2,500 years ago.

Another wrote: “Mr. Khamenei, how are you visiting this page? With proxy?”

It was a reference to Iran’s blocking of Facebook and many other Western social media sites, and the efforts to bypass the restrictions using proxy server links from outside Iran.

The U.S. State Department said Monday it will keep tabs on the page, but had no comment on whether it was genuine or not. Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland joked that Washington is curious how many “likes” the Khamenei page receives.

But much about the page — including an informal photo of Khamenei riding in a car — suggested it was not sanctioned by Iran’s top leader. It is also highly unlikely that Khamenei would endorse a banned outlet such as Facebook.

The Net is not unknown territory for Iranian leaders, however. Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others have official websites. Also, some senior Iranian clerics issue religious opinions by email.

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NBC correspondent escapes Syria kidnapping

BEIRUT (AP) — More than a dozen heavily armed pro-regime gunmen kidnapped NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and several colleagues for five days inside Syria, threatening them with mock executions and keeping them bound and blindfolded until they escaped unharmed during a firefight between their captors and rebels, Engel said Tuesday.

Speaking to NBC's "Today" show one day after the escape, an unshaven Engel said the kidnappers executed at least one of his rebel escorts on the spot at the time he was captured. He also said he believes the kidnappers were a Shiite militia group loyal to the Syrian government, which is fighting a deadly civil war against rebels.

"They kept us blindfolded, bound," said 39-year-old Engel, who speaks and reads Arabic. "We weren't physically beaten or tortured. A lot of psychological torture, threats of being killed. They made us choose which one of us would be shot first and when we refused, there were mock shootings," he added.

"They were talking openly about their loyalty to the government," Engel said. He said the captors were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group.

"They captured us in order to carry out this exchange," he said.

Both Iran and Hezbollah are close allies of the embattled Syrian regime, which has become a global pariah since it unleashed its forces in March 2011 to crush mostly peaceful protests against the regime. The bloody crackdown on protests led many in Syria to take up arms against the government, and the conflict has morphed into a civil war.

Engel said he was told the kidnappers wanted to exchange him and his crew for four Iranian and two Lebanese prisoners being held by the rebels.

Around 11 p.m. Monday, Engel said he and the others were being moved to another location in northern Idlib province.

"And as we were moving along the road, the kidnappers came across a rebel checkpoint, something they hadn't expected. We were in the back of what you would think of as a minivan," he said. "The kidnappers saw this checkpoint and started a gunfight with it. Two of the kidnappers were killed. We climbed out of the vehicle and the rebels took us. We spent the night with them."

The team crossed back into neighboring Turkey earlier Tuesday.

NBC did not identify the others who were kidnapped along with Engel. The network said there was no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing.

The Syrian government has barred most foreign media coverage of the civil war in Syria, which has killed more than 40,000 people since the uprising began in March 2011. Those journalists whom the regime has allowed in are tightly controlled in their movements by Information Ministry minders. Many foreign journalists sneak into Syria illegally with the help of smugglers.

Several journalists have been killed covering the conflict. Among them are award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier, photographer Remi Ochlik and Britain's Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin. Also, Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died after an apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria.

Engel joined NBC in 2003 and was named chief foreign correspondent in April 2008. He previously worked as a freelance journalist for ABC News, including during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He has lived in the Middle East since he graduated from Stanford University in 1996, according to his biography from NBC.

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Experts: No link between Asperger's, violence

NEW YORK (AP) — While an official has said that the 20-year-old gunman in the Connecticut school shooting had Asperger's syndrome, experts say there is no connection between the disorder and violence.

Asperger's is a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.

"There really is no clear association between Asperger's and violent behavior," said psychologist Elizabeth Laugeson, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Little is known about Adam Lanza, identified by police as the shooter in the Friday massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. He fatally shot his mother before going to the school and killing 20 young children, six adults and himself, authorities said.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation, said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger's.

High school classmates and others have described him as bright but painfully shy, anxious and a loner. Those kinds of symptoms are consistent with Asperger's, said psychologist Eric Butter of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who treats autism, including Asperger's, but has no knowledge of Lanza's case.

Research suggests people with autism do have a higher rate of aggressive behavior — outbursts, shoving or pushing or angry shouting — than the general population, he said.

"But we are not talking about the kind of planned and intentional type of violence we have seen at Newtown," he said in an email.

"These types of tragedies have occurred at the hands of individuals with many different types of personalities and psychological profiles," he added.

Autism is a developmental disorder that can range from mild to severe. Asperger's generally is thought of as a mild form. Both autism and Asperger's can be characterized by poor social skills, repetitive behavior or interests and problems communicating. Unlike classic autism, Asperger's does not typically involve delays in mental development or speech.

Experts say those with autism and related disorders are sometimes diagnosed with other mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"I think it's far more likely that what happened may have more to do with some other kind of mental health condition like depression or anxiety rather than Asperger's," Laugeson said.

She said those with Asperger's tend to focus on rules and be very law-abiding.

"There's something more to this," she said. "We just don't know what that is yet."

After much debate, the term Asperger's is being dropped from the diagnostic manual used by the nation's psychiatrists. In changes approved earlier this month, Asperger's will be incorporated under the umbrella term "autism spectrum disorder" for all the ranges of autism.

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AP Writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.

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Online:

Asperger's information: http://1.usa.gov/3tGSp5

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