New laws at a glance: Eyedrops, brakes, Facebook

New laws at a glance: Eyedrops, brakes, Facebook

As 2013 begins, many states are enacting new laws dealing with gay rights, child safety, abortion, immigration and other perennial concerns. Some other topics states are dealing with in new laws:

ANIMAL WELFARE

Pennsylvania will prohibit use of carbon monoxide chambers to destroy animals at shelters and will make it easier for shelters to get drugs for a more humane method. Activists say animals are often old, young, sick or hurt and not good candidates for gas chamber euthanasia. Some provisions are about to take effect, while others will be in place later in 2013.

AUTISM

Alaska becomes the 31st state to require insurance coverage for autism, with a law mandating coverage for the diagnosis, testing and treatment of autism spectrum disorders for children and young adults. Illinois, which previously approved autism insurance coverage, now also will require insurance companies to cover medical services related to autism.

BRAKE PADS

Washington state is requiring manufacturers of brake pads to phase out the use of copper and other heavy metals as a way to prevent the metal from polluting waters and harming salmon. When brakes wear down, they release copper shavings onto roads that eventually wash into rivers. The first phase of the law takes effect Jan. 1, when manufacturers of friction brakes will be required to report the concentrations of heavy metals in their products.

EYEDROPS

New Mexico will allow more frequent refills of prescription eye drops, such as those used by glaucoma patients. Under the law, insurance companies could not deny coverage for a refill requested by a patient within a certain amount of time — for instance, within 23 days for someone with a prescription for a 30 day supply of the eye drops. Supporters of the measure say some patients find it difficult to control how many drops they put onto their eye, causing individuals to prematurely run out of medication before an insurer will pay for a refill.

PARTY BUSES

California will start to hold party bus operators to the same standards as limousine drivers, making them legally responsible for drinking by underage passengers. The law is named for Brett Studebaker, a 19-year-old from San Mateo who died in 2010 after drinking on a party bus and crashing his own vehicle while driving home later.

ONLINE PRIVACY

California and Illinois are both making it illegal for employers to demand access to employees' social media accounts. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed the law in August at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where several students lamented that online snooping by bosses has caused some to lose out on jobs and forced others to temporarily deactivate their profiles. In September, California Gov. Jerry Brown said the legislation will protect residents from "unwarranted invasions."

UNEMPLOYMENT

To raise money for its unemployment insurance fund, Georgia will start charging employers for the unemployment insurance tax on the first $9,500 in taxable wages earned by workers, an increase over the previous $8,500. The new law stretches forward the suspension of another unemployment insurance tax, though it allows the labor commissioner to impose it to help repay money borrowed from the federal government or if fund balances dip below $1 billion.

Meaning on the Brain: How Your Mind Organizes Reality

Meaning on the Brain: How Your Mind Organizes Reality
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They called him "Diogenes the Cynic," because "cynic" meant "dog-like," and he had a habit of basking naked on the lawn while his fellow philosophers talked on the porch. While they debated the mysteries of the cosmos, Diogenes preferred to soak up some rays - some have called him the Jimmy Buffett of ancient Greece.

Anyway, one morning, the great philosopher Plato had a stroke of insight. He caught everyone's attention, gathered a crowd around him, and announced his deduction: "Man is defined as a hairless, featherless, two-legged animal!" Whereupon Diogenes abruptly leaped up from the lawn, dashed off to the marketplace, and burst back onto the porch carrying a plucked chicken - which he held aloft and shouted, "Behold: I give you... Man!"

I'm sure Plato was less than thrilled at this stunt, but the story reminds us that these early philosophers were still hammering out the most basic tenets of the science we now know as taxonomy: The grouping of objects from the world into abstract categories. This technique of chopping up reality wasn't invented in ancient Greece, though. In fact, as a recent study shows, it's fundamental to the way our brains work.

Chunks of reality

At the most basic level, we don't really perceive separate objects at all - we perceive our nervous systems' responses to a boundless flow of electromagnetic waves and biochemical reactions. Our brains slot certain neural response patterns into sensory pathways we call "sight," "smell" and so on - but abilities like synesthesia and echolocation show that even the boundaries between our senses can be blurry.

Still, our brains are talented at picking out certain chunks of sensory experience and associating those chunks with other stimuli. For instance, if you hear purring and feel fur rubbing against your leg, your brain knows to associate that sound and feeling with the fluffy four-legged object you see at your feet - and to group that whole multisensory chunk under the heading of "cat."

What's more, years of cat experience have taught you that it makes no sense to think of a cat as if it were a piece of furniture, or a truck, or a weather balloon. In other words, an encounter with a cat carries a particular set of meanings for you - and those meanings determine which areas of your brain will perk up in the presence of a feline.

But where's the category "cat" in the brain? And where's it situated in relation to, say, "dog" or "giraffe" ...or just "mammal?" A team of neuroscientists led by Alexander Huth at UC Berkeley's Gallant lab decided they'd answer these questions in the most thorough way possible: By capturing brain responses to every kind of object they could dig up.

Chunks in the brain

Those Gallant lab folks are no slouches - you might remember them as the lab that constructed "mind videos" of entire scenes from neural activity in the visual cortex. This time, though, the lab's ambitions were even broader.

A research team led by Alex Huth showed volunteers hours of video footage of thousands of everyday objects and scenes - from cats and birds to cars and thunderstorms - as the subjects sat in an fMRI scanner. Then the researchers matched up the volunteers' brain activity not only to each object they saw, but also to a whole tree of nested object categories: A taxonomy of the brain's taxonomy. A vision of a "continuous semantic space," where thousands of objects and actions are represented in terms of others.

Huth's team collected volunteers' reactions to more than 1,300 objects and categories, and arranged these brain responses not only into a tree of object and action categories, but into a map of response gradients across the whole surface of the brain.

And as you can see from the color gradients in that tree diagram to the right (which is also available as an interactive online app), the relationships among our brains' categories are multidimensional. Objects may be more or less "animal-like," more or less "man-made," and so on - and in fact, the researchers say they expect to find more subtle response dimensions that gauge an object's size and speed.

Association and meaning

All this talk of "dimensions of association" points back to a far more profound idea about how our brains work: We understand the meaning of an object in terms of the meanings of other objects - other chunks of reality to which our brains have assigned certain characteristics. In the brain's taxonomy, there are no discrete entries or "files" - just associations that are more strongly or more weakly correlated with other associations.

And that idea itself raises deeper quandaries: If associations define what an object or action "is," as some neuroscientists have argued, then why does the concept of meaning - semantic representation - need to enter the picture at all? Instead of being a special type of mental function, might "meaning" itself simply be another word for "association?"

The answer to that question won't be a simple one to find, at least for the foreseeable future. "I don't think it's possible to make a conclusive claim about that from fMRI data," says Jack Gallant, the lab's director; "and anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken."

A single three-dimensional pixel - an fMRI voxel - represents the activity of around one million neurons, Gallant explains; and at that resolution, it's impossible to say what exactly the neural activity is encoding. Meaning could depend on association, association might depend on semantic coding, or the relationship between the two might be more nuanced than we can conceive right now.

Whatever that relationship turns out to be, the implication remains: In our brains, meaning and association go hand-in-hand. In the brain, even our most abstract concepts depend on our own real-world experiences. That's an idea that's infuriated Plato and his followers far more than Diogenes' plucked chicken - but as Diogenes demonstrated on that long-ago morning, real-world evidence trumps speculation in the end.

?

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Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

? 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Woman sleeping on Los Angeles bus bench set on fire

Woman sleeping on Los Angeles bus bench set on fire

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A homeless woman was in critical condition in a Los Angeles hospital after a man doused her with liquid accelerant and set her on fire as she slept on a bus bench, police said on Thursday.

Officers arrested Dennis Petillo, 24, in connection with the early morning attack, and he has been booked in jail on suspicion of attempted murder, police said.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was being treated at a local hospital with burns all over her body, said Los Angeles police Lieutenant Damian Gutierrez.

Erickson Ipina, a witness to the attack, told local station ABC 7 that he often saw the homeless woman sleeping on the bus bench. Ipina said he chased after the attacker, and called for help on his cell phone.

"I called 911 and he just turned back on me and pulled out a knife, and he told me, 'Stop following me or I will cut you,'" Ipina told ABC 7.

The television station showed images of the bus bench set on fire, which had black burn marks along it.

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Tim Gaynor and Claudia Parsons)

What We Learned About Humanity in 2012

What We Learned About Humanity in 2012

The controversial extinct human lineage known as "hobbits" gained a face this year, one of many projects that shed light in 2012 on the history of modern humans and their relatives. Other discoveries include the earliest known controlled use of fire and the possibility that Neanderthals or other extinct human lineages once sailed to the Mediterranean.

Here's a look at what we learned about ourselves through our ancestors this year.

We're not alone

A trove of discoveries this year revealed a host of other extinct relatives of modern humans. For instance, researchers unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of a hitherto unknown species that lived about the same time and place as Australopithecus afarensis, a leading candidate for the ancestor of the human lineage. In addition, fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that at least two extinct human species lived alongside Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of our species. Moreover, fossils only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old hint that a previously unknown type of human called the "Red Deer Cave People" once lived in China.

Bones were not all that scientists revealed about modern humans' extinct relatives in 2012. For instance, scientists finally put a face on the hobbit, a nickname for a controversial human lineage. Anthropologist Susan Hayes at the University of Wollongong in Australia reconstructed the appearance of the 3-foot (1-meter) tall, 30-year-old female member of the extinct humans officially known as Homo floresiensis, which were first discovered on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. [Image Gallery: A Real Life 'Hobbit']

DNA extracted from a recently discovered extinct human lineage known as the Denisovans — close relatives of Neanderthals — also revealed new details about this group, which once interbred with modern humans. The Denisovan genome that was sequenced belonged to a little girl with dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes, and displayed about 100,000 recent changes in our genome that occurred after the split from the Denisovans. A number of these changes influenced genes linked with brain function and nervous system development, leading to speculation that we may think differently from the Denisovans.

Genetic analysis also suggested the only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals were apparently sub-Saharan Africans. These findings are just one tidbit regarding the closest extinct relatives of modern humans that was revealed this year. Scientists also found that the unusually powerful right arms of Neanderthals might not have been due to a spear-hunting life as was previously suggested, but rather one often spent scraping animal skins for clothes and shelters. Archaeologists also suggested that Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean Islands millennia before researchers think modern humans arrived at the isles.

Humans' tool use

Ancient artifacts revealed this year also have shown how tool use has helped humanity reshape the world — and perhaps inadvertently reshape humanity as well.

For instance, ash and charred bone, the earliest known evidence of controlled use of fire, reveal that human ancestors may have used fire 1 million years ago, 300,000 years earlier than thought, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life. Controlled fires and cooked meat may have influenced human brain evolution, allowing our ancestors to evolve to have larger, more calorie-hungry brains and bodies.

Discoveries involving ancient weapons also revealed that humans learned to make and use these tools far earlier than scientists thought. For instance, what may be ancient stone arrowheads or lethal tools for hurling spearssuggest humans innovated relatively advanced weapons about 70,000 years ago, while a University of Toronto-led team of anthropologists found evidence that humans in South Africa used stone-tipped weapons for hunting 500,000 years ago, which is 200,000 years earlier than previously suggested.

Even the seemingly innocuous discovery this year of the first direct signs of cheesemaking from 7,500-year-old potsherds from Poland might help reveal how animal milk dramatically shaped the genetics of Europe. Most of the world, including the ancestors of modern Europeans, is lactose intolerant, unable to digest the milk sugar lactose as adults. However, while cheese is a dairy product, it is relatively low in lactose. Transforming milk into a product such as cheese that is friendlier to lactose-intolerant people might have helped promote the development of dairying among the first farmers of Europe. The presence of dairying over many generations may then, in turn, have set the stage for the evolution of lactase tolerance in Europe. As such, while cheese might just seem to be a topping on pizza or a companion to wine, it might have changed Western digestive capabilities.

Other clues regarding the diet of ancient relatives also emerged. For example, 2-million-year-old fossils suggest humans' immediate ancestor may have lived off a woodland diet of leaves, fruits and bark, instead of a menu based on the open savanna, as other extinct relatives of humanity did. In addition, fragments of a 1.5-million-year-old skull from a child recently found in Tanzania suggest that later members of the human lineage weren't just occasional carnivores but regular meat eaters, findings that help build the case that meat-eating helped the human lineage evolve large brains.

Humans still evolving

When it comes to the future of humanity, research this year added to accumulating evidence that natural forces of evolution continue to shape humanity. Church records of nearly 6,000 Finns born between 1760 and 1849 showed that despite humans radically altering their environments with behavior such as farming, human patterns of survival and reproduction were comparable with those of other species.

One researcher at Stanford University has even suggested that humans are getting dumber over time, having lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in densely populated settlements several millennia ago. However, other scientists dispute this notion, pointing at geniuses such as Stephen Hawking, and suggest that rather than losing our intelligence, people have diversified, resulting in a number of different types of smarts today.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook?& Google+.

Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Syria envoy calls for political change to end conflict

Syria envoy calls for political change to end conflict
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Article: Russia says time running out for Syria peace deal

8 hrs ago

Article: Russia's Lavrov says world must seek peaceful solution for Syria

9 hrs ago

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The international envoy seeking a negotiated solution to Syria's 21-month-old conflict said on Thursday political change was needed to end the violence which has killed 44,000 people.

Speaking in Damascus at the end of a five-day trip during which he met President Bashar al-Assad, Lakhdar Brahimi called for a transitional government to rule until elections and said only substantial change would meet demands of ordinary Syrians.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added to the envoy's call for a peaceful solution when he told a senior Syrian diplomat that only a "broad inter-Syria dialogue and political process" could end the crisis.

Brahimi's push for a transitional government suggested he was trying to build on an international agreement in Geneva six months ago which said a provisional body - which might include members of Assad's government as well as the opposition - should lead the country into a new election.

But the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels have seized the military initiative since the Geneva meeting in June and the political opposition has ruled out any transitional government in which Assad, from Syria's Alawite minority, plays a role.

Rebel fighters resumed attacks on Thursday against the military base of Wadi Deif, which lies next to Syria's main north-south highway linking Aleppo with Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition group which monitors the violence, said rebels also clashed with Assad's forces inside the Minakh air base in Aleppo province after several days of fighting outside its perimeter, although the army still controlled the base itself.

Around the capital, Assad has used artillery and air strikes for weeks to try to dislodge rebels from suburbs which ring the east and south of the city.

"Certainly it was clear in Geneva, and it's even clearer now that the change which is needed is not cosmetic or superficial," Brahimi told a news conference in Damascus before leaving Syria.

"I believe the Syrian people need, want and aspire to genuine change and everyone knows what this means," he said.

"A government must be created ... with all the powers of the state," Brahimi added. He said it should hold power for a transitional period until elections - either for a new president or a new parliament - are held.

"This transitional process must not lead to the ... collapse of state institutions. All Syrians, and those who support them, must cooperate to preserve those institutions and strengthen them," he said.

Radwan Ziadeh of the opposition Syrian National Council dismissed Brahimi's proposal as "unrealistic and fanciful" and said a transitional government could not be built on the same "security and intelligence structure as the existing regime".

TOO SOON FOR COMPLETE PLAN

Russia's Lavrov met Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Makdad in Moscow on Thursday. Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying the chances of forging a solution based on the Geneva agreement were decreasing, but it was necessary to keep seeking a peaceful solution because the alternative is "bloody chaos".

"The longer it continues, the broader its scale and the worse (it will be) for everyone," it quoted Lavrov as saying.

Syrian and Lebanese sources said Makdad had been sent to Moscow to discuss details of a peace plan proposed by Brahimi.

Brahimi is due in Moscow on Saturday and said he also expected to have a third joint meeting with U.S. and Russian officials soon following two rounds of talks earlier this month. But he denied the existence of a U.S.-Russian plan to end the crisis and said it was too soon to present a "complete plan".

"What is preferred is that we don't present such a plan until we feel that all sides have agreed to it. That way, implementing it is easy. If that doesn't happen, the other solution could be to go to the (United Nations) Security Council to issue a binding resolution for everyone," he said.

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman also denied any joint initiative between Moscow and Washington.

World powers remain divided over what has become an increasingly sectarian struggle, with Sunni Muslim states such as Turkey and the Gulf Arab countries supporting the rebels while Shi'ite Iran and Hezbollah have backed Assad, whose Alawite community has its roots in Shi'ite Islam.

Syria's struggle "has taken a vicious form of sectarian confrontation", Brahimi said. "Syrian officials foremost, as well as the international community, must not let Syria slide down this very dangerous path which threatens the future of Syria."

Deep differences between Western powers opposed to Assad - led by the United States - and Russia and China which have supported his government, have left the U.N. Security Council paralyzed and largely sidelined throughout the conflict.

The political stalemate has helped transform a once-peaceful uprising into a civil war in which rebels have grown in military strength and taken control of swathes of territory in the north, leaving Assad increasingly reliant on air power to curb them.

Activists in the central province of Hama, where rebels launched an offensive last week to extend their control southwards towards the capital, reported on Thursday that rebels shot down a MiG fighter near the town of Morek.

The Syrian Observatory said air force fighters launched three raids on rebel forces around Wadi Deif. The British-based group also reported fierce clashes in the area.

The violence has been accompanied by an escalation in apparently sectarian attacks between the Sunni Muslim majority and minorities such as Assad's Alawite sect, which has largely supported the president.

Activists in Hama uploaded a video of what appeared to be Assad soldiers and shabbiha militia members stabbing the body of a dead man and setting it on fire. The man looked as if he had been beaten to death.

"This is a terrorist, a brother of a whore, one of those trying to destroy the country," one of the men shouted. Two men in camouflage uniforms and army helmets stood by watching. Samer al-Hamawi, an activist from Hama, said rebels in his area found the video on the phone of a soldier they captured this week.

The video emerged a day after Islamist rebel units released footage showing the bodies of dozens of Assad's fighters along a highway near an Alawite town in Hama.

(Additional reporting by Marwan Makdesi in Damascus and Steve Gutterman in Moscow; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Nicaragua volcano spews ash cloud, residents evacuated

Nicaragua volcano spews ash cloud, residents evacuated

MANAGUA (Reuters) - Nicaragua's tallest volcano has belched an ash cloud hundreds of meters (feet) into the sky in the latest bout of sporadic activity, prompting the evacuation of nearby residents, the government said on Wednesday.

The 5,725-foot (1,745-meter) San Cristobal volcano, which sits around 85 miles north of the capital Managua in the country's northwest, has been active in recent years, and went through a similar episode in September.

The latest activity began late on Tuesday.

Government spokeswoman Rosario Murillo called on residents who live within a 1.9-mile (3-km) radius of the volcano to leave the area. Around 300 families live near the volcano.

"We have some families who have self-evacuated. ... We ask (the people) to go to a safe place, it's just for a few days during this emergency," she said, adding it was a precautionary measure.

A billowing grayish cloud could be seen drifting sideways from the volcano's peak.

The volcano also stirred in mid-2008, when it expelled gas and rumbled with a series of small eruptions.

(Reporting by Mexico City bureau; editing by Todd Eastham)

U.S. retailers scramble after lackluster holiday sales

U.S. retailers scramble after lackluster holiday sales Related Content

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(Reuters) - The 2012 holiday season may have been the worst for retailers since the 2008 financial crisis, with sales growth far below expectations, forcing many to offer massive post-Christmas discounts in hopes of shedding excess inventory.

While chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Gap Inc are thought to have done well, analysts expect much less from the likes of book seller Barnes & Noble Inc and department store chain J. C. Penney Co Inc.

Shares of retailers dropped sharply on Wednesday, helping drag broader indexes lower, as investors realized they were likely to be disappointed when companies start to report results in a few weeks' time.

"The broad brush was Christmas wasn't all that merry for retailers, and you have to ask what those margins look like if the top line didn't meet their expectations," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group.

Growth was always expected to slow this season, though an improving employment picture and rising home values had helped mitigate the worst fears. But then Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast in late October, mild weather blunted sales of winter clothing and rising concern about the "fiscal cliff" became more of a reality, dragging down already-pessimistic forecasts.

The latest sign of trouble came from MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse, which reported holiday-related sales rose 0.7 percent from October 28 through December 24, compared with a 2 percent increase last year.

The preliminary estimate from SpendingPulse was in line with other estimates showing weak growth during the holiday season, when retailers can book about 30 percent of annual sales - and in many cases, half of their profit.

"It has been a very uneven industry performance, probably at least for the last year, and that certainly continued into the holiday season," said Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers, in an interview with Reuters Insider.

The latest holiday season could end up the weakest since 2008, during the last recession, when sales actually declined. The National Retail Federation had previously predicted 4.1 percent sales growth this year, versus a 5.6 percent increase a year earlier.

Markets reacted sharply to the gloomy outlook.

The S&P retail index closed down 1.7 percent, and 14 of the top 20 decliners in the broader S&P 500 were retailers or consumer brands.

INVENTORY CRUSH

To be sure, the actual percentage change in holiday sales can differ substantially, depending on which group is calculating the figure. SpendingPulse and the National Retail Federation, for example, look at different categories, which can cause some variation in their forecasts.

Regardless of how bad the figure is, one concern for retailers is that soft sales will mean an excess of inventory that will force some to slash prices.

The day after Christmas, retailers were using deep discounts to lure shoppers. Among other brands, Barnes & Noble offered 50 percent discounts in stores via email promotions on Wednesday, while Ann Inc had half-off at its Loft stores, and Macy's Inc's Bloomingdale's promoted discounts of up to 75 percent in some cases.

At a Target store in New York City's Harlem neighborhood, most shoppers seemed to be spending more on groceries, toys and small gifts than on gadgets or clothes.

Despite discounts of 50 percent, there were few takers for Jason Wu glass ornaments, Oscar de la Renta canvas totes and other designer goods launched under the mass merchant's tie-up with upscale chain Neiman Marcus.

Even in a good year, retailers would have offered discounts to lure customers, but some suggest a weak year has now forced their hands.

"Retailers are no longer chasing sales, they are chasing inventory management. That means the discounts that they would have liked to be at 50-60 (percent) off have climbed to 75 to even 80 (percent) off," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at The NPD Group.

This week's cold, snowy weather on the heels of a warm start to December could spur people to use the gift cards they received or their remaining discretionary income to buy everything from jackets to snow blowers, said Evan Gold, senior vice president of client services at Planalytics, which tracks weather for businesses including retailers.

In December, he said, "people are out spending anyway, weather can trigger what you purchase, not if you purchase, but what you purchase."

SANDY AND CLIFF

A variety of factors were thought to be at fault for the weak season, starting with Superstorm Sandy, which depressed sales in the U.S. Northeast in late October and early November.

Sales recovered in the second part of November, with early hours and promotions helping drive traffic during the "Black Friday" weekend after Thanksgiving, analysts said.

But there was a deep lull in early December as a winter storm in parts of the United States may have limited sales, said Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis at MasterCard SpendingPulse.

On top of that, there were fears that taxes will rise in the new year if Washington cannot negotiate a solution to the end-of-year "fiscal cliff" dilemma.

A recent Ipsos poll for Reuters found that only 17 percent of shoppers were spending less due to cliff fears, though analysts said the damage was still done.

"The government usually does not have a role in holidays but this year they did. They got right in the midst of it, the timing couldn't have been any worse," NPD's Cohen said.

BRIGHT SPOTS

One bright spot has been online sales, which continue to grow at a faster pace.

On Christmas Day, online sales jumped 22.4 percent, outpacing the 16.4 percent increase in 2011, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks more than 1 million e-commerce transactions a day from 500 U.S. retailers.

Whether online or off, some of the winning retailers were expected to be Wal-Mart, which attracted shoppers with early deals on the night of Thanksgiving and kept its focus on value, and apparel chains like the Gap, whose bright sweaters were successful, according to analysts.

Toys sold well, and hot items that were harder to find later in the season included certain Mattel Inc Barbie dolls and LeapFrog Enterprises Inc's LeapPad2 tablet computer, according to B. Riley Caris analyst Linda Bolton Weiser.

For retailers that have struggled, analysts said all hope was not lost. Many have fiscal quarters that end in January, so they still have time to benefit from a post-Christmas rebound. Because Christmas fell on a Tuesday, some said they could even see a boost this week from people who have extra time off.

"There's still a little bit more time to go until the holiday season is officially over," Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom said.

Wal-Mart shares ended down 0.8 percent at $67.99 on Wednesday, while Macy's shares were down 1.1 percent at $37.11, Barnes & Noble shares were down 3.5 percent at $14.49, Amazon.com Inc shares ended 3.9 percent lower at $248.63, and Ann Inc shares lost 5.1 percent to close at $32.06.

(Reporting by Brad Dorfman, Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Jessica Wohl in Chicago; additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Dhanya Skariachan in New York; writing by Ben Berkowitz; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Matthew Lewis)