AP PHOTOS: Simple surgery heals blind Indonesians
Label: HealthPADANG SIDEMPUAN, Indonesia (AP) — They came from the remotest parts of Indonesia, taking crowded overnight ferries and riding for hours in cars or buses — all in the hope that a simple, and free, surgical procedure would restore their eyesight.
Many patients were elderly and needed help to reach two hospitals in Sumatra where mass eye camps were held earlier this month by Nepalese surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit. During eight days, more than 1,400 cataracts were removed.
The patients camped out, sleeping side-by-side on military cots, eating donated food while fire trucks supplied water for showers and toilets. Many who had given up hope of seeing again left smiling after their bandages were removed.
"I've been blind for three years, and it's really bad," said Arlita Tobing, 65, whose sight was restored after the surgery. "I worked on someone's farm, but I couldn't work anymore."
Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, making it a target country for Ruit who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps while training doctors to perform the simple, stitch-free procedure he pioneered. He often visits hard-to-reach remote areas where health care is scarce and patients are poor. He believes that by teaching doctors how to perform his method of cataract removal, the rate of blindness can be reduced worldwide.
Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally, affecting about 20 million people who mostly live in poor countries, according to the World Health Organization.
"We get only one life, and that life is very short. I am blessed by God to have this opportunity," said Ruit, who runs the Tilganga Eye Center in Katmandu, Nepal. "The most important of that is training, taking the idea to other people."
During the recent camps, Ruit trained six doctors from Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.
Here, in images, are scenes from the mobile eye camps:
Wall Street Week Ahead: Political wrangling to pinch market's nerves
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Volatility is the name of this game.
With the S&P 500 above 1,400 following five days of gains, traders will be hard pressed not to cash in on the advance at the first sign of trouble during negotiations over tax hikes and spending cuts that resume next week in Washington.
President Barack Obama and U.S. congressional leaders are expected to discuss ways to reduce the budget deficit and avoid the "fiscal cliff" of automatic tax increases and spending cuts in 2013 that could tip the economy into recession.
As politicians make their case, markets could react with wild swings.
The CBOE Volatility Index <.vix>, known as the VIX, Wall Street's favorite barometer of market anxiety that usually moves in an inverse relationship with the S&P 500, is in a long-term decline with its 200-day moving average at its lowest in five years. The VIX could spike if dealings in Washington begin to stall.
"If the fiscal cliff happens, a lot of major assets will be down on a short-term basis because of the fear factor and the chaos factor," said Yu-Dee Chang, chief trader and sole principal of ACE Investments in Virginia.
"So whatever you are in, you're going to lose some money unless you go long the VIX and short the market. The 'upside risk' there is some kind of grand bargain, and then the market goes crazy."
He set the chances of the economy going over the cliff at only about 5 percent.
Many in the market agree there will be some sort of agreement that will fuel a rally, but the road there will be full of political landmines as Democrats and Republicans dig in on positions defended during the recent election.
Liberals want tax increases on the wealthiest Americans while protecting progressive advances in healthcare, while conservatives make a case for deep cuts in programs for the poor and a widening of the tax base to raise revenues without lifting tax rates.
"Both parties will raise the stakes and the pressure on the opposing side, so the market is going to feel much more concerned," said Tim Leach, chief investment officer of U.S. Bank Wealth Management in San Francisco.
"The administration feels really confident at this point, or a little more than the Republican side of Congress may feel," he said. "But it's still a balanced-power Congress so neither side can feel that they can act with impunity."
THE MIDDLE EAST AND EUROPE
Tension in the Middle East and unresolved talks in Europe over aid for Greece could add to the uncertainty and volatility on Wall Street could surge, analysts say.
An Egypt-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into force late on Wednesday after a week of conflict, but it was broken with the shooting of a Palestinian man by Israeli soldiers, according to Palestine's foreign minister.
Buoyed by accolades from around the world for mediating the truce, Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi assumed sweeping powers, angering his opponents and prompting violent clashes in central Cairo and other cities on Friday.
"Those kinds of potential large-scale conflicts can certainly overwhelm some of the fundamental data here at home," said U.S. Bank's Leach.
"We are trying to keep in mind the idea that there are a lot of factors that are probably going to contribute to higher volatility."
On a brighter note for markets, Greece's finance minister said the International Monetary Fund has relaxed its debt-cutting target for Greece and a gap of only $13 billion remains to be filled for a vital aid installment to be paid.
Still, a deal has not been struck, and Greece is increasingly frustrated at its lenders, still squabbling over a deal to unlock fresh aid even though Athens has pushed through unpopular austerity cuts.
HOUSING DATA COULD CONFIRM RECOVERY
Next week is heavy on economic data, especially on the housing front. Some of the numbers have been affected by Superstorm Sandy, which hit the U.S. East Coast more than three weeks ago, killing more than 100 people in the United States alone and leaving billions of dollars in damages.
The housing data, though, could continue to confirm a rebound in the sector that is seen as a necessary step to unlock spending and lower the stubbornly high unemployment rate.
Tuesday's S&P/Case-Shiller home price index for September is expected to show the eighth straight month of increases, extending the longest continuous string of gains since prices were boosted by a homebuyer tax credit in 2009 and 2010.
New home sales for October, due on Wednesday, and October pending home sales data, due on Thursday, are also expected to show a stronger housing market.
Other data highlights next week include durable goods orders for October and consumer confidence for November on Tuesday and the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index on Friday.
At Friday's close, the S&P 500 wrapped up its second-best week of the year with a 3.6 percent gain. Encouraging economic data next week could confirm that regardless of the ups and downs that the fiscal cliff could bring, the market's fundamentals are solid.
Jeff Morris, head of U.S. equities at Standard Life Investments in Boston, said that "it's kind of noise here" in terms of whether the market has spent "a few days up or down. It has made some solid gains over the course of the year as the housing recovery has come into view, and that's what's underpinning the market at these levels.
"I would caution against reading too much into the next few days."
(Wall St Week Ahead runs every Friday. Questions or comments on this column can be emailed to: rodrigo.campos(at)thomsonreuters.com)
(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Jan Paschal)
Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power
Label: World
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
Egyptians in central Cairo ran from tear gas during clashes with the police on Friday. Protesters took to the streets in several cities. More Photos »
CAIRO — Protests erupted across Egypt on Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided nation while raising a specter, the president’s critics charged, of a return to autocracy.
In an echo of the uprising 22 months ago, thousands of protesters chanted for the downfall of Mr. Morsi’s government in Cairo, while others ransacked the offices of the president’s former party in Suez, Alexandria and other cities.
Mr. Morsi spoke to his supporters in front of the presidential palace here, imploring the public to trust his intentions as he cast himself as a protector of the revolution and a fledgling democracy.
In a speech that was by turns defensive and conciliatory, he ultimately gave no ground to the critics who now were describing him as a pharaoh, in another echo of the insult once reserved for the deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.
“God’s will and elections made me the captain of this ship,” Mr. Morsi said.
The battles that raged on Friday — over power, legitimacy and the mantle of the revolution — posed a sharp challenge not only to Mr. Morsi but also to his opponents, members of secular, leftist and liberal groups whose crippling divisions have stifled their agenda and left them unable to confront the more popular Islamist movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The crisis over his power grab came just days after the Islamist leader won international praise for his pragmatism, including from the United States, for brokering a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel.
On Friday, the State Department expressed muted concern over Mr. Morsi’s decision. “One of the aspirations of the revolution was to ensure that power would not be overly concentrated in the hands of any one person or institution,” said the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
She said, “The current constitutional vacuum in Egypt can only be resolved by the adoption of a constitution that includes checks and balances, and respects fundamental freedoms, individual rights and the rule of law consistent with Egypt’s international commitments.”
But the White House was notably silent after it had earlier this week extolled the emerging relationship between President Obama and Mr. Morsi and credited a series of telephone calls between the two men with helping to mediate the cease-fire in Gaza.
For Mr. Morsi, who seemed to be saying to the nation that it needed to surrender the last checks on his power in order to save democracy from Mubarak-era judges, the challenge was to convince Egyptians that the ends justified his means.
But even as he tried, thousands of protesters marched to condemn his decision. Clashes broke out between the president’s supporters and his critics, and near Tahrir Square, the riot police fired tear gas and bird shot as protesters hurled stones and set fires.
Since Thursday, when Mr. Morsi issued the decree, the president and his supporters have argued that he acted precisely to gain the power to address the complaints of his critics, including the families of protesters killed during the uprising and its aftermath.
By placing his decisions above judicial review, the decree enabled him to replace a public prosecutor who had failed to win convictions against senior officers implicated in the killings of protesters.
The president and his supporters also argued that the decree insulated the Constituent Assembly, which is drafting the constitution, from meddling by Mubarak-era judges.
Since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, courts have dissolved Parliament, kept a Mubarak loyalist as top prosecutor and disbanded the first Assembly.
But by ending legal appeals, the decree also removed a safety valve for critics who say the Islamist majority is dominating the drafting of the constitution.
Secret message found with carrier pigeon may never be deciphered
Label: Technology
British man finds carrier pigeon skeleton in his fireplace with unbreakable secret code (Reuters)
Before military forces had secure cell phones and satellite communications, they used carrier pigeons. The highly trained birds delivered sensitive information from one location to another during World War II. Often, the birds found the intended recipient. But not always.
A dead pigeon was recently discovered inside a chimney in Surrey, England. There for roughly 70 years, the bird had a curious canister attached to its leg. Inside was a coded message that has stumped the experts.
The code features a series of 27 groups of five letters. According to Reuters, nobody from Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has been able to decipher it. The message was sent by a Sgt. W. Scott to someone or something identified as “Xo2.”
A spokesperson remarked, “Although it is disappointing that we cannot yet read the message brought back by a brave carrier pigeon, it is a tribute to the skills of the wartime code-makers that, despite working under severe pressure, they devised a code that was indecipherable both then and now.”
The bird was discovered by a homeowner doing renovations earlier this month. In an interview with Reuters, David Martin remarked that bits of birds kept falling from the chimney. Eventually, Margin saw the red canister and speculated that it might contain a secret message. And it seems as if the message will always be secret.
Carrier pigeons played a vital role in wars due to their incredible homing skills. All told, U.K. forces used about 250,000 of the birds during World War II.
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Larry Hagman Dies
Label: Lifestyle
TV Watch
TV News
Larry Hagman has died.
The actor, who famously played J.R. Ewing on the hit primetime soap Dallas, was 81.
"When he passed, he was surrounded by loved ones," his family said in a statement released to the Dallas Morning News on Friday. "It was a peaceful passing, just as he had wished for. The family requests privacy at this time."
"This is so sad. Larry was really someone who was loved by everyone," his agent Joel Dean tells PEOPLE. "Me especially. He was the most loving, wonderful, generous man. And he was a true trouper."
In late 2011, Hagman announced that he was battling cancer but he had also signed on to star in the TNT reboot of Dallas, which recently started filming its second season.
"Larry was back in his beloved Dallas, re-enacting the iconic role he loved most," his family said in the statement.
In addition to portraying J.R. – a lovable, scheming, villainous oilman, whose shooting death was a topic of international water-cooler discussion – Hagman starred alongside Barbara Eden as Major Anthony Nelson in the iconic '60s hit sitcom I Dream of Jeannie.
According to the Morning News report, Hagman's Dallas costars Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy were by his side on Friday at Medical City Dallas Hospital when he died.
AP PHOTOS: Simple surgery heals blind Indonesians
Label: HealthPADANG SIDEMPUAN, Indonesia (AP) — They came from the remotest parts of Indonesia, taking crowded overnight ferries and riding for hours in cars or buses — all in the hope that a simple, and free, surgical procedure would restore their eyesight.
Many patients were elderly and needed help to reach two hospitals in Sumatra where mass eye camps were held earlier this month by Nepalese surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit. During eight days, more than 1,400 cataracts were removed.
The patients camped out, sleeping side-by-side on military cots, eating donated food while fire trucks supplied water for showers and toilets. Many who had given up hope of seeing again left smiling after their bandages were removed.
"I've been blind for three years, and it's really bad," said Arlita Tobing, 65, whose sight was restored after the surgery. "I worked on someone's farm, but I couldn't work anymore."
Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, making it a target country for Ruit who travels throughout the developing world holding free mass eye camps while training doctors to perform the simple, stitch-free procedure he pioneered. He often visits hard-to-reach remote areas where health care is scarce and patients are poor. He believes that by teaching doctors how to perform his method of cataract removal, the rate of blindness can be reduced worldwide.
Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally, affecting about 20 million people who mostly live in poor countries, according to the World Health Organization.
"We get only one life, and that life is very short. I am blessed by God to have this opportunity," said Ruit, who runs the Tilganga Eye Center in Katmandu, Nepal. "The most important of that is training, taking the idea to other people."
During the recent camps, Ruit trained six doctors from Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.
Here, in images, are scenes from the mobile eye camps:
Shoppers welcome early start to "Black Friday"
Label: BusinessNEW YORK/BLOOMINGTON, Minnesota (Reuters) - Retailers declared their experiment with earlier store openings to kick off the holiday shopping season a success on Friday, with those new hours expected to be a Thanksgiving night staple for more retailers next year.
Stores such as Target Corp opened hours before midnight on Thursday to try to capture a bigger piece of the retail pie. The move seemed to bring out a different type of shopper than the usual one who grabs the "Black Friday" deals, analysts said.
That meant by Friday morning, some shoppers, like Christian Alcantara, 18, at a J.C. Penney Co Inc store in Queens, New York, had already made a lot of their purchases. J.C. Penney stuck to a more traditional 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) Friday opening.
"They should open earlier. I've been everywhere else and I've already shopped," he said.
Shoppers like Alcantara are likely to force holdouts like J.C. Penney to move their post-Thanksgiving sales into Thursday night next year, said Liz Ebert, retail lead at consulting firm KPMG LLP.
"There will be pressure on them. There'll be an expansion of it next year," Ebert said.
Hard data on "Black Friday" store traffic will not come in until this weekend. But analysts said retailers who opened early brought in a non-traditional Black Friday shopper, with more families coming in together and buying more than just the "doorbuster" sale items.
"I've never seen parents bring so many kids on Black Friday," Toys R Us Chief Executive Jerry Storch said.
The National Retail Federation expects sales during November and December to rise 4.1 percent this year, below last year's 5.6 percent increase. That made store operators' strategy important as they battled each other, rather than seeing a growing pie in a season when U.S. retailers can make a third of their annual sales and 40 to 50 percent of their profits.
"Retailers want them to buy now, they want to get that share of wallet early," said Michael Appel, a director at consulting firm AlixPartners. He noticed that the Galleria Mall in White Plains, New York, was busy from midnight to 3 a.m., but that traffic, while still brisk, was less heavy by midmorning.
Shoppers used smartphones and tablets and a lot of research as they hit stores, a mobile phenomenon that started last year and seemed to be more prevalent this year.
Thom Blischok, chief retail strategist and a senior executive adviser with Booz & Company's Retail practice, was waiting on line with one woman in Phoenix, who was shopping for a refrigerator. Using her mobile device, she found the appliance online for the same price and left the store without. She intended to buy it online instead.
"There's a fundamental transformation of shopping," he said.
Mobile devices account for 45 percent walmart.com traffic and online traffic coming from Walmart's mobile app was three times bigger than last year, Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com, said.
Overall, online sales were up 20 percent versus the same period last year, through 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Friday, IBM said.
The National Retail Federation said 147 million people would shop Friday through Sunday, when deals are at their most eye-catching - down from 152 million the same weekend last year.
The NRF estimate did not account for Thursday shoppers and anecdotal evidence suggested retailers opening earlier may have cut into traffic on "Black Friday", the traditional start of the holiday season that denotes the point when retailers in the past would turn a profit for the year.
"People seemed to be shopping quite a bit, although in talking to mall management, it seemed that traffic was not as busy as last year," Deloitte retail analyst Ramesh Swamy said.
Retailers were also using technology better, allowing sales staff to match prices customers found online and having them use tablets as mobile "checkout stands" so buyers did not have to wait in line, a service consumers were quickly coming to expect.
"I even heard customers complaining about a retailer that didn't have mobile checkout," he said.
SAVING UP FOR CHRISTMAS SPREE
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, two-thirds of shoppers were planning to spend the same amount of money as last year or were unsure about plans, while 21 percent intended to spend less, and 11 percent planned to spend more.
"I definitely have more money this year," said Amy Balser, 26, at the head of the line outside the Best Buy store in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. "I definitely don't think (the economy) has bounced back anywhere near as much as it needs to, but I see some improvement," she said.
For others, Christmas is the focal point of their annual shopping.
"We cut back spending on birthdays and anniversaries so we'd have more for Christmas. We've adapted," said Cheri Albus, 58, of Papillion, Nebraska, after shopping at J.C. Penney at Westroads Mall in Omaha.
Retail stocks rose in holiday-shortened trading on Friday, in line with gains across the market. Among the leaders, Wal-Mart ended up 1.9 percent and Macy's Inc rose 1.8 percent.
STARTING EARLY
Across the country, store lines were long - in the hundreds or more in many places - with the move toward earlier opening hours appearing to help. By sunrise on Friday, it was commonplace, even at large stores in the major cities, to find many more staffers than shoppers.
While the shift to earlier openings was criticized by store employees and traditionalists because it pulled people away from families on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, many shoppers welcomed the chance to shop before midnight or in the early morning hours.
Some workers used the day to send a message.
OUR Walmart - a coalition of current and former Wal-Mart staff seeking better wages, benefits and working conditions - targeted Black Friday for action across the country after staging protests outside stores for months.
Nine protesters were arrested on misdemeanor charges after blocking a street outside a Walmart near Los Angeles, police said. Three of those arrested were Walmart workers, OUR Walmart said.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc's U.S. discount stores, which have been open on Thanksgiving since 1988, offered some Black Friday deals at 8 p.m. on Thursday and special deals on certain electronics, such as Apple Inc iPads, at 10 p.m.
At the Macy's store in Herald Square in Manhattan, the line at the Estee Lauder counter was four deep shortly after its midnight opening. The cosmetics department's "morning specials" included free high-definition headphones with any fragrance purchase of $75 or more, and a set of six eye shadows for $10.
But for some people, cheap wasn't cheap enough - like the Macy's shopper who bought Calvin Klein shoes at 50 percent off but was still not satisfied.
"I was hoping for deeper discounts," said Melissa Glascow, 35, of Brooklyn, New York.
That could actually be an intentional strategy to help retailers' profits.
"It appears that manufacturers and retailers are making concerted efforts to drive margins, which may take some of the sales sizzle out of a traditionally big selling day/period, but should be positive to gross margins," Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter said in a note to clients.
Lines at Best Buy stores were similar to last year but the traffic to its website was "significantly" higher, Shawn Score, head of the company's U.S. retail business, told Reuters.
(Additional reporting by Martinne Geller and Jochelle Mendonca in New York, Jessica Wohl and Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Chicago, Brad Dorfman in Milwaukee, Paul Ingram in Tucson, Arizona, Jason McLure in Littleton, New Hampshire, and Barbara Liston in Orlando, Florida; Writing by Brad Dorfman and Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Nick Macfie, David Holmes, Jeffrey Benkoe, Dale Hudson and Leslie Gevirtz)
Military Analysis: For Israel, Gaza Conflict Is Test for an Iran Confrontation
Label: World
Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An Israeli missile is launched from a battery. Officials said their antimissile system shot down 88 percent of all assigned targets.
WASHINGTON — The conflict that ended, for now, in a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel seemed like the latest episode in a periodic showdown. But there was a second, strategic agenda unfolding, according to American and Israeli officials: The exchange was something of a practice run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, featuring improved rockets that can reach Jerusalem and new antimissile systems to counter them.
It is Iran, of course, that most preoccupies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. While disagreeing on tactics, both have made it clear that time is short, probably measured in months, to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Michael B. Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a military historian, likened the insertion of Iranian missiles into Gaza to the Cuban missile crisis.
“In the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was not confronting Cuba, but rather the Soviet Union,” Mr. Oren said Wednesday, as the cease-fire was declared. “In Operation Pillar of Defense,” the name the Israel Defense Force gave the Gaza operation, “Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran.”
It is an imprecise analogy. What the Soviet Union was slipping into Cuba 50 years ago was a nuclear arsenal. In Gaza, the rockets and parts that came from Iran were conventional, and, as the Israelis learned, still have significant accuracy problems. But from one point of view, Israel was using the Gaza battle to learn the capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the group that has the closest ties to Iran — as well as to disrupt those links.
Indeed, the first strike in the eight-day conflict between Hamas and Israel arguably took place nearly a month before the fighting began — in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as another mysterious explosion in the shadow war with Iran.
A factory said to be producing light arms blew up in spectacular fashion on Oct. 22, and within two days the Sudanese charged that it had been hit by four Israeli warplanes that easily penetrated the country’s airspace. Israelis will not talk about it. But Israeli and American officials maintain that Sudan has long been a prime transit point for smuggling Iranian Fajr rockets, the kind that Hamas launched against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over recent days.
The missile defense campaign that ensued over Israeli territory is being described as the most intense yet in real combat anywhere — and as having the potential to change warfare in the same way that novel applications of air power in the Spanish Civil War shaped combat in the skies ever since.
Of course, a conflict with Iran, if a last-ditch effort to restart negotiations fails, would look different than what has just occurred. Just weeks before the outbreak in Gaza, the United States and European and Persian Gulf Arab allies were practicing at sea, working on clearing mines that might be dropped in shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.
But in the Israeli and American contingency planning, Israel would face three tiers of threat in a conflict with Iran: the short-range missiles that have been lobbed in this campaign, medium-range rockets fielded by Hezbollah in Lebanon and long-range missiles from Iran.
The last of those three could include the Shahab-3, the missile Israeli and American intelligence believe could someday be fitted with a nuclear weapon if Iran ever succeeded in developing one and — the harder task — shrinking it to fit a warhead.
A United States Army air defense officer said that the American and Israeli militaries were “absolutely learning a lot” from this campaign that may contribute to a more effective “integration of all those tiered systems into a layered approach.”
The goal, and the challenge, is to link short-, medium- and long-range missile defense radar systems and interceptors against the different types of threats that may emerge in the next conflict.
Even so, a historic battle of missile versus missile defense has played out in the skies over Israel, with Israeli officials saying their Iron Dome system shot down 350 incoming rockets — 88 percent of all targets assigned to the missile defense interceptors. Israeli officials declined to specify the number of interceptors on hand to reload their missile-defense batteries.
Before the conflict began, Hamas was estimated to have amassed an arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets. Israeli officials say their pre-emptive strikes on Hamas rocket depots severely reduced the arsenal of missiles, both those provided by Iran and some built in Gaza on a Syrian design.
Jake Owen Welcomes a Daughter
Label: Lifestyle
Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog
11/22/2012 at 08:30 PM ET
Courtesy Jake Owen
It’s a Thanksgiving baby!
Jake Owen and his wife Lacey welcomed their first child, daughter Olive Pearl Owen, on Thursday, Nov. 22 in Nashville, Tenn., his rep confirms to PEOPLE.
Pearl, as she will be called after Owen’s late godmother, weighed in at 6 lbs., 3 oz. and is 19½ inches long.
“Lacey and I are so excited to start our own family,” Owen, 31, tells PEOPLE. “We are looking forward to teaching Pearl everything we learned from our parents and also learning from her.”
Sharing a photo of his newborn daughter on Twitter, the musician wrote, “Today is the greatest day of my life. Turkey baby!!! Happy Thanksgiving.”
It’s been a whirlwind year for Owen and his wife, 22. After getting engaged on stage in April, the couple wed on the beach in May and announced the pregnancy in July.
– Sarah Michaud with reporting by Julie Dam
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