‘It’s a long process going back almost a decade,’ says Bono

Angela Weiss / Getty Images file

Chaz Bono has been undergoing a female-to-male sex change since March.

Now that he’s finally in the body he always felt he belonged in, Chaz Bono says he’s enjoying something that took decades to accomplish.

“It’s a long process going back almost a decade. I got clean and sober in 2004 and I couldn’t have done this before that,” Bono, formerly known as Chastity, tells, “Entertainment Tonight” in an interview airing Thursday and Friday.

Born the daughter of Cher and Sonny Bono, Chaz, 40, has been undergoing a female-to-male sex change since March, a process that has already had significant physical changes on his body.

“It lowered my voice,” he says. “Fat redistributes, muscle growth, hair growth, sex drive increases.”

One thing that didn’t need changing: His mental and emotional concept of himself as fundamentally male.

“I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn’t much feminine about me,” he says. “I believe that gender is something between your ears, not between your legs. That is something I discovered in the early ’90s. It was just a long process of being comfortable enough to do something about it.”

3 storm deaths reported; Louisiana declares state of emergency

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - While residents in some Western and Plains states were digging out Friday after an early blast of snow, heavy rain and strong winds that toppled trees, power lines and church steeples lashed parts of the South, leaving three people dead.

The rain was forecast to let up Friday, but the National Weather Service cautioned that the ground was so saturated that even a modest amount of additional rain could cause flash flooding from the western Gulf Coast to the mid-Mississippi Valley.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency after storms caused flooded roads, power outages to tens of thousands and wind damage in the northwestern part of the state. A 20-year-old driver was killed Thursday when his car ran under a toppled tree near Shreveport, authorities said.

A man in North Little Rock, Ark., was found in a submerged vehicle and was pronounced dead at a hospital, Pulaski County Coroner Garland Camper said. Kenny Raines, 50, had driven into the high water Thursday night, police said.

In northeast Arkansas, the body of 38-year-old Eric Brashers of Batesville was found Friday morning after he was swept away from his truck by floodwaters, Independence County Sheriff Keith Bowers said.

Treacherous travel
Meanwhile, the snowstorm that walloped Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas earlier in the week tapered off, but some roads across the region remained treacherous.

Michael Smith / AP A truck driver walks along a row of stranded trucks on Interstate 25 in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Thursday.

A winter weather advisory remains in effect for parts of southeast Wyoming and western Nebraska. The weather service says gusts of 50 mph or more will reduce visibility to near zero.

Gusty winds and blowing snow kept most major highways in southeast Wyoming shut down. U.S. Highway 20 at the north end of the Nebraska Panhandle reopened into Wyoming. Stretches of Interstate 80 and U.S. Highway 30 reopened late Friday afternoon from Big Springs, Neb., north of Colorado’s northeast corner, west to the Wyoming state line.

Also Friday, transportation officials reopened a 35-mile span of Interstate 25 from Wellington in northern Colorado to Cheyenne. But U.S. 85 north of Cheyenne remained closed.

Highways in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, including Interstates 70 and 76, also reopened.

The storm, which began Tuesday, had spread 3 feet of snow and left much higher drifts across parts of northern Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

About 15 inches fell in the Deadwood, S.D., area, causing officials to shut down Mount Rushmore National Memorial. It reopened Friday morning.

Winter weather advisories remained in effect Friday for southeast Wyoming and western Nebraska.

Tornado damage
Meanwhile, flood warnings stretch from the western Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, with flash flood warnings in effect for eastern Arkansas, western Tennesseee, western Kentucky and southeast Missouri.

Several tornadoes touched down in Louisiana and Arkansas on Thursday. A steeple blew off a church in Shreveport, La., hitting a car. The 57-year-old driver had to be pulled out by rescuers and suffered broken bones, authorities said.

Caddo Parish Sheriff’s spokeswoman Cindy Chadwick said a sheriff’s substation south of Shreveport flooded with about 8 inches of water Friday. Electrical equipment and personnel were moved to a nearby church. Chadwick said deputies used boats to rescue nearly 40 people from a subdivision with flooded roads and homes Thursday night and Friday. About 20 homes were reported flooded with as much as three feet of water.

Heavy rain across Arkansas stranded an unknown number of people in their homes, while strong winds damaged buildings and knocked over trees and utility lines.

In Harrison, Lori Hudson blamed a change in drainage patterns for an ankle-high flood in her home.

“I’ve got a river running through my house,” Hudson said.

In Hardy, in northeast Arkansas, a firefighter had to be rescued after climbing to the top of the fire truck he was driving when the Spring River’s waters came up faster than he anticipated overnight, Sharp County Office of Emergency Management Director Gene Moore said.

Hardy residents near the Spring River were evacuated overnight as the river rose to 15.9 feet Friday morning, Moore said.

South & Central Asia

Akhtar Soomro / Reuters

Images: Hundreds of thousands hit by military offensive in country’s northwest frontier.

After stormy 3-day Pakistan trip, she’ll prod sides to resume negotiations

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is making a new push to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, holding talks Saturday in this Persian Gulf city with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and later in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Clinton was to make a personal plea for the two sides to resume peace talks even as U.S. officials acknowledged they saw little prospect for an immediate breakthrough.

Over the course of the summer, President Barack Obama had hoped for a fast track to renewed peace negotiations, but Clinton reported to him on Oct. 22 that neither side had taken sufficient steps toward resuming the dialogue.

Still more to be done
Obama held a three-way meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas in New York in September, hoping it would prod them to relaunch talks that broke off more than a year ago. But in her report to the president in October, Clinton indicated that while the Palestinians had strengthened security efforts and reforms of Palestinian institutions, more needed to be done to prevent terror and to stop those who carry out or encourage attacks on Israel.

On the Israeli side, Clinton has indicated that they have eased Palestinians’ freedom of movement and expressed a willingness to curtail the building of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian areas. The Obama administration, however, is demanding an end to all new settlement construction, something which the Israelis have refused.

Clinton intends to consult with a range of Arab foreign ministers on the Israel-Palestinian stalemate when she attends an international conference in Morocco on Monday and Tuesday.

After her meeting with Abbas in Abu Dhabi, Clinton was headed for Jerusalem for talks that were expected to include not only Netanyahu but also his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Lieberman suggested recently the Israelis and Palestinians come up with a long-term interim arrangement that would ensure stability, while at the same time putting off a final deal.

He has recommended leaving the toughest issues — such as the status of disputed Jerusalem and a solution for Palestinian refugees who lost homes in the conflict — “to a much later stage.”

He asks Pentagon chiefs for alternatives to troop requests on Afghanistan

WASHINGTON - President Obama has asked the Pentagon’s top generals to provide him with more options for troop levels in Afghanistan, two U.S. officials said late Friday, with one adding that some of the alternatives would allow Obama to send fewer new troops than the roughly 40,000 requested by his top commander.

Obama met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House on Friday, holding a 90-minute discussion that centered on the strain on the force after eight years of war in two countries. The meeting — the first of its kind with the chiefs of the Navy, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force, who were not part of the president’s war council meetings on Afghanistan in recent weeks — prompted Obama to request another such meeting before he announces a decision on sending additional troops, the officials said.

The military chiefs have been largely supportive of a resource request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that would by one Pentagon estimate require the deployment of 44,000 additional troops. But opinion among members of Obama’s national security team is divided, and he now appears to be seeking a compromise solution that would satisfy both his military and civilian advisers.

Obama is expected to receive several options from the Pentagon about troop levels next week, according to the two officials, who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Which strategy to embrace?
Before he can determine troop levels, his advisers have said, he must decide whether to embrace a strategy focused heavily on counterinsurgency, which would require additional forces to protect population centers, or one that makes counterterrorism the main focus of U.S. efforts in the country, which would rely on relatively fewer American troops.

One option under review involves a blend of the two approaches, featuring an emphasis on counterterrorism in the north and some parts of western Afghanistan as well as an expanded counterinsurgency effort in the south and east, one of the officials said. Obama has also asked for a province-by-province review of the country to determine which areas can by managed effectively by local leaders.

The president appears committed to adding at least 10,000 to 15,000 troops in Afghanistan in an effort to bolster the training of Afghan army and police officers in the country. Current plans call for the United States to double the size of the Afghan army and police forces to about 400,000 in the hope that they can take over security responsibilities.

In meeting with the military chiefs, Obama heard their assessment of the how prepared the services are to handle a new commitment. “Each chief discussed the state of their own service, how they are doing today and what the long-term consequences will be for each of their services,” an administration official said. The military advisers also put the troop deployments in the context of the rest of their global deployments, including in Iraq.

It was not a “recommendations meeting,” with concrete options of how to proceed, the official said. That will presumably come in the next such meeting, which has not been scheduled.

Timeframe?
The timing of Obama’s decision on Afghanistan remains up in the air. But his request for another meeting with the military chiefs — and the expectation that he will meet again with his top national security advisers before reaching a conclusion — may leave him too little time to decide the issue before he travels to Asia on Nov. 11. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to be overseas for much of that time, except for a brief stint at home from Wednesday to Friday, giving Obama little opportunity to convene his war council in person. It appears increasingly likely that Obama will not announce his new Afghanistan strategy until after returning to the United States on Nov. 20.

Obama has come under criticism from Republicans, notably former vice president Richard B. Cheney, for deliberating so long, but his advisers have said he is determined to get the decision right rather than satisfy his critics.