Revelers gather in NY's frigid Times Square on New Year's Eve

1 of 8. National Guardsman John Cebak (R) kisses his fiancee Sonja Babic at the start of the new year in Times Square in New York January 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford

By Peter Rudegeair and Greg Roumeliotis

NEW YORK | Tue Jan 1, 2013 12:43am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Throngs of revelers in and around New York's Times Square bid farewell to 2012 and extended a raucous greeting to 2013 early Tuesday.

The crowd in midtown Manhattan, which police expected to approach 1 million, cheered and counted down the final seconds of 2012 as a large lighted crystal ball descended for the last minute of the old year - a tradition started in 1907.

Thousands cheered as the new year officially began and a blizzard of colorful confetti fell on the famous square. But the cheers - and a spirited crowd rendition of the song "New York, New York" - were quickly drowned out by a fireworks show.

Paul Hannemann, the head of an incident response team at the Texas Forest Service, was in New York to help with the reconstruction efforts in areas hit by Superstorm Sandy.

Even as he spent his first New Year's Eve in Times Square, Hannemann's thoughts were on Washington, D.C., where lawmakers worked late into the night to reach a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that many economists fear could send the nation back into recession.

"I hope everybody can come together in 2013 so our country can get its finances in order and our economy back in place," Hannemann, 60, said.

In addition to the crowd on hand in Times Square, another billion people were expected to watch on television, city officials said.

People filled pens in the center of Times Square hours before the end of 2012. Police set up barricades to keep away the overflow crowd. Once people entered the police pens, they were not allowed to leave, no alcohol was permitted and there were no restrooms.

At 6 p.m. the ball rose to the top to the top of its 70-foot (21-meter) pole and fireworks went off.

A few minutes earlier, the cheering crowd turned silent when the ceremony released balloons for each of the victims of the December 14 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Mark Barrigan, a medical software product manager, traveled from Dallas to witness the ball drop live for the first time this year, fulfilling a longtime wish.

"It was one of those bucket list items," Barrigan said, referring to a list of activities people plan to do before they die.

Asked what he was hoping for in the new year, Barrigan replied, "Hopefully they'll make some good decisions in Washington, D.C."

Elsewhere in America, same-sex marriage became legal at 12:01 a.m. in Maryland.

Maryland, Maine and Washington state became the first three U.S. states to approve gay marriage by popular vote on November 6. Nine states and the District of Columbia now have statutes legalizing gay marriage.

FREEZING TEMPERATURES

The temperature in Times Square was predicted to hover just above freezing around midnight, with a possibility of rain or snow flurries, forecasters said.

The revelers came for the people-watching for which Times Square is famous, and to see performers such as Taylor Swift, Psy, Carly Rae Jepsen and Neon Trees.

"For me, 2013 is about leaving everything behind and starting from scratch," said Mara Trevin, a 26-year-old who moved from Buenos Aires to New York last week to start a new life.

"That's my resolution."

The illuminated, crystal-covered ball - some 12 feet in diameter and weighing nearly 12,000 pounds (5,443 kg) - began its descent on schedule at 11:59 a.m. EST, dropping 70 feet in 60 seconds.

One of those crystals was engraved with the name of Dick Clark, the American entertainer who hosted a popular television presentation of the Times Square New Year's celebrations for decades.

He died in April of a heart attack. Clark had suffered a stroke in 2004 that sidelined from the New Year's Eve show for the first time since he launched the annual broadcast in 1972.

But he gamely returned to the program the following year, and had continued to announce the annual countdown to midnight.

As part of the city's New Year's Eve celebration, more than one ton of confetti was to be released from the rooftops of surrounding buildings in Times Square.

The end-of-the-year crowds capped a year in which 52 million people visited New York City, the third straight record-breaking year for tourism, city officials said on Monday.

More than a million additional tourists visited the city in 2012 compared to 2011, a 2.1 percent increase, they said.

The first version of the ball in Times Square descended in 1907 from a flagpole.

(Additional reporting by Joshua Lott; Editing by Daniel Trotta, James B. Kelleher, David Gregorio, M.D. Golan and Eric Walsh)

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Insight: How Colombian drug traffickers used HSBC to launder money

By Carrick Mollenkamp and Brett Wolf

Tue Jan 1, 2013 1:06am EST

n">(Reuters) - When several Colombian men were indicted in January 2010 on money-laundering charges, the case in Brooklyn federal court drew little attention.

It looked like a bust of another nexus of drug traffickers and money launderers, with mainly small-time operatives paying the price for their crimes.

One of the men was Julio Chaparro, a 48-year-old father of four who owned three factories that made children's clothing in Colombia.

But to U.S. authorities the case was anything but ordinary. Chaparro, prosecutors alleged, helped run a money-laundering ring for drug traffickers that took advantage of lax controls at UK-based international banking group HSBC Holdings Plc. It was one of the most important leads for U.S. investigators pursuing a case against the bank that eventually led to a $1.9 billion settlement on December 11.

Chaparro was "basically putting the orchestra together" and investigators saw "him as a major player in terms of cleaning a lot of money," said James Hayes, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York. Known as ICE, the agency and its task force led the probe.

The Colombian's lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, said Chaparro was a middleman in the operation, but disputed the extent of his client's role, saying he was the "page turner of sheet music for the conductor."

Chaparro, who was arrested in Colombia in 2010 and extradited to the United States in 2011, pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy count in May and is awaiting sentencing in 2013.

An HSBC spokesman declined comment.

Much about the trail that drug traffickers used to move U.S. dollars - the proceeds from drug sales - through HSBC and other banks remains unclear. By design, the process is layered to evade detection.

But a review of confidential investigative records that originate from two U.S. Attorney office probes and federal court filings in New York and California, as well as interviews with senior law-enforcement officials, shows how investigators tracing the activities of people who allegedly worked with Chaparro were able to expose large-scale money laundering at one of the world's biggest banks.

The federal law-enforcement task force - named after El Dorado, the mythical city of gold in South America - used wire taps, email and computer searches, information from at least one inside source, and old-fashioned surveillance, to piece together the ring's operations.

SMUGGLED ACROSS BORDER

Drug cartels sold narcotics in the United States and routed the cash to Mexico, often using couriers to smuggle it across the border. That cash would then be put into bank accounts at HSBC's Mexico unit, where large deposits could be made without arousing suspicion, according to U.S. Department of Justice documents.

In one filing, U.S. prosecutors said, Chaparro and others allegedly utilized accounts at HSBC Mexico to deposit "drug dollars and then wire those funds to ... businesses located in the United States and elsewhere. The funds were then used to purchase consumer goods, which were exported to South America and resold to generate ‘clean' cash."

In a typical transaction, a middleman in a drug cartel would offer to deliver consumer goods, such as computers or washing machines, to Colombian businesses on favorable terms. Another person in the United States would buy the goods from firms using funds from drug trafficking, and fulfill those orders.

Money launderers exploited the laxness of HSBC in policing shadowy money flows, the Department of Justice said earlier this month. Failures included not conducting due diligence on customers, not adequately monitoring wire transfers or cash shipments and not having enough employees to run anti-money laundering systems. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer called the lapses "stunning failures of oversight."

The situation was so bad, according to the Department of Justice, that in 2008, the head of HSBC's Mexican operations was told by Mexican regulators that a local drug lord described the bank as "the place to launder money."

The Chaparro probe, led by ICE and the Justice Department, converged over the past two years with two other investigations - led by federal prosecutors and investigators in West Virginia and by the Manhattan district attorney - resulting in this month's settlement with HSBC.

HSBC and its employees avoided criminal indictments, as the bank agreed instead to a deferred-prosecution deal that forces it to strengthen controls and accept a compliance monitor.

Today, Chaparro sits in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, reading the Bible and awaiting sentencing, said Savitt, a former U.S. prosecutor in Brooklyn, who submitted a list of questions to Chaparro for Reuters.

"He is contrite, regretful and ashamed about his crimes," Savitt said. "He wants to serve his time and rejoin his family. He understands that a prison term could prevent that from happening for many years."

Under federal guidelines, he could face 15 to 18 years in prison.

ON CHAPARRO'S TRAIL

The El Dorado federal task force, based in a building on the west side of Manhattan near Chelsea Piers, serves as an umbrella organization for some 250 law-enforcement officials from state, local and federal agencies.

One of the task-force supervisors is Lieutenant Frank DiGregorio, a former New York detective who spent years tracking the so-called Black Market Peso Exchange, which is used to convert dollars to Colombian pesos through trading in goods. DiGregorio along with two younger investigators - Graham Klein and Carmelo Lana - led the HSBC case.

The overall probe began in 2007 when investigators analyzed how courier companies ferried cash through airports in Miami and Houston, a person familiar with the case said. They ultimately tracked that to HSBC's operations in Mexico and then connected it to funds moving through New York.

A tipping point in the investigation came in 2009 when El Dorado agents arrested a man named Fernando Sanclemente. Two sources familiar with the case say Sanclemente was an operative in Chaparro's network.

Sanclemente, who was charged with allegedly conducting financial transactions tied to narcotics trafficking, is free on bail with a $200,000 bond, according to the latest court docket entry, which dates to January 2012. His lawyer, James Neville, declined to discuss the status of the case.

According to a criminal complaint filed against him by Lana, the El Dorado agent, on June 30, 2009, task force agents followed Sanclemente for more than two hours as he drove around Queens in New York to ferry cash from drug sales.

Sanclemente first met with a person for about "30 seconds" on one street corner, and left with a yellow plastic bag. Later that night, he drove to a Dunkin' Donuts near LaGuardia Airport, where a black livery cab pulled up and the driver handed him a black bag.

The El Dorado team followed Sanclemente to Laurel Hollow, New York, some 40 minutes away, where the investigators stopped and searched him, finding about $153,000 in the two bags. At Sanclemente's apartment, investigators said they found ledgers and documents consistent with money laundering.

With the arrest, investigators gained insight into Chaparro's alleged transactions. At one point, investigators set up undercover bank accounts where they were able to get Chaparro's network to wire proceeds that could be traced back to HSBC's Mexico operations, according to people familiar with the situation and a Department of Justice filing in the HSBC case.

Federal agents would ultimately home in on $500 million that had moved from HSBC Mexico to HSBC's operations in the United States, according to the confidential investigative records.

Between October 6, 2008 and April 13, 2009, Chaparro and others conducted money laundering transactions totaling $1.1 million tied to narcotics trafficking, the indictment against Chaparro alleged.

(Reporting By Carrick Mollenkamp and Brett Wolf of the Compliance Complete service of Thomson Reuters Accelus; Additional reporting by Tomas Sarmiento Cordero in Mexico City and Aruna Viswanatha in Washington; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Martin Howell)

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Senate approves bill to avert "fiscal cliff"

WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 1, 2013 1:57am EST

The House of Representatives still must approve the measure, possibly on Tuesday.

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North Korean leader, in rare address, seeks end to confrontation with South

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un delivers a New Year address in Pyongyang in this picture released by the North's official KCNA news agency on January 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/KCNA

By Jack Kim

SEOUL | Tue Jan 1, 2013 1:59am EST

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for an end to confrontation between the two Koreas, technically still at war in the absence of a peace treaty to end their 1950-53 conflict, in a surprise New Year speech broadcast on state media.

The address by Kim, who took over power in the reclusive state after his father, Kim Jong-il, died in 2011, appeared to take the place of the policy-setting New Year editorial published in leading state newspapers.

But North Korea has offered olive branches before and Kim's speech does not necessarily signify a change in tack from a country which vilifies the United States and U.S. ally South Korea at every chance it gets.

Impoverished North Korea raised tensions in the region by launching a long-range rocket in December that it said was aimed at putting a scientific satellite in orbit, drawing international condemnation.

North Korea, which considers North and South as one country, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is banned from testing missile or nuclear technology under U.N. sanctions imposed after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear weapons tests.

"An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south," Kim said in the address that appeared to be pre-recorded and was made at an undisclosed location.

"The past records of inter-Korean relations show that confrontation between fellow countrymen leads to nothing but war."

The New Year address was the first in 19 years by a North Korean leader after the death of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather. Kim Jong-il rarely spoke in public and disclosed his national policy agenda in editorials in state newspapers.

"(Kim's statement) apparently contains a message that he has an intention to dispel the current face-off (between the two Koreas), which could eventually be linked with the North's call for aid (from the South)," said Kim Tae-woo, a North Korea expert at the state-funded Korea Institute for National Unification.

"But such a move does not necessarily mean any substantive change in the North Korean regime's policy towards the South."

The two Koreas have seen tensions rise to the highest level in decades after the North bombed a Southern island in 2010 killing two civilians and two soldiers.

The sinking of a South Korean navy ship earlier that year was blamed on the North but Pyongyang has denied it and accused Seoul of waging a smear campaign against its leadership.

Last month, South Korea elected as president Park Geun-hye, a conservative daughter of assassinated military ruler Park Chung-hee whom Kim Il-sung had tried to kill at the height of their Cold War confrontation.

Park has vowed to pursue engagement with the North and called for dialogue to build confidence but has demanded that Pyongyang abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions, something it is unlikely to do.

Conspicuously absent from Kim's speech was any mention of the nuclear arms program.

(Additional reporting by Sung-Won Shim; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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Senate approves 'fiscal cliff' deal, crisis eased

1 of 9. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (center) departs with an aide, after a senate vote in the early morning hours, from the U.S. Capitol in Washington January 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

By David Lawder and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 1, 2013 2:59am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate moved the U.S. economy back from the edge of a "fiscal cliff" on Tuesday, voting to avoid imminent tax hikes and spending cuts in a bipartisan deal that could still face stiff challenges in the House of Representatives.

In a rare New Year's session at around 2 a.m. EST (0700 GMT), senators voted 89-8 to raise some taxes on the wealthy while making permanent low tax rates on the middle class that have been in place for a decade.

But the measure did little to rein in huge annual budget deficits that have helped push the U.S. debt to $16.4 trillion.

The agreement came too late for Congress to meet its own deadline of New Year's Eve for passing laws to halt $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts which strictly speaking came into force on Tuesday.

But with the New Year's Day holiday, there was no real world impact and Congress still had time to draw up legislation, approve it and backdate it to avoid the harsh fiscal measures.

That will need the backing of the House where many of the Republicans who control the chamber complain that President Barack Obama has shown little interest in cutting government spending and is too concerned with raising taxes.

All eyes are now on the House which is to hold a session on Tuesday starting at noon (1700 GMT).

Obama called for the House to act quickly and follow the Senate's lead.

"While neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay," he said in a statement.

"There's more work to do to reduce our deficits, and I'm willing to do it. But tonight's agreement ensures that, going forward, we will continue to reduce the deficit through a combination of new spending cuts and new revenues from the wealthiest Americans," Obama said.

Members were thankful that financial markets were closed, giving them a second chance to return to try to head off the fiscal cliff.

But if lawmakers cannot pass legislation in the coming days, markets are likely to turn sour. The U.S. economy, still recovering from the 2008/2009 downturn, could stall again if Congress fails to fix the budget mess.

"If we do nothing, the threat of a recession is very real. Passing this agreement does not mean negotiations halt, far from it. We can all agree there is more work to be done," Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, told the Senate floor.

A new, informal deadline for Congress to legislate is now Wednesday when the current body expires and it is replaced by a new Congress chosen at last November's election.

The Senate bill, worked out after long negotiations on New Year's Eve between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also postpones for two months a $109 billion "sequester" of sweeping spending cuts on military and domestic programs.

It extends unemployment insurance to 2 million people for a year and makes permanent the alternative minimum tax "patch" that was set to expire, protecting middle-income Americans from being taxed as if they were rich.

'IMPERFECT SOLUTION'

The tax hikes do not sit easy with Republicans but conservative senators held their noses and voted to raise rates for the rich because not to do so would have meant increases for almost all working Americans.

"It took an imperfect solution to prevent our constituents from a very real financial pain, but in my view, it was worth the effort," McConnell said.

House Speaker John Boehner - the top Republican in Congress - said the House would consider the Senate deal. But he left open the possibility of the House amending the Senate bill, which would spark another round of legislating.

"The House will honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members ... have been able to review the legislation," Boehner and other House Republican leaders said in a statement.

Boehner has struggled for two years to get control over a group of several dozen Tea Party fiscal conservatives in his caucus who strongly oppose tax increases and demand that he force Obama to make savings in the Medicare and Social Security healthcare and retirement programs.

A campaign-style event held by Obama in the White House as negotiations with Senate leaders were taking place on Monday may have made it more difficult for Republicans to back the deal. In remarks to a group of supporters that resembled a victory lap, the president noted that his rivals were coming around to his way of seeing things.

"Keep in mind that just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Obviously, the agreement that's currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently," he said to applause before the Senate deal was sealed.

Obama's words and tone annoyed Republican lawmakers who seemed to feel that the Democrat was gloating.

"That's not the way presidents should lead," said Republican Senator John McCain, Obama's rival in the 2008 election.

A deal with the House on Tuesday, while uncertain, would not mark the end of congressional budget fights. The "sequester" spending cuts will come up again in February as will the contentious "debt ceiling," which caps how much debt the federal government can hold.

Republicans may see those two issues as their best chance to try to rein in government spending and clip Obama's wings at the start of his second term.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Mark Felsenthal, Rachelle Younglai, Kim Dixon and Jeff Mason; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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Vomiting Larry battles "Ferrari of the virus world"

Paramedics dressed in protective attire walk in front of the ship, the Bellriva, in Wiesbaden December 8, 2012. The Bellriva has been quarantined after at least 30 passengers were found to be suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting. Authorities believed it is caused by the Norovirus, a virus that is spread from person-to-person and causes flu-like symptoms.

Credit: Reuters/Lisi Niesner

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON | Mon Dec 31, 2012 8:53am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Poor Larry isn't looking too good. He's pale and clammy and he's been projectile vomiting over and over again while his carers just stand by and watch.

Yet their lack of concern for Larry is made up for by their intense interest in how far splashes of his vomit can fly, and how effectively they evade attempts to clean them up.

Larry is a "humanoid simulated vomiting system" designed to help scientists analyze contagion. And like millions around the world right now, he's struggling with norovirus - a disease one British expert describes as "the Ferrari of the virus world".

"Norovirus is one of the most infectious viruses of man," said Ian Goodfellow, a professor of virology at the department of pathology at Britain's University of Cambridge, who has been studying noroviruses for 10 years.

"It takes fewer than 20 virus particles to infect someone. So each droplet of vomit or gram of feces from an infected person can contain enough virus to infect more than 100,000 people."

Norovirus is hitting hard this year - and earlier too.

In Britain so far this season, more than a million people are thought to have suffered the violent vomiting and diarrhea it can bring. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said this high rate of infection relatively early in the winter mirrors trends seen in Japan and Europe.

"In Australia the norovirus season also peaks during the winter, but this season it has gone on longer than usual and they are seeing cases into their summer," it said in a statement.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say norovirus causes 21 million illnesses annually. Of those who get the virus, some 70,000 require hospitalization and around 800 die each year.

PROFUSE AND PROJECTILE

Norovirus dates back more than 40 years and takes its name from the U.S. city of Norwalk, Ohio, where there was an outbreak of acute gastroenteritis in school children in November 1968.

Symptoms include a sudden onset of vomiting, which can be projectile, and diarrhea, which may be profuse and watery. Some victims also suffer fevers, headaches and stomach cramps.

John Harris, an expert on the virus at Britain's HPA, puts it simply: "Norovirus is very contagious and very unpleasant."

What makes this such a formidable enemy is its ability to evade death from cleaning and to survive long periods outside a human host. Scientists have found norovirus can remain alive and well for 12 hours on hard surfaces and up to 12 days on contaminated fabrics such as carpets and upholstery. In still water, it can survive for months, maybe even years.

At the Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire, northern England, where researcher Catherine Makison developed the humanoid simulated vomiting system and nicknamed him "Vomiting Larry", scientists analyzing his reach found that small droplets of sick can spread over three meters.

"The dramatic nature of the vomiting episodes produces a lot of aerosolized vomit, much of which is invisible to the naked eye," Goodfellow told Reuters.

Larry's projections were easy to spot because he had been primed with a "vomitus substitute", scientists explain, which included a fluorescent marker to help distinguish even small splashes - but they would not be at all easily visible under standard white hospital lighting.

Add the fact that norovirus is particularly resistant to normal household disinfectants and even alcohol hand gels, and it's little wonder the sickness wreaks such havoc in hospitals, schools, nursing homes, cruise ships and hotels.

During the two weeks up to December 23, there were 70 hospital outbreaks of norovirus reported in Britain, and last week a cruise ship that sails between New York and Britain's Southampton docked in the Caribbean with about 200 people on board suffering suspected norovirus.

MOVING TARGET

The good news, for some, is that not everyone appears to be equally susceptible to norovirus infection. According to Goodfellow, around 20 percent of Europeans have a mutation in a gene called FUT2 that makes them resistant.

For the rest the only likely good news will have to wait for the results of trials of a potential norovirus vaccine developed by U.S. drugmaker LigoCyte Pharmaceuticals Inc, or from one of several research teams around the world working on possible new antiviral drugs to treat the infection.

Early tests in 2011 indicated that around half of people vaccinated with the experimental shot, now owned by Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co, were protected from symptomatic norovirus infection.

The bad news, virologists say, is that the virus changes constantly, making it a moving target for drug developers. There is also evidence that humans' immune response to infection is short-lived, so people can become re-infected by the same virus within just a year or two.

"There are many strains, and the virus changes very rapidly - it undergoes something virologists call genetic drift," Harris said in a telephone interview. "When it makes copies of itself, it makes mistakes in those copies - so each time you encounter the virus you may be encountering a slightly different one."

This means that even if a vaccine were to be fully developed - still a big 'if' - it would probably need to be tweaked and repeated in a slightly different formula each year to prevent people getting sick.

Until any effective drugs or vaccines are developed, experts reckon that like the common cold, norovirus will be an unwelcome guest for many winters to come. Their advice is to stay away from anyone with the virus, and use soap and water liberally.

"One of the reasons norovirus spreads so fast is that the majority of people don't wash their hands for long enough," said Goodfellow. "We'd suggest people count to 15 while washing their hands and ensure their hands are dried completely."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Will Waterman)

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Kim Kardashian pregnant with Kanye's baby

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian (L) and U.S. rapper Kanye West watch the Los Angeles Lakers play the Denver Nuggets during Game 7 of their NBA Western Conference basketball playoff series in Los Angeles, California in this May 12, 2012 file photo.

Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson/Files

LOS ANGELES | Mon Dec 31, 2012 1:38pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rapper Kanye West and reality TV star Kim Kardashian are expecting a child, Kardashian said on Monday shortly after West announced the pregnancy to fans at a concert.

"It's true!! Kanye and I are expecting a baby," Kardashian, 32, wrote on her personal blog.

"Looking forward to great new beginnings in 2013 and to starting a family," she added.

Kardashian began dating West in April, some six months after filing for divorce from basketball player Kris Humphries. The two were married for 72 days following a lavish, made-for-TV wedding. Their divorce has yet to be finalized.

Kardashian is about 12 weeks pregnant, according to U.S. media reports.

Fans and family took to Twitter to congratulate the celebrity power couple, and to speculate whether the new baby's name would begin with a K, in line with Kardashian family tradition.

"Been wanting to shout from the rooftops with joy and now I can!" wrote Kardashian's sister Kourtney. "Another angel to welcome to our family. Overwhelmed with excitement!"

Kardashian's brother-in-law, basketball player Lamar Odom, who has been open about struggling to have a baby with wife and "The X Factor" host Khloe Kardashian also tweeted his congratulations.

"I'm excited for Kanye and my sister!" said Odom. "There's nothing like bringing life into this world! Let's keep God's blessings coming!"

West, 35, was first to announce the news from the stage at a concert in Atlantic City on Sunday, singing, "God brought us a whole new plan, baby. 'Cause now you're having my baby."

Kardashian, who rose to fame five years ago for her appearances in reality TV show "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," was the most-searched person on the Yahoo! website in 2012.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

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