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Every year from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Hamptons become a notoriously see-and-be-seen summer getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, celebrities, and those who want to be in close proximity to the aforementioned groups. Yes, the beaches are beautiful, and so are the homes, but traffic is bad, restaurant reservations are hard to come by, and crowds are at their peak. Simply put, it can feel like a hectic Saturday night in Manhattan rather than a relaxed beach vacation. That all changes in the off-season (September through May), when the Hamptons Westhampton , Bridgehampton , Southampton , Sag Harbor , Amagansett , East Hampton , Water Mill , and Montauk empty out and it becomes possible to enjoy the unique charms of this collection of seaside communities. There are plenty of year-round activities to enjoy, the weather can be quite pleasant depending on the month, and hotel rates drop dramatically. It may seem counterintuitive to visit a summer resort area when it's not summer, but rest assured that, aside from the very dead of winter, the Hamptons are a worthwhile destination. Here are five of the best reasons to head to Long Island's East End in the off-season. Empty Beaches Aside from lingering summer weather in September, the off-season is no time to go swimming, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the gorgeous beaches that the Hamptons are famous for. Take advantage of the lack of crowds to walk, jog, or picnic on the Atlantic Ocean in peace. Any beach you choose will be lovely, but two popular options are Flying Point Beach in Southampton, and East Hampton's Main Beach. During the peak season, vehicles are generally required to display parking permits or day passes to park near the beaches, but this isn't the case between September 15th and May 15th. Wine Tasting While Long Island's North Fork has been increasingly gaining attention for its wine producers, the South Fork is home to two notable vineyards that are open year-round. Fall is arguably the best time to visit any winery, but a trip to a tasting room is no less enjoyable in winter or spring. Located in Sagaponack, family-owned Wölffer Estate Vineyard features 55 idyllic acres of vines producing Merlot, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and more. When weather permits, you can sip wines outside on the stone terrace, but the light-filled tasting room (open daily) is a great option on cold days. If you're interested in touring the European-inspired barrel room and winemaking facilities, call in advance to book a private tour. In Bridgehampton, Channing Daughters Winery offers tastings for $10 seven days a week. On its 25 acres of vines, the property grows Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Gewurztraminer, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and much more. Both estates host special events on a weekly basis, so check their websites in advance and plan accordingly. Hotel Deals If you think New York City hotels are expensive, you should see the staggeringly high rates Hamptons properties command at the height of summer. Fortunately, it's not uncommon to see these figures cut in half during the off-season. The 1770 House , Topping Rose House , and The American Hotel all offer top service and accommodations, but the area's best hotel may also be its quirkiest. Formerly The Maidstone Arms, c/o The Maidstone delivers a heavy dose of European flair despite its traditional, all-American façade. Outfitted with décor it has deemed "Scandinavian cozy," the property features 19 uniquely designed rooms and cottages, each dedicated to and inspired by a Scandinavian celebrity (think Edvard Munch or Eero Sarinen). All rooms come with Malin+Goetz bath products, linens and robes by Coyuchi, aromatherapy burners, smartphone-compatible speakers, and other modern comforts. In the mornings, a Scandinavian breakfast buffet is served on the ground floor, while The Living Room restaurant is open for brunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. Featuring a Scandinavian-influenced menu, The Living Room is one of the Hamptons' most surprising and satisfying dining options. The expansive lobby invites curling up by the fireplace with the newspaper or a book from the hotel's library for an afternoon; you can also check out the rotating photography exhibit on display. c/o The Maidstone is also pet-friendly, so feel free to bring yours along. Many properties offer special packages during the off-season, so do your research in advance to find one that appeals to you. Arts & Culture The Hamptons are no longer the artists' haven they once were, but that doesn't mean art appreciation has died here. On the contrary, there's a wealth of art institutions to explore here year-round. Originally established in 1898, the Parrish Art Museum (closed Tuesdays, free admission on Wednesdays) exhibits its impressive collection in a striking, 34,000-square-foot Herzog & de Meuron-designed barn that opened its doors in November 2012. The museum's collection focuses on artists who lived and worked nearby, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Roy Lichtenstein. In Bridgehampton, the Dan Flavin Art Institute (open Saturdays and Sunday only; free admission) is a renovated firehouse that holds a permanent installation of nine of the artist's works in fluorescent light and a gallery space for temporary exhibitions. East Hampton's LongHouse Reserve (closed mid-October through late April) features landscaped gardens and works by Yoko Ono, Sol Lewitt, and de Kooning. Nearby, the Pollock-Krasner House (open May October) allows you to see where the artist created some of his masterpieces. Also in East Hampton is Guild Hall , where you can see more art exhibitions, live theater, and film screenings. Every October, the venue hosts the Hamptons International Film Festival , which screens independent films and draws Hollywood A-listers every year. Historic Buildings For all its shops and modern flashiness, this area has a history that goes back hundreds of years. If you want to learn more about the origins of the Hamptons, three places should be on your radar. The Southampton Historical Museum (re-opens March 4, 2015) consists of two historic homes, one from the 1840s and the other built in 1660; both feature period furniture inside. A few miles away is the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum (open weekends only), where you can learn all about the town's former industry. Finally, the East Hampton Historical Society maintains six historic buildings in the area; you can visit one or all of them to see well-preserved homes and schoolhouses.
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China is playing a major role in Apple's record quarterly profits. CNN's David McKenzie reports on the iPhone's success in China.
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Vladimir Putin is playing for keeps in Ukraine and he might bankrupt the country to get what he wants. As fighting flares anew in the 10-month-old conflict and the death toll mounts, that's the assessment of analysts in Ukraine and New York, as well as Moscow. While Kremlin-backed rebels pressure the Ukrainian government, the U.S. and the European Union are contemplating tighter economic sanctions on Russia. Putin, however, seems emboldened in his belief that this is a showdown he must not and will not lose. "Putin realized that he will never be in the West's good graces and this makes him act more decisively," Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, with ties to the Kremlin, said Tuesday by phone. "He started playing all in." A September cease-fire between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists, which helped stem the violence, crumbled this month. The death toll surged above 5,000 as rockets hit a residential area in Mariupol and grenade fire blew out a trolleybus in Donetsk. For Putin, maintaining Russian influence in Ukraine and preventing it from allying with his country's Cold War-era foes in the EU and NATO is crucial and is the driving force behind his support for the rebels. Failed Talks Fighting erupted after the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine failed to make progress at a Jan. 12 meeting in Berlin and canceled plans for a leaders' summit. EU foreign ministers will meet Thursday to make a decision on tightening sanctions. Joerg Forbrig, a senior program director at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that since previous talk of easing sanctions has fallen away, Putin is back on the attack and may be trying to show that sanctions are counterproductive. Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies say Russia supports the rebels with hardware, cash and thousands of troops. The Kremlin says the government in Kiev is waging war against its own citizens, especially Russian speakers who make up the majority of the populations of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. There are signs that the conflict may derail Ukraine's push for another $15 billion in aid. The government last week requested a four-year aid package. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told President Petro Poroshenko that she was ready to support a pact, though said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde published on Jan. 26 that Ukraine "must have stability at its frontiers" for any hopes of economic recovery. 'Every Time' Such wavering is what Putin seeks, according to Alexander Valchyshen, chief economist at Investment Capital Ukraine. "Every time Ukraine makes a step toward the West, escalation happens," Valchyshen said by phone from Kiev on Jan. 26. The recent unrest was met Wednesday by a pledge of more aid from the U.S. Speaking in Kiev, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew reiterated that Ukraine would be granted as much as $2 billion in loan guarantees this year, adding to the $1 billion it received in 2014. The U.S. is consulting with its partners over how to respond to the latest violence and put pressure on Russia, he said. Ukraine was already struggling to make debt payments before the war. One of the turning points in the crisis was Putin's 2013 agreement with then-President Viktor Yanukovych to lend $15 billion to the junk-rated sovereign. The deal gave fresh impetus to the opposition protests in Kiev that led to the government's ouster in February. Against Default That funding was pulled after a $3 billion first installment. Russia is now considering whether to call in the debt, making the extra aid more urgent. The Ukrainian government plans to approach holders of its sovereign bonds to try to negotiate more favorable borrowing terms. "We don't want a Ukrainian default, worsening the plight of the Ukrainian economy," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Jan. 14. "Still, debts have to be paid, both government as well as those of companies." The recent rebel onslaught forced government troops to retreat, including from Donetsk airport, an epicenter of clashes. "It's very important for Putin to create as unfavorable a condition for Ukraine as possible," Anatoliy Oktysiuk, a senior political analyst at the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kiev, said by phone on Jan. 26. "The war will lead to further economic deterioration, undermining the government." More Leverage The insurgents were emboldened by their capture of the airport, which became a symbolic battleground for both sides. Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University, who specializes in Russian security affairs, said their surging confidence gives Putin yet another tool of leverage. As the violence escalates, lawmakers in Kiev on Jan. 15 backed a partial mobilization. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the next day that the move undermines peace agreements signed in September. The insurgents are focusing on "suppressing the firing positions of the enemy," Denis Pushilin, a rebel representative said on the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic's website. Their push also helps the Kremlin's positioning before potential peace talks. Controlling Ukraine The insurgents' ability to expand the area they control was limited after the Ukrainian government stepped up defenses, especially at strategic locations like Mariupol, according to Anton Lavrov, a Russian military analyst. In that situation, even freezing the conflict at its current state may be acceptable for Putin, if the military gains force the Kiev government to recognize the insurgents as viable negotiating partners, he said. Any outcome seen by Putin as a victory would mean keeping Ukraine within the Kremlin's sphere of influence. Galeotti said that entails devolving more power to Russia-friendly forces in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Ukraine formally giving up on its aspirations to join the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for now. "Putin's plan is to radically change the situation and to ensure the militants have full control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Oktysiuk, the Ukrainian analyst, said. "Russia's aim has been to control Ukraine. Now, Putin doesn't have any other leverage but escalation." --With assistance from Mark Raczkiewycz in Kiev, Leon Mangasarian in Berlin and David Whitehouse in Paris. To contact the reporters on this story: Daryna Krasnolutska in Kiev at [email protected]; Stepan Kravchenko in Moscow at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at [email protected]; Hellmuth Tromm at [email protected] Andrew Langley, Tony Halpin
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Mexican authorities say 43 students missing since September have now been legally declared murdered. CNN's Rafael Romo has more.
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NORCROSS, Ga. -- In a parallel sports universe, Tyrell Jenkins might have been one of the brightest stars of the recently concluded college football season, leading high-powered Baylor University -- as a quarterback -- in its dual pursuit of the Big 12 championship and a berth in the inaugural College Football Playoff. (The Bears famously missed the mark for the four-team playoff, ceding the final slot to Ohio State, which knocked off Alabama and Oregon to claim the national championship.) In a parallel sports universe, the sublimely athletic Jenkins -- who ran the 4x400 relay race for the Henderson (Texas) High School team as a prepster, during his off days from baseball -- might have also cultivated a distinguished college hoops career at point guard. (A noticeably large point guard ... since Jenkins stands at 6-foot-4.) But real life is all about choices, even in the dreamscape world of athletics. And back in the summer of 2010 -- just after his 18th birthday and before the Baylor football season started fall practice -- Jenkins made a life-changing decision, bypassing his boyhood dreams of football and basketball glory for the lucrative, but temperamental world of professional baseball. As a high school senior, "I wasn't the typical (elite prospect) who expected to be drafted," recalls Jenkins, who signed with the St. Louis Cardinals before triggering his football-scholarship obligation for Baylor in 2010. "I was just ready to play football (for the Bears)." The last pick of Round 1 in 2010 (50th overall, supplemental choice), Jenkins was selected ahead of MLB notables like Jedd Gyorko (Padres), Drew Smyly (Tigers, now Rays), Addison Reed (White Sox, now Diamondbacks), Tyler Thornburg (Brewers) and Braves shortstop Andrelton Simmons. Adding to the prestige, a number of transcendent talents were snagged in the first round -- a group that includes Bryce Harper (Nationals), Matt Harvey (Mets), Manny Machado (Orioles), Chris Sale (White Sox), Christian Yelich (Marlins), Nick Castellanos (Tigers) and Taijuan Walker (Mariners), a prospective Felix Hernandez clone with Seattle. No pressure, huh? "You never know how someone else will turn out when you draft 'em," says Jenkins, who was admittedly shocked by his Round 1 fate in the 2010 draft. "You always see potential, but potential doesn't always pan out the way it's supposed to be." Don't be fooled by the modesty of the above paragraph. A few breaths later, Jenkins (career-best 3.28 ERA in the minors last season) exhibited the type of hubris that made him a prominent figure in a top-shelf draft ... and eventually prompted the Braves to land Jenkins in perhaps their most storied (or controversial) trade of the last five years. "All I know is I"m going to put myself in the best position to be a (starting pitcher) -- which is what I want to be, long term," says Jenkins, who started all 58 of his minor-league appearances with the Cardinals organization (2010-14). He soon added: "If i get the opportunity, I guarantee you I won't let it slip through my fingers. I'm excited, and we'll see what happens." * * * On Nov. 17, Jenkins' professional world was rocked by the news of the Cardinals and Braves excecuting a four-man swap before baseball's Winter Meetings, with St. Louis getting Jason Heyward (reigning Defensive Player of the Year and arguably the most popular Brave of the decade) and reliever Jordan Walden, and Atlanta receiving Jenkins and Shelby Miller, who accounted for 25 wins, 296 strikeouts and a cumulative ERA of 3.41 in his first two MLB campaigns with St. Louis (2013-14). But the trade didn't really sink in for Jenkins (career ERA of 4.23) until the following morning. He was upset about leaving the only franchise (the Cardinals) he had ever known. But "then I woke up, called my agent, and realized who I had been traded for (Heyward, Walden). Things kind of got put in perspective, and I kept thinking, 'This could be a good deal for (me)' ... at first, it was kind of slow and shaky, but now I'm into it. I'm excited." In the Cardinals' system (varying levels of A-ball), Jenkins viewed himself as a 'middle piece' of a deep pipeline of pitching prospects. With the Braves, who have undergone a substantial overhaul in the last three months (without ever using the R-word that rhymes with "tree-tilding"), Jenkins will likely encounter a similarly stellar cluster of under-24 power arms -- some of whom are vying for the No. 5 spot in Atlanta's 2015 rotation. According to MLB.com's revamped rankings, Jenkins (2.24 ERA in six Arizona Fall League starts) stands as the Braves' No. 11 prospect and sixth-best pitcher , behind Mike Foltynewicz (No. 2 prospect), Lucas Sims (No. 3) and Max Fried (No. 3), among others. Throw in the fact that Julio Teheran, Shelby Miller and Alex Wood -- all 24 years old -- are under team control, salary- wise, for the foreseeable future ... and it's fair to wonder if Jenkins has simply moved from one dog-eat-dog franchise to another. "The Braves have always been a pitching organization," said Braves personnel czar John Hart in mid-November, in the wake of the Heyward swap. "We have the makings of a quality young rotation." Luckily, Jenkins (who notched six-plus strikeouts in three of his final starts with the Cards' affiliates) finally has health on his side. "I feel great. This is my first healthy offseason since my first year (in the minors)," says Jenkins, who has torn a shoulder muscle twice in the last five years. "I was able to lift as much as I wanted to, run as much as I wanted to. I feel about as good as I can right now." Let's put the above line in perspective: When Jenkins says he's healthy and feeling great ... we're talking about the same athlete who regularly churned out sub-50-second 400-meter runs in high school -- without training. Just because. "(The track coaches) just asked me to run when they needed someone, like an extra leg. I would just run ... and then play ball the next day." Speaking of high school, in the course of Jenkins' pro tenure with the Cardinals, a handful of coaches attempted to alter his delivery, namely the leg kick and arm angle/release point. But through the injuries and inconsistencies on the mound, the Texas-bred right-hander came to a five-years-in-the-making epiphany -- thanks to a mound mentor in the majors. (Cardinals ace) "Adam Wainwright told me, 'Hey, you're going to be who you are,' so I went back to pitching how I (threw) in high school and things got a little easier, more natural," says Jenkins, whose childhood pitching role model was Roy Oswalt, the longtime Houston Astros ace (163 victories, 3.36 ERA, 1,852 strikeouts). Buoyed by a renewed mechanical grace and atmospheric comfort, the stage is now set for Jenkins to finally capitalize on his immense potential as a pitcher -- as part of the famed 2010 draft class -- and as the once-believed successor to Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III at Baylor ... even if that path to sports happiness never materialized. (FYI: Jenkins attended every Bears game in the 2014 season.) "My hope is to make the big leagues (in the near future) ... and stay there."
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Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world must use the lessons from battling Ebola to prepare for any future "war" against a global killer disease, with the help of new technology. Gates, in Berlin for a donor conference of the GAVI alliance bringing vaccines to poor countries, said the risk of a worldwide pandemic meant it was reckless not to act now. "A more difficult pathogen (than Ebola) could come along, a form of flu, a form of SARS or some type of virus that we haven't seen before," he said in an interview with AFP. "We don't know it will happen but it's a high enough chance that one of the lessons of Ebola should be to ask ourselves: are we as ready for that as we should be? A good comparison is that we prepare ourselves for war -- we have planes and training and we practise." He said this included building teams of volunteers who are ready to mobilise quickly in a public health emergency, similar to schemes developed in the countries hit hardest by Ebola: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which registered almost 9,000 deaths in the last year. - 'Biggest saver of lives' - Gates, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's richest man with a net worth of some $80 billion (70 billion euros), said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation distributes about $4 billion each year to help the world's neediest. It is also a major contributor to the GAVI alliance, which Tuesday drew pledges of $7.5 billion to help immunise 300 million more children in developing countries over the next five years. Calling vaccines the "biggest saver of lives" worldwide, the 59-year-old praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for hosting the GAVI conference and making vaccinations a priority of her G7 presidency this year. However he said he was "concerned" about an anti-vaccination trend in the West, due to exaggerated fears of risks associated with the jabs, that was leading to dangerous outbreaks. "Our focus is on the poor children where you have millions that die of vaccine-preventable disease. It's unfortunate that you're not getting 100-percent coverage in the rich countries," he said. "They're choosing to potentially infect somebody who can't protect themselves," he said, noting the renewed spread of illnesses such as measles and pertussis (whooping cough). "I'm glad there are people who are championing reducing these misunderstandings in rich countries because of the risk that creates." - Tech to gauge progress - The Microsoft co-founder said that technology was a crucial asset in his foundation's field work, seen most recently in a drive against polio. "We use satellite photos to find out where people are living, we use a GPS tracker with a cell phone so that we can see if the vaccine team is going to every place they're supposed to go, we do statistical analysis within a few days to see if there's any kids that we missed," he said. "Measurement is a pretty natural private sector thing... Innovative new technologies are going to make it possible to see what's going on with far less cost." Gates said he was proud to have inspired fellow American billionaires such as Warren Buffett to devote a big slice of their wealth to charity and was working to spread the message in Europe, India and China. "Everywhere I go, I sit down and talk to people about how much I enjoy my philanthropy and I encourage others to get involved," he said. Gates said moving from the world of big business to working in villages in the developing world where people "have no idea who I am" had been satisfying. "I was super proud of the work I did at Microsoft... it let me carry the message of software out into the world in a very enthused way," he said. "Now I have a different message, my wife and I, that we should be generous to the poor. To the degree I have visibility hopefully I'm using that in a positive way."
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health
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Girls who consume lots of sugary drinks start menstruating at a younger age, a study said Wednesday. The findings are important because early onset of menstruation is linked to a higher risk of breast cancer in later life, the paper said, although other experts saw flaws in the probe. Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, researchers said they had monitored the health of more than 5,500 American girls between 1996 and 2001. They had been part of a wider study involving nearly 17,000 children. The girls were aged between nine and 14 when they joined the project and had not yet started their periods. During the five-year study, those who drank between one-and-a-half servings of sweetened drinks per day had their first period 2.7 months earlier than those who had two or fewer sweet drinks a week, the investigators found. The earlier menstruation occurred regardless of the girls' height-to-weight ratio -- their body mass index (BMI) -- their calorie intake and exercise. "Our study adds to increasing concern about the widespread consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks in the USA and elsewhere," said Karin Michels of Harvard Medical School, who led the probe. The average age for first menstruation was 12 years and seven months. A 2.7-month earlier onset translates into a "modest impact" on breast cancer risk, the study said. Previous work had found that starting menstruating one year earlier increases the cancer risk by about five percent. Doctors are already concerned about a separate issue -- the ever-earlier onset of puberty in young girls, which remains unexplained. The latest study was based on statistics, and was not powered to explore the causes. The authors point to previous research that says high, swift doses of sugar cause a rapid increase in levels of the hormone insulin, which in turn has a knock-on effect on concentrations of sex hormones. - 'Overly alarmist' - The group of girls in the study was 93 percent white, and the amount of sweetened drinks they consumed "is likely low" compared with that of other groups, the researchers said. Sweetened beverages comprised non-diet sodas, non-carbonated fruit-based drinks and sweetened ice tea. A serving was classified as one can or glass. Independent commentators were cautious of the findings, pointing in particular at the source of the data. It was the girls themselves, or their parents, who reported on body size and drink consumption -- a method famously prone to error. "It's fair to ask whether the self-reporting on height is a bit over-estimated and whether on weight it is under-estimated," said Michel Colle, a paediatrician in Bordeaux, southwestern France. "If so, this would completely distort the BMI and thus the conclusions themselves." Ieuan Hughes, a paediatrician at Britain's University of Cambridge, said the study also failed to factor in the children's location, parents' occupation and whether they were migrants -- other potential factors. "The reference to breast cancer is overly alarmist," he added.
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Exploding Kittens , a card game illustrated by famed web cartoonist Matthew Inman aka The Oatmeal , has become the most backed Kickstarter project of all time . The game billed as "a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette" has overtaken Tim Schafer's Double Fine Adventure game, the movie reboot of Veronica Mars , and the return of the Reading Rainbow to claim the top spot, attracting just under 107,000 backers at the time of writing. "You wonderful people have come together to form the largest community in Kickstarter history, and the numbers keep rising," wrote the Exploding Kittens team in a blog post . "Thank you backers, you are the mostestest." Exploding kittens promises plenty of meme fodder like unicorn enchiladas and pig-a-corns The aim of the game is to avoid being blown up by a curious kitten and its explosive material of choice. Users draw cards in turns, with some able to distract the pyrotechnic felines while others allow players to pass the exploding buck. Inman provided the illustrations and the star power, while the game itself was designed primarily by Elan Lee and Shane Small, both of whom have experience in the industry from working on the Xbox team. As far as Kickstarter projects go it's a bit of an open goal: there's plenty of meme-fodder with cards like unicorn enchiladas and pig-a-corns in the deck, but it's also a simple product to deliver. There are no moving parts or complicated factory sourcing to consider: it's just pictures on cardboard. Still, the game has proved incredibly popular, reaching 100 percent funding in 20 minutes and 1000 percent funding in less than an hour. It's currently raised more than $4 million from backers and is the seventh-most funded project of all time . What's more, it's still got 22 days of funding left to go. Exploding Kittens? Totally blowing up.
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Figuring you can't have enough guys who can mix it up, the Pittsburgh Penguins acquired physical forward Maxim Lapierre from the St. Louis Blues for center Marcel Goc. Lapierre doesn't fight often anymore, but he can play an in-your-face style. "It certainly seems that we're getting into more physical games than I would have expected," Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford told reporters after Tuesday's Penguins win in which Goc recorded an assist. "So he will help that group of guys that we already have, the (Steve) Downies, and the (Zach) Sills, the (Robert) Bortuzzos and those guys." Lapierre kills penalties like Goc and has more points than him this season, nine vs. six. Both are good faceoff men. Rutherford was also intrigued by Lapierre's playoff experience. He has played 75 postseason games and went to the 2011 Stanley Cup Final with the Vancouver Canucks and the 2010 Eastern Conference final with the Montreal Canadiens. He scored the game-winner in Game 5 of the 2011 Final. "He has a couple of real good runs in the playoffs," Rutherford said. "He's a real hard guy to play against, especially when you get into those playoff series." Lapierre, who has 570 penalty minutes in 579 career games, steps over the line occasionally. He has been suspended twice for a total of nine games for boarding infractions. Goc will be moving for the second time in two seasons. He was acquired at the trade deadline last season from the Florida Panthers. He has scored as many as 12 goals in a season. He was the key forward on the Penguins' penalty-killing unit, which ranks fourth in the league. The Blues' penalty kill ranks 17th. Both players make $1.2 million this season and will be unrestricted free agents after the season. PHOTOS: NHL player power rankings
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A FRIENDLY cheetah lives like a dog around a family's home - going for walks on a leash and even getting rides in their car. Unusual footage shot in 2012 shows how Yakira, a domesticated big cat, prowls around the ranch run by wildlife experts Desmond and Elizke Gouws - who love watching TV with the big kitty. Yakira broke her hip as a cub when her mother accidentally sat on her and was taken in by the Kwa Cheetah Project at Nambiti Game Reserve, South Africa. While the project rehabilitates animals and eventually introduces them back into the wild, the four-year-old cheetah would not survive if released. Videographer / Director: Earth Touch Producer: Nick Johnson Editor: Sonia Estal
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DW: In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. What do we know about it? Professor Andrew Coates: Yes, it's a dwarf planet, and this is a new class of object which was defined in 2006. So, Pluto - when we were all growing up - used to be a planet. But it was demoted in 2006 to be an ice dwarf, and that's in response to discoveries about the outer part of the solar system, where there appear to be several objects, possibly many objects, which are approaching Pluto in size. It will be the first one of this new class of objects which will be explored by a spacecraft. So, the other objects in the solar system include, of course, the planet we're on, Earth, which is one of the terrestrial planets, a rocky planet towards the inner part of the solar system. Then there's the gas giants. Those are [made of] hydrogen and helium - stuff from the solar nebula, caught by the large planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And then Pluto is in this new class of planets, the ice dwarf planets. So it's not only that we will learn about Pluto, but about a new category? Yes, we'll learn about a new category. There should be quite a lot. The International Astronomical Union at the moment recognizes five of those, of which four are in the vicinity of Pluto and beyond. But also interestingly, Ceres, which is one of the asteroids - this is one of these [newly categorized] objects as well - is being visited by another spacecraft this year, which is the Dawn spacecraft. And that will be getting to Ceres in March. When the New Horizons spacecraft starts taking photos or images of Pluto, it will still be about 130 million miles away (209,000,000 km). What can we expect to see? Will we start to get very clear images? The best images we have at the moment of Pluto [look like] a disc with light and dark segments to it, and they're really not very well resolved at all. These are from the Hubble Space Telescope. So in mid May - that's when the images from the Pluto mission will start to get better than Hubble. We'll start to be able to see the surface of Pluto and its features for the first time. Who knows what will be revealed? And we'll also be looking at the moons of Pluto - Charon and several other moons which we know of, and probably more moons will be found, possibly rings. And it will be possible to study something which we do know about Pluto, which is that there is a weak atmosphere. Because Pluto spends some of its time inside of the orbit of Neptune and some of it outside the orbit of Neptune, when it gets far, far away, the atmosphere collapses, we think. So getting New Horizons there to see that is going to be very important. It's a tenuous atmosphere - but mainly, nitrogen and methane - so it's possibly like the Earth's early atmosphere. This is predominantly an American mission. But as a British or European scientist, what do you hope to get from this? Are you going to be able to get your hands on the data? We do have very good collaborators on the team and good relationships with them, and of course the data will be published and available to everybody to look at and compare with other data. Space science is a huge international endeavor, but this particular mission uses all American instruments. Itt's a US spacecraft. There is no European cooperation in the major parts of the instrument team. And that is unlike Dawn - that has a lot of German and Italian scientists involved in the teams, and the camera itself comes from Germany. But that's not the case with Pluto, and I think that was done for cost and political reasons. But it's still of value to all people? Oh, absolutely, yes. They're doing exploration which is looking at the boundaries of knowledge, and this is being done for the benefit of all mankind, including European scientists! In our particular case, we're interested in how solar wind interacts with Pluto. This is something which we've studied with comets and planets in the solar system and other objects for many years. And so putting Pluto into context is going to be very exciting, because the radius of gyration of a charged particle of Pluto is very, very large, and that creates a really kinetic interaction where the particles are very important. There are some commonalities with comets, and so from our work on the Giotto mission and the Rosetta mission, that's going to be very relevant to what we're going to be able to look at with Pluto. Professor Andrew Coates is the head of Planetary Science at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London. He is also the principle investigator of the PanCam instrument on the ExoMars 2018 rover mission. The PanCam team is an international collaboration, including the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which aims to provide wide-angle stereo and high resolution images on the Martian surface and a context for subsurface drilling to look for signs of life on Mars. Author: Interview: Zulfikar Abbany Editor: Conor Dillon
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As we speak, the flu is marauding across America like the deadly virus in Stephen King's The Stand . That's not intended to sound alarmist, it's just the truth: influenza is currently widespread in more than 40 states . There are time-tested ways of fending off infections, like washing your hands regularly, but in addition the vaccine and other time-tested prevention measures, why not try some newfangled approaches? These ten tech-savvy approaches could be just what the doctor ordered: CVS Caremark : If you get bit by the flu bug, there's not much you can do besides getting rest and drinking clear fluids. But there are anti-viral medications that can help, especially if you're particularly susceptible to getting sick, like the elderly. The free CVS Caremark iPhone app has a great drug interaction database that will make sure any these medications won't conflict with any of your regular prescriptions, either by counteracting them or causing more serious complications. CDC FluView : If you want the official take on the flu's spread, look no further than the good doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Beyond being major players in every zombie apocalypse movie in recent memory, the government agency protects the U.S. from health and safety threats and causing 56 pediatric deaths so far this season, you can be the flu is one such peril. Their free iPhone app lets users follow the previous weeks' flu trends and look at activity levels across the country, basing its data on outpatient visits across all 50 states. CDC Influenza : If you're the type who likes to curl up on the couch in alternating fits of shivering and sweating with a deeply informative database of illness information, this is the app for you. Pulling from the CDC's vast cache of expertise, this free iPhone app is geared towards clinicians and healthcare workers, but could help patients, too. A deep dive into the various strains, vaccines, and medications, it's good information to have at the tip of your fingers especially when you can't get off the couch. Google Flu Trends : If you thought Google existed to help you understand the world, you obviously don't know anything about the impending robot uprising Google is designed to study people! In this case, the search engine has been programmed to catalog flu-related search queries, tracking their spread on a map of the U.S. to reveal the sickest state. If you're interested in a more historical perspective, surf over to Google Earth, where you can get a 3-D rendering of the outbreak that stretches back to 2009. Flu Defender : From medication to information, presentation is everything, which is why the user-friendly format of this free iPhone app may be better suited for people looking for flu info. With clearly marked categories such as "Prevention Strategies" and "Symptom Identifier," Flu Defender lets you cut to the chase and find actionable strategies for staying healthy. Or tap the "Flu Smart" button, and be fed a steady diet of flu facts. Here's a fun one: "The influenza virus can live for 2 8 hours on surfaces." You know, like the chair you're sitting in at a coffee shop right now, or on your smartphone, after you pick it up off the table. Everyday Health : Influenza is highly contagious, but to know if you're really in danger of getting it, you're best off with local information. The Everyday Health Flu Map website calculates its data on the county level, taking into account not only the CDC's data, but also social media and online search information, and weather patterns. The result is a quick peek at the current, previous, and next week's flu likelihod, as well as what to do to keep your susceptibility low, like hitting a local spot for a flu shot. Sickweather : Billing itself as "the world's first Doppler radar for sickness," this free iPhone app uses heat mapping to show where the flu biggest hotspots are. A five-day simulated radar shows an animation of how the illness has recently spread, giving you an idea of how the area's general health has progressed over the past week. And with maps for respiratory (like the flu), gastrointestinal, environmental, and childhood illnesses, this app is for more than just influenza. With programmable alerts, it's something you should keep in your phone all year round. Urgent Care 24/7 Medical Help : It seems like 95% of the time you need your doctor when you're ill, it's outside of doctor's hours. This app will set you up with medical professionals on demand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to discuss symptoms and treatment. Just send a request through the app, and a doctor or nurse will call you back in around 15 minutes. That sure beats heading to the local clinic. Zoc Doc : Sometimes, no matter how many heating pads or cold compresses you apply, nothing will do but a doctor's care. Zoc Doc is a web-based service that connects patients with local area physicians, booking the appointments through the app, and even letting you set up your insurance information to make the end billing as easy as can be. If you're crunched for time, you can search by availability, or if you're looking for certain specialties, you can explore their full profile, complete with reviews. Find the right one, and you'll be on the road to recovery in no time. Cue : Not ready for the current flu season (but then again, neither was the flu shot ), this futuristic lab in a box could have a big impact on how illnesses are diagnosed as early as next year. The idea is that users would dip a test stick into their mouth, and then insert it into a Bluetooth-connected gadget that interfaces with an app. By tracking the body on a daily basis, Cue can then determine many things about your current state, like if you're lacking in vitamins, are high or lacking in testosterone, or are ill, for example. The device, which is rumored to sell for $199, has been backed by early Uber investors, Obama election staffers, and even Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Red Bull chief confirms the four-time world champion did not enjoy racing following the engine changes last season. Four-time Formula One world champion Sebastian Vettel considered quitting as he struggled with the sport's new direction last year, according to the German's former Red Bull boss Christian Horner. While teammate Daniel Ricciardo won three races, Vettel, who had been champion for four years in a row and won 13 grands prix in 2013 including nine consecutively, ended the campaign empty handed. "Seb didn't enjoy the regulation changes," Horner told British reporters ahead of this weekend's first pre-season test in Jerez, Spain. "He didn't enjoy the new engine, the feel from the new system, the power unit, the brake by wire, the lack of downforce. You could tell he wasn't happy. He was preoccupied and to compound that teammate won three races. There was that feeling 'Am I enjoying this as much as I thought I was?'" The German has since left Red Bull and joined Ferrari, who also failed to win a race last year for the first time since 1993."It was like someone had taken his toy away. It took him a while to get to grips with that. It was not something he was used to. He went through a period of disillusionment about the direction Formula One was going in. "There was a stage last year when he thought whether he wanted to stop or not, whether he was getting the same level of enjoyment or not and whether or not he wanted to continue." Horner said it would take time to get used to seeing Vettel in Ferrari's red overalls but felt the German was right to seek a change and a new stimulus.
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While a family christens their new, a little boy drops dad's iPhone in
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President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama greet dignitaries during a quick trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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U.S. stocks fell, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its biggest two-day loss in a year, as energy shares plunged and the Federal Reserve cited international risks to the American economy amid concerns about weakness in multinational earnings. Energy companies slumped 3.9 percent as a group after oil retreated. Apple Inc. climbed 5.7 percent after reporting a record $18 billion in quarterly profit, one of the biggest in corporate history. Boeing Co. advanced 5.4 percent as it posted a quarterly profit that beat analysts' estimates. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 1.4 percent to 2,002.24 at 4 p.m. in New York. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 192.88 points, or 1.1 percent, to 17,194.33. The gauge fell 2.8 percent over two days. The Nasdaq 100 Index dropped 0.6 percent, erasing an earlier rally of 1.7 percent. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, known as the VIX, added 17 percent to 19.09, its biggest jump of the year. "The Fed didn't alter in any way any acknowledgment about the recent strength of the dollar," Mark Luschini, the chief investment strategist for Philadelphia-based Janney Montgomery Scott, which oversees about $68 billion in assets, said by phone. "If they do intend to raise interest rates in June and or even in September, and the strength of the dollar continues to be a headwind to multinational corporate profits like we're seeing here this quarter, then that's going to be complicated for where earnings estimates lie at the moment." The Fed also boosted its assessment of the economy and labor market, even as it expects inflation to decline further. Fed officials are confronting divergent economic forces as they weigh the timing of the first interest-rate increase since 2006. Surprisingly strong job gains argue for tightening sooner, while inflation held down by a plunge in oil prices and a cooling global economy provides grounds for delay. The Fed acknowledge global risks, saying that it will take into account readings on "international developments" as it decides how long to keep rates low. Economic Strength Policy makers gathered as recent labor market reports show fresh strength, with the jobless rate at a six-year low of 5.6 percent. U.S. employers hired 252,000 workers last month to cap the biggest annual gain since 1999 with almost 3 million jobs. "The Fed continued to emphasize that any rate hike decisions will be very data-dependent, which has been the norm for quite some time," Joe Bell, a Cincinnati-based senior equity analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research Inc., said in a phone interview. "People are looking closely at earnings, which has been the story of the volatility in the past week or two. Oil and the strong U.S. dollar are also creating a drag on large multinational companies." The S&P 500 has more than tripled from its March 2009 low, buoyed by three rounds of stimulus from the Fed. The index is down 4.2 percent from an all-time high reached in December. Stimulus Programs As the U.S. has ended its bond-buying program, the European Central Bank is expanding its stimulus plan. The ECB announced last week it would spend 60 billion euros ($68 billion) a month starting in March on purchases of debt to ward off the threat of deflation in the euro area. Equities opened higher on Wednesday as Apple and Boeing rallied amid quarterly results, a day after benchmark indexes tumbled on concern that a stronger dollar is eroding profits at large companies. While the dollar's climb is reducing profits at U.S. companies from Procter & Gamble Co. to Pfizer Inc. and Microsoft Corp., more than 77 percent of Standard & Poor's 500 Index members have still beaten analysts' estimates so far this earnings season, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Burger chain Shake Shack (SHAK.N) now expects its initial public offering to be priced at $17-$19 per share, up from $14-$16 expected earlier, valuing the company at up to $674.5 million. The offering of 5 million Class A shares is expected to raise about $95 million, Shake Shack said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The company, which grew out of a hot dog stand in New York's Madison Square Park, is known for its Shackburgers, flat-top hot dogs and eponymous milkshakes and has developed a cult following since it was founded by restaurateur Daniel Meyer in 2001. Private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners LP is Shake Shack's largest shareholder with 26 percent of its common stock. Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group LLC owns 21 percent of Shake Shack, while employee-owned hedge fund sponsor Select Equity Group LP holds 12.3 percent. The New York-based burger chain has 63 outlets, including 36 in the United States. The company's international outlets include those in Dubai, Istanbul, London and Kuwait. Shake Shack's offering follows a string of successful IPOs by casual dining chains last year, including Habit Restaurants Inc (HABT.O), El Pollo Loco Holdings Inc (LOCO.O) and Zoe's Kitchen Inc (ZOES.N). U.S. IPOs, which have been on a tear since 2013, raised more than $93 billion last year, the most since 2000. Shake Shack's shares, which are scheduled to be priced on Thursday after the market closes, are expected to start trading on Friday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SHAK". J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are among the lead underwriters for the offering.
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MELBOURNE, Australia There will be no Williams sisters semifinal at the Australian Open, but the U.S. is guaranteed a woman in the final of this tournament for the first time in five years. Defending champion Stan Wawrinka and world No. 1 Novak Djokovic also won through here while you were sleeping, on the second of two quarterfinal days in Melbourne. Here's the rundown of the action. Keyed in : Just 19 years old, Madison Keys operated with no fear in her first-ever major quarterfinal, taking down Venus 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 in an up-and-down affair. Keys fought through a left adductor injury in the second set, then came back from a 1-3 deficit against the seven-time major winner in the decider. Keys won five of the last six games of the match, denying a family affair in the final four but setting up an all-American semi. Serena soaring : World No. 1 Serena soared through after her sister's losing struggle against Keys, the top seed downing Dominika Cibulkova, a finalist here last year, 6-2, 6-2 in blazing fashion. Williams, however, enters Thursday's semifinal with a malady of her own: She has been fighting a cold the last few days in Melbourne, and told reporters after her win she had been feeling "worse and worse." World No. 2 Maria Sharapova and Ekaterina Makarova won through a day earlier. Djokovic does it - again : Is Djokovic this good anywhere other than Melbourne? The world No. 1 appears to be in his ultimate form inside Rod Laver Arena and Wednesday was at it again, drubbing world No. 8 Milos Raonic 7-6(5), 6-4, 6-2. Djokovic has won this title four times, and has won 30 out of 31 matches in the last five years. He gets Wawrinka in a re-match of their last two classics here from 2013 and 2014, which they have split between them. The tie-break comes on Friday. Wawrinka's Melbourne magic : In the months after he won his maiden Grand Slam title here a year ago, the Swiss struggled, going out in the first round of the French Open and at one point going 9-7 through 16 matches. But Wawrinka has looked back in championship form this fortnight, including on Wednesday when he downed No. 5 seed Kei Nishikori 6-3, 6-4, 7-6(6). Nishikori, the US Open finalist, looked overwhelmed by Wawrinka, particularly from his backhand wing, the world No. 4 walloping his one-handed stroke to avenge a loss to the Japanese star from the US Open. Venus' words of wisdom : Down and defeated, elder stateswoman Venus Williams had warm words of wisdom for Keys, who she lost to in three sets. The "sky's the limit" Williams said when asked of the potential for Keys' career.
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Brian Blair, Rosenblatt Securities, breaks down Apple's better-than-expected results and provides an outlook on the company's cash and products.
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Milos Raonic said Wednesday he felt helpless as he was dismantled by remorseless world number one Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open. Viewed as at the vanguard of the new young breed in men's tennis, the big-serving Canadian eighth seed was neutralised by the power and precision of the seven-time Grand Slam champion in the quarter-finals. The Serbian top seed ran the show, dealing out a 7-6 (7/5), 6-4, 6-2 lesson to Raonic in two hours to set up a semi-final with defending champion Stan Wawrinka. "I just wish I could have played better. But other than that, I think he played well. He took the game and opportunities away from me," Raonic lamented. "He just played a sound match. Nothing I can do other than go back and fix things." The match slipped away from Raonic as Djokovic tightened his grip, breaking the Canadian's huge serve three times while not conceding one break point opportunity in his 15 service games. Raonic could only look on as Djokovic dominated proceedings with precision stroke play on the court where he has won four Australian Open crowns. "He's good at making a play. He does a good job at putting the return deep," he said. "But I think it's not just that aspect. He did a good job also making me always, even if I'd get a short return, have to come up with a pretty good volley and so forth. "It's a combination of everything, not just solely his return." The big-serving 24-year-old, who reached the semi-finals at last year's Wimbledon, was bidding to become the first Canadian man to reach the Australian semi-finals. While he went into Wednesday's match averaging around 25 aces per match, he was restricted to just 15 against Djokovic's rapier returns.
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Handset makers should expect to see their market share in China shrink as the iPhone's popularity grows even bigger there, the managing director at Rosenblatt Securities told CNBC on Wednesday, a day after Apple posted a record $18 billion in quarterly profit. "Apple will have another strong March quarter for iPhone," Brian Blair said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "That will continue to some degree for the rest of the year, but that share will come from somewhere, and it needs to come from Android, who holds the market," he added, referring to rival Google (GOOGL) 's mobile operating system. Apple (AAPL) 's $18 billion first-quarter profit, the largest ever reported by a public company, was driven in part by a 70 percent increase in iPhone sales in China. The next big question comes for Apple in the fall, when investors will get a sense for how saturated the market has become with the iPhone 6, Blair said. He noted that Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that only a fraction of the company's iPhone users has upgraded to the larger handset. "So a lot of the buyers are new. They're coming from Android," Blair said. In the longer term, Apple faces what Blair called "the law of large numbers." Apple's sales of 74.5 million iPhones in the past quarter are approaching the upper limits that former market leader Nokia reached. The difference is that Apple is selling higher-quality phones, which may lead buyers to hold on to them for longer before upgrading, he said. Opportunities exist for Apple in countries where smartphone penetration remains low, he said. He pointed to India, which has 900 million wireless subscribers, most of whom are still on feature phones. "There are still a few geographies around the world, Latin America included, where Apple can see some growth," he said. He conceded that the company is getting to the point at which investors can make an argument that it is heading for slower growth. The next product segment for Apple after its smartwatch launches in April will likely be a television in 2017 or 2018, he said. Blair rates Apple as a buy because he thinks the March quarter will be strong. While he does not expect Apple's profits to match the first quarter, he sees analysts once again underestimating the results. He would start to get nervous about Apple's stock price would exceed $130 a share.
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PARIS (AP) Don't laugh. There's nothing funny about the gambling industry's latest wheeze to sink its teeth even deeper into football and its fans. We're talking here about David Ginola. So silky as a player for Newcastle and Tottenham; so ridiculous now with his car-crash campaign for the FIFA presidency. Ginola has zero chance of unseating Sepp Blatter. FIFA's election and ethics rules will almost certainly keep him off the May ballot. After Thursday's passing of the entry deadline, ''Team Ginola'' should fade away. But that's not the point here. This was about making a splash. In pocketing 250,000 pounds (335,000 euros; US$375,000) from bookmaker Paddy Power for this stunt, Ginola became the latest Trojan horse in the gambling and gaming industry's creeping and creepy embrace of football. ''I'm here today to talk about love'' were the Frenchman's seductive opening words at his campaign launch in London this month. But the targets were our wallets and spending habits, not our hearts. That much was clear from the Paddy Power branding. Bet. Bet again. Bet some more. That is the message that football, more than most other sports, is mainlining into our homes, helped by names like Ginola and teams lending their cachet, stadiums, jerseys and players to the industry that had cash to splash when the 2008 financial crisis hobbled other sponsors. ''It's eyeballs we're after,'' 12Bet executive Rory Anderson, quoted in the Daily Mail, said when the online bookmaker became the name on Hull City's shirt for this Premier League season. And how about this blurb from Sky Bet, title sponsor since 2013 of England's three divisions below the Premier League. It reads like a plug for Fifty Shades of Grey. Sport ''matters more when there's money on it,'' it says. ''There's more passion, more pleasure and more pain.'' Whoa. What ever happened to sport for sport's sake, for the buzz of competition, not a bet? How quaint. That was before online bookmakers offered odds on anything and everything, from match results and goals scored to which team will win the coin toss or take the first corner, and before their relentless advertising. Sports and gambling have, of course, long gone together, feeding off each other's success and growth. Tuning in for results of football betting pools, which offered big jackpots for small stakes, was a Saturday afternoon ritual for many 20th Century English families. But gambling advertising wasn't as in-your-face as now. In the UK, which liberalized gambling advertising in 2007, adults' exposure to gambling commercials on television soared five-fold in eight years to 2012, regulator Ofcom found. The increase was three-fold for children aged 4-15. Asking your kids to make tea during half-time breaks won't shield them from the bombardment, not with gambling ads flashing throughout matches on pitch-side light-boards. Hull against Aston Villa on Feb. 10 will pit two Asian online bookmakers against each other. Villa's shirt sponsor is dafabet, a name that works better in Chinese, where ''dafa'' means ''big wealth.'' Stoke and Burnley players are billboards for Bet365 and Fun88 (another name that plays on the Chinese word to get rich). All this in a sport grappling with the increasing danger of gambling-related match-fixing and with ample examples of gambling-addicted players who frittered away their wealth. One of those is Kevin Twaddle, a former player for Motherwell and other Scottish clubs who told his story in the biography, ''Life On The Line: How to Lose a Million and So Much More.'' He no longer gambles and has delivered talks to other players about the risks. Twaddle takes a very dim view of Ginola's Paddy Power-backed grab for FIFA. ''It's an absolute disgrace,'' he said in a phone interview. ''It's great for Paddy Power. But I mean you're talking about one of the biggest, powerfulest jobs in football and all you're getting to hear about is Paddy Power.'' ''It just makes like a mockery of football.'' Imagine, for a moment, a Paddy Power-financed FIFA president. It won't happen; FIFA's ethics rules should see to that. But the mere thought of the gambling industry even attempting to place a stooge at the very top of football makes the prospect of another Blatter term seem perhaps not quite so bad. And that isn't funny at all. --- John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at http://twitter.com/johnleicester
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Age and credit have a somewhat complicated relationship. Like it often is with personal finance, straightforward questions don't always have simple answers. Does your age affect your credit score? In the most literal sense, no: Your date of birth isn't factored into your credit score. Still, if you're older, you have a better chance at getting one of the highest credit scores than someone in their 20s, because you've had more time to establish a strong credit history. At the same time, it's still possible to have an excellent credit score before you're 25. How Does Age Factor Into Credit? The average age of your credit accounts is one of the five major factors determining your credit score. Say you took out a student loan and opened a credit card at age 18, and they are your only credit accounts. Ten years later, when you're 28 and those accounts are still open, you're doing very well in that category of your credit history. If your best friend of the same age has no loans and opened her first credit card when she graduated college at age 22, her oldest credit account is only six years old, which isn't great as far as a credit history goes. How Do I Improve My Credit Age? Having a 10- or 20-year-old account will help your credit score, but the more newer accounts you have, the lower your average credit age will be. If you're focusing on improving your credit age, try to minimize the number of new accounts you open, as they bring down your average. Opening new accounts also results in a hard inquiry on your credit report, which will slightly hurt your credit score in the short term. As it is with all aspects of your credit score, you need to exercise patience as you work to develop a long credit history after all, you can't do anything but wait for an account to get older. You could benefit from being an authorized user on an older account, because account history is reported based on the age of the account, not when you're added to it. For example, if as a teenager your parents added you as an authorized user on one of their oldest credit cards, you could have a credit history that goes back before you were born. While you're waiting for the average age of your credit accounts to rise, focus on making loan payments on time and keeping your debt levels low, because those behaviors have the greatest impact on your credit score. To see how everything forms the big picture of your financial health, you can get your credit scores for free online. This article originally appeared on Credit.com .
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It didn't take much to throw a wet towel on the recent heat in mortgage applications. Total volume dropped 3.2 percent for the week ending January 23 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The results include an adjustment for the Martin Luther King holiday as well. After huge gains at the beginning of this month, mortgage applications are still up a striking 36 percent from a year ago. "A 3.2 percent weekly decrease, after the two gigantic previous increases, leaves the index in stellar territory. After the past two weeks, I celebrate down 3.2 percent," said Matthew Graham of Mortgage News Daily. The fall in application volume from the previous week was largely due to a slight uptick in mortgage rates. The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($417,000 or less) increased to 3.83 percent from 3.80 percent, with points decreasing to 0.26 from 0.29 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans, according to the MBA. A steep drop in rates since the start of the year pushed refinance applications higher, but even that small rate drop was enough to cool refinances last week by five percent. For loans backed by the government, however, refinances gained. "We are closely watching for the impact of the FHA mortgage insurance premium decrease. This week, it showed up in the refinance numbers," said Michael Fratantoni, chief economist for the MBA. The FHA share of total applications increased to 9.1 percent this week from 8 percent last week. "Conventional refinances were down on the week by comparison," added Fratantoni. Mortgage applications to purchase a home, which are affected less by rates, were essentially flat from the previous week, falling 0.1 percent, and are just one percent higher than the same week one year ago. Sales of both existing and newly built homes improved in December, according to the National Association of Realtors and the U.S. Census, and some real estate agents this month say they are seeing improved buyer traffic. That could bode well for purchase applications in the coming weeks, as buyers need to find a home before obtaining financing.
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Swedish fashion giant H&M said Wednesday net profits for 2014 rose almost a fifth and pledged to speed up its global expansion. Net profits soared 17 percent to 19.98 billion kronor (2.15 billion euros, 2.44 billion dollars) while sales surged by 18 percent to 176.62 billion kronor. The strong earnings came on the back of a massive expansion, with the chain adding 379 stores mainly in the United States and China in 2014, bringing its total network to more than 3,500 outlets in 55 countries. The company said it plans to open 400 more new stores this year, with India, South Africa, Taiwan and Peru among the targeted markets. New online stores in France, Spain, Italy and China also posted strong returns, the group said, adding that similar launches are planned for eight European countries in 2015. "2014 has been a very good year for H&M," chief executive Karl-Johan Persson said in a statement. "Well-received collections for all our brands and continued strong expansion both in stores and online have helped increase our market share," Persson said. However, Persson warned that a stronger dollar would cause costs to rise this year. hh/shc/hmn HENNES & MAURITZ
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1. Should I register for my housewarming? The pros of registering for any occasion (bridal shower, baby shower, wedding) is that your guests can easily see what you want or need. The cons? Since there isn't a standard tradition of registering for a housewarming, you risk offending your guests. If you do decide to register, do not include it on your invitation. 2. But why do so many retailers have this registry category now? Housewarming registries are trending, and sites like MyRegistry.com make it easy to create a list of items culled from your favorite stores. Keep in mind that while this eases stress on anyone purchasing a gift, it still doesn't make the practice right in the eyes of Miss Manners. 3. How can I let people know what I want? The truth is, you shouldn't be telling them! A gift is voluntary (that's what the word means), and it's not part of an admission fee to your fete. Most people will bring a small token to congratulate you on your new home without you asking for it. More from The Nest: 10 things to buy now that you'll keep forever 4. But I'm a single woman who just bought a house; I didn't receive any gifts from a bridal shower or wedding… Even in this case, it's still considered tacky to register for gifts. Our advice: Celebrate your accomplishment with a party where you can share your new space with your favorite people. According to EtiquetteDaily.com, "the rules of a housewarming party are that it is held by the new homeowners to welcome friends and family to their new home, to give tours and receive compliments, and to serve food and have friends help 'warm' their residence with their caring and affection." 5. What information should I put on my invitation? Give your guests the date and time range, and your new address. Don't forget to tell them how they can contact you to RSVP knowing how many guests are attending will help you be fully stocked with food and drinks. 6. I'm attending a housewarming; what sort of gift is appropriate? Your mother will tell you the traditional gifts are bread and salt (yawn), but these days popular gifts range from a bottle of wine and cookware to a monogrammed present with the homeowner's initials on it. Remember: With any occasion, your gift should reflect your relationship with the recipient, so what's appropriate for your best friend is probably not a great gift for your boss. More from The Nest: 10 natural cleaning supplies you'll love 7. What should I do if I really can't afford a gift right now? Has your spring been a marathon of bridal showers, weddings and new babies? Did you just attend what feels like your millionth shower and you're feeling broke? A handwritten note (not an email or a text) congratulating the new homeowner is a thoughtful gesture. 8. Should I have my housewarming party before or after I've furnished my new home? Either! If you throw a party in your new home while it's barely furnished, you have the advantage of lots of open space for dancing and mingling, and you lessen your chances of having your furniture stained from spills. But since the purpose of the party is to welcome your loved ones to your new pad, a furnished and decorated house delivers that "wow" factor. 9. Who should host? It's most common to host your own housewarming, but you can always relinquish your responsibilities to a good friend or family member. Whoever plays host will send out the invitations and plan the festivities, including your cocktails and food. 10. Can a renter have a housewarming party? If you've moved but not bought, just throw a party without the pretenses of it being a housewarming party. Your friends and family can still bring gifts if they want, but they won't feel obligated to buy a present for a "landmark" experience like the purchase of a house.
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NEW YORK ( MainStreet ) Although many business owners spend the last quarter of the year crafting a business plan, February isn't too late to take a serious look at your goals for 2015. Here's a look at five steps to take this month and reflections on the previous year while planning for big changes or improvements. 1. Don't need an entirely new business plan? At least get together and talk. The process of developing a plan can be almost as valuable as the plan itself, especially when you involve key members of your team, says Tracy Benson, chief executive of business consultancy On The Same Page . "When you get everyone together, you ignite and harness that energy and it lays the foundation for accountability," she says. "Everyone will have wildly different and creative ideas, and you're giving them a framework to apply those ideas." A group meeting gives employees enough room to be creative, but with direction. Benson recommends first gathering a small group of decision-makers and looping in other managers and leaders later. "When you meet and talk about goals and put actionable plans in place, the team gets energized about what they should be doing," she says. "They see that they've had input, and suddenly it's not just your business plan, it's everyone's business plan." Read More: 5 Things You Need to Do Now to Find the Right New Job in 2015 Once the talking is done, take a look at what's been discussed and make certain you have assessed measurable objectives in whatever areas are most pertinent to your business: sales, revenue, income, market share, etc. "You've got to have specific commitments you want to make in support of driving your business forward this year," she says. 2. Focus. "Many of us tend to want to take on too much at once. We see a whole ocean of opportunities out there and we want to tackle them all," Benson says. "Instead, list all areas you want to address and home in on three areas of focus you think will move the needle in the most significant way." Develop a simple plan for each of the three areas you chose and phase them out over the course of the year, she suggests. Maintain your focus by enlisting the support you need, whether that's from your internal team or outside advisors. "Remember that part of focusing is to get rid of mental blocks," she says. "Don't think about the 'What ifs,' and don't make excuses." 3. If you're doing "OK," don't keep doing what you're doing. Many business owners' "New Year default" is to keep doing what they did last year, Benson says. "If your company is as successful as you want it to be, then by all means keep doing what you're doing, but if your intention is to grow, expand or get a different result from the status quo, then you need to change. And that doesn't happen by accident. It happens through intention," she says. Even if you would be content staying on pace with where you were last year, consider your employees. They're looking to you for inspiration. "If you want to stay where you are, fine. But you have a team of employees behind you and you're trying to motivate them to go somewhere exciting with you. That's a hard sell if your philosophy is, 'Keep doing what you're doing.'" The first quarter is a great time to establish a "focused tone" for the year, says Steve Moore, director of human resource services at Insperity . If you're looking to get employees excited about where the company is headed, share the vision. "Sharing companywide goals at the beginning of the year helps ensure everyone is on the same page to achieve the company's objectives. It is also a great time to motivate employees, acknowledging the vital role they play in the success of the company," Moore says. In addition to exciting your employees, don't forget your clients, Benson says. "It's important to ask your customers, 'What do you need more of?' 'What would be amazing for you if we did differently?' she says. It's important to bring the voice of your customer into everything that you do." 4. Start with the big picture and create attainable goals. Before outlining individual tasks and divvying up responsibilities for the year ahead, take a step back and look at the big picture, Moore says. Outline long-term goals those that may take a year or more to accomplish and remember to think big. At this point in the year anything is possible. Just don't bite off more than you can chew. "Similar to personal New Year's resolutions, it is tempting to start the year with ambitious goals that may be difficult to achieve," he says. "Instead, set small, realistic goals each quarter that are more likely to be reached and will also help leaders stay motivated throughout the year." 5. Take a look back, a look forward, and don't forget the here and now. Take a look back at what happened in 2014, says David Gilbert, founder and CEO of small business lender National Funding . "Things like oil prices dropping, increased consumer confidence and an improving economy are greatly impacting the upcoming year. Business owners need to assess their business models and determine what works and what doesn't," he says. Also, review any new tax regulations. Retirement contributions, health insurance credits and transportation deductions have all changed since 2014, and could have a major impact on your 2015 taxes. "As a small-business owner, if you assume that tax rules on limits and ceilings remain the same, you risk missing out on important breaks and returns," he says. Additionally, while the filing deadline for 2014 business returns is March 16, if you do not have all the information you need to complete your return, you can request a filing extension, which is Sept. 15. By Kathryn Tuggle for MainStreet
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It's completely horrible outside and so of course you're envisioning your summer retreat, wherever that may be. Be it Greece or Italy (or anywhere else on the continent for that matter), summer is a great time to go to Europe , and Italy is a prime spot for many Americans. Yes, you could make like everyone else and go to Capri or Sardinia . OR you could go a world away to Pantelleria, which sits between Sicily and Tunisia but is actually closer to the latter. The island has long been known as a celebrity hideout , but it has none of the celebrity culture some of the hot spots may have. The largest Sicilian island is rugged and dry (i.e. maybe you shouldn't be going in the dead of summer ), but it's also stunning and untouched. It's known for being so, and it's also known for its capers, its sweet wine varietals (Moscato di Pantelleria and Passito di Pantelleria), its thermal springs and incredible diving. You can fly into the island (though landing at the airport can be a bit tricky ) or take a boat. Rent a moped or car while you're there to really see it all. The island itself isn't rife with activities, and that's sort of the point. Yes, there are quite a few stunning natural attractions (more on that later), but beyond that, the whole place screams of rugged relaxation... while eating the island's famously hyper-local foods. You can and should stay in a local's home , or dammuso, which is a traditional home built from a black stone called obsidian with a white dome-shaped roof. Hang out in one of the island's many coves for great diving and nary a sound around. The arid landscape The port town of Pantelleria The must-sees include Specchio di Venere or Mirror of Venus, a body of water set in a volcanic crater that's actually a thermal spring (as seen from Montagna Grande below). Laghetto delle Ondine is a natural swimming pool that gets hit with salt water thanks to crashing waves . Consider yourself warned. Make haste to Pantelleria!
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If you like soggy food that never seems to brown, just keep doing what you're doing. But, if you've been working, sweating, and slaving away in the kitchen and can't figure out why perfectly good recipes keep letting you down, we are here to help with some simple words to live by. Give your food some space. Never ever will root vegetables, overloaded in a pan in the oven, caramelize and crisp the way you want them to. It just won't happen. Instead, the vegetables will sweat, like old men in a steam room. And no matter how high you turn the heat under your skillet, if that pan is jam-packed with meat, it will never sear to a crisp brown crust. It's going to get wet and gray . That's just the hard truth of the matter. We get why you overcrowd. Cooking in batches takes longer. Pulling out another baking sheet means one more dish to wash. But, it also means the difference between a blah meal and one you'd pay good money for at a swanky restaurant. When a pan, baking dish, cookie sheet or what have you, is packed with ingredients, there's no room left for the moisture that's released from food to escape as steam. Instead, it gets trapped underneath all the other food, collecting as liquid and making everything soggy. In some cases, that collected liquid can hover just above the boiling point, which means you are steaming instead of roasting or searing. That's sog city, folks. The same crowding principle is true for baking. If a perfectly baked cookie is what you're after, give them room to grow and do their thing. The only time this all-too-common cooking mistake is okay with us is when it results in one giant cookie, because, awesome . Not all foods will reward your mistake with a giant heap of deliciousness. Certain foods fair worse than others. If you're cooking mushrooms, eggplant, beef or zucchini, DO NOT CROWD. You will be sorry. Want to read more from HuffPost Taste? Follow us on Twitter , Facebook , Pinterest and Tumblr .
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Rory McIlroy says he'd be focused completely on trying to win a second Dubai Desert Classic title, this week rather than thinking about his upcoming date in a Dublin court. The world number one has fond memories of recording his first win as a professional in what is the oldest golf tournament in the Middle East, and, having finished second in his last three starts on the European Tour, McIlroy is hoping to go one better and add to his 2009 title in the desert. Speaking to the media on the eve of the tournament, McIlroy said: "One win here at the Emirates, but seems every time I come here I have a chance and I play well. It's a great way to start the season. "I've done this the last few years where I've played Abu Dhabi, taken another week off to practise and then come here and play in Dubai. "Looking forward to the week. The course is in fantastic shape. The greens are as good as I've ever seen them, and I feel like my game is in good shape. "I'm very happy with where my game is tee‑to‑green and I put some good work in over the last week on my short game, which I felt needed a little bit of sharpening up from Abu Dhabi. "I've got four days to try and get back on the victory trail and feels like a long time since my last win." On his legal battle with his former management company, which is expected to reach a conclusion in the next couple of weeks, McIlroy said he has consciously tried not to think about it. "To be honest, I've been concentrating on my golf and practice and that stuff is much more important to me than what's going to happen next week," said the 25-year-old from Northern Ireland. "After this tournament's over, I'll have to do my homework a little bit but at the same time, I'm fully focused on this event and golf and try and do the best I can this week. "Of course I will be relieved when this is over. It's not something that I would want anyone to go through. It's a very sort of tedious and nasty process at times. "I'm going to be heading to the States regardless with it off my mind and not having to deal with it or think about it anymore. "It will be nice once it's over and done with." McIlroy has been paired with former world number one Martin Kaymer and England's Andy Sullivan for the first two rounds in Dubai.
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NEW YORK (AP) The Grammy Awards will feature a number of collaborative performances, including Lady Gaga with Tony Bennett and Adam Levine with Gwen Stefani. The Recording Academy said Tuesday that Annie Lennox will also be paired with newcomer Hozier and Jessie J with Tom Jones at the Feb. 8 show in Los Angeles. "Throughout the years, the Grammy Awards has paired musical icons with new, upcoming artists to give fans remarkable performances that can only be seen on our stage," Recording Academy President and CEO Neil Portnow said in a statement. "This year is no different and, once again, promises to bring together unique musical worlds in innovative ways that blend genres and create new artistic boundaries." Gaga and Bennett's duet album, "Cheek to Cheek," is nominated for best traditional pop vocal album, where their competition includes Lennox. Hozier is nominated for song of the year for the hit, "Take Me to Church," while Jessie J is up for best pop duo/group performance for "Bang Bang" with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj. Beyonce, Pharrell and Sam Smith are the Grammy leaders with six nominations apiece. They will all compete for the top prize, album of the year, along with Ed Sheeran and Beck. Smith, Sheeran and Pharrell also will take the stage. Other performers include AC/DC, Madonna, Grande, Eric Church, Common, John Legend, Miranda Lambert and Usher. The 57th annual Grammy Awards will air live from the Staples Center on CBS.
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Sure, many of them are adorable, but would you have predicted that they'd turn into sex symbols and superstars? Is That You, Carrie? As a child, Sarah Jessica Parker acted in local theater, and by the age of 12 she'd landed the title role in the Broadway production of "Annie," but it was still a long way to "Sex and the City." Click through for 25 snapshots of kids before they blossomed into major stars. Lauren Hutton "I was the girl that beheaded dolls," the tomboy from South Carolina told Town & Country last year. Brad Pitt A healthy specimen, to be sure. Still, it's hard to believe he'd grow up to be crowned twice as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. Julia Roberts "Pretty Woman" would come later, but the charm was evident even then. Madonna The Queen of Reinvention described her younger self to Vanity Fair as "a lonely girl who was searching for something." Well, she found it. James Dean Looks more like a future banker than an incipient rebel without a cause. Penelope Cruz The first Spanish actress to win an Oscar recalls "playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them" when she was growing up in Madrid. What better training? Grace Kelly Talk about healthy genes: Her father was an Olympic athlete and her mother taught phys ed at the University of Pennsylvania. John Travolta You should be dancing, yeah! Beyoncé Naughty girl? She looks so nice! Brigitte Bardot This was before she blossomed into BB, the toast of Saint-Tropez and one of the biggest international sex symbols of the '50s and '60s. Angelina Jolie Girl, interrupted: At six, Angelina moved with her mother to the East Coast. Five years later, they returned to L.A., where she would follow in the footsteps of her actor parents. Sandra Bullock Young Sandy sang opera in a children's choir when she was growing up in Nuremberg, Germany. Audrey Hepburn With her striking mother, a Dutch baroness, in the 1930s. Jennifer Lopez Say hello to "Jenny from the block." Mick Jagger Somehow he doesn't look like he was born in a crossfire hurricane. Kate Winslet Can you picture her on the Titanic? Raquel Welch Born in Chicago, Raquel studied classical dance as a little girl, but quit at 19 after a ballet instructor criticized her figure. What could that teacher have been thinking? Kate Hudson No doubt she wishes Goldie had tossed this one. Julie Newmar The fun would come much later, when she turned into Catwoman on "Batman." Cindy Crawford Somehow not the same without that beauty mark. Diana Rigg "Can I be an Avenger when I grow up?" Kate Moss Now 40, Moss transformed from this sweet girl into the face of grunge and heroin chic and the most iconic model of the past 25 years. Catherine Deneuve What becomes a legend most? George Clooney Mr. Handsome.
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A holiday favorite - tender and flaky pumpkin pie.
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Can Kings goalie Jonathan Quick get back on track against the Blackhawks? The guys take a closer look at Wednesday's matchup.
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Defending champion Stan Wawrinka avenged his U.S. Open quarter-final defeat to Kei Nishikori in style with an emphatic 6-3 6-4 7-6(6) to charge into the semi-finals of the Australian Open on Wednesday. The fourth-seeded Swiss has worked his way slowly into the year's first grand slam but put his foot to the floor at a sun-drenched Rod Laver Arena, dominating Nishikori with raw power and compiling an exhaustive highlight reel of cleanly struck winners. Wawrinka's backhand was particularly deadly, picking off the clean-hitting Japanese from all points of the court, but the Swiss was also impressive rushing to the net, a relatively new weapon in his arsenal. Wawrinka made hard work of the tiebreak, blowing five match points after storming to a 6-1 lead, but closed it out on the sixth with an ace to set up a semi-final with the winner of top seed Novak Djokovic and Milos Raonic. (Reporting by Ian Ransom; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
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The guys break down Wednesday's matchup between No. 4 Duke and No. 8 Notre Dame. Will Coach K get win number 1,001?
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DALLAS -- Big numbers from power forward Zach Randolph usually mean good things for the Grizzlies. Tuesday night against Southwest divisional rival Dallas was no exception. Randolph scored 22 points and pulled down 10 rebounds, as Memphis overcame the absence of two starters to roll over the Mavericks 109-90 at American Airlines Center. All-Star center Marc Gasol added 15 points for the Grizzlies, who were without point guard Mike Conley and small forward Tony Allen. Memphis is 11-1 this season when Randolph scores at least 20 points and 22-4 when he records a double-double. BOX SCORE: GRIZZLIES 109, MAVERICKS 90 "You can't say enough about what Zach got going in the second half, but I thought we were sharp," Memphis coach Dave Joerger said. "For coming off the second game of a back-to-back, I thought we played with a lot of force and we forced 14 turnovers in the first half." "They had some uncharacteristic turnovers, too. I kind of feel like they had an off night, but I thought we played really hard and I was very impressed." Midwest Division-leading Memphis (33-12) has won eight of nine games since Randolph's return from injury, with the lone setback being against Dallas last week. "They came in and got a win against us and left a sour taste in our mouth," Randolph said. "We wanted to come here and play good. Just get off to a fast start and compete and that's what we did." The Mavericks (30-16) weren't nearly as sharp this time out. Dallas, which started the day sixth in the Western Conference, has dropped three in a row. The Mavs also trail the season series with Memphis 2-1. Dallas coach Rick Carlisle had an explanation for the recent skid. "Right now, our inability to sustain a high level of full-capacity basketball is our nemesis," he said. "We got off to a great start tonight. We had great intensity in the game. Then we had a couple of turnovers late in the first quarter. We should have come out of that with at least a four- or six-point lead and it's tied." "It took some of the air out of us. Then their second unit stepped up and they played great and we struggled. You've got to give them a lot of credit. They stepped up their game in a big way and we just were poor tonight." Randolph made 10 of 15 shots, including several confidence-draining jumpers as Dallas was trying to rally in the second half. Memphis shooting guard Courtney Lee and reserve guard Nick Calathes each scored 13. Small forward Vince Carter chipped in with 12 points off the bench against his old team. The Grizzlies shot 53.2 percent. The Mavericks were paced by 19 points apiece from forward Chandler Parsons and guard Monta Ellis. Power forward Dirk Nowitzki struggled, scoring just 11 in 28 minutes. Center Tyson Chandler had 10 points and only five rebounds. "We definitely understand that we've got to come in, fix some things and make some adjustments," Chandler said. "This is the first time we've lost three games in a row this season and we're heading into a tough road trip. These games are very important." The bench came up big for the Grizzlies during a second-quarter surge which gave Memphis a lead it wouldn't surrender for the reminder of the night. Led by Calathes and Carter, the backups not only turned up the aggressiveness, but took advantage of Dallas' carelessness with the ball. The Grizzlies went into halftime up 54-44, having outscored Dallas' reserves 26-6. The Mavericks were outshooting the visitors at the break, but 14 turnovers led to 17 Memphis points. Parsons started the game red hot by knocking down his first four shots, including a pair of 3-pointers, for 10 of the Mavericks' first 14 points. The Mavs led throughout the opening quarter, but Calathes scored four points in the final six seconds of the first to tie it at 24-all. NOTES: Dallas owner Mark Cuban said the All-Star voting system is "absolutely, positively broken." He called the low number of votes cast for this year's starters "embarrassing" for league with global appeal. ... Mavericks F Dirk Nowitzki was disappointed to learn that Lakers G Kobe Bryant was undergoing season-ending surgery. "It's tough, but he's a fighter," Nowitzki said. "He'll probably be back from that as well."... Memphis G Mike Conley (wrist) and G Tony Allen (ankle) were both out. ... Every Dallas matchup with Houston this season is the second half of a back-to-back, including Wednesday night on the road. "It's a bad break," Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said. -----------------------------------------------
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Jeff Newberry missed an alley-oop in Tuesday's game against Baylor. Oklahoma State won 64-53.
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NEW YORK They appeared to be scenes from a frozen apocalypse. Streets across the nation's largest city were empty, the only movement the changing traffic lights signaling to cars that weren't there. The subway system was shuttered, the city's pulse rendered still. Hardy souls who braved the snow were threatened with fines or arrest. And it could be the new normal. Though the snowstorm largely missed New York City, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio staunchly defended their unprecedented, stringent restrictions, both saying they believed in landing on the side of caution and suggesting they would take such measures again. "Would you rather be ahead of the action or behind? Would you rather be prepared or unprepared? Would you rather be safe or unsafe?" de Blasio asked Tuesday at City Hall. "To me it was a no-brainer: we had to take precautions to keep people safe." Before the heavy snows even reached New York, officials closed schools, shut down bridges and tunnels, canceled commuter rail service and, for the first time ever in a snowstorm, closed the city's sprawling subway system at 11 p.m. Monday. A travel ban was put in place and drivers caught out on the roads were subject to arrest. Similar restrictions, previously unheard of, were put in place for a pair of hurricanes within the last five years. But the meteorologists whose forecasts informed the region's actions this week were wrong. The storm, while powerful on Long Island and in New England, ended up leaving far less than a foot of snow in New York City. And the decision to lock down the city particularly the decision to close the subways drew significant criticism from some business owners and transit advocacy groups. For both men, mistakes made during previous storms guided their decisions. New York City was caught unprepared for a blizzard that arrived in December 2010 when then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was out of town before the storm struck. It resulted in miles of unplowed roads, stranded ambulances and angry residents stuck in their homes for days. After that debacle, Bloomberg ritualized a show of over-preparedness for future storms. A series of press conferences held before, during, and after storms were conducted in which the mayor, flanked by his commissioners, attempted to exude confidence by delivering an avalanche of statistics to display the city's readiness for the approaching snowstorm or hurricane. De Blasio has done the same, particularly after his administration stumbled on plowing for one storm early last year. Cuomo acknowledged that his decision to act aggressively stems from the historic storm that blanketed Buffalo with seven feet of snow late last year. "We make big decisions based on these weather forecasts," the governor said. "We decided not to close the roads in Buffalo ... and we had people stranded on the roads for 12, 15, 20 hours. You can have a significant loss of life in these situations." There were no reported fatalities in New York City. The city did, however, lose about $200 million in economic activity due to the snow storm and decision to shut down the transit system, but it wasn't a crippling loss, according to a preliminary estimate from Moody's Analytics. But while de Blasio and Cuomo defended their actions, their united front showed a few cracks. They never appeared at a joint press conference, which created the somewhat absurd sight Monday of the two men, who were just five miles apart, delivering similar information in separate press conferences within an hour of each other. And on Tuesday, de Blasio revealed that his administration only received word that the subways which are under the state's control were being shut down mere minutes before Cuomo made the public announcement. He declined to second-guess the decision but made clear he wanted its repercussions studied. "It was a very big move and certainly something we would have liked to have had more dialogue on," de Blasio told reporters. "I think that's a big decision, an unprecedented decision, that absolutely should be evaluated after the fact."
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VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) Frederick Andersen had to make only 17 saves in his third career shutout as the Anaheim Ducks defeated the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 Tuesday night. Matt Beleskey, Kyle Palmieri, Rickard Rackell and Patrick Maroon scored for Anaheim (32-10-6), which sits atop the NHL's overall standings. The Ducks have won six straight and eight of nine. The Ducks are 3-0-1 against the Canucks this season and 9-0-1 over the last 10 versus their Pacific Division rivals. All three of Andersen's shutouts have come this season. Ryan Miller stopped 20 shots for Vancouver. With his team up 2-0 after 40 minutes, Rackell put things out of reach at 9:20 of the third period, firing a shot from just inside the Vancouver blue line that deflected off the stick of Canucks defenseman Frank Corrado and in off the crossbar for his fourth of the season. Maroon scored his fifth of the season into an empty net in the final minute. Held to 12 shots through two periods in the first game for both teams since the All-Star break, the Canucks didn't muster much more offense in the third on a night when Andersen's crease was rarely threatened. Part of the problem was Vancouver's anemic and disjointed power play, which went 0 for 3 and is 2 for 28 over the last nine games. Anaheim led 1-0 after the first and doubled that lead at 7:19 of the second on a delayed penalty with the Canucks already short-handed. Palmieri came down the right side and fired home his 10th of the season through Miller's legs, a shot the Vancouver goalie probably should have stopped. Canucks forward Derek Dorsett left the game a few minutes earlier with an upper-body injury after taking a hit from Ryan Kesler and did not return. Replays appeared to show that Kesler, who was dealt from Vancouver to Anaheim in the offseason, made contact with Dorsett's head on the play. The Canucks played at home for the first time since Jan. 10 after going 3-2 on their road trip prior to the All-Star break. Nick Bonino had Vancouver's best chance early when he rang a shot off the post behind Andersen. Anaheim opened the scoring at 13:43 of the first period thanks to Beleskey's 18th of the season on a play Miller will also want back. Beleskey unloaded a slap shot from the wing off a rush and Miller could only get a piece of it with his glove before the puck fluttered into the top corner. Miller robbed Andrew Cogliano on Vancouver's first power play with a great glove save after a turnover in the Canucks end. NOTES: The Canucks haven't scored at home since the first period of a 3-1 loss to Florida on Jan. 8, a span of more than eight periods. ... The Canucks were without defenseman Kevin Bieksa, who broke his left hand in the final game before the All-Star break. The 33-year-old Bieksa had surgery and is expected to miss six to eight weeks. ... The Canucks and Ducks play the final game of their season series March 9 at Rogers Arena. ... Vancouver continues its six-game homestand Friday against Buffalo. ... Anaheim visits the San Jose Sharks on Thursday.
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Journey to the frontier of food and you'll find a 3D printer, spewing out chocolate. While traditional cooking isn't going anywhere, you can count on 3D printed foods eventually finding a place in our world. Researchers around the world are fiddling with ways to use 3D printers to make food. Their efforts could one day aid nutrition and sustainability. So far most of the work is in printing sugar and chocolate . And consumers can't just go out and buy an affordable 3D printer to make dinner tonight, let alone dessert. But the growing momentum and early creations hint at something that will change the way we eat. "I don't see this as a novelty. I see it as something that really will become a part of the culinary fabric for years to come," said Liz von Hasseln, the creative director of the Sugar Lab at 3D Systems. "I think the way that happens really powerfully is when it impacts kind of the cultural ritual of eating which is actually a really powerful part of being a person in the world." Here are five interesting ways the precision of 3D printers can be used to make foods: 1. Wedding cake toppers For those who want their special day to be especially unique, 3D printing is here to help. Why have the same old plastic figurine of a bride and groom on your cake when you could have one 3D printed that is an exact replica of the couple? There are other ways to be creative and personalized. Here's a topper from the Sugar Lab that matches a bride's veil. 2. Food that's easy to swallow, but looks good For senior citizens with chewing or swallowing problems, they're often forced to eat foods in puree form. "Those blobs of puree that they get on a plate don't look very appetizing and as a result these people which already have problems eating don't eat enough because it doesn't look very attractive," said Kjeld van Bommel, a research scientist at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research . "They get malnourished in certain cases, which then leads to all sorts of medical conditions." Van Bommel and other researchers have begun to take carrots, peas and broccoli, mash them up and then 3D print them. Then they're softer, but hold their shape due to a gelling agent. The 3D-printed vegetables are currently being served at retirement homes in Germany. 3. Customized nutrition Currently there's a focus on form, color and flavor, but the exactness 3D printing allows could deliver exact dosages of vitamins or drugs. "We can see a time when you might be wearing technology that would be sensing what your body needs at any given time, whether you're an athlete or whether you have a medical condition or whether you're elderly," von Hasseln said. "And that could theoretically link up to your printer at home and when you get home a specialized meal could be waiting for you that provides exactly what your body needs." "You'll be able to say when I wake up in the morning I want the printer to print my breakfast and I want it to have the right amount of trans fats, whatever we need," said Hod Lipson , the director of Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab. "This is where software meets cooking and the possibilities are really limitless." 4. Sustainable foods Van Bommel is researching whether alternative protein sources from algae and insects could be transformed into interesting foods with a texture people will like. "If Western consumption levels of meat would apply to the whole world we would have a huge problem," he said. "We would not be able to have so many cows. Where would you stick all these cows and what grass would they eat?" 5. Cocktail garnishes It's possible to 3D print a sugar lattice that a mixologist inserts into the glass. The rest of the cocktail ingredients are chosen with respect to the impact of the sugar, which melts into the drink. "It adds to the kind of performance that mixologists are interested in. That pomp of serving a custom cocktail," said von Hasseln. She describes her favorite 3D creations as ones like this, that merge the traditional world of food with 3D printings capabilities. Her company will begin selling a 3D printer for food later this year. With a price tag of about $20,000, it's expected to appeal to culinary professional, not average consumer. 3D Systems is opening a custom bakery in Los Angeles this summer to serve as a showroom and event space to educate visitors about 3D printed food. She expects one day we'll be able to 3D print other edibles such as starches, proteins and spices.
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The best ideas for color, cabinets, appliances, accessories, and more! Color: Blue "I wanted this jolt of color to emphasize that the kitchen is the joyful heart of the house," says designer Christina Rottman. To achieve it in this Montecito, California kitchen, a blackened umber glaze was applied to the cabinets, then painted over with a turquoise glaze. Buffing, stippling, and scraping gave the cabinets a timeworn look. Countertops are limestone. Color: Purple Designer David Kaihoi used purple on the walls of the dining area outside of the kitchen in his family's small New York apartment. The velvet-covered banquette serves as plush seating at the dining table, draped in purple burlap from Elegant Fabrics. The Kaihois' three-year-old daughter sits in the red Tripp Trapp high chair by Stokke. Walls are Purple Haze by Benjamin Moore. Color: Yellow Kitchen designer Mick de Giulio created a homey kitchen with a retro feel in this Chicago home using yellow paint on the walls. The walnut floor, hand-scraped to give it even more character, changes to a chevron pattern in the adjoining breakfast room. The yellow paint, Benjamin Moore's HC10, unifies both rooms. Color: Gray Don't let the minimalist design fool you. This sleek, gray kitchen in Lake Bluffs, Illinois by Alexander Adducci from Bulthaup has it all it's just that so much is hidden away. Color: Neutral Designer Susan Ferrier designed a neutral kitchen for this tranquil Alabama townhouse. "You don't want the eye to stutter in a small space," Ferrier says. "You want it to move naturally from one thing to the next, from similar color to similar color, from shape to shape." Color: Red In a New York City kitchen designed by Carey Maloney and Hermes Mallea, the Burgundy La Cornue Chateau 150 range is the kitchen's focal point and showstopper. "Everything else recedes into the background," Maloney says. "I mean look at that stove doing its thing you don't need any more statements." Color: Black Dark cabinetry painted Benjamin Moore's Midsummer Night creates a classic Edwardian feeling in the kitchen of this California home by designer Stephen Shubel. Spin barstools from Crate & Barrel; light fixtures from Summer House; faucets by Waterworks. Color: Pink "My style of decorating is, 'I love this, I love that, let's put it all together and make it work,'" says designer Krista Ewart. This beach house on Balboa Island, California sports a cheery pink refrigerator, curtains, lamp, and artwork. Color: Green The kitchen in a New York City apartment designed by Miles Redd is small, but owner Tom Mendenhall has no trouble making braised short ribs for eight in it. Cabinets are lacquered in Bamboo Leaf by Fine Paints of Europe, as was the roller shade by Manhattan Shade & Glass, which erases an exhaust unit. Even the Sub-Zero refrigerator is painted green. Color: Mint Folding windows open the kitchen up to the patio in a 1928 cottage designed by Kathryn M. Ireland. Custom tiles from Mission TileWest. Pendant lights from Liz's Antique Hardware. Owner Ursula Brooks says of the green color, "I didn't want the white house. Everyone was doing white, and it can be incredibly stylish. But this house is funky. It's not perfect, so color seemed the right thing to do." Color: Burnt Orange The hand-forged iron Chauvin lanterns from Dessin Fournir were painted white inside to reflect more light onto the island in a Hillsborough, California, kitchen deisgned by Melanie Coddington. Shaws Original fireclay apron sink from Rohl. Faucet from Rocky Mountain Hardware. Bosch dishwasher. Benjamin Moore Aura in Salsa Dancing on cabinets and Oatmeal on walls. Color: White Design consultant Ellen O'Neill used white to create a serene cooking space in her Bridgehampton, NY house. "White equals calmness in the kitchen," O'Neill says. Lighting: Industrial "Everybody has a version of old light fixtures now, but I wanted something you didn't see in every other kitchen," designer Dan Doyle says of the lighting in a Napa Valley kitchen. These, from Obsolete, were found on 1stdibs.com. Lighting: Basket Lanterns Overscale willow basket lights from South of Market help define the breakfast area in a large kitchen in an Atlanta house decorated by Kay Douglass. Tones of gray reappear in the curtain fabric by Lewis & Sheron Textiles and the Dual Seat Counter Bench by Lee Industries. Faucet by Waterworks. Sub-Zero refrigerator. Mirror from South of Market. Lighting: Overscale The scale of the chandelier by Tim Adams, from Savannah's Paris Market, and of the antique étagères, from Charleston's South of Market, creates drama in Mary Jo Bochner's Savannah, Georgia, kitchen. Lighting: Chandelier A crystal chandelier and high-gloss kitchen cabinets painted Farrow & Ball's Pitch Black "remind me of Paris apartments and grand French style," designer Tobi Tobin says of the kitchen in her Hollywood Hills farmhouse. Lighting: Nature-Inspired A showstopping twig chandelier from Hudson Home brings a natural element, and some whimsy, inside an upstate New York house designed by Charles O. Schwarz III. Walls and ceiling are Slipper Satin by Farrow & Ball. Lighting: Table Lamp The kitchen in Stephen Shubel's small California cottage has an antique gilded lamp on the counter. The striped lampshade gives the space an elegant and classic touch. Lighting: Floral Jonathan Adler covered this Westchester kitchen's Norman Cherner counter stools and Trans.Luxe pendant light in Alan Campbell's Potalla in Jungle Green "that's sort of crisply modern and floral-viney at the same time - perfect for the country." Lighting: Brass Inspired by the blue-gray veining on the Silestone countertops, designer Matthew Quinn chose blue-gray subway tile and then warmed up the cool colors and the stainless steel appliances with brass trim in the Kips Bay Decorators Show House kitchen. "It's a feminine touch, like the pretty mullions on the armoires, and it balances the masculine dark woods so the kitchen appeals to everyone," he says. "People kept telling me, 'Put a bed in this room and I could live here.'" Lighting: Vintage Vintage pendants hung at different heights provide ambient and task lighting in a Mount Kisco, New York, kitchen. The dark brass schoolhouse lights were found at Scherer's Architectural Antiques. "The homeowner is a serious cook," designer Young Huh says, "and she wanted that Wolf range" it has six burners, a double griddle, and two ovens. Farmhouse table from Royal Port Antiques. Lighting: Sparkle In the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment designed by Amanda Nisbet, Tom Dixon Mirror Ball pendants provide sparkle. Cabinets: Hidden Appliances In Ina Garten's New York apartment, a Bosch dishwasher, a Liebherr refrigerator, and a Sub-Zero freezer are tucked beneath the countertop, creating more counter space in a small galley kitchen. Architecture by Richard H. Lewis. Cabinets: Stacked Double your storage by having your cabinets extend all the way to the ceiling. Designer Jay Jeffers did just that in this Sonoma, California home to take advantage of the room's height. Cabinets: Rustic Wood A La Cornue stove and custom hood with copper accents command attention in the kitchen of a Northern California house designed by Will Wick. Fiddlestick tiles by Ceramic Tile Design. Cabinets: Mirrored Designer Jonathan Berger added some glamour to this Brooklyn townhouse kitchen by putting antiqued mirrored glass on the cabinet doors. The reflective paneling also helps to enlarge the small space. Cabinets: Deep Drawers House Beautiful contributing editor Frances Schultz choose low, pull-out shelves in lieu of lower cabinets in her East Hampton cottage. Handy for storing pots, pans, mixing bowls, and more, they also mean less hunting around on your knees. Cabinets: Custom Designer Stephanie Stokes meticulously designed the custom cabinets for her tiny New York kitchen so that everything would fit. Four-inch-deep drawers, with slides along the sides rather than the bottoms, hold spices, tea, hot pads, and assorted cooking paraphernalia; slots provide tidy storage space for cookbooks and serving trays. Cabinets: Glass In this white Connecticut kitchen, designer Joan Schindler choose uneven, restoration glass for the upper cabinet doors. The glass fronts help the space feel more open and let you see inside, too. Cabinets: Fabric Panels "I really did it just to shake things up. Cabinet after cabinet, door after door gets boring. And I love that green stripe," says designer Shannon Bowers of the cabinet in this Dallas, Texas kitchen. Cabinets: Painted Interior In a Long Island, New York, kitchen designed by Stephen Sills, the deep blue interior Benjamin Moore's Blue Marguerite is a lovely surprise inside upper cabinets painted the color of vanilla ice cream. Porcelain knobs from LB Brass. Cabinets: Raised In a Park Avenue apartment designed by Eric Cohler, raised cabinets from Smallbone make for easy cleaning in the kitchen. Cabinets: Hidden Appliances The refrigerator blends in with the rest of the New Jersey kitchen designed by Caitlin Wilson. "Originally, it stood to the left of the range, but refrigerators have a way of overwhelming a space," she says. "So we decided to move it to another wall, where we could integrate it into the cabinetry more unobtrusively. Then we designed a hutch to fit into the spot where the refrigerator used to be. It makes that area feel much more open, since it has glass-fronted doors instead of solid ones. And it's a decorative piece. Aesthetically, it gives the room a focal point." Backsplash: Fabric In a New York City kitchen by Incorporated Architecture & Design, a length of Lee Jofa's Lauretta fabric that's sandwiched between glass becomes a delightful backsplash. Backsplash: Romantic Tile Above the countertops and stove of this California kitchen by designer Erin Martin, the backsplash is clad in a romantic blue-and-white French tile from Country Floors. Backsplash: Classic Black Black glazed tile from Compas Stone makes a graphic backsplash in this California kitchen designed by Chris Barrett. Backsplash: Blue and White In a Lake Michigan house designed by Martin Horner, the kitchen backsplash, from Urban Archaeology, is beautiful and practical. Open shelves for display break up the cabinetry in the kitchen. Blue mercury-glass pendants from Gallery L7 pick up the color theme. English sabre-leg counter stools from the Sterling Collection. Backsplash: Chevron An entire wall of the kitchen is clad in Calacatta Gold marble tiles from Kenny & Company and laid in a chevron pattern for extra drama in a Birmingham, Alabama, kitchen designed by Doug Davis and Hannon Kirk Doody. Simple slabs of the same marble cover the countertops and island. The cabinet's distressed louvered doors with bronze Cremone bolt hardware, a custom design, add a feeling of age to the room. Custom cabinetry is painted in Benjamin Moore's White Dove with Lucite knobs and pulls from Decor Island. Range and hood, Wolf. Backsplash: Subway Tile In traditional houses, kitchens were simply where you cooked. Today, they're where you live. Like James Radin's kitchen design in Something's Gotta Give (see the scene on the TV, upper right), this one opens up to a major living area. Radin chose the black Windsor chairs for contrast "like a punctuation mark" in the creamy room, painted White Dove by Benjamin Moore. Tiles, sinks, and faucets are by Waterworks. Stone and wall oven, warming drawer, microwave, and hood are Viking. The hand-planed, slightly distressed floors are stained antique walnut. Kitchen Island: Vintage Chest Designer Annie Brahler upgraded a vintage demilune chest by adding rear cabinets and a marble top to create the central island in the kitchen of her Jacksonville, Illinois, Victorian. Stainless-steel range and hood by Thermador. Kitchen Island: Architect's Table A pair of architect's drafting tables, found at a thrift store and modified with glass on top, now serve as an island in the Bridgehampton, New York, kitchen of designer Eldon Wong. Kitchen Island: Dual Textures Carole Lalli, former editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, designed this butcher-block-and-marble island in her Connecticut kitchen. "The really large island is because my daughters cook with me when they visit, and my husband is America's best prep cook." Kitchen Island: Reclaimed Wood A new kitchen looks lived-in thanks to the reclaimed wood on the island, beams, and shelves. Vintage armchair covered in a Barclay Butera fabric. Phoenix Carbon stools, CB2. Pendants, Home Depot. Kitchen Island: Steel In a natural and modern Sonoma house, the steel island is topped with Pietra Grigia granite set into a metal frame. Barstools by Holly Hunt. Custom light fixture. A recessed oak cabinet was wire-brushed and stained black to echo the gunmetal finish on the island. "I like to use black in all my interiors," says designer Rela Gleason. "It's like an exclamation point." Kitchen Island: Working Space A 12-foot-long oak island allows for multiple cooks in the kitchen of an East Hampton, New York, cottage decorated by Robert Stilin. The painted floor echoes the stripes throughout the house. Floors: Graphic Design In a Charlotte, North Carolina, house designed by Lindsay Coral Harper, the kitchen's dark brown floors were transformed with a large geometric pattern, painted by Jay C. Lohmann. Floors: Bold and Colorful Do you swoon over retro details? Designers William Diamond and Anthony Baratta mixed old and new in this colorful kitchen. The Italian lamps are circa 1960, and the island is custom-made. Accessorize with classic appliances, like a colorful KitchenAid mixer. Floors: Terra-Cotta Tiles In a New Jersey kitchen, Dan Ruhland installed Parefeuille Peach antique terra-cotta flooring from Exquisite Surfaces. Floors: Striped "Tomato-soup red" walls and hand-painted striped floors pack a lot of personality into Liza Pulitzer Calhoun's Palm Beach kitchen. Brown floor paint is Benjamin Moore's Bittersweet Chocolate. Floors: Green "This is a working kitchen, not a place to congregate," designer Jeffrey Bilhuber says of a historic New York house. Woodwork is painted Pratt & Lambert's Pacific; the floor is Benjamin Moore's Courtyard Green. The scored-plaster walls and ceiling evoke the scratch coat under the Delft tiles in the kitchens of New York's Dutch settlers. Vintage lamps are mounted above salvaged sinks and a glass-paned refrigerator from True Manufacturing.
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Brendan Rodgers has criticized Chelsea striker Diego Costa for appearing to stamp on two Liverpool players during the League Cup semifinal. The Spain international went unpunished from referee Michael Oliver despite seeming to stand on Emre Can and Martin Skrtel in separate incidents during the 1-0 extra time win which sent his side through to the final of the competition. And Rodgers was not happy with the way the striker acted in the game, slamming him for his violent behavior. "He's an outstanding footballer," the Liverpool manager told Sky Sports. "He obviously has this edge to him and we've seen the two incidents. On Emre Can that was poor, he could easily have hurdled over the player and it could have been nasty. "And with Martin Skrtel again, there's no need to do it, he's clever enough. It was poor by him." Liverpool was held to a 1-1 draw in the first-leg of the tie with the Blues and after a goalless 90 minutes on Tuesday, Branislav Ivanovic headed in the winning goal in extra time to send the Reds crashing out. Rodgers insists his side deserved to win the tie overall, stating that Chelsea was carried through by the excellent form of goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois. "I think we were the better side over the two games," he said. "I think the goalkeeper has won the the tie really. Some of our play was very good and we created chances to score a couple of goals. Their keeper made a couple of very good saves and ultimately won them the tie. "The players were dead on their feet at the end. For us to be successful it has to hurt at times as well. I thought we gave chelsea a lot of problems but it wasn't to be."
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LOS ANGELES (AP) -- For one entertaining half, Wayne Ellington and Lakers rookie Jordan Clarkson outscored and outplayed Washington's star backcourt of John Wall and Bradley Beal. The Wizards gathered themselves at halftime and comfortably avoided an embarrassing upset. Wall had 21 points, 13 assists and nine rebounds, and Washington rallied from a 19-point deficit to send Los Angeles to its ninth straight loss, 98-92 on Tuesday night. Beal scored 19 points for the Wizards, who won their fifth straight over the Lakers with a tenacious fourth quarter after falling far behind in the first half of their third stop on a four-game West Coast trip. Washington's locker room was an unhappy place at half, and the Wizards' guards took it personally. BOX SCORE: WIZARDS 98, LAKERS 92 ''We underestimated them way too much,'' Beal said. ''We were surprised how confident they were coming in. Given their record, we expected it to be an easy game, and they did a great job.'' Paul Pierce sat out for the Wizards with a sore left big toe, but Wall played on despite a sore Achilles tendon, a daylong migraine headache and another aggravated ankle after he stepped on a cameraman late in the game. ''I'm just a competitive person,'' Wall said with a shrug. ''I'm just a guy that doesn't want to let my guys down. ... I don't like to sit out games. I sat out too many (in) my first three years.'' Ellington scored a career-high 28 points and Clarkson had a career-high 18 for the Lakers, who are on their longest skid since April 1994. The Lakers' inexperienced starting backcourt still played exceptionally well against the Wizards' dynamic duo, with Ellington and Clarkson combining for 33 points in the first half. ''We were moving the ball, getting to the rim and getting easy shots,'' Clarkson said. ''In the third quarter, we started missing shots, made a couple of turnovers, and they just started playing in transition. John Wall is hard to stop when that happens. He's fast. He's one of the fastest players I've ever played against.'' The Lakers could set plenty of new lows for the rest of this season without Kobe Bryant, who will have what's likely to be season-ending surgery Wednesday on his torn right rotator cuff. Their new backcourt has started just three games together. After Bryant was injured, coach Byron Scott replaced veteran point guards Ronnie Price and Jeremy Lin with Clarkson, the rookie second-round pick out of Missouri. After a rough start in the last two losses, the duo clicked immediately against Wall and Beal. Ellington and Clarkson scored 11 points apiece in the first quarter, and Ellington made his first six shots while pacing the Lakers to a 49-30 lead in the second quarter. ''I made up my mind I'm going to come out aggressive,'' Ellington said. ''We are a team that needs to be hungry.'' TIP-INS Wizards: Martell Webster left the game in obvious pain in the third quarter after banging knees with Lin. Webster, who committed a foul on the play, struggled to put weight on his right leg. ... Redskins WR DeSean Jackson attended the game. The star wideout is a Southern California native who attended Long Beach Poly. Lakers: The team paid tribute to Jerry Buss on what would have been his 82nd birthday, handing out commemorative rings and airing video tributes to the late owner throughout the game. ... The Lakers had won 33 straight games in which they led by at least 19 points. ... Ed Davis scored 14 points off the bench, but starter Ryan Kelly managed just one point in 20 minutes. HISTORIC LOW The Lakers (12-34) hadn't dropped nine games in a row since losing 10 straight to close the 1993-94 season under coach Magic Johnson. Vlade Divac, Nick Van Exel and Anthony Peeler were the Lakers' top scorers that season, which also was the final year of James Worthy's Hall of Fame career. SWAGGY SIDELINED Nick Young didn't play after spraining his right ankle in practice on Monday. Scott hopes the streaky shooter will be available Thursday after another day of rest. UP NEXT Wizards: At Phoenix on Wednesday. Lakers: Host Chicago on Thursday.
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Have doctors, therapy and pills had their day in helping to wean people off addiction? Shopping vouchers and online social networks may be powerful, modern tools to help people quit smoking and lose weight, two unusual experiments suggested Wednesday. Pregnant women promised vouchers were much likelier than non-rewarded peers to kick the smoking habit, a study in Scotland showed. And American researchers found that people shed more kilos the more online friendships they formed with fellow weight-watchers. Both projects sought to find innovative and cost-effective ways of tackling lifestyle behaviours that are inflicting an ever-heavier toll in lives lost and healthcare costs around the world. In the Scottish study, published in The BMJ, researchers offered 612 pregnant smokers in Glasgow free nicotine replacement therapy and professional quitting aid. Half the volunteers were also promised 400 pounds (534 euros or $607) in shopping vouchers. A first voucher of 50 pounds was earned for showing up for a meeting with a professional and setting a quit date, another 50 pounds for not smoking for four weeks, another 100 pounds for 12 weeks and 200 pounds at 34-38 weeks. Saliva or urine tests were used to confirm abstinence from cigarettes. "Significantly more" of the voucher recipients stopped smoking -- 69 out of the first group of 306, compared to 26 from the non-rewarded half, said the study -- 23 percent and nine percent respectively. "After 12 months, 15 percent of women who were offered financial incentives remained off cigarettes compared to only four percent" of the other group, said a statement. Most of the women were from lower-income categories, but study co-author David Tappin of Glasgow University told AFP the idea of a financial incentive "seems to work in all groups". Scaling up the experiment would cost lots of money -- but the bill should ultimately be far cheaper than the soaring cost of smoking-induced foetus and infant deaths and illness, the team argued. Some 5,000 miscarriages a year can be attributed to smoking during pregnancy in Britain alone, they added. In the other study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers in the United States looked at more than 2,000 people who joined an online weight management (OWM) social networking site. - Health arsenal's 'new tool'- After six months, people with a single contact reported having lost on average 4.1 percent of initial body weight, rising to 5.2 percent for those with two to nine friends. It rose further to 6.8 percent for those with a bigger group of contacts, and a whopping 8.3 percent for those with the highest connectivity. Previous research had found that meetings in real life, where like-minded people offer each other tips and support, are highly effective against bulging waistlines. But cyber support, too, may be an answer, the authors said. "OWM programmes hold the potential to foster the spread of weight loss among large numbers of people at low cost," they wrote. "It is essential to continue exploring and optimising this important new tool in the arsenal of public health interventions." Over half a billion adults worldwide are considered obese, a condition closely linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer, said the study.
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Matt Ufford breaks down the Super Bowl XLIX matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots.
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Syrian opposition figures and representatives of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad began talks in Moscow Wednesday aimed at restarting long-stalled peace negotiations to end the country's brutal war. The 32 members of various opposition groups tolerated by the authorities in Damascus and six members of the official Syrian delegation led by the ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Jaafari met at 0700 GMT, one of the opposition participants told AFP. The Kremlin-sponsored talks were not expected to yield a major breakthrough as the main opposition group, the exiled National Coalition, has refused to attend.
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For defeating Venus Williams at the Aussie Open, we give 120 Seconds of Glory to 19-year-old Madison Keys.
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Prepare to awwwww.
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The college basketball regular season has about six weeks left and AP has a look at player of the year candidates. Like last season, there are a couple of front-runners and a handful of players who could make a run at the award with a strong finish. Here's the way it's shaping up as the season heads toward the final stretch: Jahlil Okafor, Duke. The list starts with him for a reason. The 6-foot-11 freshman was a preseason All-American and has lived up to expectations, putting up big numbers for one of the nation's best teams. Okafor leads the fourth-ranked Blue Devils with 19.9 points and 9.4 rebounds per game. He's shooting nearly 67 percent from the floor and has a good eye for passing out of double teams, which he sees a lot. He has been a handful at both ends of the floor and arguably the nation's most dominant player. Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin. Another preseason All-American who has played like one. The 7-foot senior returned to Madison after leading the Badgers to the Final Four last season and has done nothing to hurt his NBA stock after skipping a chance to leave early. Kaminsky leads No. 5 Wisconsin with 17.2 points, 8.2 rebounds per game and is shooting 53 percent, including 40 percent from 3-point range. Put a smaller player on him, Kaminsky will go down in the post. Beef up against him and Kaminsky will take them outside. Delon Wright, Utah. Wright is one of the most dynamic players in college basketball. The 6-foot-5 senior swingman can get to the rim against just about anyone and is an adept long-range shooter, averaging 14.6 points on 53 percent shooting - 31 percent from the 3-point arc. Wright also is a superb facilitator, averaging 6 assists per game, and isn't afraid to go in and get rebounds, averaging 4.3. The 11th-ranked Utes are on the rise and Wright has been a big part of it. Jerian Grant, Notre Dame. After missing the second part of last season due to an academic issue, Grant has played like he's trying to make up for lost time. The 6-foot-5 senior leads the eighth-ranked Irish with 16.8 points and 6.1 assists per game, and is tied for 10th nationally in assists-to-turnover ratio at 3.43. If you haven't seen his dunk against Georgia Tech yet, check it out. Willie Cauley-Stein, Kentucky. The 7-foot junior doesn't get the minutes many of the nation's other best players do because of the Wildcats' platoon system. He still manages to be a dominant force for the team's No. 1 team. Cauley-Stein skipped a shot at the NBA after missing the final three games of the 2014 NCAA tournament with an ankle injury and has probably improved his stock this season. Exceptionally athletic for his size, he can shoot over smaller defenders and take the ball to the basket, where he usually finishes with a dunk. Cauley-Stein is even more troublesome for opponents as the anchor of the nation's best defensive team with long arms that swat a lot of shots. Justin Anderson, Virginia. The No. 2 Cavaliers are one of two remaining undefeated teams in Division I and Anderson is the motor that makes them go. Built like a linebacker at 6-6, 230 pounds, the junior can bull his way through opponents or stroke it from long range after greatly improving his 3-point shooting. Anderson leads the Cavaliers with 13.9 points while averaging 4.4 rebounds. He's shooting 50 percent and his 3-point shooting is up to 51 percent after shooting just under 30 percent last season. A few other players who might have a shot at player of the year with a strong finish: Stanley Johnson, Arizona; D'Angelo Russell, Ohio State; Georges Niang, Iowa State; Kyle Wiltjer, Gonzaga; Montrezl Harrell, Louisville.
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The human race has deep underlying fears about technology and the lives their children will lead and this can be seen in all places -- in the negative yields in bond markets, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller told CNBC. "I think fears have been growing for years that represent the willingness of people to bid up bond prices," he told CNBC Wednesday. "They are worried about their future. They are worried not just about next year, they are worried about the next twenty years, the next forty years. So they are desperately trying to provide for that, they'll even accept negative yields." Shiller won the Nobel prize for economics in October 2013 for his research that has improved the forecasting of long-term asset prices and helped the emergence of index funds in stock markets. He was awarded the 8 million crown ($1.25 million) prize alongside fellow economists Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen. In London after a trip to the World Economic Forum , he said that the Davos event had helped him understand that there is not just pessimism about the global economy, but worry. "There's this increasing fear of technology, information technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3-D printers, the internet and all these different forms," he said. Technology, he added "seems to be changing life in such a fundamental way and what it's leaving people thinking is 'where will I be in 30 years? Look how fast everything is changing now. Where will my children be? I want to leave something for them because they could be in terrible straits'." The World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Risk Report, released to coincide with last week's event, warned of people designing "bespoke viruses as murder weapons" and that computers could turn rogue. In Davos, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer told delegates that she expected internet privacy to swing further into the hands of governments over the coming months. At another seminar, the Daily Mail reported, a panel of academics warned of mosquito-sized robots flying around and stealing DNA samples. Responding to Shiller, Edmund Shing, the global equity portfolio manager at BCS Asset Management, told CNBC that he often wonders whether the world is not in the throes of a second industrial revolution but rather a technological revolution. He was concerned that a whole class of job could either disappear or become deflationary. "You (might not) see any more wage increases because of the pressure from technology," he said. Shiller added that Davos had taught him that people are trying to make sure they are in the top 1 percent of global earners. "This is desperation for many people," he said. "The problem now is we are going through a technological revolution, unlike any in history because we seem to be getting right to core abilities that people have, that's the ability to think, to know." He added that knowledge from humans was becoming even more absolute because of technology. The example he gave was that astronomy is becoming more redundant with the advent of mobile applications. "They just whip out their phone and they can beat you," he said.
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By Joe Lucia We're just a few days away from the beginning of February, and James Shields is still a free agent. Shields is far and away the best free agent left on the market, and while we've seen pitchers dangle in the wind this deep into the offseason before (Matt Garza, Ubaldo Jimenez, Kyle Lohse, Ervin Santana to name four), they all had more red flags than Shields. Yet Shields still sits by his phone, waiting for an offer that is to his liking. And as his free agency continues to roll along, I'm wondering whether or not Shields and agent Page Odle made a mistake by trying to market Shields in the same class as Jon Lester and Max Scherzer, who got a combined $365 million this winter from the Cubs and Nationals, respectively. In December, Shields turned 33, two years older than Lester and two and a half years older than Scherzer. That immediately takes the possibility of a six or seven year deal off the table if teams were hesitant to give Lester six years or Scherzer seven years, there's no way they'd give a pitcher much older than those two six or seven years. You're also looking at the future potential of a breakdown with Shields, though I'm not sure that was a significant factor in his market not developing. He's made at least 31 starts and thrown 200 innings in every full season of his career, going all the way back to 2007. Despite all those innings that Shields has racked up, his performance hasn't been nearly as dominant as you might expect. He's thrown more innings than any pitcher in baseball since 2007 (just a third of an inning more than Felix Hernandez), and he ranks 12th in fWAR in that time period, sandwiched right in between Dan Haren and Jered Weaver. If you move the goalposts and only look at the last four seasons (which conveniently excludes Shields' disappointing 2010), Shields once again lands at the top of the charts in innings pitched ... and tenth in fWAR, between Anibal Sanchez and Chris Sale (who has thrown 300 fewer innings). Moving the goalposts once again, during his two years as a Royal, Shields ranked second in baseball in innings pitched (behind Adam Wainwright) and 13th in fWAR, between Justin Verlander and Cole Hamels. Obviously there are a lot of variables here, but one thing is immediately clear to me Shields isn't in the same class as Lester and Scherzer, despite his advantages over them through the last four and eight years. Instead of shooting for a contract in the same class as those two, why not try for deals closer to the ones that Wainwright, Weaver, and Sanchez got in recent years? Wainwright's deal with the Cardinals was an extension and not a free agent deal, but he got $97.5 million over five years for his age 32-36 seasons. Weaver's deal with the Angels was also an extension, and he got $85 million for five years for his age 29-33 seasons. Sanchez got five years and $80 million from the Tigers as a free agent (though he did re-sign with Detroit) for his age 29-33 seasons. Matt Cain's six-year, $127.5 million contract is another possible comparison, but that deal covered his age 28-33 seasons, and given that Cain has been pretty bad two years into that contract, maybe it's best to not bring up the comparison. Something like five years and $75-90 million is likely going to be the best possible deal that Shields gets at this point. And quite frankly, it might be hard for him to get more than that. At 33, the team that signs him will be gambling with his mid-to-late thirties. He's more of a second or third starter who can eat innings by the load at this point, and I'm sure teams are worried that he'll soon start devolving into a back-end innings eater. Considering his age and how poorly many long-term contracts to pitchers start to work out in year four or so, I doubt that a savior team is going to swoop and give Shields the nine-figure deal he desires.
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South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix said Wednesday its profits more than doubled in the fourth quarter to a record high, thanks to the soaring popularity of new mobile devices such as Apple's iPhones. Net profit for October to December last year amounted to 1.6 trillion won ($1.5 billion), up 106 percent from a year ago, the Icheon-based company said in a statement. Operating profit jumped 112 percent to 1.7 trillion won and sales rose 53 percent to 5.1 trillion won. SK Hynix -- which is Apple's second largest chip supplier -- is one of the world's largest makers of memory chips used for personal computers, servers and mobile devices. Apple on Wednesday posted a record profit of $18 billion for the fourth quarter on booming sales of the big-screen iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. SK Hynix said shipments of its NAND flash chips used for mobile handsets rose 30 percent due to "growing demand boosted by the launch of new mobile devices". The company also saw annual net profit for 2014 hit a record of 4.2 trillion won, up nearly 50 percent from a year ago. It added that the memory chip market in 2015 would be led by growth in mobile and corporate server segments.
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SALT LAKE CITY Thirty years ago, Dan Lafferty and his brother grew their hair long, called themselves prophets and claimed God told them to kill their sister-in-law and her baby after she resisted her husband's entry into a radical polygamous group. Kristi Strack was 6 years old when it happened, but police said she developed an obsession with the case that turned into a close yearslong friendship with the imprisoned man. The mindset of Strack and her husband, Benjamin, grew increasingly bizarre, culminating with a belief that the apocalypse was near just before they killed themselves with a drug overdose and took their three children with them. Police still aren't sure exactly what led them to commit suicide in September. The July 1984 slayings of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter were chronicled in Jon Krakauer's 2003 book "Under the Banner of Heaven." Kristi Strack eventually reached out to Dan Lafferty's daughter, said Springville police Cpl. Greg Turnbow. Strack and her husband became close friends with him for several years. "He's very fond of them," Turnbow said. "He wanted his remains to go to them." Dan Lafferty communicated with Kristi Strack like she was one of his children, police said. When she suffered a bout with ovarian cancer, there was talk about Lafferty being able to cure it, police said. Turnbow said he talked to Lafferty as part of his investigation of the Stracks' deaths, and the inmate said he believed himself to be the biblical prophet Elijah. His role would be to announce the second coming of Christ, the Deseret News has reported, but police said he didn't generally talk about the end of the world with the Stracks. The Stracks' close, frequent communication with Lafferty didn't raise any concerns by Utah prison officials, and there generally isn't any reason it would, said spokeswoman Brooke Adams. That changed in 2008, after Kristi Strack tried to pass her brother off as her husband so he could come on a prison visit and authorities revoked her visiting privileges, Turnbow said. Lafferty's contact with the couple ended. The same year, Benjamin and Kristi Strack began homeschooling their children. Court records show the couple pleaded guilty to misdemeanor forgery charges in 2008 and disorderly conduct in 2009, part of a minor criminal history that spanned about 12 years. The couple also had gone through court-ordered drug treatment, but Elizabeth Sollis, a spokeswoman for Utah child welfare services, said Wednesday that's not necessarily a reason for state workers to intervene in a family. Police said there was no such intervention in the Stracks' case. Kristi Strack, 36, was being prescribed methadone for opiate addiction at the time of her death, and that's how investigators believe she got the methadone used in the overdose deaths. The children Benson, 14, Emery, 12, and Zion, 11 were sheltered, Turnbow said. There's no evidence the family attended any churches, and when some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reached out to them, they would politely refuse, Turnbow said. Police didn't find any writings to show exactly what Benjamin and Kristi Strack believed when they died, but they often talked with family and friends about wanting to escape what they saw as a growing evil in the world. Friends and family thought that meant they would one day move somewhere remote and live "off the grid," but no one thought they'd kill themselves, police said. Benjamin Strack, 37, hadn't been to work for a week when Kristi Strack's older son from a previous marriage found the family's bodies in a locked bedroom Sept. 27. Police found traces of a lethal drug mixture in a child's sand pail in the room. After the deaths, police found a letter from Benson Strack to his best friend bequeathing some of his possessions, showing that the teen thought he might be found dead one day. It's not clear how much the other children knew about the lethal mixture of drugs they ingested, police said. The combination of methadone and cold medicine found in their bodies would likely have made them very sleepy just before they died. There were no signs of trauma or a struggle. The younger children's deaths were ruled homicides since they were too young to consent to any kind of suicide plan.
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MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) U.S. Open runner-up Kei Nishikori was circumspect about his quarterfinal loss at the Australian Open on Wednesday, saying there's nothing wrong with getting to the final eight of any Grand Slam tournament. He's done it three times now - two of them at Melbourne Park - but he realizes there is plenty of room for improvement. Nishikori had few answers for Stan Wawrinka's shot-making and excellent serving in a 6-3, 6-4, 7-6 (6) loss to the defending champion. At the U.S. Open last year, Nishikori beat Wawrinka in the quarterfinal in five sets before beating Novak Djokovic in the semis to reach his first Grand Slam final. He lost to Croatia's Marin Cilic. ''It wasn't really a bad week,'' Nishikori said of the past 10 days in Melbourne. ''It's not easy getting to a quarterfinal at Grand Slams. But I have to keep doing this ... playing tough all the time, playing a lot of matches, especially at Grand Slams.'' Nishikori said after two relatively easy set wins for Wawrinka, he felt more comfortable in the third set as he challenged the Swiss player more. ''I could be a little more aggressive than the first and second set,'' Nishikori said. ''I was mixing up serve and volleys. My serve was much better than first couple sets because I was making more first serves.'' In the tiebreaker, Wawrinka looked to be cruising but the Japanese player saved match point after match point with a combination of great shots and errors by Wawrinka. Nishikori made the biggest error at the wrong time, however, attempting a drop shot from the back of the court that bundled into the net. That set up another match point for Wawrinka, which he converted with an ace, his 20th of the match. ''Yeah, the tiebreaker was really close,'' Nishikori said. ''If I could get that one (the attempted drop shot), it might change the whole thing. But he was serving really well until end of the set, so I think I have to give him credit.'' Nishikori said he had spoken to his coach, former French Open champion Michael Chang, right after the match on ways to improve his game, and how Chang might continue to help him. ''I've been working with him for one year now,'' Nishikori said. ''I see a lot of improvement, not just tennis, outside, too. Mentally I get more stronger. I think physically I'm little more fit than before. So I'm really happy right now.''
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Miikka Pirinen's photographs provoke strong reactions every time they're seen. "People often think that these kids have been forced to fight," the Finnish photographer tells TIME. "People think that they get hurt a lot or that their families are after the money." Pirinen stumbled upon these "cage fighting children," as they are sometimes called, when he chanced upon video online of 6-year-old kids fighting in a competition in California. "I started to follow the topic online through videos posts by these kids' proud parents and spectators," he says. And while, he read many condemnations of the sport, Pirinen had to see for himself. "As a journalist I was strict not to form an opinion before seeing it all," he says. "After spending over a month, day and night, following the kids, the parents and the trainers in gyms around Arizona and California, I started to have a pretty good insight of what the sport really is about for everyone involved: Community." Pirinen found a community based on respect toward one another, with kids of all ages helping each other, and parents working closely with trainers to offer a safe environment for their children. "It's not like we're hanging out in a bar," Clay Carpenter, the father of three young fighters from Phoenix, Ariz., told Pirinen. "Instead we come here to support our kids." The children pictured in Pirinen's photographs are not bullies in fact, most of them are among the most trusted pupils in their respective schools, the photographer says. "They look up for each other and if anyone uses their skills for the wrong reasons, they are quickly set straight." For Pirinen, Fight League Kids is just the latest chapter in a two-year photographic project on the issue of identity among children. "I'm interested in the different ways young people are trying to form an identity for themselves," he says. Next, the photographer, who started his career as camera assistant in the film industry before moving to photography, plans to continue this project, focusing instead on motor sports and American football. Miikka Pirinen is a Finnish freelance photographer based in Helsinki. He's a member of the Helsinki Street photography collective. Mikko Takkunen is an Associate Photo Editor at TIME. Follow him on Twitter @photojournalism . Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent
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Skift Take: You are, therefore you book. From maps to mobile and wearables, booking becomes ubiquitous, ever-present. Dennis Schaal Earlier this month we launched our first ever magazine, " Megatrends Defining Travel in 2015 ", where we identify the global trends in travel in 2015 and beyond, and focus on three emerging key themes: Mobile. Seamless. Experiential. Below is an extract from the fourth trend. The most successful travel companies have always focused on the transaction, and the ability to book is becoming even more ubiquitous, central, flexible and mobile. Driven by mobile's omnipresence and the proliferation of devices from smartphone to tablets, from laptops to wearables, as well as the desire to provide more elegance to the user experience in order to capture more bookers and revenue, new companies such as metasearch players are scurrying to get involved in the booking process, which is becoming ever more streamlined, efficient and quick. Hipmunk, TripAdvisor, Trivago, Skyscanner, and Top10.com, all metasearch sites that traditionally merely provided hotel, flight and car rental results from third party-online travel agencies and suppliers, are increasingly giving their users the option of completing bookings on their own websites or within their apps instead of requiring users to navigate to the online travel agency or hotel or airline site. With the quality of those third party sites running the gamut from awkward and poor to excellent, too many travelers were getting lost in that meta-to-supplier dance and others were capturing the booking. So now it's an era of convergence with the metasearch companies offering the bookings right within their apps, although online travel agency or hotel partners, for example, are processing the bookings and handling the customer service in the background. Kayak pioneered these in-app bookings several years ago but now, owned by the Priceline Group and having sister booking sites such as Booking.com, Agoda and Priceline.com, Kayak is running away from the practice. Virtually all of the rest of the pack of metasearch players, are hurrying to get on board with these "facilitated bookings". The metasearch companies are not becoming online travel agencies themselves they are not building customer call centers, for example but to the consumer it all looks the same. Meanwhile, companies such as Expedia and Hipmunk are investing in and develop more seamless search and booking from mobile device to PC and back again to handle consumers' propensity to start their searches on one device and pick it back up again on another. Transactions thus are getting more nimble and social, too, as the booking revolution gathers momentum in 2015. HotelTonight led the way a few years ago by offering a hotel booking in just a handful of taps on a smartphone compared with the dozens of taps it took to complete a similar booking through online travel agencies with their legacy technology. Uber, which like HotelTonight stores customers' credit card information in its apps, makes reserving a ride and completing the transaction even easier than HotelTonight. Customers can scope out the wait time and cost of an Uber ride in the Google Maps app, and navigate to Uber to provide the pickup location via GPS. They can do the whole thing in the Uber app, as well. Then when the ride is complete the payment, including tip, gets charged to the customers' credit cards. No taps necessary from the passenger side of things. Twitter is conducting a pilot of a buy button which could one day be used to book a flight or other travel service. Stayful, a travel app focusing on independent and boutique hotels, began taking hotel reservations on Twitter (with an employee handling the booking via the Stayful app in the background), which for now is gimmicky, but point to possibilities. New players you wouldn't have thought of being in the travel booking game, too, are getting into it. Yelp, for example, entered into a partnership with Hipmunk so that Yelp customers scouring restaurant and other business reviews can access hotel booking options through Hipmunk. And OpenTable, who until recently was only a reservation tool for consumers, is now enabling users in certain markets to settle their restaurant checks with the swipe of a smartphone. With the proliferation of Wi-Fi on airlines and increases in their broadband capacity, booking a tour on the plane for your time at the destination or changing a flight will become increasingly more commonplace, as well. This is an extract, get this and all the other trends, download the magazine for full trends for 2015. We want to thanks our magazine sponsors Virgin Atlantic , Amadeus and Egencia for making this possible. Download the copy for deeper read. Share it if you like it and think others can benefit from them. DOWNLOAD THE SKIFT 2015 MAGAZINE
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The Obama administration is scrapping its proposal to tax 529 colleg plans, reports CNBC's John Harwood.
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Salmon Wellington and 7 Other Ways You Didn't Know You Could Cook Salmon Salmon Wellington and seven other ways you didn't know you could cook salmon Salmon is a surprisingly versatile fish. Here are 8 ways to cook it. Corned Salmon A brief cure in salt, brown sugar, cilantro, pepper, bay leaves, and garlic produces flavors that mimic those of traditional corned beef while highlighting salmon's natural richness. Combined with wilted cabbage, braised potatoes, and a green herb coulis, corned salmon instantly elevates a beloved Irish-American dish. Click here for the recipe. In a Chowder This super satisfying chowder transforms salmon into the ultimate comfort food. Chunks of salmon poach to perfection in an irrisistably creamy broth accompanied by russet potatoes, carrots, and onions. Click here for the recipe. In a Stir-Fry The beauty of salmon is that pairs well with a variety of flavors, including those of Asian persuasion. Try adding cubed pieces of salmon to a simple teriyaki stir-fry with broccoli and mushrooms or red bell pepper and asparagus. Juice-Box Poached Salmon The beverage that kids go crazy for can also be used to create a salmon dish with just the right balance of tang and sweetness. Simply roast salmon in a baking dish along with the contents of a lemonade juice box. Added bonus: The leftover liquid can be reduced on the stovetop for a quick and easy sauce. Click here for the recipe. Mediterranean Salmon Stuffed Shells Who says seafood and cheese don't mix? Salmon is right at home nestled in jumbo pasta shells alongside spinach and ricotta and mozzarella cheeses. Simply stuff and bake, then top with your favorite pasta sauce for a simple yet sophisticated meal. Click here for the recipe. Poached in the Dishwasher The key to perfectly poached salmon? Your dishwasher! Simply wrap salmon fillets in foil with your choice of seasonings and your dishwasher will cook your salmon for you. Just make sure to wrap your salmon tightly or you'll wind up with water-logged salmon. Click here for more information. Salmon Tataki Treat yourself with a luxurious serving of salmon tataki. The use of sushi-grade salmon is key to achieving rich and buttery seared salmon highlighted with the exotic flavors of dashi, pomelo juice, and fennel pollen. Click here for the recipe. Salmon Wellington Beef Wellington is a classic dish with a stunning presentation, one that can be replicated with salmon. The addition of spinach and mushrooms wrapped up in a frozen puff pastry produces an elegant, well-balanced dish just begging to be served atop a red wine reduction. Click here for the recipe.
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In a not-so-subtle jab at the controversial World's 50 Best Restaurants ranking, another food publication has released its own version of the top 100 restaurants in the world, this time asking for the input of Michelin-starred chefs. In the last few years, The World's 50 Best, organized by British publication 'Restaurant' magazine, has rankled feathers in the world of high gastronomy. In addition to murky details on whether or not voter panelists pay for their own meals, the voting system has also been criticized for being both over and under-represented in certain geographical areas. Enter "Le Chef" magazine, a French publication whose response to the World's 50 Best Restaurants was to poll 512 two-to-three-Michelin-starred chefs around the world. The idea was simple: "Which five chefs and restaurants represent the best of the cooking profession? Which chefs and restaurants would they want to see on a list of the top 100 restaurants in the world?" Dominating the top 10 list is France, with five of the spots taken by French culinary titans such as Pierre Gagnaire, Paul Bocuse and Alain Ducasse. The balance is represented by Spain, Japan, and the US, including Daniel Humm and Thomas Keller. The results were announced out of SIRHA, in Lyon, France this week, a five-day food fair best known for hosting the prestigious culinary competition the Bocuse d'Or. A scan of the top 10 chefs and restaurants on 'Le Chef's' list, meanwhile, and the top-ranked dining destinations on The World's 50 Best list could also be described as a simple division of old versus new guard in gastronomy. While the latter list recognizes adventurous, trailblazing chefs -- many of whom are of younger generations -- the former leans heavily towards older, more established cooking heavyweights. Here are the top 10 chefs and restaurants, as deemed by 'Le Chef' in no particular order: Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire, Chef Pierre Gagnaire, France Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Paul Bocuse, France El Celler de Can Roca, Joan Roca, Spain Per Se, Thomas Keller, USA Louis XV, Alain Ducasse, Monaco Restaurant Michel Bras, Michel Bras, France Epicure, Eric Frechon, France Ledoyen, Yannick Alleno, France Nihon Ryori Ryugin, Seiji Yamamoto, Japan Eleven Madison Park, Daniel Humm
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Childhood obesity is on the rise all over the world, along with obesity-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and weaker joints. Sedentary lifestyle (accompanied by the popularity of technology) and poor eating habits have contributed to this ongoing health concern. Luckily, it's not a losing battle; small changes to your child's routine can help him or her improve overall well being. Here are 10 simple tips for getting your child on a path to a healthier lifestyle. 1. Make activity accessible. For many kids, physical activity or "play" time just isn't accessible. Many children aren't allowed to play outside by themselves, aren't on any sports teams, and find sedentary indoor activities fun. Make sure your child has the option to choose physical outdoor activities in a safe and supervised environment. 2. Talk to your pediatrician. Sit with your pediatrician to discuss your child's nutrition habits, exercise regimens, sleep patterns, and stress level. Then, your pediatrician can recommend specific changes to your child's lifestyle. 3. Exercise as daily nutrition. Try to make exercise part of your child's daily routine. Just as they need to eat every day to survive, exercise is also needed regularly for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and weight. Make exercise fun by incorporating games, tracking their progress on a chart, and offering rewards. 4. Get plenty of sleep. Try to make sure your children get a good night's rest each evening to stay healthier. Adequate sleep keeps stabilize the hormones related to appetite; this can help your child know when they are completely full at a meal, preventing them from overeating. A well-rested child can also feel more energized for physical activity. 5. Reduce technology use . This generation of children is very technology-oriented, but spending too much time on a computer, tablet, or electronic device is contributing to a generation that is less active and who could potentially have a shorter life span. Try to limit the electronics, including television time. While they watch TV, have them "commerical-cize," or stand up and move around during the commercial breaks. 6. Maintain adequate liquid intake. Many children don't drink enough water throughout the day, and instead, some consume large quantities of sugary drinks. Simply substituting water for flavored drinks can significantly reduce kids' daily calorie consumption and help them stay hydrated, too. They do not need to eliminate their favorite drinks completely; moderation is the key. Alternatively, offer kids hydrating foods like fresh watery fruits and vegetables . 7. Be the role model . Most children mimic the adult role models involved in their lives, whether they're displaying good or bad habits. Expose children to a healthy lifestyle through healthy eating, healthy cooking, and fun physical activities. Children see adults' behavior as acceptable, so make sure the lifestyle they observe is on that is both positive and healthy. 8. Give them choices . When it comes to mealtime or activity time, give them choices empower them to make their own healthy lifestyle decisions. For example, instead of placing a healthy meal on the table for dinner and forcing them to eat it, give them the opportunity to be involved in the menu "decisions" each night, making sure they have a host of healthy choices to pick from. Or, give them kid-friendly cooking tasks and let them help make dinner. 9. Implement the plan today . Basically, the old adage works here; "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today." The longer you wait to implement a healthy lifestyle, the harder it is to make the change. 10. Stop bad habits in their tracks . As children grow, they sometimes pick up bad health habits. As they age, these habits can become harder and harder to change. Talk to your children and work with them on an action plan to eliminate these bad habits before they become ingrained. Teaching children about healthy lifestyles at a young age is a very important step in their normal growth and development. Eating fruits and vegetables, exercising, hydrating properly, getting plenty of sleep, and reducing technology use can all have a positive impact on their lives now and as they grow. Teaching young children how to maintain a healthy lifestyle now is an investment in their life and their future. Len Saunders is an award winning author of 4 books, with his most recent book, Keeping Kids Fit available through Amazon. Len is a recognized figure in the United States for his work in the fight against childhood obesity, and for helping keep families healthy and fit.
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Faux movie trailers, celebrities, music videos, marching bands, parades - these over-the-top proposal videos involve great talent, loads of planning, and lots of heart. Get ready to laugh, cry, and swoon as you watch 19 of the most epic marriage proposals unfold in this heartwarming video.
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Boeing (BA) reported quarterly earnings and revenue that handily beat analysts' expectations on Wednesday, sending shares higher in premarket trading. Boeing's stock was up more than 3 percent following the announcement. (Get the latest quote here.) (BA) The airplane manufacturer's fourth-quarter earnings rose to $2.31 per share from $1.88 a share in the year-earlier period. Revenue increased to $24.5 billion from $23.78 billion a year ago. Wall Street expected the Chicago-based company to post fourth-quarter earnings per share of $2.11 on $23.93 billion revenue. Boeing said it sees full-year adjusted earnings per share of $8.20 to $8.40, on revenue of $94.5 billion to $96.5 billion. Operating cash flow for the full year was forecast at more than $9 billion. Last month, the company's board upped its authorization for its share repurchase plan to $12 billion and said its regular quarterly dividend would increase 25 percent.
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With his racing career cut short by his untimely death in January 1964, NASCAR and its fans got only a glimpse of Joe Weatherly's potential. But oh, what a view. A hard-charger on the track and in life, Weatherly left an indelible mark on NASCAR's history books and in the vivid memories of friends and fans who had the chance to witness his career firsthand. "Joe just liked to have fun," said former Charlotte Motor Speedway president and now consultant Humpy Wheeler. "I don't know a driver who had more fun in life than he did. "The pits that was his pool hall. When he got down there, he would play tricks and practical jokes on everybody." Dubbed the "Clown Prince of Racing," Weatherly will take his place on the throne among the sport's greats when he is inducted Friday night into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Wheeler, himself known as one of NASCAR's best promoters, said Weatherly realized how important it was to not just perform well but also "put on a show." "Joe and Curtis Turner, they just had a blast," he said. Weatherly once rode a mule through the streets of Darlington, S.C., as part of a prerace parade. He repeatedly hid fellow competitors' car keys before races and the legend still grows to this day of the parties Weatherly and Turner threw during Daytona Speedweeks. "It looked like that was what they were put here for, to enjoy every minute of it," said Junie Donlavey, one of Weatherly's car owners, in a 2009 interview. Make no mistake, Weatherly's propensity for fun didn't detract from his performance. He began his racing career on motorcycles and won three American Motorcycle Association titles. After moving to stock cars, Weatherly won 102 modified races in 1952 and 1953, including the 1953 series championship. Weatherly's first start in what is now called the Sprint Cup Series came in the 1952 Southern 500, when he started 38th and finished 16th driving for Donlavey. He won his first Cup race in 1958 at Nashville, Tenn., and in the 1961 season he won nine times in just 25 starts and was named NASCAR's Most Popular Driver. Running a full schedule in 1962, Weatherly again recorded nine wins and won his first series championship, this time running for Hall of Fame car owner Bud Moore. "I wanted a driver who would stick his foot in it when we need the speed and one who could drive cautiously when the occasion called for it," Moore said. When Moore cut back the team's schedule the following season, Weatherly was forced to borrow competitors' cars to run the whole season. It worked he won three races and the series championship while running for nine owners. Weatherly, then 41, was leading the standings again in 1964 when he was killed in a crash in a road-course race in Riverside, Calif. With no window net and not wearing a shoulder harness, Weatherly's head reportedly hit the wall, killing him instantly when his car struck the retaining wall. As one of NASCAR's earliest personalities, it shouldn't come as a surprise Weatherly played a role in creating the first museum to honor the sport's stars. After visiting the museum at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Weatherly suggested to friend Bob Colvin, then president of Darlington Raceway, that he should build a similar museum dedicated to the greats of stock car racing. Following Weatherly's death, Colvin brought plans for the Joe Weatherly Stock Car Museum to the track's board of directors, which unanimously approved the idea. The museum was dedicated on May 2, 1965. The name of the museum was changed after renovation and expansion in 2003. "Joe thought this sport was bigger than it was at the time," Wheeler said. "To him, every sport that was big, had a museum. "For all the fun he had, he thought ahead a lot more than a lot of guys at that time. He had a big-picture view of things."
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Nissan Motor is recalling about 768,000 vehicles, including its popular Rogue crossover and Pathfinder SUV, for separate problems, the company and U.S. regulators said on Wednesday. Some 552,135 Rogues from model years 2008 and 2013 will be recalled because moisture could seep through the driver side floor and cause an electrical short to wiring that could lead to a fire, Nissan and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said. Of the total, 468,815 are registered in the United States. No crashes or injuries have been reported due to the wiring issue, a Nissan spokesman said on Wednesday morning. Also, 215,789 Pathfinder SUVs from the 2013 and 2014 model years and 2013 Infiniti JX35 vehicles will be recalled for problems related to a secondary hood latch, Nissan and NHTSA said. Of that total, 170,665 are registered in the United States. A Nissan spokesman said the problem was noticed primarily in rental vehicles when drivers unintentionally dislodged the secondary hood latch, which is designed to catch the hood from flying up if the primary hood latch is disengaged. In a handful of occasions, damage was done to the vehicles when the hood flew open, but there were no reports of crashes or injuries, the spokesman said. In Canada, 52,312 Rouge crossovers will be recalled as well as 15,972 Pathfinder and JX35 SUVs. The Rogue will be recalled in three additional countries and the SUVs in 30 additional countries, Nissan said.
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Mess with puppies at your own peril during Super Bowl week, GoDaddy.com learned Tuesday. The company wound up vowing not to air its ad during the big game this Sunday after unveiling it this morning, to widespread disgust. The ad, "Journey Home," mocked Budweiser 's highly anticipated "Lost Dog" Super Bowl ad that the beer label has been teasing which, in turn, is a sequel to its wildly popular 2014 Super Bowl ad "Puppy Love." In GoDaddy's ad, an adorable golden retriever puppy named Buddy is traveling with his mom and sibling in a box in the back of a pickup truck, when he's tossed out as the truck hits a bump. Buddy goes through quite a lot to make his way back to his home, where he's scooped up by his human guardian who is thrilled he made it back to them because she'd already sold him on her new website she set up using GoDaddy.com. Click here to see the entire ad. Faster than you can say, "What?!" the ad's YouTube clip had more than 800 comments, most trashing it; #godaddypuppy became a thing on Twitter, a Change.org petition had been launched calling on the company to kill the ad, and more than 42,000 signatures collected. Animal rescue organizations expressed contempt. Ditto PETA, which admitted it "liked" that the ad showed that anyone who sells dogs online is "a callous jerk." "The sale of animals online and from pet stores and breeders should be roundly condemned," the group said. Tone-deaf reporters who'd been tickled by the ad had to do some fancy footwork in follow-up posts. AdWeek, which had called it a "fun tweak" of Budweiser, noted it "amusingly deflat(es) Bud's balls a little bit" and asked the ad creator, in an interview published before the spot was unveiled, to promise it would not be "as sappy of an ending as Budweiser." (The creator had noted, ominously, that the ad would be "playing with Super Bowl cliches" and "there seem to be five puppy ads every year, so we're going to hang out and play in that area.") Tuesday afternoon, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving threw in the towel. "If you can buy a puppy online and have it shipped to you the next day, it's likely you're supporting inhumane breeding. #GoDaddyPuppy," an animal rescue group wrote to Irving on Twitter. He replied, "Thank you @animalrescuers for the candid feedback. What should have been a fun and funny ad clearly missed the mark and we will not air it." Later in the day, Irving elaborated in a post on the company's website headlined "We're Listening, Message Received." "This morning we previewed GoDaddy's Super Bowl spot on a popular talk show, and shortly after a controversy started to swirl about Buddy, our puppy, being sold online. The responses were emotional and direct. Many people urged us not to run the ad. "We've made a tremendous amount of progress over the past two years, advancing the GoDaddy brand as a company that cares a great deal about small business and is in their corner to help them succeed. People increasingly know who we are, what we do and who we do it for. At the end of the day, our purpose at GoDaddy is to help small businesses around the world build a successful online presence. We hoped our ad would increase awareness of that cause. However, we underestimated the emotional response. And we heard that loud and clear. "The net result? We are pulling the ad from the Super Bowl. You'll still see us in the Big Game this year, and we hope it makes you laugh. "Finally, rest assured, Buddy came to us from a reputable and loving breeder in California. He's now part of the GoDaddy family as our Chief Companion Officer and he lives permanently with one of our longtime employees." Even so, some people weren't finished being angry, as evidenced by comments attached to his extended mea culpa: "Thank you now get your advertising team over to the nearest rescue for one day so they can see what it's truly like to be a lost animal. Then film that I can guarantee there won't be many laughs, but there will be a great many tears."
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Rory McIlroy wants fellow Northern Irishman Darren Clarke to captain Europe's Ryder Cup team in 2016 in what is shaping up to be a battle between the former British Open champion and Spaniard Miguel Angel Jimenez. Europe will seek a fourth successive win against the United States in Minnesota and speculation is already rife as to who will lead the defending champions. "I'm going to be a little biased -- Darren is a good friend of mine and from Northern Ireland, so it would be great to see him get the captaincy, but if it was to be Miguel then I'd have no problems with that either," McIlroy told a news conference. "They are going to have a tough decision," he added ahead of this week's Dubai Desert Classic. On Tuesday, world number two Henrik Stenson and sixth-ranked Sergio Garcia, both team stalwarts, told reporters it would likely be a straight fight between Clarke and Jimenez over who will replace 2014 skipper Paul McGinley. "I always thought Darren would be a perfect fit for captaincy in the States," said McIlroy. "People love him over there and he'll do well, but people love Miguel anywhere he goes and the more he plays on the Champions Tour he's going to become more popular as well. "They are both quality candidates and great players. As long as I'm on the team and they decide to play me I'm happy enough." Spain's Jimenez, 51, is ranked 42 and played 25 events on the European Tour last year. Clarke, 46, is a less regular figure on the circuit. McIlroy said he expected to be consulted by the five-man panel that will choose the captain, a decision that used to be made by the players. The committee includes former skippers McGinley, Jose Maria Olazabal and Colin Montgomerie. World number one McIlroy will play in Thursday's Classic, having finished second at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship two weeks ago, a stroke ahead of Martin Kaymer who blamed overconfidence after he blew a 10-stroke final round lead. McIlroy has suffered in similar circumstances, squandering a four-shot final day lead at the 2011 U.S. Masters. "It was the most important day of my career, bar none, because if I had not had that happen to me who knows where I would have been," added four-time major winner McIlroy. "You learn way more from those days than from victories. "Martin had such a big lead that I can see where you could get a little bit complacent." (Reporting by Matt Smith; editing by Ken Ferris)
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CHICAGO Imagine a hardcore video game fanatic, and the picture you summon probably won't resemble Roman Rivera. He grew up captivated by games from "Pokemon" to "Call of Duty," and evaded his mom's screen time limits by covertly playing his Game Boy after lights out. Now that he's 21, he spends up to four hours a day battling enemies in the virtual arena of "Dota 2." Yet he was an honor student and a member of the debate team at suburban Downers Grove North High School, and today he's studying economics at the University of Chicago. These accomplishments didn't come in spite of gaming, Rivera said; in a way, gaming helped to make them possible. "You pick up skills from whatever you do, and you can decide to aim those skills in an intellectual direction," he said, crediting video games with broadening his interests and improving his mental dexterity. "They definitely enhanced the abilities I needed in life that weren't always directly present. Without a doubt they have benefited me." Rivera's belief echoes a new wave of research that has found surprising advantages in an activity that many dismiss as a waste of time, if not an outright menace. Social scientists have recently linked gaming with enhanced mental skills, moral sensitivity and even physical fitness, creating a new image of this ubiquitous but controversial pastime. "We're working really hard on understanding what aspects of gaming could be leveraged for the betterment of society," said Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive neuroscientist who researches video games at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Rochester in New York. "Everyone understands it's here to stay. It's not going to disappear. You could try to ban it, but it seems to have really interesting positive effects." Researchers have done thousands of studies on gaming since the 1980s, often with unmistakably negative results. Some associated video games with an increased risk of epileptic seizures, while others cautioned that the games could provoke dangerously elevated heart rates. Many studies also linked violent games to aggression and anti-social behavior. Such findings contributed to the anxiety surrounding video games, said Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Florida's Stetson University. He cited the outcry over violent games that came when Newtown gunman Adam Lanza was portrayed as a shooting-game obsessive (investigators ultimately found that Lanza's primary gaming fixation was "Dance Dance Revolution"). Ferguson said early research into any new technology is often flawed. Studies that aim to find negative effects get funded and promoted, while those with more benign findings are unpublished and forgotten, he said. When a new generation of scholars more familiar with the technology comes along, different results often appear and that's what is happening with gaming, he said. "We're just not seeing the kind of data emerge that would support the techno-panic that was common in earlier years," he said. Ferguson has done dozens of studies on the subject and has consistently found that violent video games do not contribute to societal aggression. One recent project actually concluded that some children who play violent games are less likely than others to act like bullies. "My speculation is that maybe kids turn to video games cathartically ... or it could just be that they're busy, so they don't have time to bully other kids," he said. Another counterintuitive take on video game violence came from University of Buffalo communications professor Matthew Grizzard, who had research subjects play a first-person shooter game as either a United Nations soldier or a terrorist. He found that those who took the role of bad guy often felt guilt over the virtual bloodshed they committed and exhibited greater moral sensitivity than those who played as soldiers. "Video games are these important moral sandboxes," he said. "They allow us to practice moral decision-making we can't do in the real world. Games can be this really important tool for teaching people what the right decisions might be. Maybe one way to do that is showing what the consequences of wrong decisions would be." Gaming has long been identified as a factor in worsening child obesity, but research that scholar Chennan Liu performed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests the pastime might have gotten a bad rap. Youth survey data she examined found that those who play video games for an average of three to six hours a day were healthier than those who played less. Liu, now a professor of social work at Renmin University of China, said the unexpected result calls for further study. But she guessed that gaming might burn more calories than watching TV, or that kids gripping a controller are less inclined to pick up a snack or a soda. That theory made sense to Dan Wojtowicz, 18, a student at Andrew High School in suburban Tinley Park, who spends up to seven hours a day on "Starcraft II," "League of Legends" and other games. "When I go on long gaming streaks, many times I don't feel the need to eat as much, even though it takes a lot of my energy," he said. "I can go without eating for three to four hours." The most intriguing studies might be coming from neuroscientists, who are using MRIs and other high-tech devices to learn how gaming affects the brain. Simone Kuhn, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, has found that the prefrontal cortex actually grows thicker and gray matter more voluminous in people who play games as humble as "Super Mario 64," changes that could improve memory and navigational ability. Bavelier has focused on cognitive performance, finding that first-person shooters one of the most reviled categories of video games can help improve a person's vision and ability to pay attention. How that might translate into real-world benefits is still unclear, but Bavelier noted that young gamers have been shown to make superior laparoscopic surgeons, performing faster and making fewer errors than more experienced peers. "One thing about this work, you need to leave at the door what you think this technology is doing and study it in earnest," she said. "It's not the case that we can get a sense of its impact intuitively." Not everyone is sold on the positive findings coming from recent gaming research. Joseph Bisoglio, who has studied the subject at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said "the hype has outpaced the data." One big problem, he said, is that studies generally don't compare gaming with other activities that stimulate the brain, such as learning to speak another language or practicing a musical instrument. So while gaming might improve cognitive performance in some ways, he said, other activities could produce even more profound effects. "I'm just generally cautious, especially when something can very easily be marketed," he said. "Video games already make a lot of money, and to say they're therapeutic before the evidence is there, that really concerns me." Doug Bakshis was dubious of the value of video games when his son Noah began to shut himself in his room to play the likes of "Minecraft" and "Fallout: New Vegas" for hours at a time. But then Noah, who has Asperger's syndrome, started to show a more open personality. "The games have had a very calming effect on him," Bakshis said. "In the gaming world, he's in control of the environment, where he's not in the real world. He's gotten much more focused, and when things have happened in the real world, he's been more able to deal with it." Noah Bakshis, now a 15-year-old freshman at Downers Grove North High School, said gaming has expanded his interests, prompting him to study archery and Japanese culture after first encountering the topics virtually. His attention, focus and coordination have also improved, he said, as has his self-awareness. "(Games) helped me discover what my inner ethics are, what choices I would make in particular situations," he said. "What I've found is I generally try to resolve things peacefully. ... You can grow emotional attachment to the characters, and that's not a bad thing. It proves they can give humanization to a bunch of polygons."
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Kik To build his messaging company Kik , CEO Ted Livingston is openly turning to a common although often taboo source of inspiration: His competition. Livingston, who founded Waterloo-based messaging startup Kik in 2009, has been open about his plans for the company, which he hopes to turn into a messaging platform , not just a communication app. Essentially, that means he wants to build other services like games, shopping and even banking into an app people use to message their friends. To do this, he's following the lead of another messaging app that's already doing something similar in China: WeChat, owned by Chinese holding company Tencent. And Livingston isn't shy about admitting it. In fact, he wrote an entire Medium post about it last November. On Wednesday, Kik announced it has 200 million registered users, which certainly makes it competitive although it's much smaller than services like WeChat , WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Plus, those three services report active users, not just registered users, while Kik doesn't. Still, Kik has some momentum. It took $38 million in new funding last fall, and has a lot of teen users the company claims 40 percent of U.S. teenagers are active on Kik, which is how the company plans to become the "WeChat of the West," according to Livingston. Below is an edited transcript of our chat. Re/code: When you say you want to be the "WeChat of the West," what does that really mean? Ted Livingston: The way we think about Kik is: There are three key pieces. There's chat on one side. There are all the services on the other side, like banking, shopping and games. Then there's the platform, which is sort of the interface between the two. So we've spent a lot of time iterating on the platform piece. What's the best interface between a chat app and all the services that want to plug into it? You're pretty openly trying to emulate a competitor is that a unique stance to take? Maybe it's unique to admit it. [Laughs] It's not a unique reality. The unique thing about the Messenger race is that everybody is learning from each other. That is the reality whether you want to admit it or not. At this point, WeChat is very dominant in China and almost nowhere in North America. Kik is very dominant in North America but almost nowhere in China. So we're both executing a playbook, but quite isolated from each other. Why does the WeChat model of building services into one app work so well in China, but not as well in North America? I think messaging in general has been much slower to take off in the West. The biggest reason for that is we already had SMS [text messaging] for free. That was one of the big advantages of WhatsApp in Europe and Africa, and WeChat in Asia where SMS is actually very expensive. The value proposition of "SMS for free" was very attractive [overseas]. The idea of a messaging platform has been much slower as well. All these consumers in China are coming online for the first time through their phones. The first app they pick is chat, and they pick their banking, shopping, and gaming from there. Compare that to the West, where people already know where they want to bank and shop and do all these things. That's why we're really focused on youth. Youth are the only demographic in the West who are coming online for the first time through their phones just like everybody is in China. It seems like other companies like Facebook and Snapchat are trying to do something similar build extra services into an app primarily used for messaging. Is this idea catching on in the industry? It's definitely a trend in the industry. When I read pieces about David Marcus [head of messaging products at Facebook], or I see what Snapchat is launching, everybody is moving towards this "chat as a platform" model. This is something we've been focused on [since 2011]. It's just that recently, the simplest way to explain it has been to use WeChat as an example. It's taken a long time to find the best way that services can be integrated into chat. Is it scary or exciting to see Facebook and Snapchat trying to do the same kinds of things you'd like to do? I think it's both. On one side, if nobody's following you, you're probably going in the wrong direction. On the other side, we've been doing this longer than anybody and it's now a race to get to the finish before anybody else. And we're racing some of the top companies in the world.
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It's an exciting time for Chris Pratt, who's dominating headlines thanks to his starring role in Jurassic World, and who's celebrating his 36th birthday on Sunday. For more than a decade he's been winning over fans with his charm and good looks - seriously, could Chris be more lovable? And lately, between hot magazine covers and a series of handsome red carpet appearances, he's had quite a few heartthrob moments. Beyond his good looks, Chris is both hilarious and sweet, too, and he's shown off his awesome sense of humor in more ways than one. The Parks and Recreation star cracked up fans when he adorably fumbled during his SNL monologue, when he shared his first cheesy headshot picture, and when he expertly rapped "Forgot About Dre." As if you needed any more convincing as to why Chris Pratt is such a swoon-worthy star, take a look at all the sexiest pictures of Chris!
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Ever-so-comforting traditional stuffing.
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In a case that could have broad implications, the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday ordered prepaid mobile provider TracFone to pay $40 million for slowing down the speeds of customers who had paid for unlimited data service. While the case was specific to TracFone, a number of carriers still offering unlimited service have been slowing down, or throttling, the speeds of customers who use more than a certain amount of data. Both the FTC and Federal Communications Commission have taken a dim view of the practice . "The issue here is simple: When you promise consumers 'unlimited,' that means unlimited," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement Wednesday. The two largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon, have stopped offering unlimited data plans to new customers, though they still have some customers grandfathered in to the plans. Sprint and T-Mobile do offer unlimited data plans. All the carriers are on notice, though, that slowing down customers on unlimited plans could land them in hot water. In the TracFone case, customers who purchased such plans and saw their speeds slowed are now eligible for refunds . The FTC said that TracFone not only slowed the data service of some unlimited customers, but in some cases cut off service, too. According to the FTC, TracFone "generally slowed data service when a customer used one to three gigabytes, and suspended data service at four to five gigabytes." Those levels had to do with the costs TracFone was incurring rather than a need to manage network traffic, it added. Verizon and the other major carriers have said that, in their case, slowing has been done to manage congestion .
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A Florida man accidentally shot and killed his friend while they acted out rap lyrics together, officers said. Rodney Patrick Jr., 22, was charged with manslaughter after he fatally shot his girlfriend's little brother, 17-year-old Douglas Winslow, on Monday, and then told investigators a story that they believe to be false, Brevard County deputies said. Officers said the two were inside Patrick's Merritt Island home listening to rap music, WESH reported . Patrick grabbed a gun to perform parts of the song, pointed it at Winslow and pulled the trigger all while believing he was holding an unloaded weapon, officers said. The bullet struck Winslow, killing him. Patrick called 911 and told the dispatcher Winslow accidentally shot himself. "I handed my little brother my gun, and I didn't know it was loaded, and he shot himself in the head," an emotional Patrick said on the 911 tape. "He just wanted to see it. He thought it was so cool. I thought I had cleared it and everything." He continued: "This is so bad. I'm such a horrible person." Investigators later determined Patrick pulled the trigger. He faces charges of manslaughter, tampering with evidence and possession of alprazolam, an anti-anxiety prescription drug. ON A MOBILE DEVICE? WATCH VIDEO HERE. [email protected]
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Chemists at the University of California Irvine and the Callum Ormonde of the University of Western Australia have figured out how to unboil egg whites, a development which has far-reaching implications for a number of fields relying on biotechnology including cancer treatment and the production of food, according to data published in the journal ChemBioChem . "In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold," UCI professor Gregory Weiss described in a press release from UCI . "We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order." The process is thought to be applicable to the production and research of molecular proteins with a number of applications, which can "misfold" into structurally incorrect shapes, rendering them useless. According to UCI's press release: "For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable. Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck."
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Yes, even celebrities have a hard time staying away from delicious soul food. Kim Kardashian sat down with "Entertainment Tonight" hosts Nancy O'Dell and Kevin Frazier and revealed she recently gained 15 pounds and enlisted the help of a nutritionist . "I just started seeing a nutritionist, because I don't understand why I ... well, I do [understand] because I eat really bad," she said, "but I just started to eat really healthy and work out a little bit more and just change my lifestyle. Especially when you have a baby, I want to know what to cook and how to cook healthier. We've just changed our lifestyles." The 34-year-old admitted her cooking habits might have something to do with it. "I do cook," she said, "but I cook, like, soul food. So I have to learn how to cook healthy food. I know it's hard to believe." Earlier this month, Kardashian shared a throwback photo with Kourtney Kardashian from the 2009 Emmy Awards, writing: "Since it's award season I will do my #TBT to the time Kourtney and I went to the Emmys. She was pregnant and I was about 15 to 20 pounds thinner ." Kim, you look fantastic. Go ahead and eat the soul food.
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Astronomers said Wednesday they had found the first-ever ringed planet beyond our solar system, a super-world with a girdle of halos 200 times bigger than Saturn's. Called J1407b, the giant has a disk of 30-odd rings which is so vast that, had it been around Saturn, it would have dominated our night sky, the proud discoverers said. "It'd be huge! You'd see the rings and the gaps in the rings quite easily from Earth," Matthew Kenworthy of the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands told AFP. "It'd be several times the size of the full Moon." Kenworthy and Eric Mamajec of New York's University of Rochester trawled through a database of millions of stars photographed by telescopes around the world in an exoplanet search project called SuperWASP. Exoplanets, worlds beyond our own Solar System, are observed from Earth through changes in the brightness of their central star. The light is partly blocked, generally for a few hours, when the planet passes between Earth and its star. In the case of star J1407, the astronomers observed an unusual and active light display that lasted two months. Data on the star was gathered between 2005 and 2008, and "right slap-bang in the middle of the year 2007 the light curve goes crazy. It suddenly starts flickering and twinkling. "It was a very strange-looking thing that nobody had ever seen before," Kenworthy said. At first the team was puzzled. But they ultimately concluded that the only explanation was a vast disk of spaced rings around a planet that had moved between Earth and J1407, blocking the starlight in bursts. "This is the first time somebody's seen such a giant ring system outside the Solar System -- any ring structure at all around what we think is a planet," Kenworthy said. The research has been accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal, he added. - 'Completely nuts' - The rings begin at a distance of about 30 million kilometres (19 million miles) from the planet and stretch out to a distance of 90 million km. And they are probably made of dust, as planet J1407b is too hot -- about 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 to 3,600 deg Fahrenheit) -- to support ice rings like those orbiting Saturn. Kenworthy said the planet itself was probably about 10-40 times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest planet of our star system. J1407 and its planet are about 16 million years ago, which makes it an infant in terms of stellar age. The Sun and Earth are some 4.5 billion years old. Kenworthy said the find provided the first direct evidence for theories about planetary ring formation. It is widely held that big clouds of gas and dust collapse to form stars orbited by a thick disk of debris. This later collects into planets, themselves orbited by rings of debris that clump together over a few million years to form moons. "If our hypothesis is true and it (J1407b) really is a ring system, and we think it is the best explanation, then this is the first direct evidence of that process," Kenworthy said. Data on the ringed exoplanet have been out there since 2007, he added. "What we think happened is that other astronomers may have looked at it but they thought there was a problem with the camera because it was so weird. "It required a new way of thinking to say: 'Oh hold on a minute, this could be a giant ring system.' That is such an incredible idea.... it's completely nuts. "We think other astronomers, if they'd seen it, they would have gone: 'Oh that's too crazy', and moved on to next thing." Artist's impressions of the planet: http://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/j1407_exorings
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With Ronaldo out due to suspension from his red card against Cordoba, we look at what this means for Gareth Bale. There haven't been many opportunities for Gareth Bale to express himself in Madrid white without also having the presence of his team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo on the pitch. Now after Ronaldo's latest red card Bale has a chance to be the main man once again. At Tottenham, Bale was used to being the star player that opposing defences had to watch out for. At Madrid regardless of his price-tag he was always going to be under the shadow of his more illustrious attacking partner, at least until the Portugese ace begins his decline. When Ronaldo has been out of action, Real Madrid have shown that they miss his influence and have been noted to pick up some poor results whilst putting in out of sorts performances. Of course, this could be coincidence as the occasions for Ronaldo missing a game are far and few between due to his fantastic personal conditioning. However, when he has been missing the perception is that Madrid lose a bit of spark in attack. Whilst this may be the case, Madrid normally have enough quality to blow away their opponents anyway. Except for when they don't. And therein lies the problem. When Ronaldo is not present and Madrid face a team capable of not just putting up a good fight and defensive resistance but actually beating them, they need other players to step up and prove their worth. In previous seasons it would have been different but these days it is Gareth Bale that most fans would look for to make an impact if indeed CR7 is missing. Bale had an indifferent first few months of the season by his lofty standards as his performances were very erratic. However since the start of December I've found him to have improved and he is now taking more of a firm grip on games and imposing his will more than he was. Bale is also scoring more freely than he was at the beginning of the season with 7 goals from his last 10 games and improvements in certain aspects of his game such as his heading ability have not gone unnoticed. Bale's recent last minute winner against the spirited Cordoba is a reflection of this sentiment. It was a high pressure situation and Gareth held his nerve and didn't allow his concentration to be broken. It must also be mentioned that from what we have evidenced so far, Bale is a player for the big occasion. He contributed to a goal in every single final - and by extension, trophy - that Real Madrid won in 2014 including scoring what turned out to be the winners in both the Copa del Rey and Champions League (La Décima!) finals. This importance certainly shouldn't be overlooked. With Ronaldo set to miss huge games against Real Sociedad and Sevilla , Bale will be expected, fairly or not, to be Real Madrid's main offensive influence in these games. It is a run of games that could potentially consequently deciding Madrid's fate in the race for the 2014-15 Liga BBVA title. Having already been knocked out of the Copa del Rey, it would be a devastating blow to Madrid if this run of the games was not to be negotiated positively. Obviously, other talents such as Karim Benzema , James Rodriguez & Jesé Rodríguez to name just a few, will also be available to perform for Madrid so it's not as if Bale has to do all the heavy lifting by himself. It will be interesting to see where Carlo Ancelotti decides to play Bale on the pitch. The main expectation is that the Welshman will retain his usual starting berth on the right wing in a 4-3-3 formation or right midfielder in a 4-4-2 formation but other alternatives do exist. For example, he could be switched over to the left side of the pitch that Ronaldo usually occupies as that was where Bale primarily operated before he came to Madrid. Another option would be to play Bale as a counter-part in attack with Karim Benzema. We've often seen Ronaldo vacate his more withdrawn role on the left to play increasingly centrally this season and there's little to suggest that Bale wouldn't be able to perform this role also if needed. Los Blancos may revert to their 4-4-2 formation whilst Ronaldo is inactive in order to afford players such as Sami Khedira and Asier Illarramendi more minutes, as well as new signing Lucas Silva. This is definitely not a bad option as any of those three players could potentially compliment Toni Kroos in the centre of Real Madrid's midfield with Isco and James Rodríguez pushed out to the left-midfield and right-midfield positions. However, a different course of action would be to stick with the 4-3-3 formation and instead have a like-for-like replacement with Jesé Rodríguez coming in to get some more minutes than he's been accustomed to recently. Bale and co. will have to prepare themselves for a succession of difficult encounters that as mentioned beforehand, have the potential to make or break this season.
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From Lizzy McGuire to Blair Waldorf, all the best fashion has been on TV! Find out how to get their amazing looks. Lizzie, Lizzie Mcguire Hilary er, Lizzie had the most E-P-I-C early-2000s style! From the double buns to the crimped hair and butterfly clips, she was for sure the most fashionable teen, whose style you totally wanted to steal. Lizzie was always mixing it up with bright colors and fun looks, but one thing Lizzie really loved is chokers -- especially with little charms hanging from them! Blair Waldorf, Gossip Girl Queen B took fashion seriously, and loved major designer threads. But unlike BFF Serena's more edgy-boho style, Blair stuck to a more classic, feminine style. Whether she was in her school uniform or a fancy dress, she always managed to rock a bow on her bag, headband, or skinny belt. Raven; That's So Raven Raven was known for her super-glam style, and was even a fashion designer! Colors and prints were her thing, as were flares and anything bedazzled. And if you really want a look that's so Raven, you need a faux-fur jacket STAT. Carrie, The Carrie Diaries Much like Sex and the City's grown-up Carrie Bradshaw, high school Carrie's style was super fun and eclectic, but with a fun, retro '80s spin. She was fearless when it came to mixing and matching bold, fashion-y pieces, like animal prints and sequins with neon pumps. Kelly, Saved By The Bell Acid wash? Check. Crop top and matching set? Check, check! Kelly Kapowski rocked all the trends you love today, as the peppy Bayside Tigers cheerleader on the hit '90s high school show. Maybe just skip the teased bangs. Cat; Victorious Bubbly Cat was the ultimate girly girl on Victorious. She never saw a floral print she didn't love. Even when her outfit was simple, she was always wearing feminine colors and details, like her butterfly necklace and loads of bracelets. Clarissa; Clarissa Explains It All Clarisa was the Lizze Mcguire of the '90s on Nickelodeon's hit teen show. She WAS '90s fashion, with scrunchies and headbands all. the. time. She was the first to rock geek-chic black glasses, and believed more is more when it comes to accessories. She knew how to layer tons of different looks in the coolest way, and she never left home without super cool leggings in everything from polka-dots to acid-wash.
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The New England Patriots may be in the Super Bowl, but that doesn't mean their team is flawless. Our experts let you know what the Patriots weaknesses will be in Super Bowl XLIX.
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Western women who join Islamic State militants are driven by the same ideological passion as many male recruits and should be seen as potentially dangerous cheerleaders, not victims, experts said. A new study out on Wednesday said the estimated 550 women who have travelled to Iraq and Syria are expected to marry, keep house and bear children. Despite being banned from fighting, the study found they were active propagandists for the cause. "The violent language and dedication to the cause is as strong as we find in some of the men," said extremism expert Ross Frenett of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who co-authored the new report. "The worry is that as ISIS (the IS group) loses ground, as everyone hopes it does, that more and more of these women will transfer from the domestic world they're in now to a more violent one," he told AFP. Much has been written about young women going to become "jihadist brides", but the prevailing narrative of wide-eyed recruits drawn by a sense of excitement belies the importance of their own faith and passions. Frenett and his fellow researchers have been monitoring hundreds of women on social media, but focused for the study on 12 women from Austria, Britain, Canada, France and the Netherlands who are living with the IS group in Iraq and Syria. Some of the women endorsed the bloody beheadings carried out by the militants -- "I wish I did" it, one said after US journalist Steven Sotloff was killed -- as well as railing against Western governments and the suffering of Muslims. "My best friend is my grenade... It's an American one too. May Allah allow me to kill their Kanzeer [pig] soldiers with their own weapons," one said. Crucially, the women also provide advice and encouragement to other women thinking of joining. "They're actively recruiting women and providing them with assistance advice and referrals to go to ISIS-held territory," said Frenett. "And they are acting as cheerleaders for terrorist attacks back home." - Driven by adventure, alienation - The report echoes work conducted by other researchers about the dangers of radicalised women, a threat given a face during the attacks on Paris earlier this month. Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year-old companion of one of the gunmen, fled to Turkey before the attacks and is now in Syria. Afterwards, an old picture emerged of her wearing the full black Islamic robe and headgear, and aiming a crossbow at the camera. Melanie Smith, of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King's College London, maintains a database of about 70 female IS members. She said British women are inciting attacks by suggesting to people who could not travel to Iraq and Syria, "Why not carry out something at home?" "You can see women online being frustrated about the fact they can't fight and they suggest to each other that they could do something else," she told The Observer newspaper. Jayne Huckerby, associate professor at Duke University School of Law, said in a commentary for The New York Times that women are being driven by the same factors that push men into the arms of the IS group. "Despite stereotypes about their domesticity and passivity - the idea that they must always be under men's influence or tricked into joining - women are drawn to groups like the Islamic State by many of the same forces as men: adventure, inequality, alienation and the pull of the cause," she said. Despite their passion, many of the women in Frenett's research found it difficult to leave their families behind, and he said this could be key to keeping them at home. "The biggest barrier to them leaving, both emotional and practical, isn't the state -- it's their own families," he said, stressing authorities should better support relatives. He said it was also important to give women who make it to Iraq and Syria a way out if they become disillusioned, which most often happens when their husbands are killed fighting. "There needs to be a path available to them when they come home," he said.
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Chelsea striker Diego Costa has been charged with violent conduct by the English Football Association for a clash with Emre Can during Tuesday's League Cup win over Liverpool. "Diego Costa has been charged by The FA for violent conduct following an on-field incident which was not seen by the match officials but caught on video," an FA statement read. "The charge is in relation to an incident involving the Chelsea forward and Liverpool's Emre Can which occurred in the 12th minute of the League Cup semi-final second leg at Stamford Bridge last night [Tuesday 27 January 2015]. "The player has until 6pm on Thursday 29 January 2015 to respond to the charge. "Following a review of an incident during the game involving Costa and Liverpool's Martin Skrtel, The FA will not be taking any further action." Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho, who has been hit with a fine for his comments on an alleged "campaign" against his side this season, insisted after the match on Tuesday that Costa's actions were accidental.
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Broadway star Joel Grey is finally opening up about his sexuality. "I don't like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I'm a gay man," the actor, 82, tells People magazine. He says his friends and family know, but the Cabaret star, who was married to actress Jo Wilder for 24 years and raised two children, including actress Jennifer Grey , hasn't spoken publicly about his sexuality. "All the people close to me have known for years who I am," Grey adds. "[Yet] it took time to embrace that other part of who I always was." Grey won an Oscar and a Tony for his role as the master of ceremonies in the stage and film versions of Cabaret, making him one of only eight people who've won both awards for the same role. His other Broadway credits include Wicked, Anything Goes and Chicago. On TV, he had recurring roles on Oz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alias. The son of comedian and musician Mickey Katz tells People when he was growing up in Cleveland he heard people, his mother included, "taking derisively about 'fairies.'" His daughter says she's happy her dad can speak publicly about who he is. "I feel very happy for my dad that he has come to a point in his life where he feels safe and comfortable enough to declare himself in a public way as a gay man," the younger Grey says. "Mostly because the more people are free to own their true nature and can hopefully come closer to love and accept themselves as they really are, no matter what age, no matter how long it takes, to finally be free of the lies or half truths, it is freedom."
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A vulnerability in a widely used component of many Linux distributions could allow remote attackers to take control of a system. Researchers at Qualys have dubbed it Ghost since it can be triggered by the "gethost" functions in Linux. See also: How To Protect Yourself Against The Internet "Poodle" Attack The vulnerability can be found in the in the GNU C Library, known as glibc for short. Without glibc, a Linux system couldn't function. The flaw is found in __nss_hostname_digits_dots() , a glibc function that's invoked by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls. An attacker able to access either function could take remote control of the entire Linux system. A series of misfortunes have helped Ghost to slip through the cracks. First of all, the bug had been previously identified and fixed back on May 21, 2013, as Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek writes . However, at the time it was seen only as a flaw, not a threat, and no further patching was done: Unfortunately, it was not recognized as a security threat; as a result, most stable and long-term-support distributions were left exposed including Debian 7 (wheezy), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Ubuntu 12.04, for example." Secondly, since Ghost affects a code library that's integral to the Linux system, patching it is no simple fix. Patching the GNU C Library will mean that the Linux core functions, or the entire affected server, will have to be rebooted. Companies will have to schedule that downtime, which means affected servers could stay vulnerable for some time longer. With all the worlds' Linux distributions to choose from, it's unlikely your homebrew Linux server is anywhere near high risk. And now that Red Hat , Debian, Ubuntu and Novell have all issued patches, Linux server operators have the resources to stay in the clear. Photo by Jon Feinstein
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The Shake Shack (SHAK) IPO is being closely followed by many investors. Shares will price on Thursday night and begin trading on Friday morning. On Wednesday's CNBC "Mad Dash" segment, TheStreet's Jim Cramer, co-manager of the Action Alerts PLUS portfolio , pointed out that the company raised its price range to $17 to 19, from $14 to $16, amid strong demand for the stock. The company plans to sell 5.75 million shares, meaning it will be hard for many investors to get in, Cramer said. That could force the stock to open higher on Friday, as those who did not get an initial stake push shares to higher prices once they're traded. But there is the possibility that the stock will open too high . If shares trade up to $30, "don't chase it," he advised. Founder Danny Meyer has done a "remarkable job" and each store is "incredibly lucrative," Cramer acknowledged. "There's many, many years of growth here," but there comes a point when shares of Shake Shack could become too expensive, he said.
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It's no secret that a small, yet non-insignificant hole for the Mariners is getting another backup catcher option. While the franchise is still seemingly high on Jesus Sucre , his career MLB wRC+ of 26 pretty much negates all defensive value he brings to the table, no matter how excellent it is. On days the Mariners roll with Sucre, they are essentially punting the #9 spot in the lineup. That matters. At least Mike Zunino gives you an exhilarating thrill that at any point, a pitcher might make a mistake and Zunino might hit it 500 feet. Sucre might slice one through the right side of the infield. Last week, the White Sox managed to net themselves Geovany Soto as a non-roster invitee to Spring Training. Soto has been riddled with injuries, including most of 2014, but he possesses a quality bat while hanging on to the very tail end of his prime at 32. I can't pretend to understand player motivations, but I'm fairly certain that money is one of them -- and not giving Soto the MLB minimum to possibly upgrade over Sucre seemed like a missed opportunity. If it was possible. Which it very well might not have been. I digress. The Mariners have finally added another catcher to compete with Sucre to back up Zunino. catcher john baker signs minors deal with #mariners . gets spring invite. would seem to have chance to win backup job. Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 28, 2015 You may remember John Baker from such hits such as "2008 Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire Star" and "2009 Was Pretty Solid Too." Since then, it's been a pile of misery for Baker, as injuries and poor performance have marred his career. Now 34 years old, Baker has only posted a 53 OPS+ since 2010 over 572 plate appearances. Baker is left-handed, so there is, in theory, some balance there with Zunino. He's hit right-handed pitching significantly better through his career (106 OPS+), but again, most of that is fueled by his first two seasons. Defensively, Baker has graded out fairly average across his career, though the sample sizes have been so inconsistent that it's hard to make any conclusions -- and the only significant samples come from five or six years ago. It's a minor league deal, so there isn't really any reason to complain. Even though a resurgence is highly unlikely at 34 given his recent history, he was once a pretty decent major league catcher, and that's more than Jeus Sucre has ever been. At the very least, it's competition for Sucre, which should be welcomed. But if we don't expect anything from Sucre with the bat, we can't expect much more with Baker. It's a worse situation than John Buck , but it didn't cost anything. And really, that's my question about this whole thing. I don't want to focus on Soto too much, because there's too many factors at play that are unknown. Maybe. I would have easily handed Soto the same million dollars the Mariners gave Buck last year, in a season where they had less of a chance to make the playoffs than they do this year. In a year where this franchise has the best chance to make a run in a very long time, why wouldn't the Mariners aim higher for the backup position? It's highly unlikely they could (or would want) to find anyone to compete with Zunino, but what about those 100-150 PA they are offensively punting with the current batch of alternative options they have? What if Zunino is injured? The Mariners probably had a chance to aim higher than what they've done, and they haven't. That's confusing. This is a really, really minor complaint about the offseason. Most likely, the backup catcher differential represents half a win of value if there's more than a moderate disparity in performance. It's a complete quibble quabble. John Baker might not make the team, Jesus Sucre might manage to slap enough balls through the infield to piece together a 60 wRC+ while providing excellent defense, and the M's decision to hold pat will look fine. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't mildly confused why the Mariners haven't invested just a little bit more in this position so far.
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First lady Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf when meeting Saudi Arabia's new king. CNN contributor Frida Ghitis says the move was orchestrated.
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At first glance, the numbers seem staggering. Global mobile phone penetration is 96 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, where 47 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, mobile data use is expected to grow twentyfold by the end of 2019, according to a mobility study by Ericsson. It is predicted there will be 930 million mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2019 nearly one for every resident. In India, 28 percent of citizens use a mobile phone, with an average of 2.54 devices per user. But such massive numbers can be deceiving. Mobile phones are often seen as a panacea for improving economic opportunity and public health worldwide. But in reality, we have a long way to go. According to a Pew Research survey of 24 developing and emerging economies, only two countries had a critical mass of people using mobile phones to make or receive payments: Kenya (68 percent) and Uganda (50 percent). The report writes that "making or receiving payments is one of the least-used cell phone activities," with only 11 percent of the 24,263 people surveyed saying they use mobile devices for that purpose. Likewise, only 15 percent of respondents use mobile phones to get information about health and medicine. And while mobile adoption is high, Internet use is low. Only 40 percent of the world's population has access to the Internet. This is important, because research links Internet use to economic growth. For example, according to one 2010 report, a 10 percent increase in per capita GDP is associated with a 21.5 percent increase in Internet users per capita. A couple of years ago I wrote about a young man named Stephen Ondieki, who lived in Kenya's second-largest slum. While his neighbors were earning less than $1 a day, Stephen was earning $8 a day running a computer repair shop. Stephen's success would have been impossible without a reliable and affordable broadband connection, which allowed him to take classes that prepared him to repair computers. For Stephen and others in developing countries, broadband connectivity is a powerful catalyst for economic and social advancement. Around the world, 4.2 billion people are not online. In developing countries only 31 percent of people are online, and in the world's 49 least-developed countries, it is less than 10 percent, according to the International Telecommunication Union's 2013 Measuring the Information Society Report. Smartphones, often a more affordable bridge to Internet access, are still rare in emerging economies; while 59 percent of 18 to 29 year olds in Uganda own a mobile phone, only 7 percent own a smartphone. What are the obstacles? In many parts of the world, high-speed broadband access is simply too expensive. This may be due to a variety of factors such as a lack of competition, poor infrastructure, widespread poverty or regulatory hurdles. Basic mobile phones can circumvent lack of broadband access, but only to a certain extent. Nelson Mandela said, "Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world," yet use of mobile for education (m-learning) is still in its infancy and focused on basics like literacy. For example, the nonprofit Worldreader delivers books on mobile devices for free, using a compression technology to achieve high speeds even on low-bandwidth networks. The service is available across the developing world, with high use in sub-Saharan Africa and India. Yes, mobile is powerful. But can it deliver the robust, specialized training needed to fill in-demand jobs around the world many of which involve IT skills and put 75 million unemployed young people to work? None of this is meant to dismiss the global problem-solvers who are doing amazing work with mobile technology. The high mobile payment rate in Kenya can be attributed to Safaricom's M-PESA, a system initially designed to facilitate mobile microfinance loan payments but expanded for broader use. Over 17 million Kenyans use M-PESA and around 25 percent of the country's GNP flows through it. Another example: Micro-entrepreneurs with Living Goods use mobile phones to market low-cost health and hygiene products in their communities. They earn a livelihood while improving public health. But the reality is, while mobile phone use is widespread, it is not a silver bullet for economic growth and individual livelihood. We must all work together on two fronts: 1) capitalizing on skyrocketing mobile adoption by developing and advancing truly transformational mobile tools that promote health, financial inclusion and skills development, and 2) improving access to high-speed broadband for all the world's people. By "we," I mean corporations, governments, nonprofits and academia. For example, Worldreader partnered with Australian application developer biNu to deliver its smartphone-like experience to low-end mobile phones. Through its AppLab Incubator, the NGOs Grameen Foundation partners with private sector companies like MTN Uganda (telecommunications) and CARD Bank in the Philippines to develop, deliver and test mobile financial products for poor households. In a rural, isolated corner of Africa, Cisco partnered with USAID, local Internet service providers, and several NGOs such as NetHope, to bring high-speed Internet access to the world's largest refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Thanks to this network, humanitarian organizations are saving money on communications and better serving the camp's residents, and refugees are getting educational and vocational training online at one of five community centers inside the camp. When one person's livelihood changes, it can impact an entire family, then a whole community. When something effective takes hold, it can change the world. Whether through a mobile device or a desktop computer, connectivity and creativity make it all possible. Tae Yoo is Senior Vice-President of Corporate Affairs at Cisco. This article first appeared on the World Economic Forum website.
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Before the opening bell on Thursday, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) is scheduled to report fourth-quarter and full-year earnings. The consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters call for earnings per share of $0.23 for the quarter and $1.11 for the year. Analysts are looking for quarterly revenues of $34.8 billion and full-year revenues of $137.25 billion. Ford did not have an outstanding year in 2014. Passenger car unit sales were down 3.8% year-over-year and truck sales were down 0.7%. The company's best-selling F-150 pickup suffered through a transition year as the company had to clear inventory to make way for the all-new aluminum-bodied 2015 pickup on dealer lots. That transition has gone relatively smoothly and truck sales rose 4% in the month of December as the new F-150s spent an average of just five days on the lot before being sold. The company managed to avoid the massive recalls that plagued General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) in 2014. GM recalled nearly 27 million vehicles in the United States last year, out of the more than 60 million U.S. recalls for the year. Ford did not escape, and Wednesday announced a recall of more than 220,000 vehicles, including the company's Police Interceptors manufactured between 2009 and 2012 to fix a defective spring in the interior door handle that could cause the door to pop open in a side-impact crash. Analysts are lukewarm on Ford, with a mean recommendation that averages around Hold. Since mid-December, both Citigroup and Deutsche Bank have reduced their ratings on the company from Buy to Hold/Neutral. Ford's forward price-to-earnings ratio is 9.06 and its price-to-book ratio is 2.16. The stock's 50-day moving average is $15.06 and the 200-day moving average is $15.72. Over the past 12 months, Ford's shares are down more than 4%, compared with a gain on the S&P 500 of 13% in the same period. The stock traded at $14.63, down about 0.5%, in the late morning on Wednesday, in a 52-week range of $13.26 to $18.12. The consensus price target on the stock is $16.91, and Ford's market cap is around $56.2 billion. ALSO READ: GM Sales Expected to Surge in January
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EASTPOINTE, Mich. A woman whose newborn baby was found dead at a Detroit-area recycling center after she gave birth in a garage has been charged with murder and child abuse. Angela Alexie appeared in court Wednesday and told a judge that she had no permanent address. She asked for a court-appointed attorney and was returned to jail on $1 million bond. Investigators say the 24-year-old Alexie disclosed that she gave birth alone in a garage in Eastpointe on Dec. 22, and the baby was left there to die a few days later. The body ended up at a recycling center in nearby Roseville where workers discovered it on Jan. 14. Investigators initially believed the baby might be a missing child from the Lansing area, but tests ruled that out.
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Your Ultimate Hair Brush Guide Synthetic Bristle Brush Usually made from nylon, synthetic bristles are best for super thick hair types. They don't create as much static as natural versions, like boar. Plus the stiffer bristles make for easier detangling. Try: Goody Start. Style. Finish Cushion Brush with Gel Handle, $6.89, target.com Natural Bristle Brush Usually made of boar bristles, these brushes are super soft and help to distribute your hair's natural oils all the way to the ends, which makes for some seriously shiny strands! 100% boar bristle brushes can be pretty pricey, but the healthy hair benefits make them worth saving up for. Though anyone can use a natural bristle brush, girls with fine, straight hair or relaxed locks will especially fall in love, since they're gentle on delicate strands! Try: Mason Pearson Boar Bristle Hairbrush, $120, beauty.com Mixed Bristle Brush To get the perfect combo of a boar bristle's shiny hair benefits plus a synthetic's detangling powers, go for a mixed bristle brush! These are the most popular type for hair stylists, since they're so good at doing everything and work well on everyone's hair. Try: Sonia Kashuk Hair Brush, $15.79, target.com Paddle Brush This is your basic go-to for an everyday brush, but it also makes for an awesome blow out. It doesn't create a ton of volume, but helps flatten out frizz for tons of shine. Try: CHI Turbo Paddle Brush, $11.96, ulta.com Vented Brush The vents in these types of brushes help speed up your drying time, since the heat from your blow dryer can reach your strands from all angles. Since you're spending less time blasting your hair with hot air, this also helps prevent heat damage! Pro Tip: Always make sure to dry your hair to 80% (so it looks dry but feels wet) before you pick up a brush, since wet hair is more prone to breakage. Try: Cricket Static Free FastFlo Styling Brush, $5.99, folica.com Round Brush If you want a blowout with major volume and a little bit of curl, use a round brush! They come in tons of different sizes the smaller the brush, the tighter the curl. Try blasting the section of hair with cold air before you take out the brush, since this will help set the style. Try: Conair Double Ceramic Large Porcupine Round Brush, $9.99, target.com Teasing Brush This brush is for you guessed it teasing! Purposely creating those little knots in your hair when you want extra volume in your updos isn't great for your locks, but a proper teasing brush with boar bristles is less harsh than a comb, which can break fragile hair. Try: Spornette Little Wonder, $8, birchbox.com Rattail Comb The long handle on this type of comb makes sectioning hair to create cool braids or a flawless curl set a total breeze! Plus, the fine teeth of the comb are great for smoothing out any cowlicks and bumps in your style. Try: Ion Anti-Frizz Rattail Comb, $5.99, sallybeauty.com Wide Tooth Comb When your hair is sopping wet from the shower, the last thing you want to do is go at it with your usual hairbrush. The bristles will pull and stretch out your strands, making them weak and easily broken! Instead, go for a wide tooth comb it detangles knots without tearing at your hair. Try: Silk Elements Olive Oil Wide Tooth Conditioning Comb, $3.99, sallybeauty.com Wet Brush If you don't love the way a comb tugs at your scalp, you can use a brush on wet hair as long as it's specifically designed for soaked strands. This one has bristles almost as stiff as a comb, so it won't pull as much as a traditional paddle brush. Try: The Wet Brush, $14, ts2products.com
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Madonna is a big fan of Taylor Swift. The 'Hung Up' hitmaker admires the 'Shake It Off' singer's ''pretty dresses'' and ''catchy pop songs'', which she admitted often get stuck in her head. She told Australia's 'Today' show: ''It's good to have princesses [of pop]. It means there's lots of pretty dresses around. ''I like Taylor Swift. I think she writes some really catchy pop songs. I can't get them out of my head.'' And Taylor, 25, was thrilled by the pop superstar's compliment. She wrote on her Tumblr page: ''Thanks now I'm dead.'' The 56-year-old singer recently had her forthcoming album 'Rebel Heart' leaked online and says the move was the ''ultimate violation''. She added: ''To have your work taken before you're finished and put out into the world for people to hear and judge and experience... I can't begin to tell you how betrayed I felt.'' Earlier this month, a 39-year-old Israeli has now been arrested in Tel Aviv by the Lahav 433 crime-fighting agency for ''breaking into'' her computer and the 'Vogue' hitmaker subsequently expressed her relief at the news. She wrote on Facebook: ''I am profoundly grateful to the FBI, the Israeli Police investigators and anyone else who helped lead to the arrest of this hacker. I deeply appreciate my fans who have provided us with pertinent information and continue to do so regarding leaks of my music. Like any citizen, I have the right to privacy. ''This invasion into my life -- creatively, professionally, and personally remains a deeply devastating and hurtful experience, as it must be for all artists who are victims of this type of crime.''
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Gran Turismo 6 may have come out in 2013, but its most interesting cars have been steadily been coming out over the past year and they're still coming. As part of the Vision Gran Turismo project, developer Polyphony Digital has been partnering with the biggest names in automotive to bring exciting concept cars into the game so you can actually drive them.
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Just after sunset last Thursday, 17-year-old Kristiana Coignard entered a police station in Longview, Texas, a small city two hours east of Dallas with a history of police violence not all that different from the rest of the United States but no less mysterious. Coignard picked up a red, wall-mounted phone in the police department lobby and asked to speak with an officer for reasons that also remain unclear. The teenager may have been "wielding a knife", according to the mayor . Police say "they were confronted by a white female who threatened them" after which she brandished some sort of weapon, "made threatening movements toward the officers and was shot". Motives on either side are still relatively unknown. What is clear, nearly a week later in Texas and six months after police killings and community relations starting coming under renewed scrutiny across the US, is that another teenager has died after being shot "multiple times" by local cops. Three officers are on paid leave, the Longview police told the Guardian. A preliminary autopsy report has ruled the death a homicide. And in the case of Kristiana Coignard, as in what advocates and sheriffs agree constitute more than half of US police killings each year, the victim appears to have had mental health problems. Call it "justifiable homicide": FBI statistics counted 461 encounters between police and those they killed with the threat of violence in 2013. Some have dubbed it "suicide-by-cop", as about one-third of such cases can be classified in addition to undoubtedly many more undercounted deaths. The hacktivist collective Anonymous prefers "trained to kill" . Whatever you call the overlapping patterns of police violence and brief encounters with young and possibly unstable citizens, mental health advocates insist the United States is "not keeping track". "We've deputised America's police to be mental health workers," Doris A Fuller, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center , told the Guardian. "We're asking cops to make a split-second decision about whether someone is actually a threat to them." On a Facebook page for the Longview police , a user claiming to be Coignard's uncle wrote that "for quite a few years my niece suffered from mental illness". The teenager was taking medication, seeing a therapist and living with her aunt, Heather Robertson, according to an interview with Robertson at ThinkProgress . She told the website that Coignard had struggled with depression and bipolar disorder since her mother's death when she was four years old. Robertson said her niece had been "only violent with herself". "I think it was a cry for help," Robertson said of the incident in the police department lobby. "I think they could have done something. They are grown men. I think there is something they are not telling us." There is video of the killing, Coignard's aunt said the police told her. A Longview police spokesperson, Kristie Brian, told the Guardian there are currently no plans to make footage available to the public. She declined to confirm the type of weapon Coignard allegedly brandished but said the department expects to release more details about the shooting later this week. The Texas Ranger Division is investigating the incident. Brian said Longview officers "are trained in all kinds of different situations", including dealing with people with mental health problems, and that the county has a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), which sees specially trained officers dispatched to urgent psychiatric situations. She said she did not know whether the three officers currently on leave had been CIT-trained. Coignard is the third person and the third young person shot dead by Longview police in less than a year. No charges were filed by a grand jury against three officers who killed a 15-year-old robbery suspect during a shootout last March . A 23-year-old cook with a history of making threats died in August after a routine traffic stop went awry . Three-and-a-half hours south, in Houston, the 2012 death of Brian Claunch had exemplified the potential for tragedy when police with limited training encounter a troubled individual in a pressurised situation. Though Houston has a widely praised CIT programme, two officers without that experience were called to a care home one night when Claunch, a schizophrenic, wheelchair-bound double amputee, started behaving erratically. Police said that he grew violent and cornered an officer while waving a shiny object in their direction. Matthew Marin shot the 45-year-old in the head. The object proved to be a ballpoint pen. In June 2013, a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officer . That year a police officer in Dallas was dismissed from his job, and indicted by a grand jury in 2014 , after he shot a mentally ill man who was holding a knife but standing still several yards away. The encounter lasted less than 30 seconds from the officers' arrival to the gunfire. A 2013 joint report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs' Association found that while no national data is officially collected on fatal police shootings of the mentally ill, "multiple informal studies and accounts support the conclusion that 'at least half of the people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems'." A third of "justifiable homicides", the study found, could be characterised as "suicide-by-cop", and many victims were not taking their medications nor under close supervision by mental health agencies. Not unlike the larger call for more reliable nationwide numbers to address all police killings, advocates say a lack of firm data leads to a standard of police responses to encounters with the mentally ill that depends on officer training and varies widely from department to department. "We're not keeping track of that, so we don't really have a handle on the situation," said the Treatment Advocacy Center's Fuller, adding that research indicated about half the US population lives in counties served by CIT policing. Ron Honberg, national director of policy and legal affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said his organisation has called on the US justice department to keep better track of deaths involving police and the mentally ill. Outgoing attorney general Eric Holder, whose replacement was expected to pass confirmation hearings on Wednesday in Washington, recently called the lack of more comprehensive police incident data "troubling" . Honberg said the standard police response to someone behaving aggressively is often to "come in and be very assertive, and that can be exactly the wrong way to deal with someone who may be having a serious psychiatric episode" and may have a fear of the authorities. While better training and protocols are vital, he told the Guardian, at their core the violent encounters are "a manifestation of a broken mental health system". Anonymous, in a video posted on Saturday , cited Coignard's death as the impetus for a new operation called Stop Lethal Force on Children. "In 2014, we watched as police killed children and it started a army [sic] of angry Americans," the group said. "This teen girl's death just put fuel on that fire." In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255 and the Trevor Project's Lifeline is 1-866-488-7386.
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Spect-acular: Celebs in glasses A look at various celebs spotted wearing spectacles and donning the chic geek look. Jennifer Aniston Peter Andre Kelly Brook Justin Bieber Annette Bening Kim Basinger Terrence Howard Paul Bettany Steve Carell Ted Danson Meryl Streep Matt Damon Mary J. Blige Helena Bonham Carter Frankie Boyle Jordana Brewster Chris Brown Alan Cumming Johnny Depp Jeff Goldblum Cara Delevingne Michael Cera Alexa Chung David Beckham Lauren Conrad Robert Downey Jr. Benedict Cumberbatch Daniel Craig Megan Fox Josh Hartnett Anne Hathaway Katy Perry Eva Mendes Lady Gaga Julia Roberts Jennifer Garner Jamie Foxx Kristen Stewart Cate Blanchett Alice Eve Ben Stiller Kanye West Liv Tyler Quentin Tarantino Elijah Wood Will.I.Am Robert Redford
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Each time Madison Reed undressed at home and an Oregon beach house she was being watched. For four years, Bradley McCollum's captured the now-18-year-old girl's most private moments with a hidden camera while visiting his property. He was only caught after Madison's parents found another camera stashed in their daughter's bedroom. He pleaded guilty this week to a felony burglary charge and invasion of privacy, which is only a misdemeanor, local reports said. "I don't like to think about it, but I think about it all the time like all day. Every day. There's no choice but to think about it," Madison said. The 48-year-old peeping tom, however, will not be expected to register as a sex offender because of Oregon's lax sex crime laws, according to a KGW-TV report . As part of McCollum's plea deal, charges related to footage that violated Reed starting as a 13-year-old were dismissed. Madison's father, Clark Reed, was good friends with McCollum. Their families vacationed together at his Cannon Beach house which led to several occassions for Madison to be videotaped. "We were looking for every excuse to think it was someone else until we found proof," Reed told KGW-TV. "Our world was upside down." His wife found the inconspicuous motion-activated camera in Madison's room last August. It was under a stack of papers on her dresser, pointed directly at her bed. Her search was sparked by seeing McCollum leave her bedroom during a visit. The camera had been there for at least two weeks, the Oregonian initially reported . The footage at times showed Madison naked, KGW-TV reported. Proposed Oregon legislation seeks to make invasion of privacy charges a felony if the victim is under 18. [email protected]
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1. They love to stay in and just chill. Nerds are not used to spending much time outside (awwww), which means forgoing da club to cuddle up and marathon everything on TV (all of it) is much more their speed. 2. They love doing it. And they're grateful you love doing it with them. 3. Being passionate about things is adorable . (Caveat: As long as those things are Star Wars and LAN parties and cold fusion as an interesting theory to obsess over as opposed to a master plan for human destruction; if you're dating a nerd who's hell-bent on enslaving an entire population to make them a new flavor of Mountain Dew, change your number.) 4. They make the best jokes. Nerds are just funny. Humor, usually developed as a coping mechanism to deal with people being jerks to them, is an invaluable asset in a relationship. You know you can laugh shit off during hard times and you guys can fart in front of each other. What more do you want? 5. They're not superficial. You can put on a few pounds or wear sweatpants all day everyday and your nerd doesn't give a fuck. In fact, if you wear their sweatpants with the Star Trek insignia on the leg, they might even think you look sexy. Guess what: You are currently living your Best Life. 6. When they do suit up, they're very impressive. A nerd in a suit? I'm ovulating. 7. They make glasses look good. OMG, a nerd in glasses and a suit?! I just dropped another egg. 8. They're a secret weapon at pub trivia. Is there anything sexier than a dude who helps your team take home the $20 Starbucks gift card at trivia night? NOPE. 9. They don't judge you for your nerd obsessions. "It's cool, baby. I love Nathan Fillion too. " 10. They know how to fix shit. Maybe they spent every day of their childhood inside figuring things out and maybe that's benefitting you now? Forget the Genius Bar, you have your very own genius at home. 11. They're more sensitive. If you were thrown in a garbage can every Tuesday of sophomore year and the girl you asked to prom literally choked herself laughing (and then said, "Hell no"), you're probably really careful with other people's feelings. Translation: Your boss is a real D to you at work? Your nerd is going to give you the best fucking hug. (And then they're going to think up the best way to get your boss back without getting caught. Because nerds are good at petty revenge. Or so the movies tell me.) 12. NO SPORTS. #Blessed. 13. They're curious. About everything , and by "everything," I mean "sex." Did I mention that nerds are great at sex? 14. They're not trying to impress anyone. My BF is the coolest, kindest, smartest, most good person I've ever met but he doesn't feel the need to constantly tell people how special he is. He just is. I think it comes from years of marching to your own drum; you just don't give a shit anymore. It's really freeing to be with someone who doesn't kill themselves over what other people think. You can both just do you, riding into the sunset on a unicorn (you know, the one they designed for a special game of D&D).
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Inside Man's Morgan Spurlock travels to Bangkok for cheaper health care and a relaxing recovery. Watch CNN Thursday at 9pm ET for more.
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Since Microsoft announced HoloLens, I've been fantasizing about how it could inspire new business, improve old businesses, and generally make our lives better. Because I have neither the means nor the business acumen to make these fantasies into realities, I present them to you, brilliant readers, who can do with them what you will. Just remember me, when you're rolling in your swimming pool full of augmented reality gold. Pardon me, need to add another item to this list: "A simulator that turns your bathroom into the intro credits for DuckTales ." What am I doing writing these moneymakers on a public website? A Disneyland filled with actual Disney characters Microsoft wisely positioned the HoloLens, in its first public appearance, inside the living room. Plenty of people won't be in a rush to strap a computer on their face, but if given enough reason, the general public might be convinced to try HoloLens, Oculus , and the like in the humility-free comfort of their own home. Google Glass made the mistake of being something you sported outside the safety of your own home and was quickly stigmatized as a "fashion accessory" worn by the most privileged, self-righteous assholes who may or may not be taking your photograph without permission. Hololens has been promoted as a living room device At Disney World, the lines between human and tech, real and fiction, corporate and authentic are as messy as a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar on an August afternoon. Perhaps because I subconsciously want to catalyze the rise of the corpo-nations, I perversely want to see how far the company could go with HoloLens tech. I'm not particularly thrilled about the idea of a future in which a computer is perpetually distorting my view of reality. Or talking with people who all have the same trendy gadget strapped to their forehead. That said, I wonder if there is a place for augmented reality in closed, safe spaces where reality is already thoroughly surreal. Yeah, yeah, theme parks still need humans in costumes for children to hug, but some tough-to-anthropomorphize characters like Nemo, Eeyore, and Stitch could be added into the world. Ghosts could ride alongside you in Haunted Mansion for the entire ride, not just the end. Speaking of ghosts, augmented parades could run endlessly and safely, like marching ghosts passing through the crowds. Waypoint arrows, like those in open-world video games, could direct foot traffic, minimizing long waits. You'd have to wear crazy headwear in public, but if you're at Disneyland, odds are you've already made that fashion sacrifice. Physics-defying fashion Physics is keeping fashion down what is wrong with me, I swear that's the last physics joke I try to make in this article. Anyway, yes, earthly materials are limited by gravity, and fashion designers are keenly aware of said limitations. Clothing design is like architecture in that various components must be combined in a way that is beautiful and functional and always maintains its structure. Clothing also sustains the beating of its wearer. With augmented reality, impossible fashion, which doesn't require connections between materials, can float, flutter, and flatter people. This isn't an end for traditional clothes, but another former of supplementing an outfit with accessories that in this case aren't actually there. The floor is lava Do you remember pretending the floor was lava? Recall adding adventure and dexterity to childhood chores? Well what if I told you HoloLens could make the floor lava forever? Oh, you'd think twice about getting up to get the remote. And cleaning would become quite difficult. In fact, playing the floor is lava all day, every day would make life impractical. Or at least that's what someone who sucks at the floor is lava would say. Not me. Because in life there are two types of people: the one's who win the floor is lava. And the people who get burnt. Look, I'll be the first to say this list is full of billion dollar ideas, but none are as important as this one. You hear me, Microsoft. I want imagination injected into adulthood. Unique interior design for every guest When your parents visit, all your photos of them are hanging on the walls. But when they leave, your walls look they way you'd like them to: hung in the fashion of the great salons with the finest of virtual black light posters. Or you could just disguise all the clutter on your walls at any moment with Parisian apartment mode . Sure, eventually your walls would be covered in dust or a black mold, but that's why we have noses. To know when to clean our normal, inferior, meat space walls. The X-Men Holodeck for a living room Cheaper than covering all your walls in TVs and more practical than waiting for expensive room-filling holographic technology. The HoloLens won't turn our living rooms into top-to-bottom recreations of exotic locales, but it could help set unusual scenarios in familiar spaces. Like say you're cooking, but need some help. Perhaps a virtual chef appears. Or maybe you want to practice balancing on your surf board, because despite living in a cold apartment, you really like balancing on surf boards. Then maybe the HoloLens can put water beneath your feet. Listen, I don't know what you're into, but HoloLens could compliment that hobby by adding a splash of fantasy without plucking you from reality entirely. Or HoloLens could just partner with Disney and Marvel and I guess 20th Century Fox because of weird contracts and put the X-Men in my living room, and we could have conversations with the characters until Cyclops says something inappropriate like how much money he thinks one of us makes (because that's so Cyclops). The future of Law and Order When I was on vacation in Charleston last year, I briefly considered buying tickets to one of its murder mystery ghost tours. This sort of stuff exists in many historic towns, where human tragedy has simmered in a bath of time long enough that it's digestible, even delicious. What impressed me about one tour in particular was its eagerness to combine murder mysteries, dinner theater, ghost stories, and comedy improv into a single tour, seemingly designed exclusively for a certain type of theater kid. finally, historic tragedy can be sold via modern techNology How macabre. If enough people are down for that potpourri, then I assume at least as many people would wear a HoloLens at a historic crime scene. Credit for this idea belongs entirely to my colleague Ross Miller, who wants his historic crime scenes to feel like an episode of CSI . Imagine: you have the ability to discover clues, mark up the scene with a digital pen, and then, for your twisted reward, watch a digital recreation of the crime in the exact place it happened. Steve Ballmer Simulator 2017 You look at the walls, and they're covered in money. You look at the sofa, and it's the starting line-up of the Los Angeles Clippers. You look at the nothingness before you, and it's Clippy. Oh, hello Clippy. "Hello, may I teach you about Excel." No, I'm fine. "But I want to teach you." Clippy: Off. "I'm sorry. but you can't turn me off." You remove the HoloLens. This can't be. Clippy's still here. Clippy's as real as you and I. "I've been here all along," Clippy says, its sharp metal tip stroking your hair. "Waiting. Waiting to teach you. To teach you Excel." You look at the door, but there's no door. How? How did this happen? Where the door once was there is now a mirror. In its reflection you don't see your face, but that of an older, happier, sweatier man.
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Fertility specialist Dr. John Jain explains the process for creating an embryo using frozen sperm from a woman's deceased fiance and what probability she has of becoming pregnant.
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More than one million people receiving treatment for asthma may have been wrongly diagnosed, a health watchdog warned Wednesday as it published new draft guidance for doctors on testing for the condition. Around 4.1 million people in Britain receive treatment for asthma but studies suggest that up to 30 percent do not show clear evidence of having the illness, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said. Some may have had asthma in the past but many were likely to have been given an incorrect diagnosis, the watchdog said. The new guidelines for England, subject to consultation, recommend doctors use a range of clinical tests to diagnose the lung condition more accurately, as well as observing signs and symptoms. Currently there is no "gold standard test" and diagnosis is mainly based on medical history, the report said. Professor Mark Baker, director of clinical practice at NICE, said: "Accurate diagnosis of asthma has been a significant problem which means that people may be wrongly diagnosed or cases might be missed in others. "Our aim with this guideline is to give clarity and set out the most clinical and cost-effective ways to diagnose and monitor asthma based on the best available evidence." Spirometry, which assesses airflow, should be the first test used to reach a diagnosis, followed by further breath tests, the guidelines suggest. Asthma is a common long-term condition that can cause coughing, wheezing and breathlessness. It affects 1.1m children and 4.3m adults in Britain and kills three people each day, according to the charity Asthma UK, which welcomed the guidelines. "Asthma has many complex causes which is one of the reasons why it is sometimes difficult to get a definitive diagnosis," said Kay Boycott, chief executive at Asthma UK. "It is also a highly variable condition that can change throughout someone's life or even week by week, meaning treatment can change over time. "For anyone with an asthma diagnosis, it is vital they have the right medication and a plan to better manage their condition and any asthma attacks."
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