WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hackers sympathetic to the late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz claimed on Saturday to have infiltrated the website of the U.S. Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.
The Sentencing Commission site, www.ussc.gov , was shut down early Saturday.
Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organized group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz’ suicide on January 11.
In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government’s prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service.
Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $ 1 million.
The FBI is investigating the attack, according to Richard McFeely, of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.
“We were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation,” McFeely said in an emailed statement. “We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.”
(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Vicki Allen)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
01/26/2013 at 01:50 PM EST
Kutcher was one of the first to arrive at the official after party, hosted by Nur Khan Presents NK on Main Street for the cast and filmmakers and sponsored by Red Touch Media.
Kutcher was captivated by a floor-to-ceiling portrait of late Apple visionary Steve Jobs, whom Kutcher portrays in the film. Guests were quick to snap a photo of the actor admiring the subject of his role.
Without Kunis by his side, Kutcher very much remained a one-man guy, focusing his attention all night on his table of male friends and colleagues and posing for pictures with fans, according to an observer. The pride he takes in jOBS was palpable, as Kutcher was incredibly excited to chat about his film and role with all the guests who came up to greet him.
Co-star Ahna O'Reilly spent the evening in a very social mood, dancing to the beats of DJ Cash and catching up with co-star Josh Gad. Not to live down his "funny man" persona, Gad went into the evening entertaining all the guests and causing an uproar of laughter with Kutcher and O'Reilly while catching up about filming and their time at Sundance.
– Jennifer Garcia
New government figures show that flu cases seem to be leveling off nationwide. Flu activity is declining in most regions although still rising in the West.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitalizations and deaths spiked again last week, especially among the elderly. The CDC says quick treatment with antiviral medicines is important, in particular for the very young or old. The season's first flu case resistant to treatment with Tamiflu was reported Friday.
Eight more children have died from the flu, bringing this season's total pediatric deaths to 37. About 100 children die in an average flu season.
There is still vaccine available although it may be hard to find. The CDC has a website that can help.
___
CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/
Authorities are investigating after a woman in San Bernardino County allegedly struck her fiance with a car. The California Highway Patrol said both were naked at the time of the Thursday incident.
CHP officials told KTLA News that the couple were in the parked car on Phelan Road in Phelan when Alberto Giovanni Bravo got out and walked in front of the vehicle. For reasons that are not clear, the woman, identified as 22-year-old Hesperia woman, got behind the wheel and ran into him.
Bravo was thrown onto the hood of the car and then tossed to the ground as the vehicle preceded to cross the road and run into a chain-link fence and some trees before coming to a stop.
The man was airlifted to a hospital and was said to be in serious condition. The woman, whose name was not released, was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. She was arrested on suspicion of felony DUI.
-- A Times staff writer
BEIJING — The young women met the officials for illicit trysts with video cameras hidden in their purses. Every detail of the encounters was recorded. Then a group of men confronted the officials with the video recordings and made demands.
China’s state news media reported on Friday details of a sex extortion ring that brazenly operated “honey traps” in the southwest metropolis of Chongqing for several years. The widening scandal, which first emerged late last year, has led to the dismissals of at least 11 officials of the Communist Party, government or state-owned companies for having sex with women in the ring and then being blackmailed by the men who had set up the snares.
Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader, has vowed to root out official corruption and said this week that “flies,” or relatively low-level bureaucrats, as well as top officials he referred to as “tigers,” must be brought down.
The most famous victim of the sex ring scandal has been Lei Zhengfu, a middle-aged district party chief who was secretly filmed having sex in a hotel room in 2008 with a young woman. In late November, the leaked video of Mr. Lei began circulating on the Internet and he became the poster boy for a series of low-level or midlevel officials who have been brought down by scandals, often sexual in nature, across the nation. Mr. Lei was removed from his job and placed under investigation soon after the video appeared online. Now, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, 10 other officials have been removed as well for falling prey to the sex ring. Five of them were executives in state-owned companies.
The sex scandal might have come out earlier but Bo Xilai, the Chongqing party chief at the time, and Wang Lijun, his police chief, buried the results of an investigation into the ring. Mr. Bo and Mr. Wang were both felled last year by the fallout from the murder of a British business executive arranged by Mr. Bo’s wife; Mr. Bo is expected to be tried soon on a wide range of criminal charges. While the two scandals are unrelated, the airing of the blackmail ring at this time could reflect a decision by the Chinese leadership to highlight other problems in Chongqing under Mr. Bo’s rule.
The ring’s mastermind was a man named Xiao Ye, according to a report by Southern Metropolis Daily on Wednesday that was cited by Xinhua in its Friday article. Three women were used as bait. The state media reports did not say exactly what the officials gave the men in return for keeping their involvement secret, but one report said that a company run by Mr. Xiao was involved in a real estate development project in the district governed by Mr. Lei.
Mr. Xiao gave the women a list of Chongqing officials whom the women were to contact, Xinhua reported. The women sent text messages to the officials. They would tell the officials they worked for a local real estate company and had met the official at a banquet.
“Hope we can stay in touch a lot,” they wrote. If the officials said they had no memory of the meeting, the women would invoke the name of a chief executive and pretend to be angry that the official had forgotten the woman already. If the official bit, the woman would continue flirting by text or transmit seductive photos of themselves, Xinhua said.
A woman would then meet with the official in an upscale hotel to have tea, coffee or a snack. The official would hand her gifts, such as jewelry. Eventually, when the two were ready to have sex, the woman would make sure to show up at the hotel room with a hidden camera. The official would rarely stay the entire night, but the video caught all the action.
This happened over and over until the video was clear enough, Xinhua reported. Then at a later tryst, several men in the ring would show up while the official and the woman were in the middle of having sex. One of the men would pretend to be the woman’s boyfriend and throw a fit. Behind him would be another man pretending to be a private detective. A third man would then show up and say he was a member of a gang.
They would beat up the official and show him the video. Mr. Xiao entered the scene afterward to work out an agreement with the official and assure him that the video would remain buried, as long as the demands were met.
Of the victims, Mr. Lei was the one who tried to fight back most vigorously, one report said. He assumed the video would eventually come out, and so he went to senior Chongqing officials to explain his plight. Wang Lijun, who was then the police chief of Chongqing, took charge of the case. By 2009, the investigation was done and Mr. Wang and Mr. Bo had the results. But they decided to quash the case or ignored it, and the officials who were found to have been victims of the ring were eventually promoted.
The Xinhua article on Friday said people have been especially surprised that one district party chief in particular, Peng Zhiyong, who holds a doctorate, fell victim to the honey trap.
“He was spoken highly of by the people and enjoyed a reputation for being talented, smart, eloquent and outstanding in all ways,” Xinhua said. In addition, the report said, he “was widely regarded as having enormous political potential.”
Amy Qin contributed research.
01/25/2013 at 02:25 PM EST
Wilko Johnson
Kate Booker/Redferns/Getty
The Game of Thrones actor, 65, who is aware "death is upon me," tells U.K. Radio 4's Front Row that upon hearing the news of his condition, he left the doctor's office and oddly felt "an elation of spirit."
Says Johnson, "You're walking along and suddenly you're vividly alive. You're looking at the trees and the sky and everything, and it's just, 'Whoa. I am actually a miserable person.' I've spent most of my life moping in depressions and things, but this has all lifted."
Johnson's illness was announced earlier this month. His manager wrote a Facebook post explaining, "[Wilko] has chosen not to receive any chemotherapy."
The actor and longtime musician plans to make the most of his opportunities before he dies. In fact, he currently has a series of concerts, which he's billing as a farewell tour, scheduled for February and March in France and in the U.K.
"I'm not going to go on stage looking ill," he says. "I don't want to present a sorry spectacle. This position I'm in is so strange. ... I'm not hoping for a miracle cure or anything. I just hope it spares me long enough to do these gigs, then I'll be a happy man."
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation.
The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1.
For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.
Younger smokers could be charged lower penalties under rules proposed last fall by the Obama administration. But older smokers could face a heavy hit on their household budgets at a time in life when smoking-related illnesses tend to emerge.
Workers covered on the job would be able to avoid tobacco penalties by joining smoking cessation programs, because employer plans operate under different rules. But experts say that option is not guaranteed to smokers trying to purchase coverage individually.
Nearly one of every five U.S. adults smokes. That share is higher among lower-income people, who also are more likely to work in jobs that don't come with health insurance and would therefore depend on the new federal health care law. Smoking increases the risk of developing heart disease, lung problems and cancer, contributing to nearly 450,000 deaths a year.
Insurers won't be allowed to charge more under the overhaul for people who are overweight, or have a health condition like a bad back or a heart that skips beats — but they can charge more if a person smokes.
Starting next Jan. 1, the federal health care law will make it possible for people who can't get coverage now to buy private policies, providing tax credits to keep the premiums affordable. Although the law prohibits insurance companies from turning away the sick, the penalties for smokers could have the same effect in many cases, keeping out potentially costly patients.
"We don't want to create barriers for people to get health care coverage," said California state Assemblyman Richard Pan, who is working on a law in his state that would limit insurers' ability to charge smokers more. The federal law allows states to limit or change the smoking penalty.
"We want people who are smoking to get smoking cessation treatment," added Pan, a pediatrician who represents the Sacramento area.
Obama administration officials declined to be interviewed for this article, but a former consumer protection regulator for the government is raising questions.
"If you are an insurer and there is a group of smokers you don't want in your pool, the ones you really don't want are the ones who have been smoking for 20 or 30 years," said Karen Pollitz, an expert on individual health insurance markets with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "You would have the flexibility to discourage them."
Several provisions in the federal health care law work together to leave older smokers with a bleak set of financial options, said Pollitz, formerly deputy director of the Office of Consumer Support in the federal Health and Human Services Department.
First, the law allows insurers to charge older adults up to three times as much as their youngest customers.
Second, the law allows insurers to levy the full 50 percent penalty on older smokers while charging less to younger ones.
And finally, government tax credits that will be available to help pay premiums cannot be used to offset the cost of penalties for smokers.
Here's how the math would work:
Take a hypothetical 60-year-old smoker making $35,000 a year. Estimated premiums for coverage in the new private health insurance markets under Obama's law would total $10,172. That person would be eligible for a tax credit that brings the cost down to $3,325.
But the smoking penalty could add $5,086 to the cost. And since federal tax credits can't be used to offset the penalty, the smoker's total cost for health insurance would be $8,411, or 24 percent of income. That's considered unaffordable under the federal law. The numbers were estimated using the online Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator.
"The effect of the smoking (penalty) allowed under the law would be that lower-income smokers could not afford health insurance," said Richard Curtis, president of the Institute for Health Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan research group that called attention to the issue with a study about the potential impact in California.
In today's world, insurers can simply turn down a smoker. Under Obama's overhaul, would they actually charge the full 50 percent? After all, workplace anti-smoking programs that use penalties usually charge far less, maybe $75 or $100 a month.
Robert Laszewski, a consultant who previously worked in the insurance industry, says there's a good reason to charge the maximum.
"If you don't charge the 50 percent, your competitor is going to do it, and you are going to get a disproportionate share of the less-healthy older smokers," said Laszewski. "They are going to have to play defense."
___
Online:
Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator — http://healthreform.kff.org/subsidycalculator.aspx
A San Pedro mother has been charged with going to a fight between her 12-year-old daughter and another schoolmate and beating the girl. The incident was captured on a cellphone video.
Amber Lee Gutierrez, 33, is facing a charge of felony assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury after she was arrested by Los Angeles police in connection with the Jan. 14 fight in a West Gaffey Street alley.
Gutierrez's daughter and another child had allegedly agreed to fight in the alley near their school. But Gutierrez, according to prosecutors, accompanied her child to the alley and then became involved in the conflict. The incident was recorded by an onlooker, according to prosecutors
The two girls from Dana Middle School had agreed to fight but then the other girl turned up with the mother and another woman. In the video the mother can be seen delivering blows to the child. The incident left the child with a possible broken arm. During the conflict the adults yelled expletives and allegedly called the child who is African American a racial slur.
Gutierrez faces a possible maximum state prison term of seven years. Prosecutors say at this point no juvenile case has been presented at this time, but the LAPD is continuing to investigate.
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-- Richard Winton
The trial of five men accused in the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in New Delhi is being watched closely as a symbol of India’s commitment to justice for women, but information about the ongoing court proceedings may be scarce.
As court proceedings began Thursday, the presiding judge said there would be a blanket ban on reporting on the trial. The judge, Yogesh Khanna, also warned defense lawyers, who have been openly speaking about the case, not to provide information about the proceedings to the press.
The five men accused in the Dec. 16 rape and murder of a physiotherapy student were ushered into the special fast-track court in South Delhi on Thursday at noon, flanked by policemen, with their faces were covered with gray woolen caps. During the two-hour court proceedings, the prosecution used the opening arguments to lay out charges against the men, which include gang rape, murder, robbery and destruction of evidence.
The police allege that the five accused men and a sixth teenager, who is being tried as a juvenile, committed a premeditated, vicious crime that included plans to kill their victim. The woman died nearly two weeks after the rape from injuries suffered during the attack, which included an assault with an iron rod. Her companion, a 29-year-old man, was also beaten, and is expected to testify at the trial.
The court proceedings took place in room 305 of the Saket District Court complex, a small wood-paneled chamber. The next hearing will be on Monday, when the defendants’ lawyers will respond to the charges the prosecution has laid out.
Separately on Thursday, India’s Juvenile Justice Board rejected a plea that the juvenile, who according to school records is 17 years old, be tried as an adult. The petition, filed by Subramanian Swamy, president of the Janata Party, claimed that the extreme malice of the alleged actions of the juvenile showed that he was not of the “tender age and mind” of a juvenile.
Indian law requires that rape cases be held “in-camera,” allowing only those directly connected with the case to be present in the courtroom, to protect the victim’s identity, and bans publishing of information about the proceedings. The victim has not been named by the media, but her family has spoken openly to the press about her life and their willingness to let her name be used if it were for something that benefitted the public, like new legislation to protect women.
Some are agitating for the proceedings of this trial to be made public, because of the high profile nature of the case. “In this case, what is on trial is the criminal justice system — investigating agencies, the administration and the judiciary,” said Meenakshi Lekhi, a Delhi-based lawyer who has filed a petition in the Delhi High Court challenging the media ban. The case has “brought women’s rights to the center stage of public discourse,” she said. “This would not have been possible without the media,” she said.
The High Court will hear the petition on February 13.
The new fast-track court will try only cases related to crimes against women, and once trials have started, they will not adjourn for weeks or months, as is common in other courts. Several fast-track courts have already been set up in Delhi to hear crimes against women in the wake of the Delhi gang rape, which brought thousands of protesters to the streets demanding justice for the victim and other victims of sexual assault.
Judge Khanna ordered Monday that all court proceedings in ths current case would take place “in camera,” allowing only those directly connected with the case to be present in the courtroom, reiterating an earlier magistrate’s order on the case. He also renewed a blanket ban Monday on the printing or publishing of any information relating to the case’s proceedings.
Defense lawyers were instructed by the court during the proceedings to “honor the spirit” of the gag order, they said, after the special public prosecutor Dayan Krishnan said he would file a petition of contempt of court if lawyers for the defendants continued to brief the media on developments.
V. K. Anand, the lawyer for Ram Singh, one of the accused, confirmed Thursday that he would now also represent Mr. Singh’s brother Mukesh. Mr. Anand and Vivek Sharma, a second lawyer for accused, told the media after Thursday’s court proceedings that they could not answer any further questions.
The Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat has elicited some strong and controversial words from opponents of the move.
First, Tucker Carlson. Last night, the Daily Caller publisher tweeted: “Feminism’s latest victory: the right to get your limbs blown off in war. Congratulations.”
This drew some swift criticism on Twitter, and a counterpoint from The Week’s Marc Ambinder, who noted that one woman who lost limbs in combat, Tammy Duckworth, is now serving as a Democrat in the House of Representatives.
Then, Politico reported that Allen West, the former GOP congressman and Army lieutenant colonel, tweeted this morning: “Women in combat billets? Another misconceived lib vision of fairness and equality.”
West is already getting trashed on Twitter by users who took offense. After the controversial remarks made by Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s and Rick Santorum last year, it’s no surprise that the Pentagon’s decision is stirring debate.
Also Read
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
01/24/2013 at 02:25 PM EST
Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore
Donato Sardella/Getty
Longtime friends Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz hit up Crown restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side Tuesday night, escorted by Barrymore's husband Will Kopelman and Diaz's mystery date, a dark-haired man dressed in a suit.
Barrymore – looking radiant, according to an onlooker – was raving about her baby, 3-month-old daughter Olive, and the group appeared to be having a great time.
When it came time to chow down, the foursome shared a dinner of beet salad, pasta, scallops and steak.
– Kristin Boehm
NEW YORK (AP) — A new strain of stomach bug sweeping the globe is taking over in the U.S., health officials say.
Since September, more than 140 outbreaks in the U.S. have been caused by the new Sydney strain of norovirus. It may not be unusually dangerous; some scientists don't think it is. But it is different, and many people might not be able to fight off its gut-wrenching effects.
Clearly, it's having an impact. The new strain is making people sick in Japan, Western Europe, and other parts of the world. It was first identified last year in Australia and called the Sydney strain.
In the U.S., it is now accounting for about 60 percent of norovirus outbreaks, according to report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Norovirus — once known as Norwalk virus — is highly contagious and often spreads in places like schools, cruise ships and nursing homes, especially during the winter. Last month, 220 people on the Queen Mary II were stricken during a Caribbean cruise.
Sometimes mistakenly called stomach flu, the virus causes bouts of vomiting and diarrhea for a few days.
Every two or three years, a new strain evolves — the last was in 2009. The Sydney strain's appearance has coincided with a spike in influenza, perhaps contributing to the perception that this is a particularly bad flu season in the U.S.
Ian Goodfellow, a prominent researcher at England's University of Cambridge, calls norovirus 'the Ferrari of viruses' for the speed at which it passes through a large group of people.
"It can sweep through an environment very, very quickly. You can be feeling quite fine one minute and within several hours suffer continuous vomiting and diarrhea," he said.
Health officials have grown better at detecting new strains and figuring out which one is the culprit. They now know that norovirus is also the most common cause of food poisoning in the U.S.
It's spread by infected food handlers who don't do a good job washing their hands after using the bathroom. But unlike salmonella and other foodborne illnesses, norovirus can also spread in the air, through droplets that fly when a sick person vomits.
"It's a headache" to try to control, said Dr. John Crane, a University of Buffalo infectious disease specialist who had to deal with a norovirus outbreak in a hospital ward a couple of years ago.
Each year, noroviruses cause an estimated 21 million illnesses and 800 deaths, the CDC says.
For those infected, there's really no medicine. They just have to ride it out for the day or two of severe symptoms, and guard against dehydration, experts said.
The illness even got the attention of comedian Stephen Colbert, who this week tweeted: "Remember, if you're in public and have the winter vomiting bug, be polite and vomit into your elbow."
____
Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Earlier today, she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee .
At a House Committee hearing last October investigating the attack, as reported on The Lede, State Department officials and security experts who served on the ground offered conflicting assessments about what resources were requested and made available to deal with growing security concerns in Tripoli and Benghazi.
Mrs. Clinton had been scheduled to testify before Congress last month, but an illness, a concussion and a blood clot near her brain forced her to postpone her appearance.
As our colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported, four State Department officials were removed from their posts on last month after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
As content providers continue to intimidate tech companies with a seemingly endless couch-potato conundrum, the latest innovation in the war to win your living room isn’t some new gadget from Apple or Netflix, or even that exciting à la carte content delivery system from Intel — it’s a protocol that helps our screens better communicate with one another. YouTube and Netflix have teamed up to create something called DIAL, a competitor of sorts to Apple’s AirPlay, which, as GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers describes it, ”helps developers of second-screen apps to discover and launch applications on smart TVs and connected devices.” Basically, it turns your phone into a kind of wireless super-remote for your TV, as Roettgers explains:
With DIAL, the Netflix app on your phone will automatically discover that there is a device with a Netflix app connected to your TV. It will fire up that app, and then the two apps are free to do whatever they want — which presumably involves some healthy binge-viewing.
This solves a “big problem” because it makes using those apps on your smart television a lot easier. As of right now, controlling the Netflix app on a PlayStation still requires the console remote to open up the app on your television before controlling it from a phone or tablet. This eliminates a step — and that, ladies and gents, is the biggest thing actually happening in TV tech right now. Instead of letting us pay just for the content we want, the cable industry’s aging model is still forcing tech companies to help us sift through all the extras were forced to buy. Because with the big media companies refusing to budge on innovative content deals so far this year, “content discovery” tools like GIAL and AirPlay remain one of the only ways everyone can get along.
RELATED: Netflix Is Winning the Internet
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. Many expected hardware like a supped-up Apple TV or the Roku streaming stick to “fix” television — instead of some protocol that makes finding stuff on our TVs easier. But, as Netflix discovered when it tried to get in the hardware business, the total package can alienate the other key players. Back in 2007, the streaming company had a set-top box in the works that would transform Netflix into a cable competitor, reports Fast Company’s Austin Carr. But CEO Reid Hastings scrapped the idea because it was too competitive. “We could not be competing against Sony, LG, and Samsung,” says Steve Swasey, then the company’s VP of communications. On top of the potential loss of support from hardware makers, this separate Netflix box scared away the content owners, with which Netflix has worked so hard to get streaming TV deals.
RELATED: The Future of Streaming Video Looks Like TV Reruns
The old-school media industry’s fear of tech-world competition has driven the future of television in a spiraling direction. When one of the too-many entities gets offended, the future falls apart, as we saw with Google TV in an experiment that ultimately scared off content providers as well. A protocol like DIAL is the politically correct solution: It doesn’t change how we pay for content — but it sure does work within the comfortable way we’re used to sitting down and watching TV!
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
By Maggie Coughlan
01/23/2013 at 02:30 PM EST
Taylor Swift
Annie Leibovitz for Disney Parks
In a new photo, Taylor Swift poses as the fairy-tale character Rapunzel featured in Disney's Tangled, who is famous for her long, golden locks. Swift, 23, is the latest star to pose for Annie Leibovitz's Disney Dream Portrait series commissioned by Disney Parks.
In the photograph, the singer is perched atop a tower, dressed in a purple and pink gown and surrounded by endless locks of shiny, blonde hair.
But the photo shoot isn't the only new thing happening for the Grammy nominee. Swift – who split from One Direction singer Harry Styles earlier this month – recently Tweeted she's making new music.
"Back in the studio. Uh oh …" she wrote.
WASHINGTON (AP) — International scientists who last year halted controversial research with the deadly bird flu say they are resuming their work as countries adopt new rules to ensure safety.
The outcry erupted when two labs — in the Netherlands and the U.S. — reported they had created easier-to-spread versions of bird flu. Amid fierce debate about the oversight of such research and whether it might aid terrorists, those scientists voluntarily halted further work last January — and more than three dozen of the world's leading flu researchers signed on as well.
On Wednesday, those scientists announced they were ending their moratorium because their pause in study worked: It gave the U.S. government and other world health authorities time to determine how they would oversee high-stakes research involving dangerous germs.
A number of countries already have issued new rules. The U.S. is finalizing its own research guidelines, a process that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said should be completed within several weeks.
In letters published in the journals Science and Nature this week, scientists wrote that those who meet their country's requirements have a responsibility to resume studying how the deadly bird flu might mutate to become a bigger threat to people — maybe even the next pandemic. So far, the so-called H5N1 virus mostly spreads among poultry and other birds and rarely infects people.
"The risk exists in nature already. Not doing the research is really putting us in danger," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands separately created the new virus strains that could spread through the air.
The controversy flared just over a year ago, when U.S. officials, prompted by the concerns of a biosecurity advisory panel, asked the two labs not to publish the results. They worried that terrorists might use the information to create a bioweapon. More broadly, scientists debated whether creating new strains of disease is a good idea, and if so, how to safeguard against laboratory accidents.
Ultimately, the flu researchers prevailed: The government decided the data didn't pose any immediate terrorism threat after all, and the two labs' work was published last summer.
Fouchier said that within weeks, he will begin new research in the Netherlands, with European funding, to explore exactly which mutations are the biggest threat. He said the work could enable scientists today to be on the lookout as bird flu continually evolves in the wild.
U.S.-funded scientists cannot resume their studies until the government's policy is finalized.
But the NIH had paid for the original research — and it would have been approved under the soon-to-come expanded policy as well, Fauci told The Associated Press. That policy will add an extra layer of review to higher-risk research, to ensure that it is scientifically worth doing and that safety and bioterrorism concerns are fully addressed up-front, he said.
Had that policy been in place over a year ago, it could have averted the bird flu debate, Fauci said: "Our answer simply would have been, yes, we vetted it very carefully and the benefit is worth any risk. Period, case closed."
Authorities are investigating a nurse who allegedly had sex with a corpse at a Sherman Oaks hospital, police said.
Alejandro Razo, 61, of Reseda, was arrested Sunday on a state Health and Safety Code violation, police said.
Razo, whose last name was initially released by authorities as Lazo, is free on $20,000 bail, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jail records.
The L.A. County coroner will perform an autopsy on the body, said Sgt. Ammon Williams of the Los Angeles Police Department. He said police are working in conjunction with the coroner’s office.
The findings could determine whether more charges would be filed, Williams said.
The coroner's office declined to comment on the case, citing a security hold.
Razo is due in court Feb. 11, according to online records.
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-- Nicole Santa Cruz
When a hooded assailant flung acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the director of the Bolshoi Ballet, late on Thursday night in Moscow, the attack almost instantly made headlines worldwide.
Although doctors have now said that Mr. Filin will not lose his sight in both eyes, the extent of the damage to his vision and face is not yet known. The viciousness of the intention — blindness, disfigurement, pain — behind the attack has left the ballet world (and journalists) groping for explanations. Some have been quick to link the incident to the byzantine politics and history of infighting that has long characterized the Bolshoi theater.
The Bolshoi’s general director, Anatoly Iksanov, immediately said that he believed the attack was linked to the theater, and Mr. Filin, in an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, published Tuesday, said “he believed he was attacked because of his work at the ballet company,” wrote Ellen Barry, who has been covering the events from Moscow for The New York Times.
Reports in European and American news media have almost all mentioned the simmering hostility between the director and the flamboyant principal dancer, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who has made no secret of his belief that he should head the company, nor of his criticism of Mr. Filin’s artistic policy. Mr. Tsiskaridze is said to inspire fanatical devotion in his fans, who sent a petition to President Vladimir V. Putin in November demanding that their hero replace Mr. Filin as head of the ballet company. But commentators have stopped short of suggesting that the dancer himself might have had something to do with the attack.
“As ruthless as the ballet world might be, it’s hard to imagine Tsiskaridze committing such a crime,” wrote Ariane Bavelier in Le Figaro.
That ruthlessness has been repeatedly alluded to, with, naturally, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film, “Black Swan,” and its lurid portrayal of the ballet world, repeatedly invoked. “An acid attack on the artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet has shone the spotlight on the fierce “Black Swan”-like competition for starring roles at the famed Russian dance company,” wrote Lynn Berry and Nataliya Vasileva on the Huffington Post Web site.
Hearing about the persecution that preceded the physical attack on Mr. Filin in previous months — his car tires were slashed, his phones, email and Facebook page hacked, and he received numerous threatening phone calls — makes the fictional events of the film “Black Swan” and Natalie Portman’s psychotic ballerina seem rather less far-fetched.
Many have placed the attack on Mr. Filin in the context of a long history of internecine war at the Bolshoi, linked to the polarizing figure of Yuri Grigorivich, who headed the ballet company for three mostly Soviet-era decades, until his dismissal in 1995.
“Just turned 86, he retains almost godlike status for his supporters, who include many veteran Bolshoi coaches as well as some celebrated dance stars such as Tsiskaridze, who share a suspicion of modernizers,” wrote Ismene Brown on the Artsdesk web site.
Grigorovich supporters criticize what they see as an overly Westernized approach on the part of subsequent directors. Several commentators have suggested that the departure of Alexei Ratmansky, who is widely seen as having revitalized the company during his 2004-2008 tenure, was due at least in part to pressure from this group.
Although Mr. Ratmansky has always been tactful about his reasons for leaving the Bolshoi, his feelings were clear in a Facebook post after the attack: “Many of the illnesses of the Bolshoi are one snowball,” he wrote, “that disgusting claque which is friendly with artists, ticket speculators and scalpers, half-crazy fans who are ready to slit the throats of their idol’s competitors, cynical hackers, lies in the press and scandalous interviews of people working there.”
And the departure of Gennady Yanin, who resigned in 2011 after sexually explicit photographs resembling him were posted on the Internet, has also been described by Mr. Yanin’s supporters as the result of a crude smear campaign.
It was announced Tuesday that Galina Stepanenko, a former principal dancer and the first woman to hold a senior position at the Bolshoi, will run the company during Mr. Filin’s absence.
What is clear from the media coverage is that ballet has a political status in Russia that is very different from that in the west.
“Shocking as it might seem to western observers, politics in the Bolshoi and other Russian companies are often just as turbulent and murky as those in the outside world – and no less locked in a struggle between cold war-style conservatives and liberal modernisers than Russia itself,” Judith Mackrell wrote in The Guardian.
It’s not impossible to imagine that artistic directors in London or Paris or Berlin might be subject to threats or intimidation, as might be the case for any powerful head of a large organization. But it’s harder to envisage a culture in which ballet is as powerful a symbol of political prestige and national brand as government itself.
“Ballet in Russia is more politics than art,” wrote the New York-based impresario Sergei Danilian, who represents a number of major Russian ballet dancers, in an email message.
“Would that ballet ignited such passion here,” wrote a New York resident on Twitter.
Well, not really, but you know what she means.
Kantar Worldpanel’s December smartphone market share numbers are out. And they are as fascinating as ever. Kantar pegs the BlackBerry market share in America as 1.1% last month, down from 1.4% in November. Surprisingly, Windows Phone’s market share also ticked down to 2.6% in December from 2.7% in November. That might be a statistical artifact, but it is surprising not to see a substantial boost in Windows share considering the marketing support and new devices from AT&T (T).
[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]
In Europe, Windows Phone is rapidly picking up steam. Its market share soared to 13.9% in Italy from 11.8% in November. In the UK, Windows Phone’s share moved to 5.9% from 5.1% in a month.The EU average share of Windows Phone bloomed to 5.4% from 4.7% between November and December.
[More from BGR: Verizon Q4 loss doubles to nearly $ 2 billion despite record subscriber adds]
At the same time, BlackBerry dipped to 4.0% from 4.4%. The stage is set for the spring battle between Windows Phone and BlackBerry camps.
Interestingly, Apple’s (AAPL) share in the UK slipped to 32.4% in December from 36.1% in November. The massive popularity of Samsung (005930) models in the British market was undoubtedly the main reason; Android’s share hit 54.4% in the UK.
This is the latest sign that Apple’s market share problems outside the U.S. market are not limited to emerging markets and Southern Europe. The UK has traditionally been the second most loyal market to the Apple brand, right after the United States. According to Kantar, Apple slipped 2.1 percentage points in America between November and December, ending up with 51.2% share of the smartphone market.
This article was originally published on BGR.com
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
White Collar Stars' Baby PicturesAs the crime series returns to TV, see how the stars of the USA series have grown up
Credit: Courtesy USA; Inset: Getty
Updated: Tuesday Jan 22, 2013 | 01:00 PM EST
NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.
A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.
"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.
An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.
Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.
Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.
The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.
Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.
But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
Michael Sinensky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."
"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinensky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.
Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.
"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.
Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.
In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.
The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.
Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.
While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.
"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."
___
Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
___
Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz
About L.A. Now
L.A. Now is the Los Angeles Times’ breaking news section for Southern California. It is produced by more than 80 reporters and editors in The Times’ Metro section, reporting from the paper’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters as well as bureaus in Costa Mesa, Long Beach, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, Riverside, Ventura and West Los Angeles.
Have a story tip for L.A. Now?
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria once again failed to form a transitional government in exile on Monday, deciding instead to postpone the step while new proposals are drawn up. The development at a conference in Istanbul was apparently a setback to the opposition’s plans to fill the power vacuum created by nearly two years of ever bloodier civil war.
The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main exile opposition group, gathered in Istanbul on Saturday specifically to try to assemble a transitional government. The organization has won recognition by a number of foreign countries as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people, but it has not yet solidified support among rebels fighting on the ground, nor has it begun planning for a post-Assad future.
The Western and Arab nations that pressed Mr. Assad’s adversaries into a reorganization last year have been urging the coalition to select a prime minister, but no candidate has won a consensus.
A statement by the National Coalition on Monday said that it had formed a five-member committee to “lead consultations” with rebel commanders, foreign backers and others seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster, and to draw up proposals for a transitional government within 10 days. After the coalition tried and failed to form a government at a meeting in Cairo last month, it made a similar announcement about creating a committee to work on the idea.
The conflict continued to rage in Syria on Monday, where the government accused rebels of attacking an important power line, blacking out Damascus, the capital, as well as areas to the north and a swath of territory reaching south to the Jordanian border. Power failures have been frequent reminders of the conflict that has engulfed Syria, but the latest one appeared to be the first to affect the entire capital, where Mr. Assad’s forces are still largely in control. The Associated Press reported that power was restored in parts of Damascus on Monday.
The talks over a transitional government were bogged down by a heated debate over a provision in the coalition’s bylaws banning its members from assuming ministerial posts in any future interim government, in an effort to protect the coalition from accusations that its members are merely seeking personal power. Some opposition leaders want to scrap that provision, arguing that it will deny the interim government the benefit of including experienced and respected senior figures, but they met with strong resistance.
“The idea faced an immediate storm of objections and criticism,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the Syrian National Coalition. “We saw that during the meeting, and decided not to change anything.”
Mr. Nachar said the main reason the opposition has failed to shape a transitional government so far is that it is not sure such a government would receive the international recognition and support it would need to function.
“Falling into the trap of forming a paralyzed government will not just be useless, it will be a huge disappointment to Syrians,” he said. “The coalition was promised a lot when it was formed, and none of that materialized.”
Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Alan Cowell from London. Hala Droubi contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Console gamers frustrated that their Xbox isn’t holding up well compared to high-end gaming PCs can relax a bit, because it looks like the next-generation Xbox is going to be a monster. It seems that website VGleaks has gotten ahold of leaked specifications for the Xbox 720, which it says will include an 8-core 1.6GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, an 800MHz graphics processor, a 50GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The leaked specifications are in line with previous rumors that also gave the next-generation Xbox an 8-core processor and 8GB of RAM, so there’s nothing overly surprising about VGleaks‘ report. The Xbox 720 will likely be announced at the E3 gaming convention this June and will be released in the fall.
[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]
This article was originally published on BGR.com
Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News
By Simon Perry
01/21/2013 at 02:40 PM EST
"Obviously I'm thrilled for both of them," Harry, 28, says of his brother Prince William and sister-in-law Kate, joking, "It's about time."
In an interview in Afghanistan, where he served since September, the prince says he had chatted to the couple – and didn’t text or send them a letter, despite reports he had done so – when their news was released in early December.
"I spoke to my brother and her, and they're both very well and both very happy obviously," he says. "I think it's very unfair that they were forced to publicize it when they were, but that's just the media for you."
The royal couple revealed the pregnancy prematurely because of Kate's hospitalization due to severe morning sickness.
Harry, in charge of the weaponry on his crew's Apache attack helicopter, was interviewed about 10 days after the pregnancy was revealed, but his remarks were kept under wraps for security reasons, released now because he's returning to the U.K.
"I literally am very, very happy for them," he says, "but I just only hope that she and him – but mainly Catherine – hopefully that she gets the necessary protection to allow her as a mother-to-be to enjoy the privacy that that comes with. I seriously hope that's going to be able to happen."
Now that he's back from his tour of duty, is there some pressure on him to follow his brother and find a wife?
"I don't think you can ever be urged to settle down," he says. " If you find the right person and everything feels right, then it takes time, especially for myself and my brother."
But, as he has hinted before, it is hard to find the right kind of woman who isn’t going to be scared off by everything else that goes with being with a royal.
"You ain't ever going to find someone who's going to jump into the position that it would hold," he says. "Simple as that."
NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.
A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.
"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.
An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.
Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.
Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.
The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.
Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.
But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
Michael Sinensky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."
"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinensky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.
Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.
"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.
Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.
In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.
The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.
Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.
While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.
"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."
___
Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
___
Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz
An FBI agent testified Friday that he had sex with
an employee of a karaoke bar in the Philippines whom he met while working
undercover on a case involving weapons smuggling.
Marc Napolitano was working as a member of a surveillance team
during meetings at karaoke bars in which another undercover agent, Charles
Ro, spent time with three Filipino nationals now accused of smuggling
weapons into the U.S.
Napolitano received text messages from several young Filipino
women on a cellphone paid for by the government, he said. One woman, who went
by the name Maui, came to his hotel room -- also paid for by the
government -- where they had sex, he said.
Napolitano testified as part of a defense motion seeking to throw
out the criminal charges against the defendants. A deputy federal public
defender representing one of the three defendants has alleged the government
committed "outrageous government misconduct" while investigating the
case.
Defense attorneys have
accused agents of spending taxpayer dollars during their investigation in
karaoke bars that were widely-known to offer prostitution.
Government attorneys and agents dispute the allegations.
Napolitano denied Maui was a prostitute and said he never paid to
have sex while working on the investigation.
The defense motion is expected to continue Tuesday.
ALSO:
California reporting widespread flu illnesses
Manti Te'o hoax: Uncle says linebacker manipulated by 'liar'
Mark Yudof to step down as president of UC system in August
-- Hailey Branson-Potts
LONDON — While Lance Armstrong was (not quite) baring his soul to Oprah Winfrey this week, a very different celebrity, the disgraced London fashion designer John Galliano, was taking a small step on the path to redemption.
Two years after he was ousted from Dior in the wake of his arrest for a drunken, anti-Semitic rant in a Paris bar, Mr. Galliano is to make a modest comeback at the New York design studio of Oscar de la Renta.
As Eric Wilson writes over at On the Runway, many had speculated that the man described as “the prince of romantic glamor” would never work in the fashion industry again after his downfall in 2011.
However, with the support of fashion luminaries like Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington of Vogue, he appears set for rehabilitation.
“As far as a comeback strategy, working for Mr. de la Renta in a casual capacity, practically an intern, is, in effect, a way of testing the waters,” Mr. Wilson writes.
The downfall of Mr. Galliano, born in Gibraltar and raised in London, came after two patrons of a bar in the Marais district of Paris accused him of making an anti-Semitic slur.
An online video later surfaced that showed a previous incident in which a bleary Mr. Galliano told fellow customers in the same bar, “I love Hitler” and, “People like you would be dead.” “Your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed,” he said.
All the more surprising, then, that among those who welcomed the 52-year-old designer’s return was Abraham H. Foxman, leader of the Anti-Defamation League, the American anti-Semitism watchdog group.
Mr. Foxman said on Friday, “Mr. Galliano has worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry.”
The Anti-Defamation League had met the designer on numerous occasions and said it hoped to work with him in the future as a spokesman against bigotry.
A Paris court fined Mr. Galliano €6,000, or $8,000, for racial insults after he offered his apologies, and last year President François Hollande of France stripped him of the Légion d’Honneur that he was awarded in 2009.
The designer’s behavior was widely blamed on drug and alcohol addiction, which he’s sought treatment for over the last two years.
“Under intense pressure to produce at least eight full collections a year, Galliano — like so many other artists — reached for sustenance and oblivion,” Suzy Menkes, the I.H.T.’s fashion editor, wrote in November.
Another celebrity who has admitted to turning to drugs, but for very different reasons, is Lance Armstrong, the disgraced American cycling superstar.
Summing up the response among cycling and anti-doping officials, my colleague Ian Austen wrote: “Many characterized Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey as being more self-serving than revelatory.”
Has Mr. Armstrong done enough to pave the way for an eventual comeback or were his television appearances indeed self-serving? And what about Mr. Galliano? Should his repentance for his unpardonable remarks lead to a second chance at success? Does either celebrity — or both — deserve redemption? Tell us what you think.
(Reuters) – Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o has denied ever being in on an elaborate hoax, telling ESPN he had believed his relationship with a woman who turned out to be an online fabrication was real.
The tragic story of his girlfriend and her injuries from a car accident and death from leukemia was one of the most widely recounted U.S. sports stories last year as Notre Dame made a drive toward the national championship game.
“I wasn’t faking it,” Te’o told ESPN in an off-camera interview on Friday, excerpts of which were posted on ESPN.com. “I wasn’t part of this.”
When asked whether he had made up the tale to support his chances of winning the Heisman Trophy, the highest individual honor for a college football player, Te’o replied: “Well, when they hear the facts they’ll know. They’ll know that there is no way that I could be part of this.”
The interview was Te’o's first since the sports blog Deadspin.com on Wednesday exposed the heart-wrenching tale of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, and her death as a hoax and that a friend of Te’o's named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was behind it.
Te’o told ESPN that Tuiasosopo called him on Wednesday and admitted he was behind the hoax and it was then Te’o was sure the woman had never existed.
“I don’t wish an ill thing to somebody,” Te’o said of Tuiasosopo, according to ESPN. “I just hope he learns. I think embarrassment is big enough.”
Outside Tuiasosopo’s home in Palmdale, California, on Thursday, a member of his family who did not identify himself told reporters they had no comment.
Te’o acknowledged in a statement on Wednesday that he had never met the woman in person, though he considered her his girlfriend and said he had been duped.
In the ESPN interview, Te’o said he tried to video chat with her several times, but she could never be seen on the other end. He also said he intentionally told people stories about her in a way that would make people believe they had met in person.
“I even knew that it was crazy that I was with somebody that I didn’t meet,” Te’o said.
NATIONAL PROMINENCE
ESPN said the interview was held at a training facility in Florida where Te’o has been preparing for the National Football League draft. The star linebacker was expected to be a high draft pick before the hoax was revealed.
Te’o sprang to national prominence last fall when he led Notre Dame to a victory over Michigan State within days of learning his grandmother and girlfriend had both died. The grandmother’s death was real.
The story grew to become a big feature in coverage of the team, which went undefeated in the regular season and reached the national championship game. Alabama defeated Notre Dame in the title game on January 7.
Notre Dame, one of the most powerful institutions in U.S. collegiate athletics, held a news conference within hours of the Deadspin.com article to say that Te’o had been duped.
Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said on Friday the Indiana university was comfortable, based on a private investigation it launched and on four years experience with Te’o, that he was the victim and encouraged Te’o to speak publicly.
(Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Editing by Eric Beech)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
By Alison Schwartz
01/20/2013 at 01:45 PM EST
Bettheny Frankel and Warren G. Lichtenstein
Gary Gershoff/Getty; Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Getty
But is she moving on with Lichtenstein, the chairman and CEO of Steel Partners Holdings L.P.?
"Bethenny and Warren have been great friends for more than 20 years, and he has really been a support system during this sad time," a source tells the U.K.'s Daily Mail.
The source also quelled rumors that the reality star, 42, moved into his $6.3 million Upper East Side, N.Y., apartment. However, she did clock in some time at his Manhattan digs – when he wasn't home.
She reportedly stayed at the billionaire's place for one night with 2-year-old daughter Bryn "so that she and Bryn could have some girl time," adds the source. Hoppy, whom she married in 2010, still lives in the former couple's Tribeca loft, according to the Daily Mail.
It's been just less than a month since Frankel announced her split from Hoppy. "I feel like a failure," she recently told Ellen DeGeneres. "I really put it out there. I wanted the fairy tale."
NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.
A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.
"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.
An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.
Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.
Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.
The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.
Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.
But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
Michael Sinesky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."
"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinesky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.
Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.
"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.
Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.
In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.
The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.
Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.
While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.
"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."
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Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
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Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz
An FBI agent testified Friday that he had sex with
an employee of a karaoke bar in the Philippines whom he met while working
undercover on a case involving weapons smuggling.
Marc Napolitano was working as a member of a surveillance team
during meetings at karaoke bars in which another undercover agent, Charles
Ro, spent time with three Filipino nationals now accused of smuggling
weapons into the U.S.
Napolitano received text messages from several young Filipino
women on a cellphone paid for by the government, he said. One woman, who went
by the name Maui, came to his hotel room -- also paid for by the
government -- where they had sex, he said.
Napolitano testified as part of a defense motion seeking to throw
out the criminal charges against the defendants. A deputy federal public
defender representing one of the three defendants has alleged the government
committed "outrageous government misconduct" while investigating the
case.
Defense attorneys have
accused agents of spending taxpayer dollars during their investigation in
karaoke bars that were widely-known to offer prostitution.
Government attorneys and agents dispute the allegations.
Napolitano denied Maui was a prostitute and said he never paid to
have sex while working on the investigation.
The defense motion is expected to continue Tuesday.
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-- Hailey Branson-Potts
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