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Google reports 'alarming' rise in censorship by governments Over six months Google complied with 47% of requests for content removal and 65% of court orders. There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google. Since the search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with censorship. It said Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper articles critical of public figures. It did not comply. In Poland, it was asked to remove an article critical of the Polish agency for enterprise development and eight other results that linked to the article. Again, the company did not comply. Google was asked by Canadian officials to remove a YouTube video of a citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused. Thai authorities asked Google to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy, a violation of Thailand's lèse-majesté law. The company complied with 70% of the requests. Pakistan asked Google to remove six YouTube videos that satirised its army and senior politicians. Google refused. UK police asked the company to remove five YouTube accounts for allegedly promoting terrorism. Google agreed. In the US most requests related to alleged harassment of people on YouTube. The authorities asked for 187 pieces to be removed. Google complied with 42% of them. In a blog post, Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote: "Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not. This is the fifth data set that we've released. Just like every other time, we've been asked to take down political speech. It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect - western democracies not typically associated with censorship. Over the six months covered by the latest report, Google complied with an average of 65% of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests. Last month Google announced it was receiving more than one million requests a month from copyright owners seeking to pull their content from the company's search results. Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, said copyright infringement was the main reason Google had removed links from search terms. He said the company had received a total of 3.3m requests for removals on copyright grounds last year, and was on course to quadruple that number this year. The company complied with 97% of requests.

Billy Bob Thornton turns car wreck past into a film BERLIN (Reuters) - When actor-director Billy Bob Thornton was a boy, his father took him to the scene of car crashes to survey the wreckage. Now he has turned his unconventional childhood into a movie. "Jayne Mansfield's Car" is a dark family comedy that explores how war affects men and how fathers and sons so often fail to communicate. The picture, warmly applauded at the Berlin film festival on Monday ahead of its world premiere, is the first feature Thornton has directed for over a decade. He also stars. "If you could say what this movie is about in one sentence, it's about the romanticism of tragedy," Thornton told reporters in Berlin, where the movie is in the main competition. Jayne Mansfield's Car, a reference to the actress killed in a car crash in 1967, is set in 1969 in southern United States where Robert Duvall's character Jim Caldwell and his middle-aged children live a materially comfortable life. Son Carroll, played by Kevin Bacon, is a drug-taking hippie and anti-war protester who is a constant source of shame to his gruff, conservative father. Brother Jimbo is more like his father, while child-like oddball Skip (Thornton) lies somewhere in between. Jim's ex-wife dies in England, where she remarried and had another family, and when they turn up on the Caldwells' doorstep to attend her U.S. burial, chaos ensues. The male characters, including the visiting father played by John Hurt, are all defined by their experiences of war - World War One, World War Two and the Vietnam conflict. The figure of Jim, cold, cruel and unable to express his feelings, was partly inspired by his own father, Thornton said. "My father was a very violent Irishman and so there was abuse both verbal and physical in our household," the 56-year-old Oscar winner said. He was a Korean war veteran in the navy and he was a very intense guy who I don't think I ever had a conversation with. Scenes in which Jim takes his grandson to see the aftermath of car crashes are based on truth, Thornton added. He (my father) would take my brother and I ... to car wrecks and he would stand there and smoke Lucky Strikes and stare at the car wreck for two hours while my brother and I were like 'why are we here?' That was how he connected with us. Through all of that, through beatings and no communication or anything when I grew up, I realized that I understood my father and I loved my father. The comedy in the film stems from the Caldwells' failure to communicate -- Jim only lets down his guard after his tea is spiked with LSD -- and the interplay between upper class English visitors and straight-talking American southerners. "That accent makes me hornier than Frank Sinatra," Skip confesses to his English half-sister, before trying to organize an unconventional sexual encounter with her. But amid the laughs there is a serious side to Jayne Mansfield's Car, which had a budget of around $12 million and was funded by Russian money. Thornton is in Berlin at the same time as ex-wife Angelina Jolie, whose Bosnian war drama "In the Land of Blood and Honey" was also screened at the festival. "Angelina is a wonderful woman and one of my best friends in the world -- we talk on a regular basis," he said. When people split up, people like to make up stories about how much they are against each other. This was never true, it never has been and never will be. I'll love her to the end of my life and she'll love me, as friends.

Virginia Tech basketball vs. Virginia: Dorenzo Hudson hits clutch baskets to push Hokies past Cavaliers Virginia Tech (12-7, 1-4 ACC) called a timeout to set up a play, and with 16.5 seconds remaining, Hudson struck again with a three-pointer from the corner. The shot put the Hokies up by four and all but sealed their victory. Hudson, who came off the bench for the second straight game, finished with 12 points. Virginia Tech guard Erick Green tallied a game-high 15 points. The win marks the Hokies" first in ACC play this season, while Virginia fell to 15-3 overall, 2-2 in conference play. Three Cavaliers scored in double figures, but none tallied more than 10 points. Virginia shot 32.6 percent from the field and made 1 of 14 three-point attempts. During a media timeout just less than five minutes into the second half, Virginia Coach Tony Bennett made a strategic switch that proved critical to the contest's outcome. Using the traditional three-guard, two-forward lineup the Cavaliers have employed much of the season, Virginia had struggled mightily on the offense to that point. The Cavaliers shot 25 percent from the field in the first half and had settled repeatedly for long jump shots to start the second. But Bennett implemented a four-guard lineup out of that timeout and stuck with it for much of the rest of the night. Virginia went on an 8-0 run that pushed the Cavaliers back into the lead. Sophomore guard Joe Harris - who, at 6 feet 6, essentially moved into the power forward position - fought for rebounds over several Virginia Tech defenders, and he and Virginia's other guards began making a concerted effort to penetrate into the lane. Using four guards was the approach Virginia was forced to take during the latter part of last season, when forward Mike Scott was out with an ankle injury. After senior center Assane Sene suffered an ankle injury Thursday that will keep him out for approximately six weeks, the Cavaliers discovered Sunday such an adjustment might be necessary once again. With Sene sidelined, Virginia had done almost exactly what it needed to do in the first half defensively against the Hokies. With only three scholarship players available taller than 6-6, the Cavaliers needed their front-court trio of Scott, Akil Mitchell and Darion Atkins to stay out of foul trouble, and it did. Rather, it was Virginia guards Jontel Evans and Malcolm Brogdon that picked up two fouls each before the break. The Cavaliers also had to remain true to the defensive principles that largely have carried them to the program's best start in three decades without the services of Sene, whose familiarity with and ability to execute his assignments in Bennett's system was easy to underappreciate in the season's first few months. And indeed, Virginia successfully forced Virginia Tech to take contested attempts late in the shot clock. That enabled the Cavaliers to maintain a slim lead for most of the first half, but the Hokies finally got some shots to start falling and went on a 10-4 run to close the opening period. Virginia Tech led by four at the break.

Costa Allegra passengers delayed at sea Passengers aboard the Costa Allegra cruise ship are shown on deck while being towed by a French tuna boat in the Indian Ocean on Tuesday. Passengers aboard a disabled cruise ship will spend 10 to 12 hours longer at sea than was needed because a French vessel pulling the ship refused to give way to tugboats, a Seychelles government minister says. Joel Morgan told The Associated Press that the cruise ship Costa Allegra likely would have arrived in the Seychelles' main port of Mahe on Wednesday night local time if the tugs had been allowed to take over. The cruise ship instead is not set to arrive until midmorning Thursday. Morgan, the transport minister, said the Seychelles is not happy that the financial objectives of the French vessel was put ahead of the well-being and safety of the passengers. Conditions on board the disabled Costa Allegra are "regular," Costa Cruises said Wednesday. The company said soft drinks, cold cuts, cheese and fruit are available to eat and drink, mineral water is offered for personal hygiene, and fresh bread was delivered by helicopter. Costsa Cruises said the ship has sufficient food and that a small generator delivered by a navy ship - it did not specify from which country - could help restore basic services and "to make the situation on board more comfortable." The ship is expected to arrive in port on Thursday at about 9 a.m. local time (midnight EST), but that depends on sea conditions and towing speed. Passengers will begin flying to Rome within hours after arrival at port, Gilbert Faure, chief executive of the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority, said Wednesday. Three planes with a seating capacity of at least 580 passengers were lined up, he said. The first plane is tentatively scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon. With no electricity aboard the Costa Allegra, passengers and crew have taken to sleeping on deck. A woman whose son escaped the Costa Concordia, and whose daughter is now stuck on the Costa Allegra, says all she wants to do is see her daughter. Carl Dinnen Channel Four Europe reports. It could all depend because they have been at sea for three days. They may want to take a shower, we are not sure," Faure said. I can assure you that we are doing our best to ensure that they have a nice few hours in the Seychelles. The Costa Allegra lost power Monday after a fire broke out in its generator room, setting the Italian cruise ship adrift in a region where Somali pirates have long been active. A French fishing vessel began towing the Costa Allegra, at first to a small, nearby island, but later to the Seychelles main port - Victoria. Two tug boats arrived alongside the cruise ship on Tuesday but the slower French fishing vessel continued to tow it. Alan St. Ange, the chief executive of the Seychelles Tourism Board, said the tugs were helping push the Costa Allegra and that "everybody is working together." Officials indicated that the more than 1,000 passengers and crew are on board the Costa Allegra would have overwhelmed the resources on the tiny resort island Desroches. Monday's fire came only six weeks after the Costa Concordia hit a reef and capsized off Italy, killing 25 people and leaving seven missing and presumed dead. No one was injured in the fire Monday, but passengers have been without power, communications and air conditioning since the accident. The Allegra, whose Italian name means "merry," or "happy," left northern Madagascar, off Africa's southeast coast, on Saturday and was cruising toward Port Victoria when the fire erupted. The liner is carrying 413 crew members and 636 passengers, including 212 Italians, 31 Britons and eight Americans. Four passengers are children ages 3 or younger.

Afghans suspect US cover-up over soldier's killing spree The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who called for an investigation into whether a US soldier who killed 16 civilians acted alone. Photograph: Omar Sobhani/Reuters When the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, called for an investigation to determine whether a US soldier who massacred nine Afghan children and seven other civilians had acted alone, he was voicing a question on the lips of most Afghans. The 38-year-old staff sergeant Robert Bales has been depicted as a mentally strained, "rogue" killer by US and Nato military officials, who have shown Afghan officials surveillance video of his solitary return to base among other evidence that he acted alone. Among Afghans however there is a widespread belief that the soldier had companions, and perhaps official sanction, on his shooting rampage. The implication that the US is lying about perhaps the worst military killings in Afghanistan reflects how far a decade of spiralling war has eroded trust between the Nato-led coalition and Afghans. "In four rooms people were killed, children and women were killed, and then they were all brought together in one room and then put on fire; that one man cannot do," Karzai told journalists, after hearing from a relative of the worst-affected family who survived because he was away that evening. The scale of the massacre shocked the West, because although there have been far larger death tolls from air strikes, they have been accepted in foreign troops' home countries as tragic mistakes. But for many in Afghanistan, the shooting spree is just the latest in a string of tragic and unnecessary killings by soldiers who have lots of firepower and little accountability, and who usually move in groups. This is not like past civilian casualty incidents. This wasn't a mistake in the heat of battle, the result of poor intelligence, or an indiscriminate reaction. But in Afghan eyes it looks pretty much the same," said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer working on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Open Society Institute. The foreign military's poor handling of other civilian deaths has made Afghans more likely to believe that there could be some kind of cover-up involved in the account of a lone, rogue gunman, she added. The lack of meaningful public accountability and explanation of past civilian casualties incidents has led to a widespread - if unfair - perception that international military wantonly kill Afghans with impunity. The massacre also came after a string of damaging revelations about US soldiers' conduct in Afghanistan, that heavily undermined trust in their conduct and motives. Last year a group were tried for murdering three Afghan civilians for sport, in January a video surfaced of marines apparently urinating on Taliban corpses, and deadly violence erupted in February over the burning of copies of the Quran by US troops. "I have encountered almost no Afghan who believes it could have been one person acting alone, whether they think it was a group or people back at the base somehow organising or facilitating it," said Kate Clark, of Afghanistan Analysts Network. Rumours and conspiracy theories spread easily in Afghanistan, a country where internet is an elite luxury, and outside cities many people do not have electricity, much less television. But a conviction the US is not telling the truth about the Panjwai killings - and their wider aims in Afghanistan - is not confined to the poor or illiterate. "The aim of the US in our country is to kill our people every day, and take our country under their control," said Mohammad Baqar Shaikhzada, a mullah and former Member of Parliament who now preaches at the Jafaryia mosque in the centre of Kabul and said he believes there were several gunmen. "It is the job of the people of Afghanistan to show a reaction against the people of America, and that reaction has to be jihad," Shaikhzada added. Feeding suspicion, Karzai also complained the US is not collaborating with his investigative team, as lawmakers and many other Afghans demand a speedy trial and death by hanging for the killer. But Washington's ability to answer Afghan questions over the massacre, may be limited by its promises to bring him to justice through the complex and slow-moving US legal system. Prosecutors in such a high-profile case are likely to be taking extreme caution to avoid any misstep that could allow defence lawyers to win Bale's freedom on a technicality, rather than a court-room examination of his guilt. "I think the differences lie in part in the fact that it is vital that the US investigators conduct their investigation with regard for the due process rights of the suspect," said one US official who asked not to be named as he was not authorised to speak on the subject. The United States wants justice as much as anyone in Afghanistan for this terrible act, which has horrified every American, however the premature release of evidence could ultimately undermine prosecutorial efforts.

Record profits at Hargreaves despite looming Maltby mine closure In preliminary results the company booked pre-tax profits of £43.1m over the year, up from £36.9m last year. Revenue rose from £552.3m in the previous year to £688.3m. But the company is increasingly concerned about safety at its Maltby mine, which supplies the Drax power station. In May the company had warned that "unusual geological conditions" threatened profits, as oil and water started to seep into new sections and cause production delays. The problems have continued and the company has now budgeted for an £8m loss at Maltby this year, warning that it could close the mine altogether. Chairman Tim Ross said: "If we are unable to work through the current issues with an acceptable level of risk, we are fortunate to have reached a point in the group's overall strategic development when we are able to contemplate closing or mothballing the operation with minimal impact on our growth prospects. The developments at Maltby were unexpected and we are closely assessing the implications of those developments. Based on early trading, setting Maltby aside, and despite a slow start to production at Tower, we are cautiously optimistic that we will meet or even exceed our overall budget for this financial year. Should the mine be closed, the company estimates that the revenue from the sale of plant and machinery would "comfortably" cover the cost of staff redundancies, but admits that this would be a "disappointing development for the management and employees."

Mark Rypien takes lead at Tahoe celebrity golf updated 8:31 p.m. (AP) - Former NFL quarterback Mark Rypien had two birdies and an eagle over the last four holes Saturday to take the lead after the second round of the American Century Championship at Lake Tahoe. Dan Quinn was in second, followed by first-round co-leader Mark Mulder. Rypien scored 27 points in his round, shooting the equivalent of a 1-under-par 71, and had a 36-hole total of 43 points in the modified Stableford scoring system. Rypien hasn't finished higher than third since winning the inaugural event in 1990. Quinn was three points behind after getting 20 for the second straight day. Mulder was another two points back after a 16. Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, Hall of Famer John Elway and former pitcher John Smoltz were tied with 37 points. Actor Jack Wagner, the defending champion who shared the first-round lead with Mulder, was another point back.

Dino feathers about mating, not flying? Microraptor fossil. Credit: David W. E. Hone, Helmut Tischlinger, Xing Xu, Fucheng Zhang BEIJING, March 9 (UPI) -- The feathers of a winged dinosaur that lived about 130 million years ago may have been more about attracting a mate than flight, researchers say. Microraptors had an impressive pair of long, narrow tail feathers that may have been used to call attention to themselves in courtship in the way that modern peacocks do, the researchers from the United States and China said. Fossils of the small, four-winged Microraptor found in northwestern China indicate a feather pattern that would have made them a predominantly glossy iridescent sheen in colors of black and blue like a crow, The New York Times reported. "Iridescence is widespread in modern birds and is frequently used in displays," said Matthew D. Shawkey, a biologist at the University of Akron in Ohio. Our evidence that Microraptor was largely iridescent thus suggests that feathers were important for display even relatively early in their evolution. Researchers used scanning electron microscopes to examine well-preserved fossil remains of pigment-containing cells known as melanosomes, Writing in the journal Science, a Chinese member of the research team said the feather findings strongly suggested a visual purpose to the coloring. "Although we cannot assign a definitive function to iridescence in Microraptors, a role in signaling aligns with data on the plumage" of the specimen discovered in 2003, Quanguo Li of the Beijing Museum of Natural History wrote.

Business news in brief: Xstrata EUROPEAN regulators have set a deadline of 8 November to decide on whether to clear the $33 billion (£20.5bn) takeover of mining group Xstrata by commodities trader Glencore. Brussels officials now have just over a month to decide whether to approve or reject the deal. They could also kick off an in-depth probe into one of the largest mining takeovers to date. However, the tie-up would also need the approval of regulators in China and South Africa. Nokia may sell HQ to help stay afloat Nokia plans to sell its headquarters in Finland as part of a €1.6 billion (£1.3bn) cost-cutting programme. The company will maintain its corporate base in the country but selling the glass and steel structure known as "Nokia House" near Helsinki is one of the options the struggling mobile phone maker is considering as it disposes of noncore property holdings. McCormack's key role at Macdonald Macdonald Hotels & Resorts, with more than 40 four- and five-star establishments throughout the UK and Spain, has named Elaine McCormack as its director of sales. McCormack, who is said to have more 20 years" experience in the hotel, travel and leisure attraction sectors, said: "Macdonald Hotels & Resorts has a superb reputation and a fantastic portfolio to offer the corporate, conference and leisure markets." Brewer "resilient" despite the weather Brewer and pubs operator Marston's has reported a "resilient" performance in the face of unseasonable weather, with a 2.2 per cent rise in sales across its managed pubs estate during the year to 29 September, boosted by higher food sales. Operating profits at its leased, tenanted and franchised pubs, were around 3 per cent higher than last year. The group, which brews the Marston's Pedigree and Hobgoblin brands, said beer volumes were up 2 per cent.

Leveson orders editors to say whether they back plans for new regulator Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry will resume on Monday. Lord Justice Leveson will find out whether newspapers are divided or united over proposals for a new press regulator that will be able to levy fines of up to £1m for breaches of ethical standards. He has used his powers under section 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005 to order newspaper editors to say whether they agree with the detailed proposals submitted last month by Lord Black of Brentwood for regulation of the press. Black, the chairman of the Press Standards Board of Finance, will appear as a witness on Monday when the inquiry resumes for its final phase which centres on future press regulation. Also appearing on Monday is Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, which is being phased out. Black set out plans last month for what he described as an "entirely different" regulator with a new structure and powers to punish errant newspapers and incentives to ensure every newspaper agrees to supervision. Richard Desmond's Daily Express and Daily Star, which are not in the current PCC system of regulation, would under the new system risk being banned from taking advertising and using Press Association news wire services if they did not join the proposed regulator. These proposals are unlikely to have unanimous backing by newspaper editors and the body for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers has already questioned how a ban on advertising for errant newspaper owners could work in practice. Next week the inquiry will also hear from other regulators including the Irish ombudsman, Professor John Horgan, and Ed Richards, the chief executive of Ofcom. Horgan and Hugh Tomlinson QC, who has been involved in behind-the-scenes roundtable discussions among newspaper groups on future reforms, will give evidence on Friday as will Professor John Curran and Angela Phillips of the Co-ordinating Committee for Media Reform. The National Union of Journalists general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet, will appear at Leveson on Tuesday when Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust is also giving evidence.

Farm bill backers rally on Capitol Hill Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow spoke at a rally urging Congress to pass a farm bill before September 30. House Republicans are sharply divided on the issue Failure to pass a comprehensive farm bill could result in major political and economic fallout The Senate passed a new farm bill with a bipartisan vote in June Washington (CNN) -- Backers of a comprehensive new farm bill held a campaign-style rally Wednesday on Capitol Hill, cranking up the political heat on House Republican leaders struggling to balance competing election year and ideological pressures. "All of us gathered here today ... share one common and resounding message," said Bob Stallman, head of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Congress, for our farm and ranch families, their communities and for our nation, pass the farm bill now. Stallman was cheered by a boisterous crowd at the Capitol Reflecting Pool. "We are out here to let our congressmen know it is important that they pass the farm bill," Julie Taylor, an independent voter from Indiana, told CNN. It is frustrating. ... Knowing that we don't know what to do or what to plan for is very difficult. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, told CNN the House Republican leadership is still "working with the Senate to see what can be done." He conceded, however, that the "timing is definitely short." Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he hopes the Senate will pass a livestock disaster aid bill previously approved by the House. He stressed that "we are still discussing options on a farm bill extension." The current five-year law establishing various levels of federal support for drought-stricken farmers and ranchers expires September 30. While the Democratic-run Senate passed a $969 billion replacement bill in June through a rare bipartisan 64-35 vote, numerous conservatives in the Republican-controlled House have balked at the overall price tag and spiraling cost of food stamps included in the measure. For conservatives like myself ... the real concern (is) that what is now a farm bill is really not that. It's a food stamp bill," said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas. Speaking at a roundtable discussion with other Hill conservatives, Huelskamp argued Wednesday that social safety net programs such as food stamps should be considered separately from more direct agricultural support programs. Farm Belt Republicans in tight political races this fall, however, are pushing hard for quick legislative action on a more traditional comprehensive deal. North Dakota Rep. Rick Berg, a freshman House Republican seeking to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad, said Wednesday his message to the House Republican leadership is simple: Get it done. "We've got to get this done," Berg told CNN. This is what's wrong with Washington. Berg refused to speculate about possible repercussions for his campaign if the House fails to act. Cafferty: Why is Congress so good at kicking the can down the road? "This is about the farmers and ranchers in North Dakota," he said. The last thing we need to do is create this cloud of uncertainty that will happen if we don't get a long-term farm bill done. The congressman expressed optimism that the House will be able to act over the next few weeks. "In the legislative process they work best under deadline, and so I just think we need to keep pushing right now," he said. South Dakota Rep. Kristi Noem, a first-term Republican, told reporters at the rally she is "disappointed" that House GOP leaders haven't scheduled a floor vote on another five-year bill approved by the House Agriculture Committee. The committee's bill is broadly similar to the Senate plan. "That has been a big disappointment for me," she said. Noem and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vermont, sent a letter to Cantor on Wednesday requesting a meeting to discuss the possibility of bringing a bill to the House floor for a vote by the full chamber. "Whether members support or oppose the farm bill, we believe the House should be allowed to vote so that we can be held accountable to those we represent," the letter said. While the full House has supported short-term drought disaster relief, several prominent Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern about the economic fallout that may accompany a failure to enact a new long-term deal. "If the farm bill is allowed to expire and things begin to unwind, we turn back the clock in rural America," said Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, head of the Senate Agriculture Committee and primary author of the Senate plan. Agricultural markets, Stabenow declared at the rally, would be in "disarray" without a comprehensive new law. "It's absolutely crazy to even get close to something" like that scenario, she said. Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, told the crowd more grass-roots pressure will be needed in order to force the GOP leadership's hand before the end of the current Congress. So far "the groundswell is not out there," he warned. This rally is a good starting point but what we need -- what is going to change this -- we need 100 or 200 calls from people in their districts to these members. That's what is going to change this. "If you don't do that, we're not going to get a farm bill," he said. A number of conservative leaders want to wait until after the November election, at which point they hope full Republican control of Congress and the White House will allow them to draft a bill more in line with their ideological preferences. Farmer: 'It was the system that failed us' Rep. Tom McClintock, R-California, argued Wednesday that Congress "shouldn't be subsidizing any product." "It has nothing to do with how much they're making or not making," he said at the panel discussion with Huelskamp. Prices convey an enormous wealth of information that is absolutely essential to consumers to make rational decisions in the marketplace. For their part, top Senate Republicans have indicated support for a short-term extension if the Senate's five-year bill can't get through the House. "I represent a state in which agriculture is important," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said Tuesday. I don't believe that we ought to let the current farm bill expire if we're unable to at this point to pass a replacement. The head of the House Agriculture Committee -- Oklahoma GOP Rep. Frank Lucas -- told CNN on Wednesday "there's a growing probability" that a one-year extension is "the most practical thing." "I believe some kind of action will happen before we go home (for the campaign), and it's my intent to help to make it happen," he said. Something has to happen. Farm bill fight escalates ahead of deadline CNN's Ted Barrett and Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report

Video: Christmas getaway: passengers struggle to get to Heathrow after Paddington fire delays The fire led to many services being cancelled in and out of Paddington station, forcing travellers to find alternative routes on one of the busiest days of the year. Network Rail said the fire damage was so extensive it has had to rebuild the equipment room from the ground up. No trains were running between Paddington and Heathrow Airport, putting extra pressure on the Tube network. One passenger, who was heading to Denver for Christmas said she regretted having chosen to travel to the airport by train: "We thought about getting a car to the airport but we thought, 'no, the Heathrow Express is only 15 minutes,' so we just got a cab to Paddington - we should have got a car to Heathrow."

WikiLeaks releases 5m intelligence emails WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, has started publishing more than 5m emails it claims to have from a US intelligence analysis company that has been described as the "shadow CIA." The emails could expose sources and intelligence gathering by Stratfor, whose clients include a number of large corporations including BT, BAE Systems, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Google. Stratfor's computer systems were attacked just before Christmas by members of Anonymous, the loose-knit group of politically motivated hackers. The hacking attack exposed credit card numbers and personal data, and members of Anonymous also claimed they had emails from about 100 employees, which they would arrange to publish. Stratfor confirmed that a number of emails had been stolen in the December attack, and described the action as "a deplorable, unfortunate - and illegal - breach of privacy." Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimised twice by submitting to questioning about them," the company said. "This is another attempt to silence and intimidate the company, and one we reject," said Stratfor. WikiLeaks said the emails showed the inner workings of the intelligence agency and links between government and private agencies, as well as containing information that revealed that the US government and Stratfor were collecting information on WikiLeaks itself. "The material contains privileged information about the US government's attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor's own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks," the WikiLeaks website wrote. WikiLeaks said there were more than 4,000 emails mentioning Mr Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, within the documents it was publishing.

2 Border Patrol agents shot, 1 killed The slain agent was identified by a Border Patrol official as Nicholas Ivie, 30, KPHO-TV, Phoenix, reported. Ivie was one of three agents investigating a ground sensor that had been triggered about 7 miles east of Bisbee, Ariz., when they reported by radio about 1:50 a.m. they were under fire. When deputies arrived, Ivie was dead and another agent, whose name had not been released, had serious but not life-threatening injuries, said Carol Capas, a Cochise County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman. No suspects were in custody and she could not provide information on the shooters. White House press secretary Jay Carney said President Obama was informed about the shooting. "His thoughts and prayers, and our thoughts and prayers go out to the family members of the border agent who was killed, as well as to the agent who was wounded," Carney said. "Last night's events demonstrate the danger that law enforcement officers face along the Southwest border every day," James Turgill, special agent in charge of the FBI for the Phoenix division, said at an afternoon news briefing. Ivie was doing his job, protecting the border in the line of duty. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered all DHS flags to fly at half-staff in honor of Ivie, who leaves behind a wife and two children.

Whitney Houston's family to star in reality show Late Singer Whitney Houston (L) and her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 2011. LOS ANGELES, May 11 (UPI) -- Late U.S. singer Whitney Houston's daughter Bobbi Kristina and mother Cissy are to star in a new reality series, Lifetime announced Friday. The Hollywood Reporter said the cable network has ordered 10 hour-long episodes of "The Houston Family Chronicles." Also expected to appear on the show are Houston's sister-in-law and manager Pat Houston, her husband Gary and their daughter Rayah. "The tragic loss of Whitney Houston left a void in the hearts of people all over the world, but certainly none more so than her beloved family," Lifetime Executive Vice President of Programming Rob Sharenow said Friday. In this series, the multi-generations of the Houston family will bravely reveal their lives as they bond together to heal, love and grow. I have been working with [production company] Simmons-Shelley over the past few years developing a project suitable for myself and our family. The unexpected passing of Whitney certainly affects the direction of the show. However, it is my hope that others will be enlightened as they watch our family heal and move forward," Pat Houston said in a statement. Houston accidentally drowned in a hotel bathtub Feb. 11 after using cocaine. She was 48.

Shopping Snapshots: June 21 - Slide Show - NYTimes.com Shopping Snapshots: June 21 Footprints From Spain AVARCA sandals, traditionally worn in the countryside on Minorca, have made their way stateside. These, from Riudavets, are handmade much the way they were in the 1920s, when the family business was established, with Spanish leather uppers, a suede lining and soles of recycled rubber. They come in an array of colors to suit your laid-back weekend wear. Avarca sandals, $112 at Maryam Nassir Zadeh, 123 Norfolk Street; mnzstore.com.

2 Convicted in Al-Qaida Terror Plot in Norway Two men were found guilty Monday of involvement in an al-Qaida plot to attack a Danish newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, the first convictions under Norway's anti-terror laws. A third defendant was acquitted of terror charges but convicted of helping the others acquire explosives. Investigators say the plot was linked to the same al-Qaida planners behind thwarted attacks against the New York subway system and a shopping mall Manchester, England, in 2009. The Oslo district court sentenced alleged ringleader Mikael Davud, to seven years in prison and co-defendant Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak to three and a half years. Judge Oddmund Svarteberg said the court found that Davud, a Chinese Muslim, "planned the attack together with al-Qaida." Bujak was deeply involved in the preparations, but it couldn't be proved that he was aware of Davud's contacts with al-Qaida, the judge said. The third defendant, David Jakobsen, who assisted police in the investigation, was convicted on an explosives charge and sentenced to four months in prison - time he's already served in pretrial detention. It wasn't immediately clear if any of the defendants would appeal. Davud, who moved to Norway in 1999 and later became a Norwegian citizen, also said his co-defendants helped him acquire bomb-making ingredients but didn't know he was planning an attack. "There is no doubt that Davud took the initiative to prepare the terror act and that he was the ring leader," the judge said as he delivered the verdict. He said Davud planned to carry out the attack himself by placing a bomb outside Jyllands-Posten's offices in Aarhus, in western Denmark. The men had been under surveillance for more than a year when authorities moved to arrest them. An Associated Press investigation in 2010 showed that authorities learned early on about the alleged cell by intercepting emails from an al-Qaida operative in Pakistan and - thanks to those early warnings - were able to secretly replace a key bomb-making ingredient with a harmless liquid when Jakobsen ordered it at an Oslo pharmacy. The judge said it had been proven that Davud had contacts with al-Qaida in Pakistan, and that his notebook contained references to Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaida's chief of external operations, who officials believe helped organize the New York, Manchester and Norway plots. He was killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan in 2009.

Europe's cold snap claims more lives

Hackers take over law enforcement websites Hackers take over law enforcement websites - Security Anonymous targets American, British and Greek authorities in latest wave BOSTON - The hacking collective Anonymous is claiming credit for defacing the Boston Police Department's website, part of a string of online attacks around the world being attributed to the group. A message posted on the website Friday said, "Anonymous hacks Boston Police website in retaliation for police brutality at OWS," apparently a reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement. A police spokesman would not confirm Anonymous was responsible. In Salt Lake City, police say hackers who attacked the department's website on Tuesday gained access to sensitive data, including citizen complaints about drug crimes, including phone numbers, addresses and other personal information. The attacks come after Anonymous published a recording of a phone call between the FBI and Scotland Yard early Wednesday, gloating in a Twitter message that "the FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now." In Greece, the Justice Ministry took down its site Friday after a video by activists claiming to be Greek and Cypriot members of Anonymous was displayed for at least two hours. Police in Salt Lake City blamed the attack on Anonymous' opposition to an anti-graffiti paraphernalia bill that eventually failed in the state Senate. The website remained down Friday as the investigation continued, and police said criminal charges are being considered. In a message posted on the Boston police department's website, the group said that the site had been attacked several months ago and that hundreds of passwords were released in retaliation for what they called brutality against Occupy Boston. In October, Boston police acknowledged that various websites used by members of the police department - including the website belonging to the police patrolmen's association - had been hacked and possibly compromised. The department said it had asked all department personnel to change their passwords on the police department's network. Boston's Occupy movement set up camp in the city's financial district for two months this fall. The first hack came about 10 days after Boston police arrested 141 Occupy Boston demonstrators on Oct. 11. Police dismantled the camp Dec. 10, citing public health and safety concerns. "They clearly ignored our warnings," the message on the department's website said Friday. So you get your kicks beating protesters? That's OK; we get kicks defacing ... your websites - again. "It is unfortunate that someone would go to this extent to compromise BPDNews.com, a helpful and informative public safety resource utilized daily by community members seeking up-to-date news and information about important safety matters," police said in a statement. Anonymous is a collection of Internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists whose targets have included financial Visa and MasterCard, the Church of Scientology and law enforcement agencies. Following a spate of arrests across the world, the group and its various offshoots have focused their attention on law enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular. Associated Press writer Raphael Satter in London contributed to this report.

Pakistan airline sacks pilots over fake qualifications Asif Yasin Malik, the chairman of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), has also promised to launch an investigation to root out any other staff whose degrees turn out to be forged. "PIA is a bleeding organisation at this juncture and needs some time for recovery before getting rid of fake degree holders and incompetent and corrupt officials," he told a parliamentary committee investigating the airline's performance. The sacked pilots had flown thousands of hours for the airline including time spent flying government officials. One had recorded 25 years service. PIA has lurched from crisis to crisis in recent years as its ageing fleet and bloated workforce haemorrhage cash. A report prepared for a judicial probe - launched after the country's chief justice was delayed - found it had lost almost a billion pounds during the past decade. On Sunday, passengers described seeing smoke billowing from an engine as a PIA 747 jet prepared to leave Karachi bound for Islamabad. Although the airline insisted there was no danger, merely a technical fault, it faced a barrage of criticism from ministers and parliamentarians on board the plane. "Smoke billowing out of the burning engine escaped into fuselage after they opened the emergency exit hatch," Maula Bux Chandio, political affairs minister, told a TV news channel. It was so asphyxiating in there. I saw many passengers, who were not feeling well at all, gasping for air. However, Pakistan's fake degree scandal is nothing compared with India's aviation problems. Last year it emerged that 57 Indian pilots had been caught with excessive alcohol in their blood before taking cockpit controls. And in 2011, 14 pilots were dismissed when it was found they had used forged documents to obtain flying licences.

NJ Girl to Meet With Easy-Bake Team at Hasbro A New Jersey girl who started a campaign calling for an Easy-Bake Oven in gender-neutral colors is planning to meet with the people who design it. Toy maker Hasbro says it has invited 13-year-old McKenna Pope and her family to meet with the Easy-Bake team Monday at its Pawtucket headquarters. McKenna Pope,13, poses for The Associated Press in her home in Garfield, N.J. on Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012. Pope started petition demanding the toy company Hasbro make its Easy-Bake Oven more boy friendly. She was inspired to do so when her 4-year-old brother Gavyn Boscio put the oven on his Christmas wish list and she and their mother, Erica Boscio, found the toy only available with girls on the packaging and and in pink or purple colors. The petition garnered more than 30,000 signatures in a little more than a week. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Close Hasbro's Julie Duffy says they invited McKenna in to listen to her thoughts and ideas. McKenna was prompted to start an online petition after she wanted to buy an Easy-Bake Oven for her 4-year-old brother and found them only in purple and pink. Several top chefs, including Bobby Flay, have since asked Hasbro to make them in more colors. Duffy says Hasbro has made the toy in gender-neutral colors in the past and believes it's great for girls and boys.

Army medic and Royal Marine killed in Afghanistan firefight that started by 'mistake' An army medic, who died alongside a Royal Marine in a firefight in Helmand involving the local police, has become the third woman soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. Tonight there was confusion and controversy over claims that the fatal firefight had started by "mistake." The soldier was identified last night as 25 year old Channing Day from Northern Ireland, serving with 3 Medical Regiment. A friend, Iona Montgomery, 43,from Comber, County Down, said: "She was so proud to be in the Army, so proud to wear the uniform. The family are very close, my heart is breaking for them. The Ministry of Defence stated that an investigation was being launched into what happened at Nahr-e-Seraj district during a routine patrol. But Afghan officials maintained that an off duty policeman, out of uniform but armed, was thought to be an insurgent by the British forces and shooting subsequently started. Other policemen in the vicinity thought they had come under attack and they, too, started shooting. Haji Toryali, chief of police at the district told the Afghan media that a policeman had been engaged in ritual washing before prayers when "One of two Isaf (Nato-led International Security Assistance Force) patrols thought he was Taleban and started shooting at him. The policeman stood up and said "I am police, I am police. The other (Afghan) policemen then thought they were under attack and started shooting back, which made the British forces shoot more. They even fired rockets. Colonel Nabi Elham, the chief of Helmand police, described the event as a tragic misunderstanding. Major Laurence Roche, spokesman for the Helmand task force, said: "I am extremely sorry to announce the deaths of a Royal Marine from 40 Commando and a soldier from 3 Medical Regiment serving with Task Force Helmand. This is dreadful news for all of us serving in Afghanistan. Our sincere condolences go to their families, friends and colleagues at this time of grief. Following a spate of shootings of Western service personnel by members of Afghan security forces, Isaf had suspended some joint operations. Initial reports about the Nahr-e-Seraj shootings had mentioned such a "green on blue" attack; if the account given by Afghan officials is true then British and Afghan commanders would be fully engaged in limiting any adverse fallout. In a separate incident two US soldiers were killed today when a man wearing an Afghan police uniform shot them both in the head. The killer is thought to have been the bodyguard of the Khas Uruzgan district police chief Commander Noorzai.

Florida man to plead guilty in celebrity hacking case: prosecutors LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A man accused of hacking into email accounts to access nude photos and private information of celebrities including Scarlett Johansson has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, prosecutors said on Thursday. Christopher Chaney of Jacksonville, Florida, will plead guilty to nine criminal counts including unauthorized access to a computer, according to a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 60 years in prison. Chaney was arrested in October after an 11-month investigation dubbed "Operation Hackerazzi" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was charged with 26 counts of cyber-related crimes for hacking into e-mails of "The Avengers" star Johansson, along with actress Mila Kunis ("Black Swan") and singer Christina Aguilera. Other victims were identified only by their initials, which included B.P. and J.A. The photos of Johansson, 27, showed her topless and in a towel with an exposed backside. She revealed in a Vanity Fair magazine interview they were taken for her now ex-husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, when they were still married. Leaked photos of Kunis showed her in a tub filled with bubbles, showing only her face. In the plea agreement, prosecutors say that between November of 2010 and October of 2011 Chaney hacked into the email accounts of more than 50 members of the entertainment industry. Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Tim Gaynor

Memorial service marks the sinking of the 'Lancastria' A memorial service yesterday marked the 72nd anniversary of the sinking of the Lancastria, the UK's worst maritime disaster. Members of the Lancastria Association gathered in Clydebank in Scotland to remember those who died when the ship was bombed and sunk off the French coast on 17 June 1940. More than 6,000 servicemen and civilians were on board. Only 2,500 are thought to have survived.

Michael Tippett: a visionary in the shadow of his rival As for Tippett, his reputation since his death in 1998 has had a calamitous fall. To read some commentators, you'd think Tippett was nothing more than an amiable amateur with pretensions to visionary depths, incurably deficient in technique, who in later years had an embarrassing crush on African-American street culture and tried to transplant it into his operas - with toe-curling results. So all praise to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's decision to focus on Tippett's music during the current season. Beginning next Friday, they'll be performing all four of Tippett's symphonies, plus the Piano Concerto and Triple Concerto. The disparity in status between Britten and Tippett was there from the beginning. Britten had that aura that always goes with precocious genius, and in Aldeburgh he became the centre of a fiercely efficient promotion and performance machine. Tippett also lived in the country, but there was no Tippett court. And he was never precocious. Although he was born five years before Britten, in 1908, it was Britten who first surged ahead in the Thirties. Tippett was at that point still toiling away in rural obscurity, teaching music at Morley College, conducting amateur choirs, reading voraciously. The wartime premiere of Tippett's great pacifist oratorio, A Child of our Time, was a turning point. People were struck by Tippett's very different sort of talent, meditative, mellifluous and richly allusive where Britten was chiselled and sharp-edged and brilliant. Tippett's first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, followed some 10 years later. The opera's mythic scenario, with its echoes of Mozart's Magic Flute, was in sharp contrast to the closely observed small-town atmosphere of Britten's first opera, Peter Grimes. The two works foreshadow the directions each composer would take. There's an essential realism and modesty about Britten. He said his aim was to pare away at his music until it reached maximum clarity. Paring away can feel much like repression, and this, combined with Britten's favourite themes of cruelty and the loss of innocence, gives his music a peculiar potency. It's a form of "depth" that modern audiences can feel comfortable with, because it's both hauntingly beautiful and essentially passive. It puts us in the position of entranced witnesses to our own disturbing depths; we suffer them, rather than make them. Compare Tippett's view of human depths, which was strenuously aspirational. He felt art provided the luminous images and narratives to help us forge a union between our dark and light aspects. In an essay of 1959 he declared: "When we let the common level of our social life sink away too far from the beautiful and the comely, we suffer as sharply as if we took away the children's milk to make whipped cream for the wealthy. Part of the poet's, the painter's or the musician's job is just that of renewing our sense of the comely and the beautiful. This affirmation of the artist's prophetic role is another factor that makes Tippett seem a distant figure. But it also makes him a lovable one. The composer Peter Sculthorpe once said the problem with Britten is that "he cannot exult." Whereas exulting in music comes as naturally to Tippett as breathing. He achieves it through astoundingly long-breathed melodies, buoyed aloft by the sprung rhythms of early English music. This was enriched during the Sixties with something quite different: a way of building forms from fiercely grand blocks of sound, etched in brass and percussion. Later, he entered a third period where these opposites were brought into a wonderful synthesis. The late Triple Concerto, which opens the Tippett celebrations, has a radiant serenity. Starting at the end might seem odd, but with Tippett it seems somehow right. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's Tippett season begins at the Barbican, London, on Oct 19. Hear the series live on BBC Radio 3

Hacking group Anonymous takes on India internet 'censorship'

Jazz review: Christian Scott puts his outrage to good use On "Danziger Bridge Massacre," the concluding number of Christian Scott's second 45-minute set Thursday night at the Blue Whale in Little Tokyo, the furiously gifted young jazz trumpeter let loose with exquisite howls of pain. The song's title refers to the shooting deaths of two unarmed men (one of them mentally disabled) by New Orleans cops during the chaos that engulfed the city in the days after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Five former officers were found guilty in the subsequent civil rights and cover-up trials and sentenced to prison. Scott's soulful requiem began with a soft, melancholy through line. Gradually he was joined by drummer Jamire Williams, tapping out a funereal cadence with mallet and stick. Passing through stretches of Stygian gloom, the song finally burst into hot blasts of jovial defiance, as Scott twisted his body downward until his knees nearly touched the floor, summoning every ounce of breath as his trumpet yelped and seethed before winding down in a tender, tragic wail. "Danziger Bridge Massacre" could be the 21st century's "Strange Fruit" for a country that some persist in calling "post-racial" despite abundant contrary evidence. Scott's hometown always has been the alpha and omega of his art, just as it has been for another Crescent City trumpet-playing favorite son, Wynton Marsalis. But Scott's relationship to his native city and its indigenous cultural forms has been more audibly restless and tormented than that of the urbane, bespoke-suited artistic director of New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center. In the liner notes to Scott's two-CD, 23-track new album, "Christian aTunde Adjuah" - the title is a traditional African name that the musician lately has adopted - Scott responds to older jazz colleagues who've questioned his Bourbon Street bona fides and challenged his right to be regarded as the second coming of Miles Davis. In his disclaimer/manifesto, the post-hip-hop Scott points out that Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver didn't play swing or bebop either, for the simple reason that they didn't live long enough to invent it. "When one defines something," Scott writes, "they are forcing it to exist within the confines of its explanation." At the Blue Whale, Scott mostly let his trumpet do the preaching. Wearing a black shirt with small red-and-white polka dots, jeans, black high-top sneakers and a traditional West African-style gold necklace, he opened his first set with a vehemently executed version of "Jihad Joe," off the new album. The punning title alludes to U.S. home-grown Islamic extremism. Set in motion by a simple melodic fragment repeated over and over by the elegant, mild-mannered pianist Lawrence Fields, "Jihad Joe" built to a conflagration of discordancies. Scott repeatedly pressed the custom-made, 22-degree-angled bell curve of his trumpet right up to the mike, sometimes almost swallowing it, as he tapped out staccato Morse-code prophesies before bringing his band to an ominous screeching halt. Next came another new tune, "Vs. the Kleptocratic Union (Ms. McDowell's Crime)," inspired by a Connecticut homeless woman sent to prison for enrolling her son in a local school. Thursday's live version turned the song into a rowdy lamentation, graced by one of electric guitarist Matthew Stevens' lovely, introspective solos. Scott rags on his bandmates when he introduces them, but clearly he's enamored with them, and rightly so. Leaning in close, nodding his head and shouting exhortations, Scott led his colleagues through the gentle wash of the dreamy "Isadora" and the maelstrom of "K.K.P.D." Ku Klux Police Department. On the latter tune, which closed out his first set, Williams' thunderstorm Cuban drumming and Stevens' guitar kept bringing the beat staggering back to life, like Lazarus, after it had been beaten down and nearly collapsed into submission. At the Blue Whale, righteous outrage fueled endless rounds of resilient resistance.

Serco Northlink Ferries to cut up to 36 jobs

The Bad News Is Good News There was one brief shining moment last week when Mitt Romney appeared to be saying something sensible about sex. "The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I'm not going there," he told reporters. This was the way Republicans used to talk, oh, about a millennium or so ago. The state legislators wore nice suits and worried about bonded indebtedness and blushed if you said "pelvis." A woman's private plumbing? Change the topic, for lord's sake. Now some of them appear to think about women's sex lives 24/7, and not in a cheerful, recreational manner. And it turned out that Romney misspoke. He apparently didn't realize that the subject he was proposing to steer clear of was a Republican plan to allow employers to refuse to provide health care coverage for contraception if they had moral objections to birth control. He was definitely going there! Mittworld quickly issued a retraction making it clear that Romney totally supports the idea of getting into questions of contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman. Particularly when it comes to reducing health insurance coverage. Really, what did you expect? If Romney couldn't even take a clear stand on Rush Limbaugh's Slutgate, why would he say anything that forthright unless it was a total error? This is why we can't get the dog-on-the-car-roof story straightened out. The reporters have their hands full just figuring out Mitt's position on the biggest controversy of the last month. We've certainly come to a wild and crazy place when it comes to the politics of sex. Perhaps this would be a good time to invest in burqa futures. However, I like to look on the bright side, and I am beginning to think we may actually be turning a corner and actually getting closer to resolving everything. All of this goes back to the anti-abortion movement, which was very successful for a long time, in large part because it managed to make it appear that the question was whether or not doctors should be allowed to cut up fetuses that were nearly viable outside the womb. But now we're fighting about whether poor women in Texas - where more than half the children are born to families whose incomes are low enough to qualify them for Medicaid coverage of the deliveries - should have access to family planning. As Pam Belluck and Emily Ramshaw reported in The Times this week, the right has taken its war against Planned Parenthood to the point where clinics, none of which performed abortions and some of which are not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, are being forced to close for lack of state funds. Or about whether a woman seeking an abortion should be forced to let a doctor stick a device into her vagina to take pictures of the fetus. The more states attempt to pass these laws, the more people are going to be reminded that most abortions are performed within the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when the embryo in question is less than an inch-and-a-half long. And the more we argue about contraception, the more people are going to notice that a great many of the folks who are opposed to abortion in general are also opposed to birth control. Some believe that sex, even within marriage, should never be divorced from the possibility of conception. Some believe that most forms of contraception are nothing but perpetual mini-abortions. Most Americans aren't in these boats. In fact, they are so completely not in the boats that very, very few Catholic priests attempt to force their parishioners to follow the church's rules against contraceptives, even as the Catholic bishops are now attempting to torpedo the health care reform law on that very principle. Every time a state considers a "personhood" amendment that would give a fertilized egg the standing of a human being, outlawing some forms of fertility treatment and common contraceptives, it reinforces the argument that the current abortion debate is actually about theology, not generally held national principles. And, of course, every time we have one of those exciting discussions about the Limbaugh theory on making women who get health care coverage for contraception broadcast their sex lives on the Internet, the more the Republican Party loses votes, money, sympathy - you name it. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which last summer found women almost evenly divided on which party should control Congress, now shows that women favor Democrats, 51 percent to 36 percent. The longer this goes on, the easier it will be to come up with a national consensus about whether women's reproductive lives are fair game for government intrusion. And, when we do, the politicians will follow along. Instantly. Just watch Mitt Romney.

Seven killed in Nairobi bus attack Nairobi Police Chief Moses Nyakwama said the blast occurred on a so-called "matatu," or local minibus, in the district of Eastleigh, where mainly Somalis or Kenyans of Somali origin live and which has been the target of other attacks in recent weeks. The information we have is that there were about 25 people in the bus. It looks like it is an improvised explosive device that was thrown in it," he said. It occurred at a congested place so even people passing by got injured. The Kenyan Red Cross said on its Twitter account that the death toll was now seven people while the number of wounded was 29. Kenya has suffered a wave of grenade and gun attacks, often blamed on sympathisers of Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents, since its army went into Somalia last year to flush out the Shebab. The Eastleigh area has often been a target of the violence. On Wednesday, a suspected grenade attack in a supermarket in the district wounded one person, and two weeks earlier another explosive device went off, wounding two. Earlier this month, attackers also hurled a grenade into a church in the northeastern town of Garissa, close to the Somali border, killing one policeman and wounding 14 people.

Anchorage breaks winter snowfall record ANCHORAGE, Alaska, April 8 (UPI) -- An early spring snowstorm put Anchorage, Alaska, into record territory for the winter, weather forecasters said. More than 2 inches of snow fell over the weekend at Ted Stevens International Airport, establishing a new record of 134.5 inches for the season. The old record of 132.6 inches was established in the winter of 1954-1955. KTUU-TV, Anchorage, said the winter got off to a slow start with the first flakes holding off until Halloween. November came on strong with an above-average 32.4 inches.

For Romney, touting business prowess may be risky strategy As Democrats launch their general election assault on Mitt Romney, their approach has sounded familiar to those who followed the meteoric rise and fall of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, corporate chieftains who lost their Republican bids for senator and governor in California two years ago. Much as Fiorina and Whitman emphasized their business experience, Romney's presidential campaign has presented him to voters as the man to tackle the nation's economic problems because of his grasp, as he likes to say, of "why jobs come and why they go." When Romney was struggling to capture the Republican nomination, President Obama and his strategists seemed content to let his Republican opponents challenge that image - most notably with an ominous film financed by a Republican "super PAC" that cast Romney as a corporate raider who pursued profits while slashing jobs at the private equity firm Bain Capital. But Obama waded into that debate earlier this month - criticizing Romney by name for embracing a Republican budget plan that the president said amounted to "thinly veiled social Darwinism" that favored the wealthiest Americans over working families. In a subtle aside, he poked at Romney's privileged circumstances by noting that the likely GOP nominee had used the word "marvelous" to describe the plan by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) - "a word," the president noted archly, that "you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget" and "a word you don't often hear generally." The president's lines echoed attacks used against Fiorina and Whitman - who were painted by Democrats as out of touch because of their wealth and top-flight business careers. On countless occasions, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) mentioned Fiorina's yachts almost in the same breath as the layoffs Fiorina had ordered as Hewlett-Packard Co.'s chief executive. In the race for governor, Jerry Brown repeatedly accused Whitman, the billionaire and former EBay chief executive, of trying to buy the election, and her professional performance was dissected throughout. Obama's allusion to Romney's background was no accident. At a recent breakfast in Washington, Obama pollster Joel Benenson mentioned the Whitman and Fiorina races when asked whether the Obama team viewed any 2010 contests as models for this year's campaign. In California, Benenson said, "You had two people who ran on their business experience, spent a boatload of money ... and lost - in a state that has elected Republicans." Romney, Benenson continued, "had no qualms about bankrupting companies" and "walking away with millions of dollars." While voters may not object to his success and his resulting wealth, the perception that he is "not in touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans" will be used against him, the pollster said. To blunt such assertions, Romney has already launched his own line of attack accusing Obama of being out of touch - a member of what he described as the "extraordinary elite." There are distinctions between the races. California's Democratic edge meant both women started with a disadvantage - though their genders countered that to some extent. And a national campaign is far more complex than a state race, even in a place as diverse and wide-ranging as California. Still, political strategists see lessons in the defeats. Fiorina lost by 10 percentage points, even though Boxer's approval rating was at an all-time low. Whitman lost to Brown by an even larger margin, 13 points, after spending $144 million of her own money. Boxer pollster Mark Mellman noted that, as with Romney, voters initially were receptive to the business experience of both women, particularly Fiorina's arc of working her way up from the secretarial pool to run HP. But that perception changed as Boxer's campaign pummeled her with television ads that juxtaposed outsourcing and layoffs under her watch at HP with her lifestyle. "Outsourcing jobs, out for herself," the tag line of one ad read. "We turned what was her greatest strength into her greatest weakness," Mellman said. Fiorina and Whitman declined requests to talk about the lessons of 2010, but strategists for both Republicans said the attacks could have been brushed aside better with explanations to voters of how the two women had improved people's lives in their corporate careers. That is a challenge that lies ahead for Romney. The Boxer campaign, Fiorina campaign manager Marty Wilson said, did "a very good job of defining Carly - even though none of this was true - as a coldhearted businesswoman who was going to do what it takes to advance her cause." When pressed about the controversial decisions she made at HP, Fiorina often argued that layoffs were necessary to save the company, and pointed to HP's successes after she left. Just as quickly, she would shift the discussion back to Boxer's record. That was in part because her strategists had decided to keep the focus on Boxer's record rather than defend Fiorina's tenure at HP. "In this age of sound bites, explaining the fundamentals of the American economy and how it overlays the global economy is a lot more complicated than 'This person did a bad thing to send jobs out of the country,'" said former Fiorina advisor Beth Miller. It's a lot easier to make the businessman the bogyman for what's wrong. The drawn-out Republican primary has already given voters a glimpse of the more aggressive Romney strategy. When a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich released the film "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town" in January, Romney's communication operatives fired off fact-checking reports from various news organizations, including a Wall Street Journal story in which three workers who had been portrayed as being laid off because of Bain's actions said that claim was inaccurate. After then-candidate Rick Perry called Romney's brand of business "vulture" capitalism, the Romney campaign leaned on surrogates and conservative leaders to take his rivals to task as being "anti-business." Romney's general election challenge will be to rebut the negative stories about thousands of job cuts during his tenure at Bain with positive stories about companies that he helped launch or turn around. Romney failed to make the affirmative case in his 1994 Senate campaign against Edward M. Kennedy, whose campaign focused attention on Bain's layoffs. As with Whitman and Fiorina, both sides will argue over how many "net jobs" were created in the candidate's business endeavors. "But whatever the number is, he's got a story to tell," former Whitman strategist Rob Stutzman said. Stutzman argued that Romney may have an easier time contrasting his record with Obama's than the California Republicans had with their Democratic opponents. "Romney can put some compelling people to camera who say, 'I voted for this guy four years ago because I believed in it all and he hasn't delivered,'" he said. To the swing vote - that's the proposition. That's where the whole election is won and lost.

First, Republicans Must Find Common Ground Among Themselves For four years, the leader most capable of unifying the fractious Republican Party has been Barack Obama. Now the Republicans find their divisions newly revealed in the raw. By exposing the party's vulnerability to potent demographic shifts, the 2012 results have set the stage for a struggle between those determined to rebrand the Republicans in a softer light and those yearning instead for ideological purity. But before acceptance comes denial. And the party's first challenge, it seems in the immediate aftermath, is to find common ground simply in diagnosing the problem. Though some leaders argued that basic mathematics dictates that the party must find new ways to talk about issues like immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage, others attributed Republican losses to poor candidate choice, messaging missteps and President Obama's superior political operation. "We continually crank out moderate loser after moderate loser," said Joshua S. Treviño, a speechwriter in George W. Bush's administration who now works for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group. He said Mitt Romney was part of a "pattern" of Republican nominees, preceded by John McCain, Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush, who were rejected by voters because of "perceived inauthenticity." By contrast, Ralph Reed, the longtime Republican strategist and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said he would redouble efforts over the next four years to recruit women, Latinos and young people as grass-roots organizers. "I certainly get the fact that your daddy's Republican Party cannot win relying singularly on white voters and evangelicals alone - as critical as I believe those voters are to a majority coalition," Mr. Reed said. The good news for conservatives is there are many of those who have not always felt welcome in our ranks who share our values. The re-election of Mr. Obama, despite the flagging economy and ambivalence about his leadership, left questions that Republicans may sort out only over time, starting with the direction set by the party's majority in the House and the run-up to the 2016 campaign. Can the Republicans shore up their weaknesses purely with tonal changes on issues like abortion, immigration and same-sex marriage, along with a repackaging of conservative fiscal policy? Will it require real moderation on social and economic positions that the Tea Party movement and the conservative base consider inviolate? Or is an embrace of unyielding conservatism required to rally an electorate that has grown cynical about candidates who shape-shift after the primaries? The debate is already roiling, with early markers laid in postelection news conferences and on the Sunday talk shows. On CNN's "State of the Union," Carlos Gutierrez, a Romney adviser and a commerce secretary under George W. Bush, blamed the loss "squarely on the far right wing of the Republican Party." Countered Gary L. Bauer, the socially conservative former presidential candidate, "America is not demanding a second liberal party." The Republican National Committee is undertaking a two-month series of polls, focus groups and outreach meetings about its message and mechanics, with added focus on Latino subgroups like Cubans, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Introspection will also be on the agenda when the Republican Governors Association convenes on Wednesday for a three-day meeting in Las Vegas. "The question really is how do we set the best tone in delivering our conservative message so that it becomes attractive to more people," said Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, the association's chairman. Looking at how young voters and minority voters are voting, it's an unsustainable trajectory. In addition to losing both the popular and electoral votes for president, the Republicans lost nearly every swing state. Although the race was far closer than in 2008, Mr. Romney won two million fewer votes than Mr. McCain did against Mr. Obama that year. Democrats, once fearful of losing the Senate, gained one seat there and four in the House. They also added seats in state legislatures. The Republicans" only bright spot, other than maintaining the House majority, came in governors" races. They picked up a long-elusive seat in North Carolina, bringing their total to 30, the most by either party in 12 years. The longer-term concerns for Republicans were revealed in exit polling. While Mr. Romney won the votes of 59 percent of whites, 52 percent of men and 78 percent of white evangelicals, Mr. Obama claimed 55 percent of women, 60 percent of voters under 30, 93 percent of African-Americans and more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asians. Although the president's majority shrank nationally, he won a larger proportion of Latino and Asian votes than in 2008. Among Latinos, Mr. Romney's share of the vote fell 17 percentage points below the 44 percent won by George W. Bush in 2004. Perhaps most ominous, the Latino share of the total vote rose to 10 percent from 8 percent in 2004, and the Asian share rose to 3 percent from 2 percent. The electorate is now 28 percent nonwhite, more than double the figure from two decades ago. That growth is certain to continue; in 2011, births to nonwhites outnumbered births to whites for the first time.

Egyptian police arrest protesters as calm returns in Cairo From Ian Lee and Hamdi Alkhshali, CNN September 15, 2012 -- Updated 0850 GMT (1650 HKT) Traffic around the area is getting back to normal Scores of injuries are reported over the past few days near the U.S. Embassy At least 15 protesters are injured from tear gas inhalation Cairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Egyptian police arrested protesters in Cairo on Saturday after days of anti-U.S. demonstrations over a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammed. Traffic in Tahrir Square was beginning to get back to normal as police made the arrests. Streets were strewn with debris, a reminder of the days of skirmishes. The demonstrations at the square -- which in 2011 was the hub of activity in the revolution that led to the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak -- started Tuesday. The protests , fueled by outrage over an anti-Islam film made in the United States and posted online, were mostly peaceful. But there was at least one death and scores have been arrested, according to authorities. As of Saturday, 142 protesters were detained and 99 police officers injured, the Interior Ministry said. At least 15 protesters were injured Friday from tear gas inhalation and eye irritation, said Health Ministry spokesman Mohamed Sultan. In recent days, nations in North Africa have taken to the streets to protest the film. The region is on edge after the killings of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other American officials at the U.S. Consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. Ties between the United States and Egypt have cooled since the overthrow last year of Mubarak and the election of President Mohamed Morsy, the country's first democratically elected leader. Before he became president, he was a leader in the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the popular Islamist movement. Some of the protests occurred near the American Embassy, which is close to Tahrir Square. When the protests began Tuesday, police and Egyptian troops formed defensive lines around the embassy to prevent demonstrators from advancing, but not before the protesters had scaled the embassy fence and placed a black flag atop a ladder in the American compound. Police arrested a handful of protesters at the time, but the failure of Egyptian authorities to take action sooner has been widely questioned, as has the initial response from Morsy. Morsy initially focused his criticism on the anti-Muslim film as an unacceptable slap at Islam. But after speaking with President Barack Obama, Morsy on Thursday directly criticized the violence. "Those who are attacking the embassies do not represent any of us," he said from Brussels, Belgium, where he was visiting the headquarters of the European Union. Ian Lee contributed from Cairo and Hamdi Alkhshali from Atlanta Protests stemming at least in part from an anti-Islam film produced in the United States are unfolding outside U.S. embassies around the world. September 14, 2012 -- Updated 0053 GMT (0853 HKT) Sean Smith was a computer expert legendary in the gaming world. Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were former Navy SEAL commandos. September 14, 2012 -- Updated 1431 GMT (2231 HKT) September 14, 2012 -- Updated 1501 GMT (2301 HKT) The fall of dictatorships does not guarantee the creation of free societies, says Ed Husain, author of "The Islamist." September 14, 2012 -- Updated 1626 GMT (0026 HKT) The U.S. has been clear about how it thinks leaders should react to the anti-American violence this week, but what are they actually saying? September 14, 2012 -- Updated 1508 GMT (2308 HKT) Protesters are able to overpower security forces to breach the walls of the German embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. September 14, 2012 -- Updated 0233 GMT (1033 HKT)

Louis Coldros suspended by Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi CORAL SPRINGS, Fla., Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Police in Florida said an officer who attempted to purchase ammunition to hide the fact that he lost 40 rounds was suspended for five weeks. The Coral Springs Police Department said officials received a call in June from the bullet company saying an order placed by Louis Coldros, 44, was being processed. Coldros was sent home to retrieve the magazines for his gun, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported Thursday. Coldros returned to say his vest and two 20-round magazines it contained were missing and must have been stolen from his car. However, investigators said the missing items were found in a SWAT vehicle July 13 and may have been left there June 5. When I realized equipment was missing from my police car, I expected to be held accountable. In an attempt to avoid repercussions and face further criticism from my supervisors, I attempted to purchase and replace the missing items on my own. With 18 years in law enforcement, I should have known better and disclosed the missing items right away," Coldros said in an Aug. 15 letter to Chief Tony Pustizzi. Coldros was issued a five-week unpaid suspension.

Eva Longoria treats 'Desperate Housewives' set to burgers on last day Eva Longoria treated "Desperate Housewives" cast and crew to a Fatburger truck on the ABC show's final day of shooting. Drew Connick / April 26, 2012 April 27, 2012, 10:07 a.m. The cast and crew on ABC's "Desperate Housewives" got the perfect parting gift from Eva Longoria: burgers and fries in which to drown their sorrows. Longoria, who has played high-strung fashionista Gabrielle Solis for eight seasons, treated her coworkers to a Fatburger lunch truck on the show's final day of shooting Thursday. "Thank you Fatburger for making the last day on the set of Desperate Housewives special!" she tweeted, rocking a purple cocktail dress and comfy boots. While an onlooker tells us costar Doug Savant chowed down and socialized with staff, the main ladies of Wisteria Lane were busy with their final shot. If additional photos posted to Longoria's Twitter account are any indication, one of the show's final scenes will be a fan-pleaser. Pictures of Longoria embracing fellow stars Felicity Huffman and Marcia Cross have the ladies at a dining table over cheese and wine -- the site of many of the classic card-game scenes where the women (including Teri Hatcher) bonded over murder, adultery and recipe-swapping. One last shot from Longoria includes show creator Marc Cherry, Vanessa Williams, Eva's onscreen husband Ricardo Chavira and Brenda Strong, the show's posthumous narrator who kicked off the intrigue eight years ago when she killed herself in the pilot. Eva Longoria: No, I'm not breathing -- it's a Victoria Beckham Eva Longoria, Judd Apatow do a fundraising dinner with President Obama Victoria Beckham gets perfect pink baby shower with Eva Longoria, Nicole Richie

AK-47s vs tanks: Syria's rebels fight on despite odds

At SoHo Bar, Jeremy Lin's Fans Share His Heritage Su Nam, a graphic designer, sat in the booth of a SoHo bar Friday night and surveyed the raucous crowd huddled in front of the broadcast of the Knicks game. "All the Asian-American guys want to be Jeremy Lin," she said. And all the Asian-American girls want to marry him. More than 50 people, almost all of them Christians and the children of Asian immigrants, gathered to cheer for Jeremy Lin, the most unlikely story in sports, and a star they could relate to like no other. They clapped when the television showed him walking to the locker room in a gray V-neck sweater. They screamed when he was introduced over the loudspeaker as the Knicks" starting point guard. They shook the room when he made his first basket in a 38-point effort as the Knicks beat the Lakers, 92-85. Many of them were not even basketball fans. Jay Kim, 29, had not watched the Knicks since they were in the N.B.A. finals more than a decade ago. Greg Wong, one of the night's organizers, admitted to falling asleep when he watches sports. "I don't even follow football," one woman said. Wait, this isn't football. But those in the crowd treated this regular-season game as if it were the Super Bowl, handing out "Linsanity" posters, hollering at the screen in their freshly purchased No. 17 jerseys and asking the harried waitress for one more beer. If Lin's storybook week captured the imagination of New York City and the wider sports world, it hit the community of Christian Asian-Americans like a lightning bolt. "He is so much what I am," said Stanley Lee, 28, who had been a Knicks fan for all of two days. He ticked off the similarities: Chinese-American, Christian and athletic. Lee said he had completed several triathlons. And they both were underdogs, too. "I know what it's like to be picked last," Lee said. Everyone in the room had his own reasons to identify with Lin. Some had been following him his whole career, from his collegiate success at Harvard to his struggles in Golden State, Houston and New York. Others had not heard of him until last week. But the standing-room crowd cheered his every basket - 18 points at the half - and competed to trace a connection to him. One man knew someone from Bible study who knew Lin's sister-in-law. Another had a friend in San Francisco who (perhaps) knew him at Harvard. Leonard Lin, 29, got obvious bragging rights, while one group tried to figure out if he attended its church. The winner: one woman said she had met him. If basketball fans have delighted in Jeremy Lin's fast-forward crossover and uncanny court vision, the crowd at Gatsby's bar admired him for other reasons. "He's bold about his faith," sad Kim, 29, a videographer who regularly attends church. He's not apologetic about it. That's something that's impressive to me. Daniel Chao, a Los Angeles native, wore a Kobe Bryant jersey, but he bought a Lin jersey for his wife, Kendra. He said that Lin's record of success, despite his humble beginnings and his many setbacks, had inspired him at his own job at a health insurance firm. "In Asian culture, you're supposed to do hard work and you'll get noticed," he said. All the hard work I've put into where I am - maybe I could be that executive. For a room crowded with bankers, teachers and tech entrepreneurs, Jeremy Lin's rise had already become something of a fable, a basketball version of "The Little Engine That Could." "He just keeps going," Chao said. He's defying all the coaches who said no, all the teams that have dropped him. Many people in the room said they felt protective of Lin, nervous that he would stumble in the bright lights. They breathed easier as he knifed through the Lakers" defense, but they knew his astonishing run could not last forever. When the final buzzer sounded, the room erupted in cheers and the D.J. turned up the music full blast. He outscored Kobe! Leonard Lin said. Kendra Chao, who had no interest in the Knicks before last week, pointed to the No. 17 on her jersey with a broad smile. She said she was excited and proud, but the rest of her sentence was swallowed by the noise of the bar. But what would it mean for Jeremy Lin, and for them, if his star begins to fade? Audrey Kim, a Korean-American who works in New York University's admissions office, shrugged off the concern. "He's already a success and made so many people proud," she said. He's such an inspiration to young Asian-Americans. She thought that he opened up a new field for Asian-Americans, and that Lin's parents, who supported his basketball dreams, should be models for immigrants raising American children. There was a pause in the conversation. Daniel Chao spoke up. "I mean," he said, in a slightly stunned voice, "an Asian-American dunked." Correction: February 11, 2012 An earlier version of this article contained a Web headline that misspelled Jeremy Lin's last name as Linn.

Even seven days later, the feeling of devastation at the death of Synchronised in Grand National is still with us all He has won over three-and-a-half miles at Cheltenham, so I don't envisage him having too many problems over four miles at Ayr. Recent records show that horses carrying more than 11 stones face a really stiff task, so he looks on a nice weight with 10st 12lb. Jonjo has trained him with this race in mind for a while and after he ran fourth To Calgary Bay in the Great Yorkshire in January he had a good spin over hurdles at Bangor last month. The dangers are Walkon, one of the classiest runners in the 25-strong field, the Philip Hobbs trained Mostly Bob and I have a feeling that the trip should suit Gary Moore's Fruity O'Rooney. In the Isle of Skye Blended Whisky Scottish Champion Hurdle (2.50) I ride Tetlami for Nicky Henderson. He's a pretty smart novice and after winning three times he ran ninth behind Cinders And Ashes in the Supreme Novices" at Cheltenham. I believe Barry Geraghty had the choice of the Henderson horses and he's gone for Petit Robin, if that's any sort of a hint for you. However, we both have Ruby Walsh's mount Edgardo Sol to beat. I just got the better of him on Alderwood in the County Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival, but he hacked up in a two-mile handicap chase at Aintree last week and it looks like we may not have seen the best of him yet. Russian War (4.00) runs in the two mile-five furlong handicap hurdle. He won a few handicaps last season and two in April last year including this race, but he's been struggling a bit this season. If it doesn't rain American Trilogy, who had a nice prep when running out an impressive winner of the Legends Charity Race at Aintree last week with Mick Kinane in the saddle, should take all the beating. I'm a lot closer to home on Sunday when I go to Wincanton and I'd like to think that Whistling Senator (3.10) and Avoca Promise (4.10) have excellent chances. For most of next week, probably until Sandown on Saturday, I will be at the Punchestown Festival where my main rides will be Alderwood and Get Me Out Of Here. It is a real celebration of Irish racing and is usually well attended by British racegoers. I hope I can ride a winner or two.

Boehner tries to keep budget from becoming election year issue For months, congressional Republicans have hammered Senate Democrats for failing to pass a budget. Now, with their majority position on the line in the November elections, GOP House members are having budget troubles of their own. Conservatives are pressing House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and other GOP leaders to slash 2013 agency budgets below levels set during last year's debt-limit showdown, arguing that the deal did too little to curb spending. While that move might impress tea party voters, it would put them at odds with Democrats and even Republicans in the Senate, who are eager to get through the summer and fall without another nasty spending fight that could shut down the government five weeks before voters head to the polls. Congressional approval ratings plummeted after last year's budget drama, and many House Republicans also aren't keen to repeat the experience. On Thursday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) met with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other GOP members of the panel to try to settle the dispute. Aides said there was no resolution. "Today's meeting was productive and will lead to a budget resolution that addresses the major fiscal challenges facing our country and ensures that hard-earned taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly," said Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon. Ryan aides declined to comment Thursday. In an interview last week, Ryan declined to take sides. He is due to unveil his latest spending plan March 20, one week after congressional budget analysts release their reestimate of President Obama's budget request. We haven't finished writing the budget yet. We're in the middle of all these conversations as a team," Ryan said, adding that he "is not really worried" about inviting the threat of another government shutdown. But GOP sources said Ryan is leading the charge for lower spending, and many in the party are worried. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) told reporters Wednesday that he is "uncomfortable" lowering the budget caps for next year. Republican sources said a consensus appeared to be developing around $1.028 trillion - which would require appropriators to find an extra $19 billion in cuts. Democrats pounced on the disarray Thursday, warning Boehner and his team not to renege on the hard-fought debt-limit arrangement. "If House Republicans walk away from the agreement their own speaker made less than a year ago, then they will show that a deal with them isn't worth the paper it's printed on," said Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), who served as the Democratic chairman of last fall's debt-reduction "supercommittee." "Republicans are playing with fire here, and I urge them to not cave to their most conservative members and to stick to the budget levels we already agreed to last year," Murray said.

Heroin in a burrito allegedly smuggled by L.A. County deputy into courthouse jail Henry Marin was assigned to provide courthouse security, but in 2010 prosecutors say the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy strayed. He poked his head out of his courtroom doors, according to an indictment, and spotted a woman who was there to sneak him a package. Marin waved her over. The woman told him she had been instructed to hide the special delivery inside a burrito. "OK ... no problem," the deputy said as he allegedly accepted the hand-off. Inside that bean-and-cheese burrito was heroin that prosecutors say the deputy intended to smuggle into the courthouse jail. On Wednesday, Marin, 27, surrendered to fellow deputies at the sheriff's South Los Angeles station. He pleaded not guilty to charges of bringing drugs into a jail and conspiracy to commit a crime. The charges against him are the latest in a string of prosecutions and internal affairs investigations that have targeted corrupt sheriff's deputies and other department staff for delivering contraband behind bars, and helping fuel a lucrative drug trade behind bars. Three sheriff's guards have been convicted and a fourth fired in recent years for smuggling or attempting to smuggle narcotics into jail for inmates. The porous nature of the jails was highlighted last year when The Times revealed that FBI agents conducted an undercover sting in which a deputy was accused of taking $1,500 to smuggle a cellphone to an inmate working as a federal informant. Federal authorities are investigating reports of brutality and other misconduct by deputies. The full scope of the smuggling problem is hard to quantify, and the players within the trade extend far beyond sheriff's employees, officials say. The department has seen a significant increase in drug seizures across county lockups over the last few years, but it is impossible to know how much of that involves guards. In a sign of how serious officials consider the smuggling problem to be, the Sheriff's Department recently recorded a former deputy, now in state prison, as he explained what led him to help inmates sneak in heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. In the video, Peter Felix tearfully recounts from behind bars how his fall from grace started with taking a burrito to an inmate. The video is meant to serve as a cautionary tale for other deputies. In Marin's case, prosecutors allege that at least two other unnamed individuals conspired with him. According to the indictment, one of those individuals contacted the other to discuss using a deputy to get narcotics into the Airport Courthouse jail. Several days later, the two met at a sheriff's jailhouse. One instructed the other to get the drugs and stuff them into a "food item," the indictment states. After following those instructions, the woman took the package to a specific courtroom at the Airport Courthouse, where she allegedly met with Marin and completed the hand-off. Authorities said Marin has been relieved of duty. He was released from custody Wednesday on $25,000 bail. "We take this very seriously," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore. This kind of behavior is absolutely inexcusable for anybody, especially a law enforcement representative. Los Angeles Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.

The adventure interview: Alex Thomson What is your relationship to the boat? The boat, Hugo Boss (named after my sponsors), is 60ft long, carbon, with absolutely zero comforts - no toilet, no sink, no bed. It is a bit of kit that can do 40 miles an hour. It's extremely wet, pretty fragile - fairly easy to break if you don't look after it. You physically can't sail it to its full potential because you simply haven't got enough manpower, so it's like getting as close as you can to an imaginary line, where you're fast, so you're not going to get any problems. You're kind of walking a tightrope the whole time. It doesn't sound very comfortable. What's the appeal? It's three things really. The first thing is it is one of the most challenging things - to my mind the most challenging - you can do in the world today. When you look at the number of people who have climbed Everest , it is probably nearly 3,000 now; more than 500 or 600 people have been into outer space, but less than 100 people have sailed single-handed non-stop around the world. Number two, I am a highly competitive person. At the end of a game of squash and tennis, I'm the guy with cuts and bruises at the end of it. To be in a race that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 12 weeks kind of suits me really. The last thing is the boats. They limit our length, but apart from that pretty much anything else goes. They are an absolute joy to sail. Do you have a favourite part of the world to sail? Any sailor that loves exciting hard sailing - which is most of us - would probably want to sail in the Southern Ocean. Down there, the winds are always strong, and the waves are big. It's very exhilarating and very dangerous at the same time. You can spend the first four weeks of a race dying to get into the Southern Ocean, you spend a couple of days there and you can't wait to get out, because it's so harsh, and you feel extremely isolated, you have the threat of icebergs, whales, and the water temperature is less than zero - it's a very hard environment, which you are reminded of as soon as you get down there. How do you rate your chances? For us, the priority is to finish, that's our goal really, then along the way if I am in contention, we'll go for it. But really for me, this race is about finishing, and we will think about winning later on. This will be my third Vendee Globe and I haven't finished the other two. Tell us more about Mike Golding (another English Vendee Globe competitor)? He rescued me in the Southern Ocean - saved my life really - in 2006 when my boat's keel broke and he came and picked me up. Then I was on his boat for three hours and his mast fell down. A pretty bad day at the office. Since then we've been pretty good friends. I wish him all the best for the Vendee, and hope I finish in front of him! Where have you enjoyed sailing most? I think travelling by boat is one of the best ways to see somewhere. One of the best places I've sailed is Hawaii: it's right in the middle of the ocean, it's beautiful, and it's where the trade winds are, so at the right time of year, you've constantly got a great wind. Another one, a very different one is the archipelago off Stockholm, which is just unbelievable. There are hundreds of islands, with little blue and pink houses with their flagpoles, and Swedish flags - they have special water in the Baltic, unsalty, and when you sail in Stockholm is so unspoilt. In Britain, I don't think you can beat the Solent - it is almost unrivalled in the world. It can be very challenging for the sailor, because it is very tidal, the wind can be against the tide. It's the number one place in the world to learn, I would say. In terms of cruising, and beautiful places, you can't beat the west coast of Scotland. The water is absolutely crystal clear, white beaches, just stunning - shame it's so ridiculously cold.

Hot Property: Harrison Ford sells longtime Brentwood home By Lauren Beale May 30, 2012, 7:16 p.m. Actor Harrison Ford has sold his compound in Brentwood for $8.195 million. The Colonial Revival-style house, designed by Gerard Colcord and built in 1951, sits at the end of a long gated driveway. On more than three-quarters of an acre with mature trees and three detached guest suites, the two-story main house has been restored and remodeled in keeping with the original design. Features include paneled walls, four fireplaces, extensive built-ins and a bomb shelter. There is a swimming pool and a detached workshop. Ford, 69, played Han Solo in the original "Star Wars" trilogy. He also starred as adventurer Indiana Jones in that film series. A fifth installment is reportedly in the works. Last year Ford starred in "Cowboys & Aliens." His movie "42," about baseball's Jackie Robinson, will be released in 2013. Public records show that the actor bought the property in 1983 for $1 million. He put it on the market in April for $8.295 million. David Offer of Prudential California Realty in Brentwood represented Ford and the buyer.

BBC News - Body of Rhys Jack found in search of water-filled quarry

Canada Hesitates on Plan for F-35 Jets OTTAWA - Canada's plan to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin grew less certain on Tuesday after a scathing report by the country's auditor general. While large military contracts are often politically contentious in Canada, the Conservative government's decision in 2010 to join the United States in selecting the F-35 as the country's next fighter aircraft has been particularly controversial. Cost increases and delays in the F-35 program have caused headaches for both governments, and Canadian critics argue that the aircraft costs too much and is too sophisticated for the needs of the country's air force. Michael Ferguson, the auditor general, said on Tuesday that his staff had concluded that the F-35 was selected without a "fair competition" and that the Canadian military had underestimated the cost of the aircraft and overstated industrial spinoffs for Canadian manufacturers. He added that the government had not made sufficient provisions to handle increased costs. "There were significant problems in the decision making process," Mr. Ferguson told a news conference here. For this kind of a purchase, a $25 billion purchase, they should have done a better job. The report does not deal with the role of politicians in the process. By law, the auditor general's department may review only the work of public servants. Initially, the Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper vigorously defended the purchase of F-35s, at times suggesting that its critics did not have the safety and well-being of members of the military in mind. But over the last several weeks, Mr. Harper and the cabinet minister responsible for military procurement have been distancing the government from the program. "At some point we will have to make a final decision," Mr. Harper said last month. But obviously we have not signed a contract so that we can retain our flexibility in terms of ensuring the best deal for taxpayers. Shortly after the release of the auditor general's report, and before members of opposition parties began their attacks, the government announced that it had frozen its budget for the direct purchase of the aircraft at 9 billion Canadian dollars. It also said that the purchase would be overseen by a wider variety of government departments. The auditor general said that it was still unclear how much the aircraft would cost. But his auditors concluded that the government appeared to have both understated the likely purchase price - the 9 billion Canadian dollar estimate - and not included several substantial costs directly related to the program. The country probably cannot stay within its budget by reducing the size of its order. The F-35s will replace a fleet of CF-18s, a variation of the F-18, which went into service during the 1980s and which will remain airworthy without further upgrades until the end of the decade. Sixty five, it is widely agreed, is the minimum number of replacements required. Lockheed Martin did not respond to requests for comment. Two weeks ago in an e-mail, Keelan Green, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin Canada, wrote that "the government of Canada has not indicated to Lockheed Martin that it is changing its commitment to the F-35 program."

A.I.G. Shares Fall Amid Treasury Sale Shares of the American International Group slid in early trading on Thursday after the Treasury Department said it would sell nearly 207 million shares at $29 a share. The shares quickly fell below that price and were at $28.45, down almost 3.5 percent, in morning trading. The Treasury Department said late on Wednesday that it would sell $6 billion worth of A.I.G. shares. The insurance company is buying back as much as $3 billion of that. "We're continuing to move forward to wind down TARP and exit our stakes in private companies as soon as practicable," said Timothy G. Massad, a senior Treasury official. Today is another important step in our efforts to recover the taxpayer's investment in A.I.G. Last spring, the Treasury Department sold off 200 million shares of A.I.G. With the latest sale, the government will own a stake in the company of roughly 70 percent. The government bailed out the teetering insurance giant in the financial crisis of 2008, pumping in more than $182 billion.

Matt Prior stands firm for England after Dale Steyn inspires fightback Counter-attacking Matt Prior pushed England up to 385 all out, despite a Dale Steyn-inspired fightback from South Africa on a rain-interrupted second day of the first Investec Test. A resurgent Steyn removed England centurion Alastair Cook, and then Ravi Bopara for a duck, among four wickets for only 59 runs yesterday morning. But as black clouds somehow skirted the Oval, Prior (60) still helped England from their start-of-play 267 for three to recover a little composure and put themselves within sight of 400 when they were all out in mid-afternoon. The long-threatened storm broke almost immediately after tea, but South Africa still had time to reach 86 for the loss of Alviro Petersen due to an unbroken stand between Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla. Cook (115) dug in throughout yesterday, but the game changed in two successive wicket maidens from Steyn. The seamless accumulation of day one was replaced by England's struggle to retain control as Steyn upped the ante and then Jacques Kallis stifled resistance. South Africa's world premier fast bowler had a point to prove, and wasted little time. In his second over, Steyn tempted Cook to drive and bowled him off an inside edge to end his 295-ball vigil. With Cook gone, a big moment came and went for Bopara. He was bamboozled by an odd, looping bouncer from Steyn. Bopara lined himself up for the pull, and when he tried to bale out somehow managed only to offer a straightforward catch behind after the ball ran over the face of his bat. It was a frustratingly soft dismissal, and left Ian Bell and new batsman Prior with much work to do. They survived Steyn's spell of 5-2-8-2, only for Bell to fall in the first over from his replacement Kallis. He might already have gone, run out by half the pitch had Petersen managed to throw down the stumps from gully. But that mattered little when Bell left a delivery from Kallis which brushed over the off bail, just enough to dislodge it. It took until the 19th over of the morning for England to bring up the 300, Tim Bresnan doing it in style with a flamboyant extra-cover drive for four. Then Bresnan succumbed in Imran Tahir's first over, edging down on to his stumps. A fluent and resourceful 75-ball half-century from Prior was completed with his ninth boundary, but the England wicketkeeper lost his chum Stuart Broad, another bowled by one that just clipped the bails - this time from Vernon Philander. Prior went himself, edging Morkel (four for 72) behind as he looked for his trademark off-side outlet, and last man James Anderson became stand-in wicketkeeper AB de Villiers" fifth catch of the innings in the same over. But England's last three wickets had nonetheless accrued 72 runs - a decidedly handy buffer should South Africa prosper in improved weather today. The tourists" reply suffered an early setback when Anderson snaked an inswinger through Petersen's defences, to the back pad, to have him lbw for nought. But from one for one, captain Smith and Amla saw their team safely to stumps in a promising partnership.

State of the Union: A Call for Unity, in a Political Package One of the running narratives of Barack Obama's administration has been how much it should mirror, or avoid, the acts of the last Democratic administration, Bill Clinton's. In his State of the Union address last night, at least, Barack Obama became a Clintonian, at least in style. Like Clinton's SOTU speeches, Obama's was long (just over an hour) and organized less around a grand narrative than a point-by-point list of priorities, from taxes to immigration to education, and much more. When Clinton gave these speeches, they tended to get criticized by reviewers as "laundry lists"; voters and home viewers responded to them much better than pundits in polling. Whether that's true as well of Obama, in a polarized election year, we'll have to see. But the Clintonian list of priorities was delivered in an Obaman frame. While the SOTU did not have the rhetorical loft from beginning to end of one of his 2008 campaign speeches, it was bookended by uplifting tributes to the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama Bin Laden last spring, which Obama used as an example of Americans setting aside differences to achieve a goal. The opening and closing felt like a deliberate callback to his 2004 Democratic convention speech, in which he said that there was no "red America" and "blue America"; here, he said, "When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. The description sounded a familiar theme for Obama, of Americans finding their commonalities instead of being separated by their differences. It also, of course, reminded his audience that he was the President who got Bin Laden killed, which does not exactly hurt in an election year. And the speech was filled with awareness of that election, and of the divisions and differences that have stalled legislation in the Congress he was speaking to. Differences that were underlined, maybe better than any words in the speech, by the repeated cutaways to a stone-silent Mitch McConnell and a scowling Eric Cantor staring lasers at the podium. So while praising Americans" ability to come together on one hand, he also, repeatedly, urged the particular group of Americans in the room to send legislation to his desk. He also directed a good chunk of his economic message to one American not in the room. When he pointed out Warren Buffett's secretary in the audience, noting that her billionaire boss pays a lower tax rate than she does because of rules on capital gains, he may as well has said, "Cough! Mitt Romney! Cough! And he directly echoed Romney's "class warfare" rhetoric back from the podium: "When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it's not because they envy the rich," he said, with a touch of scorn on the word "envy": "It's because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don't need and the country can't afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference." Common cause or not, red or blue or purple, this was a politically minded speech for a political year, and Obama signaled that it would be a combative one. Though there were moments of lightness, including an aside about milk regulations that led slowly to one of the most groan-worthy "spilled milk" jokes in history. And for the Republican response, the GOP went with a figure party leaders tried to persuade to run for president, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana. Daniels didn't come across as a dynamic dream candidate, speaking in cool tones while facing the camera sidelong, from a 30-degree angle. To Obama's spilled milk, he was a glass of warm milk. But the response is a generally thankless job, usually delivered to an empty room in silence, and Daniels at least was not memorably bad in a way that's likely to follow him afterward - as did Gov. Bobby Jindal's golly-shucks performance a couple years back - and kept his speech pointedly on the GOP's favored deficit-hawk, small-government economic themes. Maybe the most memorable moment of the night, though, was not part of a speech, but came when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, recovering from being shot in the head a year ago, entered the chamber. Obama wrapped her in a long, warm hug before he spoke, and during the speech, a Republican colleague repeatedly helped her stand to applaud. This was something that transcended party, but then, Giffords recently announced she's leaving Congress. It was a reminder, as the speeches ended and the political arguments struck up on cable news, that you take your flashes of bipartisanship where you can get them, and don't expect them to last long.

Frankie Boyle: BBC editor admits she wasn't a fan of Adlington joke Frankie Boyle was censured by the BBC Trust in 2009 after he described Rebecca Adlington as resembling 'someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon'. Photograph: Julie Greene The former BBC production editor of Mock the Week has said she "wasn't a fan" of Frankie Boyle's controversial joke about Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington in 2008, but gave it the green light after a discussion with BBC producers. Suzanne Gilfillan, now the executive editor at Remedy Productions, told the high court on Thursday that producers agreed to include Boyle's joke if they could also show the response of Mock the Week host Dara O Briain, which was "sympathetic" to Adlington. Boyle was censured by the BBC Trust in 2009 after he described Adlington as resembling "someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon." Gilfillan gave witness testimony in support of Boyle at the Scottish comedian's libel trial against the publisher of the Daily Mirror. Boyle is suing Mirror Group Newspapers for libel over an article that described him as a "racist comedian." He also claims he was defamed by the article because it said he was "forced to quit" Mock the Week in 2009. She told jurors: "In the case of the Rebecca Adlington joke, people have said comedy is about the context and that week the Olympics was the big story ... We discussed it and I wasn't a fan of the joke, as many people weren't, but in the context of the show and after discussions with editors [we decided to keep it in]. If we keep the joke in and we keep Dara's response, which was quite sympathetic and quite outraged, it sort of makes the joke feel less cruel in isolation. Asked by the Mirror Group Newspapers counsel, Ronald Thwaites QC, whether it was correct that the joke was included as a matter of compromise between producers, Gilfillan replied: "Absolutely." Boyle told the court earlier this week that he had asked producers not to cover the Olympics on the show that week. He added that producers wanted him to make a joke about a photograph of Adlington returning from Beijing. Gilfillan said producers had decided there was not many other light news events to discuss on the show that week, because the news had been dominated by deaths of troops in Afghanistan. She emphasised the BBC had hoped Boyle would return to the show as a guest after he left in 2009, and denied that there was any pressure from BBC bosses for him to quit. Gilfillan was one of two witnesses to give evidence in support of Boyle on Thursday. The other witness was his manager, Hannah Chambers. The trial continues.

Protesters in capital pledge to stay despite ban WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defiant anti-Wall Street protesters in Washington vowed to remain peacefully entrenched in two parks near the White House on Monday despite a police order to stop camping on federal land, raising the specter of possible confrontation. The U.S. National Park Service, in its first challenge to the demonstrators, said last week it would start enforcing a ban at noon on Monday against camping in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, where protesters have camped out since October. It ordered bedding and cooking equipment removed but said tents could remain as a protest symbol if flaps stayed open. While many protesters told Reuters they would comply with the order, blankets were still visible in some tents. After a cursory inspection of the McPherson Square camp, police remained on the outskirts and no arrests had been reported by late afternoon. Protesters said police appeared hesitant to move in while television crews thronged the area. While similar "Occupy" protests against social and economic inequality in other U.S. cities have been shut down by police, the demonstrations in the capital have survived an unusually warm winter and a permissive approach by federal authorities reluctant to provoke confrontation. In Charlotte, North Carolina, city police began evicting another group of Occupy protesters from city property on Monday. Despite their small numbers, the Washington protesters enjoy outsized media attention because their camps are just blocks from President Barack Obama's official residence and one is next to K Street, a wide thoroughfare that is home to many lobbyists and is synonymous with corporate influence in the capital. While Obama has not explicitly backed the protests, he has made economic inequality a central theme of his re-election campaign and called for higher taxes on wealthier Americans, angering his Republican opponents. McPherson Square protesters set up a huge tent decorated with stars and moons over a statue of Civil War General James McPherson in the center of the square to protest the police order. "The people united will never be defeated," they chanted. Tensions rose in the "Occupy DC" camps after police used a stun gun on one protester on Sunday. More than 400 people were arrested during violent anti-Wall Street protests in Oakland, California over the weekend. Some Washington protesters said they would defy the park police order while others said they would sleep in churches and elsewhere. They are permitted to hold overnight vigils in the parks overnight so long as they do not use their tents for sleeping or cooking. "We're not going to fight, but we're just going to make it difficult," said Jake Roszack, 22, from New York, who had built a barricade of spare wood, tents and cardboard, around his personal belongings and those of his friends. A U.S. Park Police spokesman, David Schlosser, said arrests would be made on a case-by-case basis. "We're very pleased that we're getting some voluntary compliance," he said. Inspired by the Arab Spring, "Occupy" demonstrations began in New York in September and spread across the United States and to other countries. Protesters are targeting the growing income gap, corporate greed and what they see as unfair tax structure favoring the richest 1 percent of Americans. Washington protesters also cite other pet causes, including joblessness, big agriculture and the homeless, some of whom sleep in the park. The U.S. capital, site of historic demonstrations over the decades, so far had done little to deter the protesters, drawing a rebuke from congressional Republicans who accuse the Obama administration of sympathizing with the groups and refusing to enforce park rules - a charge denied by park officials. The National Park Service regulates both parks and forbids camping on federal land not designated as a campground. Local city officials have complained about squalor, rats and trash. The number of protesters in the Occupy DC camps fluctuates, but city officials estimate there are less than 100 in total. The Occupy protests had faded over the last few weeks but flared anew on Saturday when violence broke out in Oakland. Officials in Charlotte, the site of the Democratic National Convention this September, began taking down tents under cover of a police helicopter even though protesters said they had complied with rules to remove their belongings. Police said seven protesters were arrested for resisting orders to leave their tents. Writing by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Rick Rothacker in Charlotte; Editing by Ross Colvin and Doina Chiacu

London 2012 Olympics: David Beckham fails to impress Stuart Pearce as LA Galaxy lose to New York Red Bull However, under the gaze of Olympic manager Stuart Pearce, who had flown out to Los Angeles to study the midfielder's form, he failed to impress on Sunday as his Galaxy team lost 1-0 at home to New York Red Bull, thanks to Joel Lindpere's 19th-minute goal. Playing in central midfield for Galaxy, in a team which also included Robbie Keane and Landon Donovan, Beckham struggled to impress, regularly overhitting his passes and even his usually reliable dead-ball prowess was not up to scratch at the Home Depot Center, in California. It's a little bit easier for him for players in Europe, but, obviously, coming all the way over here is good for me. But his evening was summed up when he missed a good last-minute opportunity to level the game - it was fired harmlessly wide. Though Beckham played the whole game, he was cautioned and expressed his frustrations about his team - who won the MLS Cup last season but are placed seventh in the Western Conference after their fifth defeat in nine games - to the media after the game. "It's getting even more frustrating week after week," he said. We had our chances and we didn't finish off the chances that we had. We got sloppy in defence with a couple plays and obviously it's disappointing to lose at home. Pearce is set to select his 18-man squad at the end of the month, and it remains to be seen whether Beckham can convince his former England team-mate to give him one of the three over-age places for London 2012. On this evidence, it seems unlikely.

Super Bowl TV deals likely to be scarce New England Patriots Tom Brady points to the Baltimore Ravens defense in the second quarter in the AFC Championship Game at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro Massachusetts on January 22, 2012. UPI /John Angelillo WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- U.S. shoppers hoping to find deals on big-screen TVs in time for the Super Bowl may have less success than in years past, industry analysts said. Retailers probably won't have as many sets on hand compared with previous years, and deep price cuts will be harder find, they said. Shoppers "will see a lot of advertising," Paul Gagnon of DisplaySearch told USA Today. But I don't know that the deals (will) be especially stellar. Analysts say the main reason is strong 2011 holiday TV sales, which contrasted to a year ago when stores had a surplus of unsold sets and cut prices in January to make room for arriving 2011 models. "A lot of consumers took advantage of those spectacular Black Friday prices and bought sets that they might have waited a little longer on," Gagnon said. Retailers will be discounting fewer older models and concentrate on selling coming 2012 models -- most with improved smart-TV apps and better picture quality -- at full price, he said. Still, willing buyers eager to purchase a new TV before Super Bowl kickoff should be able to find something to their liking. "It actually drives a lot of large-size TV sales traditionally, because everyone is thinking of inviting everyone over," John Schindler of TV manufacturer Vizio said.

Glamorgan captain Mark Wallace targeting winning formula

APNewsBreak: US Says Soldier Split Killing Spree U.S. investigators believe the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians split the slaughter into two episodes, returning to his base after the first attack and later slipping away to kill again, two American officials said Saturday. This scenario seems to support the U.S. government's assertion - contested by some Afghans - that the killings were done by one person, since they would have been perpetrated over a longer period of time than assumed when Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was detained March 11 outside his base in southern Afghanistan. But it also raises new questions about how Bales, who was formally charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and other crimes, could have carried out the nighttime attacks without drawing attention from any Americans on the Kandahar province base. The two American officials who disclosed the investigators' finding spoke on condition of anonymity because the politically sensitive probe is ongoing. Many details about the killings, including a possible motive, have not been made public. The documents released by the U.S. military Friday in connection with the murder charges do not include a timeline or a narrative of what is alleged to have happened. Bales, 38, is accused of killing nine Afghan children and eight adults. The bodies were found in Balandi and Alkozai villages - one north and one south of the base, in Kandahar's Panjwai district. Bales also was charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault in the same case. El sargento del ejército estadounidense Robert Bales fue acusado el viernes 23 de marzo de 2012 de 17 cargos de homicidio premeditado por su implicación en matanzas de civiles en sur de Afganistán. Bales está recluido en una prisión militar en Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. En la imagen, Bales durante un entrenamiento en Fort Irwin, California. (Foto AP/DVIDS, soldado especialista Ryan Hallock) Close U.S. investigators now believe that Bales walked off his base that night and killed several people in one of the villages, then went back to the base. The American officials, who are privy to some details of the investigation, said they do not know why Bales returned, how long he stayed or what he did while there. He then slipped off the base a second time and killed civilians in the second village before again heading back toward the base. It was while he was returning the second time that a U.S. military search party spotted him. He is reported to have surrendered without a struggle. Bales is being held in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. There have been previous suggestions that Bales could have returned to base after the first set of shootings, but the American officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Saturday provided the first official disclosure that U.S. investigators have come to this conclusion. Members of the Afghan delegation investigating the killings said one Afghan guard working from midnight to 2 a.m. on March 11 saw a U.S. soldier return to the base around 1:30 a.m. Another Afghan soldier who replaced the first and worked until 4 a.m. said he saw a U.S. soldier leave the base at 2:30 a.m. It's unknown whether the two Afghan guards saw the same U.S. soldier. U.S. officials have said Bales left the base the first time armed with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher. Bales' civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, said Friday that he believes the government will have a hard time proving its case and that his client's mental state will become an important issue. Browne has said Bales suffered from the stress of serving four combat tours. The decision to charge Bales with premeditated murder suggests that prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence that he consciously conceived the killings. The maximum punishment for a premeditated murder conviction is death. Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann in Kabul contributed to this report. Robert Burns can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP

Big Yellow Group turns to Aviva for £100m loan The loan to Big Yellow Group is thought to be the first by an insurance company to the self-storage sector and is further evidence of how companies are bypassing banks to secure finance. Insurance groups and fund managers are increasingly looking to raise debt funds to fill the funding gap left by banks retreating from new lending. BlackRock, the US fund manager, is understood to have hired leading UBS banker Edward Cook to head up its new capital markets team in London, a sign that it is moving into directly providing finance. Already in 2012 Aviva has backed the £282.5m acquisition of London landmark Tower 42 by South African investor Nathan Kirsh with a £145m loan, and provided debt to FTSE 250 West End property owner Shaftesbury. John Trotman, chief financial officer of Big Yellow, said: "We are delighted to have arranged this new loan with Aviva, which provides a stable core of long-term financing for the group from a new debt provider to the business." The company, which operates 65 self-storage centres in the UK, will use the loan to pay off £100m of a bank facility. This will reduce bank debt to £225m. However, paying off the debt involves the cancellation of £100m of interest rate swaps, which will cost Big Yellow £9.2m. The loan from Aviva will mature in April 2027 and has a fixed interest rate of 4.9pc. The bank debt Big Yellow will pay off was costing 4.8pc per year. Mr Trotman said the company will now enter discussions with lenders about refinancing the rest of its bank debt, which matures in September 2013 Shares in Big Yellow rose by 9.80, or 3.5pc, to 290.8p on Thursday. Harm Meijer, analyst at JP Morgan, said: "We believe the loan should be seen as a strong signal of confidence to Big Yellow's business."

Jil Sander, Bottega Veneta and Prada Highlight a Strong Milan Most of the time, Milan evokes Fellini. A red carpet, grimy from use, leads guests down a street to a fashion show. Leaving Armani on Monday morning, Anna Wintour and her bodyguards are pursued by paparazzi. Parties go on despite Italy's economic troubles. During the wait before the Missoni show, photographers shout affectionately but vulgarly at Marpessa Hennink, a runway favorite of the 1980s who was a front-row guest. "Come toward us," they chant, with one photographer grunting (with an expletive), "Why are you sitting in the middle, Marpessa?" That Italian designers tend to be creatures of habit, doing things the same way season after season, as if someone has hit the repeat button, is also in a way amusing. But this time the shows had a touch of Orwell in the arbitrariness of Raf Simons's departure from Jil Sander after seven years as creative director. Franco Pene, the chairman of Gibo, an Italian subsidiary of Onward Holdings, which owns Jil Sander, said of the decision: "It's not that we wanted to change designers. Raf has done a really good job. He's one of three or four top designers in the world. He mentioned Phoebe Philo of Céline and Alber Elbaz of Lanvin. But, Mr. Pene said, "it was a strategic issue to return to the culture of the brand" under its founder, Ms. Sander, and gain "consistency." Any way you spin it, the Sander situation is illogical. Throughout the industry, people have lamented the lack of creative talent; you don't let it slip away from you. Mr. Simons has consistently earned strong reviews for his women's line for the last few years, as the retail business climbs out of the recession. In a double-page spread on Monday devoted to his luxurious fall coats and pink-to-silver dresses, WWD said his show "proved how captivating calm clothes can be." No, the problem at Jil isn't inconsistent products or a fickle designer. Rather, it is management's inability to make a business out of Mr. Simons's designs, the way Céline has done with Ms. Philo. Her designs are no more or less challenging than Mr. Simons's. The difference is she has a structure around her that functions the way it's supposed to. Several retailers said the Sander label hasn't sold well, but such comments don't mean much unless you know who the customer is. Besides, stores like Neiman Marcus and Blake in Chicago said their Jil business was good. To me, the weakness in the company's structure is evident in the Milan flagship, where last week the spring runway collection was not well represented. Were key pieces sold out? Maybe. But in every other shop I visited - Prada, Céline, Stella McCartney, Saint Laurent, MaxMara - I saw solid presentations that jibed with their runway images. All in all, it has been a strong Milan season, led by Jil Sander, Bottega Veneta and Prada, with good collections as well by Pucci and Versus. Mr. Simons's clothes worked on several levels: the glorious pinks, reds and palest beige that evoke female interests in lingerie and makeup (or flowers, as suggested by the show's bouquet-filled vitrines), and a new take on deconstruction. Many of the shapes, notably the knit slip dresses and a navy cocktail dress with a keyhole bodice, deconstructed the original form. Mr. Simons has obviously looked at haute couture, past and present, and asked how it can be modern and also heart-racing. In the Sander showroom, editors reached for that navy dress, which has almost no underpinning, and draped looks in new synthetics. At Bottega, Tomas Maier showed chic, beautifully balanced coats and suits in dark matte wools with velvet details and covered buttons. You noticed how perfect the look was, and nothing more. Ribbed sweaters worn with matching cropped pants (trousers are a big story here) or slim skirts with a silk peplum looked surprisingly fresh - relaxed but still polished. The soft peplum, shined up with random sequins, was a clever touch in Mr. Maier's powerful look. Clothes tend to be covered up this season. At Pucci, Peter Dundas offered flattering long-sleeve dresses in black or deep purple wool, with chiffon-backed vents. He also had a fresh-looking print in deep blues and lavender, lovely evening outfits based on pajamas, and embroidery and knits that subtly referred to fisherman sweaters from his native Norway. Giorgio Armani was in step with the covered-up mood, opening with a jolt of neon-bright jackets over slim gray tweed pants, and other jackets in a vibrant broken-stripe pattern. The collection was loaded with guy-girl contrasts, not least the pointy rockabilly shoes. Although the military tailoring at Ferragamo looked great, the show hit the repeat button with gold-flecked peasant dresses meant to capture a woman's fragility, a poky idea in 2012. Marni was simply overpowered by too many solid-colored, boxy coats and nurse tights with Kabuki shoes. Angela Missoni kept her best designs - gorgeous knit dresses combined with suede or fur and heated at the edges for an organic texture - under wraps. One felt that the styling crowded the designs. An Aquilano.Rimondi dress isn't a Ferrari, despite the obvious amount of textile research. This season's minidresses and tunics with corseted waists and velvet panels were actually quite youthful, but there were too many spare parts for modern speed. And that's what Christopher Kane and Donatella Versace gave to Versus: lots of cute dresses and tops in dusty blue or bright orange, some in a graphic print or laced-together panels, and worn with black boots or shoes vented with colored mesh. The streaky jeans were all about the cool fit. Sometimes that's all you want from Milan.

"Naked rambler" vows to keep walking in the nude on release from jail THE "Naked Rambler" was today released from prison in Edinburgh - and immediately vowed to keep walking in the nude in his "fight for freedom." Stephen Gough, 53, left HMP Saughton in Edinburgh completely naked with his rucksack on his back and his belongings in carrier bags. The rambler has spent most of the last six years imprisoned in solitary confinement for being nude in public places but said he will continue to stroll naked whenever he wants. He set off through the Pentland Hills Regional Park and said when he gets to a town it was "pot luck" whether he would be arrested again. Gough said: "I have no route or location in mind but my plans are to head south basically, I'm going to head towards Peebles today. I expect to do around 15 miles a day. I have no idea if I'll be arrested again. I'll just have to wait and see what happens. I'll be fine in the woods but when I get to a town there could be trouble. When I'm not walking and it's cold I do wear my clothes to keep warm. But I'm going to sort out my clothes from the carrier bags and put them in my rucksack and get on my way naked. Hopefully the weather will stay warm. Gough was seen walking unclothed near a children's play park in Dunfermline, Fife, on July 20 and was sentenced to five months in jail at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court last month -where he appeared naked in the dock. He also said he would not co-operate with social workers tasked with assessing his mental health. Sheriff James Williamson said Gough had behaved with arrogance and self-indulgence after repeatedly being convicted of breach of the peace following complaints about his nakedness. But the rambler yesterday insisted that it was his right to walk naked and said the threat of prison would not deter him from being unclothed in public places. He said: "I've been in prison so many times during my life - over 20 times I think for various things. They treated me just the same as always this time round, like any other prison. I was in solitary confinement again. But I do this because I want to. I don't know why the police and authorities have such a problem with it. I'm not hurting anybody. I want my freedom. But that's the way it works for people who fight for their freedom, they get locked up for it. But I will continue to fight for freedom. There are a lot of totalitarian countries out there that people criticise but in some ways we aren't much different.

Brutal killing of at least 108 in Houla marked new low in Syrian uprising Piecing together exactly what happened in the sprawling rural area, which is more a collection of Sunni settlements than a distinct village, is difficult given the Syrian government's restrictions on journalists and the inevitable fog that has shrouded a day of intense and multifaceted violence. But interviews conducted by telephone and on Skype make it clear that, even by the standards of the brutal Syrian revolt, what happened in Houla on May 25 was extraordinary, an act of hatred and perhaps revenge that exposed the depth of the animosities tearing the country apart. The events in Houla, an area northwest of the city of Homs, also exposed the powerlessness of the international community to stop what many fear is becoming the inevitable disintegration of Syria into a vicious civil war in which neighbors kill neighbors and the world looks on - just as happened in Bosnia and Rwanda in an earlier era. In a speech Sunday, Assad denied that his government was responsible and blamed the massacre on his opponents, saying it was unimaginable that security forces could do such a thing. Whoever did this in Houla could not be a human being but a monster. And even a monster could not carry out such an act," he told a session of the nation's newly chosen parliament. Houla residents give a very different account. They blame the Syrian army and the loyalist militias known as the shabiha, which they say came from surrounding villages inhabited by members of Assad's Shiite-affiliated Alawite sect. It is also clear that many questions remain unanswered. The day began, as is typical on a Friday, with the men of the town gathering after prayers in at least two locations to hold demonstrations against the government. They left their wives, mothers, sisters and children at home, which is why so many of them would be among the dead. "The people want to execute Bashar," they chanted, according to a video of one demonstration. Held above the crowd was a big black banner, emblazoned in white with words that are chilling in light of what unfolded later in the day. "Let the world know we die with a smile on our faces," it said. And, as was typical on a Friday here and in many other parts of the country, shortly before 1 o'clock in the afternoon, as the protests began, Syrian troops positioned around the area began firing artillery and heavy machine guns to break up the demonstrations. What happened next is murky, but according to at least two activists in Houla, rebel fighters attacked a Syrian army position overlooking the area. Nine soldiers were killed, including three officers, according to Ahmad Qassem, one of the activists, who said he was given the number by the local hospital. The government, in its account of the killings that day, has said that "several" of its troops were killed in an attack on a checkpoint. The rebel force also suffered casualties, Qassem said.

Highland hits heights for Lavelle If Reinhold Messner can climb Everest without oxygen, then a horse can gallop three miles round Towcester on the bridle. Only rarely, however, do you see this stiffest of tracks completed with the exuberance that suffused Highland Lodge in his first novice chase yesterday. Impressive in two novice hurdles last season, Highland Lodge disappeared after an odds-on reverse at Warwick in January. But his trainer, Emma Lavelle, having ended her best campaign to date with 42 winners, remained confident he could elevate her Andover stable to fresh heights. Sure enough, after a mild stumble over the first, Highland Lodge saw off some useful rivals with a bold round of jumping in front, easing five lengths clear on the climb to the post. "He's a smart horse, with a proper way of doing things," Lavelle said. When he won at Haydock last year, it was beyond bottomless - and I think he just left the rest of his season there. He hung badly right at Warwick, and I don't think there was anything left in the tank. But chasing was always going to be what he'd be best at, and it certainly looked that way today. After Highland Lodge won a point-to-point in Ireland, Lavelle and her assistant, Barry Fenton, were convinced he would prove far beyond their budget at the sales. Yet somehow they managed to secure him for just €35,000 (£27,900). "Maybe everyone was too busy drinking," Lavelle said. I've absolutely no idea how it happened. I remember saying there was no point even going in to see him sold, but Barry said not to be ridiculous, at least to go in and watch. We started the bidding at €5,000 and when we got him we had absolutely nothing left. Alterations to novice chase conditions have rendered the midweek scene so competitive that it is harder to give a horse like this experience in a lesser grade. "But I wanted to get today out of the way before making any plans," Lavelle said. We've always thought masses of this horse and were just anxious to see him do everything right. What was nice was that the ground was quite decent, so for him to show that pace opens up a few doors. After scoring with another Irish import, Shotgun Paddy, at Chepstow the previous day, Lavelle hopes her yard has now kicked into top gear after a quiet start. "A lot of ours have started out a bit gassy, they've been fresh and needed it, whereas now, hopefully, they're a bit closer to spot on," she said. Gullinbursti was a prime case in point, racing with the choke out at Exeter the other day, but I still thought he ran a nice race and he has come on a bundle. Court In Motion, cantering on the home turn before fading into third at the Festival, makes his own chasing debut at Wincanton tomorrow. "That's if we get the rain on Friday," Lavelle said. I'm not totally convinced he saw out three miles last season, so we're taking a bit of a shot in the dark over a shorter distance. But he seems in really good order, and schooled brilliantly this morning. The Turf, meanwhile, bade a couple of high-profile farewells - one, it seems safe to say, with a rather heavier heart than the other. Frankel, who retired unbeaten after his 14th race at Ascot last month, left Warren Place for the nearby stud where he begins his stallion career in the new year. And Paul Scotney, not always a darling of the professional community during 10 years of anti-corruption work for the British Horseracing Authority, is stepping down from his full-time role by mutual agreement. A consultancy role beckons, extending to other sports. Mawhub (7.20 Wolverhampton) Much the least exposed of these and this sharper track will suit after he just failed to see things out after travelling strongly at Kempton last month. Get The Papers (3.00 Hexham) Deeply impressive in an Irish point-to-point, and could be value on his debut for a small yard that can be relied upon to make the most of his talent. Sohar (James Toller) Opened up new horizons tried over two miles at Newmarket last week, only worn down late and well clear of the third. Cue Card is 9-1 from 10-1 with the sponsors for the William Hill King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day.

Deaths Allegedly Linked to Monster Energy Drinks Are a PR Nightmare Every company's worst nightmare just came true for Monster Energy: the Food and Drug Administration is claiming that five people may have died after consuming Monster's highly caffeinated drinks over the last three years, and the mother of one of the apparent victims filed a lawsuit against Monster last week. This October 23, 2012 photo illustration shows a variety of Monster Energy drinks in Washington, DC. The US Food and Drug Administration is investigating five deaths and a heart attack for possible links to consumption of Monster Energy drinks, an agency spokeswoman said Tuesday. "I can verify that FDA has received five adverse event reports of death and one of heart attack possibly associated with Monster Energy drink," said Shelly Burgess in an email. Burgess cautioned that such reports "serve as a signal to FDA and do not prove causation between a product or ingredient and an adverse event." The family of an adolescent, Anais Fournier, who died of an arrhythmia in December 2011, allegedly after drinking two cans of Monster Energy over a 24 hour period, brought suit Friday in California against Monster Beverage. Her parents accused the company of not warning consumers of the potential dangers of its product. Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images Monster's way out of PR-hell won't be a walk in the park, public relations experts agree. "Monster has to balance the very important need to make sure it says enough but doesn't endanger its legal case, along with the need to guard its very important reputation," says Lance Ignon, co-head of the New York office of prominent crisis management firm Sitrick And Company, which isn't involved in the case. It's not easy at all. Corona, California-based Monster company is denying any connection to the death of 14-year-old Anais Fournier, who died from a cardiac arrhythmia after drinking two 24-ounce cans of Monster over 48 hours. Monster, which is handling press via its external investor relations firm PondelWilkinson, issued a press release (PDF) on Tuesday expressing sympathy for "the untimely passing of Anais Fournier." The company stated it "does not believe that its products are in any way responsible for the death of Ms. Fournier," and claimed that a 24-ounce can of Monster Energy contains 30 percent less caffeine than an average 16-ounce cup of coffee. But Monster's reputation may have already begun to unravel: the company's stock plummeted 16 percent after news of the lawsuit and F.D.A filings made headlines, and it continued to fall throughout the week. The lawsuit was filed (PDF) last Friday by Fournier's mother, Wendy Crossland, after Crossland obtained the F.D.A. records through the Freedom of Information Act. Crossland's lawyer, Alexander R. Wheeler, told the Daily Beast "his clients would like justice - and in our country justice means money." "There has to be a warning and full disclosure about the drinks" dangers and what part of the population might be more vulnerable to having heart attacks or other heart problems," he added, "instead of just pretending they're safe and have no downsides." Sitrick's Ignon says Monster's damage control apparatus has to act fast. "Monster has to demonstrate cooperation with the F.D.A," he says, "and deny, and to the extent possible show, that the product does not cause harm, by enlisting data and having outside experts make that point." Monster has plenty of company among corporations whose products were blamed for death or serious injury. Johnson & Johnson's handling of the Chicago Tylenol murders of the early 1980s - when seven people died from taking Tylenol pills poisoned with cyanide - is considered a model for navigating out of just the kind of crisis Monster now faces. Johnson & Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol and cooperated with the FBI, FDA and Chicago Police. It's very difficult for companies that are the targets of lawsuits to say, We're going to do X, Y and Z and we're sorry. Those sorts of admissions can be used against them in a court of law," says Lance Ignon of crisis management firm Sitrick And Company. But Monster hasn't yet shown that it understands the concerns of its customers, says Peter Duda, Executive Vice President at crisis communications firm Weber Shandwick. "What they can do to demonstrate that they're listening now is to make clear the amount of caffeine in the drink," he says. They're very focused on litigation and standing behind their product. But the real issue is, How much caffeine are our kids getting? Monster may have to put out most of its fires behind the scenes, Ignon says. Those sorts of admissions can be used against them in a court of law. Ignon says Monster can privately portray this lawsuit as yet another company "accused of various misdeeds that may well turn out to be untrue." Indeed, many companies have battled allegations that turn out not to be true. In 1996, Sitrick And Company handled a lawsuit against El Torito, a restaurant chain in California, after a customer claimed he bit into a taco and found a frog's head. "We had the frog analyzed by experts," Ignon says. We realized the human mouth could never have done this. We hired private investigators to check out the person making this claim and he told his girlfriend he was going to do something exactly like this. After much mockery on late night TV, El Torito's name was cleared and the staged frog incident became the focus of ridicule. But the allegations against Monster go far beyond frog heads. With five people allegedly dead from Monster products, the company has to start "addressing consumer concerns" quickly, says Weber Shandwick's Duda, "before the government forces them to."

Hundreds tear gassed amid clampdown on Sudan protests NEW: Riot police use tear gas outside two opposition mosques (CNN) -- Riot police sprayed tear gas at hundreds of protesters who attempted to lead a march after Friday prayers from the two main opposition party mosques in Sudan's capital Khartoum and its second city, Omdurman. A CNN journalist at the Al Sayid Abdelrahman mosque said that after prayers about 500 riot police gathered outside the gates and fired tear gas canisters at the crowd as they began to leave. Protesters responded by throwing rocks at officers, he said. The head of the opposition Umma party -- also the last democratically elected prime minister of Sudan -- was escorted to safety out of the mosque by supporters after the clashes began, he said. Tear gas was also fired at protesters outside the Al Sayid Ali mosque, said the spokesman for activist group Sudan Change Now, who goes by the name Ahmed Samir for security reasons. They are attacking people inside mosques. Protesters inside Al Sayid Ali and Al Sayid Abdelrahman Mosques have had tear gas canisters fired at them. All roads to Al Sayid Ali Mosque have been closed off," he told CNN. The two mosques are attended by supporters of Sudan's two largest opposition parties, the Umma and Democratic Union Parties. Activists and eyewitnesses say thousands of people are demonstrating on the streets of Khartoum and Omdurman, demanding the president's ouster over economic woes. The clashes follow calls by Sudanese activists for mass protests, as world leaders condemned authorities for cracking down on demonstrators. Activists say that hundreds from their networks are being detained as the clampdown intensifies. Riot police surrounded mosques in the capital of Khartoum in anticipation of protests after prayers, witnesses said earlier Friday. The demonstrations, which started June 16 at universities in the capital of Khartoum, have spread to other cities nationwide. Police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters over the past two weeks after the government ordered a crackdown, witnesses said. Samir, of Sudan Change Now, accused the government of using gangs of plain clothes thugs, known as "Rabatta," to beat protesters and reinforce the security forces. In Hajj Yousif district the rabatta militias were firing AK-47's into the air. It is an attempt to intimidate but the government is in denial," he said. The demands of the people are clear -- they want a revolution to sweep away this government. The austerity measures we are suffering under are a result of this government's prioritizing of military and security. They want the people to pay the price for their irrational wars. Authorities have arrested opposition leaders and forced some to sign paperwork vowing not to participate in any more protests, the United Nations said in a statement this week.

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Putin warns protestors and West about "Russia's own will" Prime minister Vladimir Putin has warned against the dangers of foreign influence at a campaign rally attended by tens of thousands of people, many of them state workers who were pressured to take part as a show of support for a leader facing his first outburst of public discontent. With little real competition, Mr Putin is almost certain to win a third term as president in the 4 March election. His approval ratings are still running at well above 50 per cent despite the largest opposition protests the country has seen since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr Putin has tried to discredit the protesters by accusing their leaders of being paid agents of the West working to weaken Russia. His references yesterday were more subtle as he called on all Russians who "cherish, care about and believe in" their motherland to unite. "We ask everyone not to look abroad, not to run to the other side and not to deceive your motherland, but to join us," he said from a stage erected in a football stadium as a light snow fell on his bare head. But he also warned the West: "We won't allow anyone to meddle in our affairs or impose their will upon us, because we have a will of our own." The pro-Putin rally was held on Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a national holiday that replaced the Soviet-era Red Army Day. As participants marched in columns toward the stadium along the Moscow river, they carried Russian flags and wore armbands in the national colours. Patriotic songs from decades past blared from vans parked along the route. They carried signs saying "As long as we have Putin we have a strong country," "Vote for Putin, vote for a stable country," and "There is no alternative." The rally was a response to the opposition protests, which began in December after a parliamentary election that Putin's party won through what appeared to be widespread fraud. But while the protests have been embraced by Russia's middle class and young urban professionals, many of those who attended yesterday's rally showed little enthusiasm. They included workers paid by or dependent on the state, including teachers, municipal workers and employees of state companies. Some said they had been promised two days off in return for attending. An estimated 75,000 people filled the stadium, which had room for about 100,000 in the stands and on the pitch. Some march participants offered genuine praise. "I love Putin and Putin loves me," said Vladimir Gryzlov, a 68-year-old musician who brought his accordion. With him was 70-year-old Tatyana Goytseva, who said she was too old to live through another change of government. "We are happy with it, but of course the young people don't think the same," said Ms Goytseva, a social worker who helps the elderly. She said her three grandchildren were not voting for Mr Putin. Mr Putin has four challengers, including three veteran party leaders who long ago reached an accommodation with the Kremlin and pose little challenge to his authority. The only newcomer is Mikhail Prokhorov, a 46-year-old billionaire businessman. Mr Prokhorov's candidacy has been viewed as a Kremlin-approved effort to add legitimacy to the election and channel the discontent of the protesters. Grigory Yavlinsky, the veteran leader of the liberal opposition party Yabloko, was denied the right to run. The Communist and nationalist candidates held separate rallies in Moscow yesterday, each drawing around 3,000 supporters.

Supreme Court ruling confuses religious workers DETROIT - Aleeza Adelman teaches Jewish studies at a Jewish school, yet she considers herself a teacher whose subject is religion, not a religious teacher. She's rethinking how to define her job after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling left her wondering what could happen if she ever needed to defend her right to keep it. The high court ruled last week that religious workers can't sue for job discrimination, but didn't describe what constitutes a religious employee - putting many people employed by churches, synagogues or other religious organizations in limbo over their rights. "I think of myself as a teacher who is just like any other teacher," said Adelman, who works at the New Orleans Jewish Day School. Yes, my topic of teaching happens to be Jewish stuff, but if I were to just think in general about it, am I different from the teacher across the hall who is teaching secular studies? The justices denied government antidiscrimination protection to Cheryl Perich, a Detroit-area teacher and commissioned minister who complained to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that her firing was discriminatory under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The commission sued the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School of Redford Township, Mich., over her firing. Perich got sick in 2004 and tried to return work from disability leave despite a narcolepsy diagnosis. She was fired after she showed up at the school and threatened to sue to get her job back. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit on grounds that Perich fell under the so-called ministerial exception, which keeps the government from interfering with church affairs. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated her lawsuit, arguing that her primary function was teaching secular subjects so the ministerial exception didn't apply. The high court disagreed, but didn't set rigid rules on who can be considered a religious worker of a religious organization. That appears to give wide leeway to churches and other religious organizations to decide who qualifies for the exception. Rita Schwartz, president of Philadelphia-based National Association of Catholic School Teachers, said she's comforted by the fact that the justices didn't set a broad precedent. But she said it leaves employees of religious-based institutions in an unsettled position until or unless they are deemed a ministerial employee. "I don't mind that title unless it is used to deny my rights as a citizen," said Schwartz, whose association was formed in 1978. I don't give up my rights at the schoolhouse door. I should not have to do that. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote a separate opinion, argued that the ministerial exception should be tailored for only an employee "who leads a religious organization, conducts worship services or important religious ceremonies or rituals or serves as a messenger or teacher of its faith." Schwartz also is concerned about how far the exception can go. She supported maintenance workers in a dispute several years ago in which she said Catholic officials argued that the workers were ministerial employees because "they polished the pews in the chapels and they repaired the crucifixes on the walls." David Lopez said he sees both sides of the argument as an English instructor at both a Detroit-area Catholic high school and at a community college. At the college, he has the protections of collective bargaining, but at the high school he is an at-will employee with a year-to-year contract. "I either accept that because I like the environment or I work at a public school where I have better protections," said Lopez, whose day job is at Gabriel Richard High School in suburban Riverview. "I enjoy teaching students who are actually interested in what I'm trying to teach them," he said. I lose the protection, but by the same token it's a pleasant environment. It's hard to put a price tag on something like that. Adelman said she has the highest respect for administrators at the New Orleans Jewish school and believes she would be treated fairly if a problem arose. Still, she'd like to think that she wouldn't lose protections just because of what she teaches. If I felt discrimination in the workplace? Of course, I would definitely want to feel I have the right to speak up about any issue, and the fact that I'm a religious educator ... is not going to cause problems along the way," she said.

I'll Have Another's exit from Belmont hits home in Southern California The withdrawal of I'll Have Anotherfrom Saturday's Belmont Stakes is reverberating throughout the horse racing community, particularly in Southern California. "It's very disappointing for horse racing but shows how fragile our stars are," said Jack Liebeau, president of Hollywood Park. We were anticipating a big day. We were publicizing it. We had 10,000 shot glasses to give away. I'll Have Another was based at the Inglewood track. His trainer, Doug O'Neill, lives in Santa Monica. His owner, J. Paul Reddam, got a doctorate from USC and has been a big supporter of local racing. In New York, I'll Have Another was scratched from the Belmont because of what O'Neill said was a swollen tendon in the horse's left leg. He was trying to become the first horse in 34 years -- since Affirmed in 1978 -- to win the Triple Crown. All week, Hollywood Park was gearing up with promotions, newspaper advertisements and giveaways planned for Saturday. "Root on Our Hometown Hero in the Belmont" was the headline in a full-page advertisement by Hollywood Park in Friday's Los Angeles Times. At Santa Anita, the Frontrunner restaurant was sold out for Saturday even though there's no racing at the Arcadia track. A promotion featuring a buffet lunch, souvenir glasses and T-shirts honoring I'll Have Another -- with a chance to watch the Belmont on TV -- was attracting lots of fans. Liebeau said he was expecting a crowd of 15,000 for Hollywood Park's 11-race card. Now he said the track will substantially reduce the number of employees needed to work. "It's just very disappointing because you want to see a Triple Crown winner," trainer John Sadler said. But we know how hard it is. It's extremely hard to do. I don't think anybody is shocked. O'Neill said I'll Have Another was facing a three- to six-month rehabilitation, so instead the horse will retire from racing. I'll Have Another, a 3-year-old Kentucky-bred son of Flower Alley, was purchased by Reddam for $35,000 at the Ocala (Fla.) 2-year-olds-in-training spring sales in 2011. He won four consecutive races this year, starting with the Robert B. Lewis Stakes at Santa Anita on Feb. 4, followed by the Santa Anita Derby on April 7, the Kentucky Derby on May 5 and the Preakness Stakes on May 19. More than 14,000 had "liked" the I'll Have Another Facebook page. It was the most excitement local racing fans had shown for a horse since Zenyatta, the John Shirreffs-trained mare who won 19 of 20 races and was named the Horse of the Year in 2010. "They're 1,200, 1,300 pounds and landing one foot at a time," Shirreffs said. What thoroughbreds do is amazing. We were just blessed with Zenyatta. She was unique. Trainers said they understood the predicament faced by O'Neill, who made the call to scratch I'll Have Another. A light race schedule supposedly had prepared the horse for the challenge of racing three times in a little more than month. "Any horse can get hurt on any given day," Sadler said. There's no guarantees. This is an example of that. The bright side is that it was picked up pre-race. It could have been worse. It's a tough pill to swallow. He was a great representative for California. Said trainer Ron Ellis: "Everybody is kind of waiting for somebody to break that streak of not being able to win the Triple Crown. It's what makes it so tough to accomplish. Everything, in capital letters, has to go right. ... We'll have one, one day.

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Boehner to Stand By His Fund-Raiser Speaker John A. Boehner has not said much publicly about the ethics issues swirling around Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, the embattled chief fund-raiser for House Republican candidates, but Mr. Boehner will standing by Mr. Buchanan's side at a pricey fund-raising event in Sarasota this weekend. Mr. Boehner, who vowed to take a hard line on ethical transgressions as speaker, is scheduled to be the guest of honor at Saturday night's fund-raiser at a private residence in Mr. Buchanan's district. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported this week that donors can get their pictures taken with Mr. Boehner at a special V.I.P. reception for $10,000 a couple. In terms of political symbolism, the planned appearance amounts to something of a vote of confidence from the House speaker for Mr. Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan, who is one of the richest members of Congress and is in his third term, has been accused by a number of former employees and executives in his auto businesses of using corporate funds to reimburse political donations to his campaigns and engaging in tax violations. The House ethics committee is also investigating whether Mr. Buchanan failed to properly disclose all of his financial interests or leadership positions in a number of companies and organizations, and a federal grand jury in Tampa is said to have heard testimony in the case as well. Mr. Buchanan's lawyers say they are confident he will be exonerated and point out that the Federal Election Commission has already declined to take action against Mr. Buchanan over allegations that he personally directed improper reimbursements at three of his auto dealerships. Mr. Boehner's office had no immediate comment Tuesday on his appearance at Saturday's fund-raiser. But Democrats did not pass up the chance to spotlight what they charged was a hypocritical stance by their Republican rivals. "Despite Republicans pledging a zero-tolerance policy on ethics, Speaker Boehner is now choosing to fund-raise with his scandal-plagued finance chairman, Congressman Vern Buchanan," said Jesse Ferguson, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It's a reminder that Republicans have zero plan to stick to their zero-tolerance pledge on ethics," he added

Michele Bachmann downplays Swiss citizenship Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmannis downplaying reports that she and her family recently became Swiss citizens, saying she has technically enjoyed dual citizenship since she married her husband in 1978. Bachmann's husband Marcus is eligible for Swiss citizenship because his parents are Swiss immigrants, but he only recently registered with the Swiss government, Politico reported earlier this week. Michele Bachmann and her three youngest children became Swiss citizens on March 19, according to the Politico report. Bachmann called reports of the family's Swiss citizenship a "non-story," saying the family had "just recently updated our documents." "I automatically became a dual citizen of the United States and Switzerland on 1978 when I married my husband, Marcus," Bachmann said in a statement. News of Bachmann's new citizenship caused a stir in Washington, especially since she did not disclose the "automatic" dual citizenship when she was running for president. "It wasn't necessary to disclose, because she is an American citizen and always has been," Bachmann spokeswoman Becky Rogness told Politico. As a candidate, Bachmann often criticized President Obama's policies as "socialist." Switzerland is ruled by a coalition including members of the Social Democratic Party. "I am proud of my husband, Marcus, the love of my life, and his Swiss heritage," Bachmann said. Even though I have been a dual citizen since I was married in 1978, I have never exercised any rights of that citizenship. Rather, I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America. We live in the greatest nation humankind has ever known and I am proud to be an American.

Who Would Believe a Kid? Check out this week's funniest, craziest and buzziest quotes that made news this week. Former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was found guilty Friday of nearly all of the allegations of child sex abuse leveled against him. After 20 hours of sequestered deliberations, the jury of seven women and five men read 45 "guilty" verdicts as Sandusky stood and looked at the jury with his left hand in a pocket of his brown sport coat. After the verdict, Attorney General Linda Kelly said the jury believed that Sandusky "calculatingly and with meticulous planning mercilessly preyed" upon his victims. Who would believe a kid? The jury here in Bellefonte, Pa., would and did believe a kid," she said, referring to testimony by Sandusky's victims. I hope this outcome allows the victims to heal and encourages other victims to come forward. No Longer Viewed as Novelty When We Achieve Things Forty years later, some boldfaced names, including tennis star Billie Jean King, spoke on Capitol Hill about what the passage of Title IX meant to them. What few people knew on that September day was that for King, the tennis match was more about "social change" than anything else. Just one year before, President Richard Nixon signed a landmark law -- Title IX, that requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding. After hearing the athletes speak, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., attributed her "raging hormones" to guys who did not want to give equal access to women because they had too many "raging hormones." We are beyond raging hormones, we are beyond celebrity status ... no longer viewed as novelty when we achieve things. I Was Raped Twice, Once by the Perpetrator and Once by the State of North Carolina. "I was raped twice," Elaine Riddick said. Once by the perpetrator and once by the state of North Carolina. 'Even Though It's Been Almost Three Years Since The Recession Ended, It Probably Doesn't Feel That Way For Most Families.' Last week, the Federal Reserve released its Survey of Consumer Finance, which found the median family had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, levels last seen in 1992, down from $126,400 in 2007. "Broadly speaking, these two surveys are in line and show how tough financial conditions are for American households and just how far we have to go to get back to where we were," said Karen Dynan of the Brookings Institute. Lead Is Stunningly Toxic. 'We Don't Guarantee Dates, We Guarantee Introductions' Instead of the online dating services, like eHarmony, Two of Us offers professional matchmakers and "promises to arrange 'matches' with another member for the purposes of arranging a dating relationship between those individuals." I Need an Ambulance. This Guy Was Raping My Daughter and I Don't Know What to Do.' You Are Going To Want To Hold It Microsoft announced this week a new tablet called Microsoft Surface, a device with a 10.6-inch screen that runs on the company's new Windows 8 operating system. It will come in two versions, each weighing less than two pounds, the company said. "When you touch it, you are going to want to hold it," Panay said.

Semitic crime rate in UK

Al Qaeda group threatens Yemeni troop executions From Hakim Almasmari, for CNN March 9, 2012 -- Updated 1523 GMT (2323 HKT) Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula says it'll kill 73 Yemeni troops it's holding hostage It wants government to release al Qaeda prisoners; government rejects demand, source says Threat comes as Yemen mourns deaths of around 200 troops killed by al Qaeda this week (CNN) -- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is threatening to kill the 73 Yemeni troops it is holding hostage if the government does not release al Qaeda prisoners. In a statement issued late Thursday, the group advised family members of the hostages to push the government to cooperate, but a senior security official in the southern province of Abyan, where the troops are being held, said the government would not give in to the group's demands. We will work on freeing the soldiers being held by the militants, but only by reasonable means. The government will not set free any militants. This will only make the terror crisis even worse," said the security official, who is not authorized to talk to media. The official said three of the troops have already been killed. The threat comes as Yemen mourns the deaths of around 200 troops killed by al Qaeda this week in three Yemeni provinces. President Abdurabu Hadi vowed Thursday to step up government efforts to fight al Qaeda, saying he will not allow Yemen to fall into the hands of extremists. A delegation from the Yemen Military Committee, the highest security authority in the country, reached Abyan on Wednesday as part of an investigation into how al Qaeda has been able to score constant victories in Abyan over the past week.

Actress' claim to be gay by choice riles activists SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Cynthia Nixon learned the hard way this week that when it comes to gay civil rights, the personal is always political. The actress best known for portraying fiery lawyer Miranda Hobbes on "Sex and the City" waded into a controversy when The New York Times Magazine quoted her as saying that for her, being gay was a conscious choice. Nixon is engaged to another woman with whom she has been in a relationship for eight years. Before that, she spent 15 years and had two children with a man. Among the gay rights activists angered by the remarks is Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen, whose organization monitors programs that claim to cure people of same-sex attractions. Besen says Nixon's comments could be used to force people into such programs.

Rangers hopes of reprieve in SPL vote sunk by 'arrogant' Malcolm Murray "The arrogance was unbelievable," said one chairman. The atmosphere hardened immediately. Charles Green conducted himself well enough but the Rangers chairman was arrogant and dogmatic. Another who was present told The Daily Telegraph: "Some people in the room wanted a reason to make a case for Rangers but the standard of the presentation was woeful. Ally and Charles Green were not always on the same page but that was not damaging. The chairman was another matter entirely and the brochure was substandard - you could have easily knocked something better together given half an hour. It makes you wonder what kind of management team they have. Murray, Green and McCoist absented themselves from the meeting to allow discussion, then returned for the vote and cast theirs as a proxy for Duff & Phelps, administrators of the Rangers oldco. Only Michael Johnston of Kilmarnock gave them any sort of support with an abstention, while the other 10 clubs - including those who had expressed a degree of willingness to help Rangers, voted "No" to the newco's admission. The Rangers party departed and a further two-hour discussion ensued. "It was constructive," said one who took part. People actually listened to one another and respected the other positions. It was a huge leap of faith for integrity and it's now up to the SFA and SFL to make their decision. Neil Doncaster, the SPL chief executive, said of the decision to refuse the newco entry: "Clearly there were discussions going on between the newco and the members and ultimately that could have led to a presentation and a proposal put to clubs that they might have said yes to. In the end the proposal put forward to the clubs was considered and they said no. He added: "I think [the vote] surprised a number of people. Money is important in professional football and I think what our chairmen have done today is put aside the short-term commercial considerations, that would ordinarily drive behaviour, ahead of the longer-term interests of their clubs - and supporter involvement has clearly been a huge part of that. Ultimately they believe they have made the right decision and one that brings a bit more clarity to an unclear world. Until we know where Rangers are playing next year we won't be able to ascertain what the damage is to the Scottish game. A number of people have said the decision today has enhanced the reputation of the league but it's not for me to say. Celtic released a statement in which they expressed the integrity of Scottish football as the main reason behind their opposition of newco Rangers entering the SPL. It read: "Today's decision to refuse access into the SPL was an overwhelming one and demonstrates the depth of feeling amongst everyone involved in Scottish football. Fundamentally, the Celtic Board has also been very mindful of the need to take what it believes to be the correct course of action in protecting the integrity of the game in Scotland. Throughout the whole sequence of events leading up to today's decision the Celtic Board has been of the singular view that the integrity of the game in Scotland is of paramount importance. The Rangers Supporters" Trust, meanwhile, accused other SPL clubs of acting out of "malice." Mark Dingwall, as spokesman for the Trust, said: "We are disappointed but not surprised by this decision which has been taken out of malice rather than for the greater good of the Scottish game."

Vt. debates letting parents skip vaccines for their kids (CBS/AP) Should childhood vaccinations be required for all children or up to parents to decide? It's an oft-debated topic in the U.S., and in Vermont, the debate has reached the state legislature . State lawmakers are debating whether to end the state's "philosophical exemption" - the right of refusal for parents who want to enroll their kids in school or child care without immunizations. PICTURES: Vaccines for kids: 8 states where parents say no The Vermont Department of Health and the CDC call for about 20 vaccinations by the time a child enters kindergarten. The CDC and state health officials say Vermont is among the states with the highest exemption rates for childhood vaccinations. Some say it's no coincidence that Vermont recently has seen an outbreak of one of the diseases the vaccines target: pertussis, or whooping cough. Jill Olson, a mother of two, says it's a matter of trusting the experts. There's not really any way that as an individual I can do more scientific study and research than the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Centers for Disease Control. For Jennifer Stella, it's a question of informed consent. Her son had a seizure after getting childhood vaccinations and her daughter suffered a "head-to-toe" eczema outbreak; she says parents should research the risks and benefits of immunizations and decide which ones are appropriate. For Vermont House Speaker Shap Smith, the state motto sums it up: "freedom and unity" - individual choice versus the public health benefit of having a high percentage of kids vaccinated. "It's a balance between individual rights and our obligations to each other in society," the Democratic speaker said. If no agreement is reached in the 2012 legislative session, the legislation will die and Vermont will remain among the 20 states that allow some form of philosophical exemption from required childhood immunizations. All but a handful of states offer religious exemptions, and all allow medical exemptions for kids. Many of Vermont's more vocal vaccine skeptics are active in alternative health and natural food movements and are critical of what they see as a profit-driven pharmaceutical industry. Stella, a homeopathic health practitioner, works at a clinic that also offers massage and herbal medicine. Critics of the philosophical exemption say that the drop in Vermont's immunization rates must be stopped, to preserve what public health officials call "herd immunity." That's when most of the population is immunized against a specific disease to keep outbreaks from occurring. Christine Finley, immunization program manager at the state Health Department, said the percentage of Vermont kindergarteners with all their required immunizations dropped from 93 percent in 2005 to 83 percent in 2010. Finley says prevention is necessary. "Do you want to wait until you've got a measles outbreak?" she asked. Vermont saw 102 pertussis cases between January and the first week of April, Finley said, more than were reported in the state all last year. Stella's group, the Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice, says the rate of vaccination decline is exaggerated, since kids are counted as unvaccinated if they miss just one of the required shots. "The question is whether they have the right to endanger other children in the school setting," Vermont lawmaker Rep. George Till, D-Jericho, an obstetrician-gynecologist, said during a recent House debate on ending the philosophical exemption. The debate goes far beyond the state of Vermont. Nationally, the CDC renewed its call for parents to get their children vaccinated after U.S. measles cases reached a 15-year-high in 2011, mostly fueled by unvaccinated persons traveling overseas. Washington state is currently in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic, prompting officials to call on all adults and children to get a pertussis vaccine if they haven't done so. Some doctors across the nation have even taken to the extreme step of "firing" patients who refuse to have their children vaccinated, arguing they might infect other children in patient waiting rooms. Who should make the decision about whether not a child is vaccinated?

Rory McIlroy tops European Tour money list after Matteo Manassero wins Singapore Open The race would still have been alive if either Peter Hanson or Oosthuizen had played in Hong Kong or at this week's South African Open, but they have not entered. On clinching the money list double McIlroy said: "It really is hugely satisfying to finally become the European number one, especially after finishing second two of the last three years. It has always been one of my goals ever since securing my Tour card five years ago, but then to also end the year as both European and PGA Tour No 1 is just amazing. I feel so proud and humbled to join so many fabulous names in Europe who have won the Order of Merit. To be able to accomplish this goal with still two events remaining means that I can head to my UBS Hong Kong Open defence and the DP World Championship Dubai without that added pressure and just really enjoy my golf. Winning a second major championship (the USPGA in August by eight shots just like his US Open triumph last season) already made it a fabulous season, but then to follow Luke Donald in becoming number one in both Europe and the States is the icing on the cake after a fabulous season. I set myself a number of ambitious goals at the start of the year, and to have ticked so many of the boxes feels great. A lot of hard work went into this and I am really proud of what I've achieved in 2012. I would like to give special thanks to the team around me for all the support they have given me throughout the year. I've still got two events remaining this year and the goal is still to try and win at least once more before the end of the year. Beyond that I'm looking forward to a good break over the winter! I've got a healthy lead in the world rankings, but with so many very good players on both sides of the Atlantic it will not be a time to be resting on my laurels. My goal is to push on in the new year. Monty (Colin Montgomerie) won eight Order of Merits in his prime and I have won one, so there is plenty of ground to make up. Also Jack Nicklaus won 18 Majors and I now have my name on two, so targeting the majors will still be my main focus next season. Manassero, just 17 when he became the Tour's youngest-ever winner in Spain two years ago, had slipped from 29th in the world to 85th and said: "This year has been a little tough for me and I'm glad this came. I'm going through a few swing changes and have picked up length. The driver is the most important thing - I changed it this week and it gave me a few extra yards. It's been an extremely long day, but the adrenalin kept me going and the key, I think, was starting really well with a few birdies this morning. The Verona youngster made four in a row from the third hole in a third round that resumed at 7.30am and after posting a 64 for a two-stroke lead he grabbed two more birdies early in the final round. They dried up after that, however, and Oosthuizen caught him with three in a row around the turn, only to bogey the 12th and 13th. A chip-in for a two on the 201-yard next increased the pressure again, however, and Manassero bogeyed the 15th after driving into rough. When Oosthuizen pitched to a foot on the last for a 67 he went ahead again, but Manassero's two-putt birdie gave him a 69 and forced sudden death on 13 under par. Both birdied the 18th again, then parred it with Oosthuizen lipping out from under five feet and after returning to the tee again - they actually played the 542-yard hole five times during the day - it was Manassero who came up with the decisive stroke to claim the first prize of over £618,000. He has earned over £2.5million in his career already - and will not be 20 until next April.

George Zimmerman returns to jail two days after judge revokes his bail George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer charged with murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, surrenders to police. NBC's Charles Hadlock reports. Updated 4 p.m. ET: George Zimmerman, the man charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, was booked into jail Sunday, two days after a judge revoked his bail after evidence surfaced that Zimmerman and his wife may have misled the court about their finances. He arrived at the jail before 2 p.m. on Sunday. Zimmerman met police at a business park and was driven to the jail. He was handcuffed and wore a blue checkered button-up shirt. He is being held without bail and is listed as having $500 in his jail account, according to the jail website. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Fla., was released after posting $15,000 in cash on April 20 after he was charged with killing Martin, 17, who was unarmed, in February. The case triggered a nationwide debate about whether race was involved in the shooting; Martin was black, while Zimmerman is the son of a white man and a Peruvian woman. Zimmerman was quiet and his return to jail went smoothly, Seminole County Sheriff Donald Eslinger said at a news conference Sunday. He said Zimmerman will stay in a single cell as he did before he was released in late April. The cell is 67-square-feet and is equipped with a toilet, two beds, a mattress, pillow, blanket and sheets, according to The Associated Press. Seminole County Sheriff Donald Eslinger and George Zimmerman's lawyer Mark O'Mara, spoke at a news conference after the former neighborhood watch volunteer surrendered to police. Key events in the Travyon Martin case Seminole County Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester revoked Zimmerman's bond Friday after learning that Zimmerman and his wife, Shellie Zimmerman, may have misled him about their assets when he set bond. Prosecutors demonstrated that Zimmerman had at least $135,000 that he did not disclose in a special PayPal account he had set up to pay for his defense. Zimmerman and his wife testified at a bond hearing that they had little money. During the hearing, Zimmerman also apologized to Martin's parents. The judge set bail at $150,000 -- days later, Zimmerman was released after putting forth 10 percent of the total bail amount. But prosecutors listened to recorded jailhouse phone calls and said the Zimmermans talked about the money "in code to hide what they were doing." Judge revokes bail for George Zimmerman Wearing a casual, pink-striped button-up shirt Sunday, O'Mara said that Zimmerman is concerned about his and his wife's safety because of the "enormous anger and frustration and hatred that has spurred from this case." Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Martin's family, said Judge Lester's finding that Zimmerman was dishonest is "very important because his credibility is the most important thing in this entire case." Legal experts also told The Associated Press that the judge's questioning on Friday could undermine Zimmerman's credibility in trial. On the defense team's website, O'Mara wrote: "The defense team hopes that Mr. Zimmerman's voluntary surrender to Sanford police will help demonstrate to the court that he is not a flight risk." But at Sunday's news conference, O'Mara added: "As Mr. Crump said, there's a credibility issue that needs to be rehabilitated by explaining away why they did what they did, if that's what happened." Msnbc.com's Isolde Raftery contributed to this report.

Cinco de Mayo: Margaritas, happy hours and a burro Town Tavern's annual Cinco de Mayo party features a real burro on its patio. (2011 photo by Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post) Cinco de Mayo is traditionally the biggest party day between St. Patrick's Day and Memorial Day, with dozens of happy hours, concerts and parties around the area. We've put together a guide to our favorite events , and whether you're looking to taste exquisite Mexican cuisine, listen to an up-and-coming salsa band, enjoy a margarita at a rooftop happy hour or spend the night dancing on a bar, there's a party out there for you. And, hey, if you just want to get your picture taken with a serape-wearing burro in Adams Morgan, you can do that, too.

Cuomo's Wise Move on New York's Gas Resource New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (@nygovcuomo) appears to be closing in on a plan for extracting natural gas while limiting environmental risks in the state, as reported today by Danny Hakim for The Times. The plan, as described by senior state officials to Hakim, is to proceed only in the deeper parts of the Marcellus Shale, the subterranean rock formation that holds vast amounts of gas, and only in communities that support gas drilling - which would unavoidably involve the productive but contentious process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of the shale layers deep underground. On the latter point, the governor is, in essence, conceding to the effort by some communities to exert home rule in blocking this industrial activity but saying home rule cuts both ways. Having traveled earlier this spring in communities along the New York-Pennsylvania border, I've seen both. New York's Tioga County, in particular, has an active, engaged coalition of landowners seeking to move ahead, potentially using fracturing methods that involve propane in place of water (water disposal has been a significant problem). There are several levels of opposition that will fight hard, ranging from the most worried activists who want no drilling, ever (their reaction to the news is summarized well at the No Fracking Way blog), to those seeking to fill gaps in the current proposed regulations before any drilling proceeds. My guess is the state will address some of those gaps before a drill bit sinks into New York soil. But this shift by Governor Cuomo signals the overall direction of his energy policy. The governor's approach, creating a limited drilling zone focused in places where many landowners are eager to move ahead, is appropriately measured and cautious. It also syncs well with public attitudes in the state as delineated in recent polling by Siena College. A few weeks ago, when talk of a limited pilot drilling zone was percolating, I asked Donald P. Levy, the director of the Siena polling effort, how he thought that would go over with voters. "To paraphrase public opinion in the state, if there's inexpensive energy available to us, it sure would be nice to have a safe way to get it," Levy told me. If the D.E.C. [the state Department of Environmental Conservation] moves to prudently and carefully test this in a walled-off, monitored and controlled way, public opinion in support would probably be off the charts. Just because Governor Cuomo's plan suits public views doesn't mean it's right. But my sense is he's taking a wise, measured approach even setting political considerations aside. The low price for gas now, after the boom years since 2007 or so in other states (which produced the problems and anger distilled into the film "Gasland"), will insure that any drilling effort plays out at a pace that will be manageable. As it happens, gas supporters have just released "Truthland." An essential resource if you want a clear view of the bright and dark side of gas in Pennsylvania and New York is "Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale," by Tom Wilber, a longtime news reporter in New York's gas zone. His blog, Shale Gas Review, is also a vital touchstone. His post on Governor Cuomo's reported plan includes valuable context. Stuart Gruskin, a former deputy commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental Conservation who worked on the first draft of the state's hydraulic fracturing rules, put it this way to me (in an exchange before the latest news broke): Despite the overheated media coverage, hyperbolic blogs, and seemingly constant effort to persuade people that they must take a pro or con position, we will end up with a set of protocols that will achieve the environmental protection goal. My position doesn't make me a lot of friends, but I think Gruskin is right. For more on my views, revisit "Beyond Hype, a Closer Look at New York's Choice on Shale Gas."

NBC regroups under Comcast with new cuts LOS ANGELES NBC slashes Jay Leno's "Tonight" pay in half, but forks out more than $8 billion to renew its broadcast rights to Sunday Night Football. Rumors swirl about a salary cut for Matt Lauer and Alec Baldwin tweets an offer to cut his salary, even as the network gambles on a $4.4 billion bid for the Olympics. Is this any way to run a network that's been stuck at No. 4 in the prime-time ratings for eight seasons? Yes, according to observers, who say NBC is making the right moves by saving where it can and spending where it should under new owner Comcast (CMCSK). "I'm impressed they're both taking all these creative shots and exercising financial discipline," said Garth Ancier, a network veteran who helped launch Fox and was an entertainment chief at NBC. Stephen Burke, Comcast vice president and NBCUniversal CEO, "knows where to spend money and where not to," Ancier said. But steps including Leno's pay cut (to a still-enviable $15 million) and "Tonight" staff reductions raised eyebrows and this question: Is NBC returning to the chokehold on costs that was in place under previous CEO Jeff Zucker, when viewership spiraled downward? The ill-fated experiment of putting "Tonight" at 10 p.m. instead of more costly drama series was one example of Zucker's programming approach. Barclays Capital (BARC) analyst Anthony DiClemente cautions against a "cynical" reading of NBC's position. Particularly in a TV universe fragmented by cable and satellite, "management is looking to be as efficient as possible when they look at program expenses," DiClemente said. In fact, NBC under Bob Greenblatt, the new entertainment chief who took over last year, the network has shown promising, if very early, signs of a ratings rebound. "NBC has made a really impressive recovery from the last-place broadcast network to having a fall schedule that put them in first place" in the fall season's kickoff week, DiClemente said. The network slipped to No. 2 in the second week among total viewers but held the top spot among the advertiser-favored young adult audience. Using the Summer Olympics as a springboard for its fall lineup, NBC cracked the top 10 with the J.J. Abrams thriller "Revolution" and returning singing show "The Voice," and scored with the Matthew Perry freshman comedy "Go On," which landed in the top 20. Burke, in charge of NBCUniversal since cable TV giant Comcast's 2011 takeover, told a conference call with analysts last month that NBC, which he said is averaging $1 billion less in operating profits annually than the other major broadcasters, ABC (DIS), CBS (CBS) and Fox (NWS), is his top priority for the coming year among properties that include cable channels, the Universal Pictures movie studio and theme parks. "There's really no reason for that (competitive difference), other than we need to make better shows, we need to schedule them better, we need to rebuild NBC brick-by-brick, which is the process we're going through right now," he said. The network is shelling out big for dramas such as "Smash," which reportedly cost $7.5 million to produce, and for premiere sports events and reality shows like "The Voice" that invite live viewing to overcome ad skipping. But the corporate wallet isn't open wide for all. Programs that are slipping in the ratings and those with ballooning budgets are at risk of the fiscal axe. A traditional place to start is with "talent," the on-camera performers who may find their designer belts among the first to be tightened because they represent a hefty share of a show's budget. Leno falls in that camp and, according to one report, Lauer of "Today" might find himself there as well, although the show quickly denied that. Baldwin of "30 Rock" tried a preemptory move, offering to take a pay cut to keep the sitcom on the air. Greenblatt, who declined to comment for this story, told The Wall Street Journal that the recent "Tonight" cuts were needed to restore the show's budget to pre-2009, when it made its short-lived, costlier foray into prime-time competition. But its fortunes are dimming in the increasingly crowded late-night arena despite its top-rated status. "Tonight," which brought in $460 million in ad dollars in 2007, was down to $161 million in 2011, according to Kantar Media. It made $4 million less in the first half of 2012 than it did for the same period last year. Given the changing media marketplace, retrenching isn't unusual. David Letterman, Leno's rival on CBS' "Late Show," accepted a significant pay cut in 2009. Another key NBC franchise, "Today," is finding itself on shaky ratings ground after 15 years at the top. Since the beginning of July, "Today" has lost each week in the ratings to "Good Morning America," with the exception of the two weeks NBC was in London for the Olympics. A continued downward slide could make NBC question the deal it gave Lauer earlier this year for a reported increase from $17 million to $25 million annually. The network might suggest to its host that "the show is not doing the same numbers. Would you take a reduction given that situation? Ancier speculated. It's far from unusual, he said, and something he himself has done. As the WB network's onetime programming chief, he took a hard look at the costs of "Seventh Heaven," the network's aging and most expensive series. At a certain point, it didn't make sense to keep airing it unless we could get the costs down. We asked the cast to an equal reduction" by percentage, Ancier said. Or, as he put it, "everyone has to take a haircut." Baldwin's offer to take a 20 percent reduction in his reported $15 million "30 Rock" salary, however, looks to be grounded more in the grand gesture than reality. Never a ratings success, the Tina Fey comedy did bring NBC the prestige of multiple Emmy Awards and enough viewers to warrant continued production to reach the threshold for lucrative syndication. NBC has declared this abbreviated seventh season to be the show's last. The ratings explain the decision. Last week's debut was the lowest-ever for "30 Rock" with 3.5 million viewers, a number dwarfed by the 15-plus million that tune to top-rated sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" on CBS. Even before the Comcast acquisition, "30 Rock" cleverly mocked the company as KableTown, headed by the erratic, glad-handing CEO Hank Hooper (Ken Howard) who holds the fate of network executive Jack Donaghy (Baldwin) in his hands. If art follows life, Donaghy should brace himself.

Women get less information on post-cancer fertility NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Cancer treatment can sometimes lead to infertility, but young women are less likely than young men to be informed of that risk, a new study suggests. Swedish researchers found that of nearly 500 cancer survivors ages 18 to 45, most men -- 80 percent -- said their doctor had told them their chemotherapy could affect their future fertility. But only 48 percent of women said the same, the team reports in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. What's more, women were far less likely to have received information about options for preserving their fertility. Only 14 percent said they did, versus 68 percent of men. That gap, researchers say, is likely related to the fact that preserving fertility is more complicated in women than men, and the techniques for doing so are not as widely available. But regardless, women should still be informed, said senior researcher Claudia Lampic, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. "Even in cases when fertility preservation could not be performed, patients -- and in particular, women -- should be informed about their risk of decreased fertility and their risk of entering menopause prematurely," Lampic told Reuters Health in an email. A range of cancer therapies can affect fertility. Some chemotherapy drugs, for instance, can damage a woman's eggs or a man's ability to produce normal sperm. Radiation therapy near the reproductive organs, or to the brain, can also harm fertility, as can hormonal therapies for breast, prostate and certain other cancers. "This study is yet (more) evidence of healthcare disparity when it comes to fertility preservation," said Dr. Kutluk Oktay, a post-cancer fertility expert who was not involved in the research. Other studies have found that cancer patients' likelihood of getting fertility information varies based on where they live, or even by medical center, explained Oktay, who directs the division of reproductive medicine and infertility at New York Medical College in Valhalla. "Not only there are tremendous differences between geographical areas as to who receives fertility preservation information and treatment, but there seems to be a gender gap as well," Oktay said. He agreed that it's likely related to differences in how male and female fertility are preserved. Men can have their sperm frozen and banked before cancer treatment -- which is a relatively quick, simple process, though there is a cost. According to the American Cancer Society, the cost of sperm banking typically tops $1,500, which includes three sperm donations and a few years of storage. Insurance often does not cover fertility preservation for cancer patients. For women, the most common way to preserve fertility is to have in vitro fertilization to create embryos, which are then frozen and banked. It's also possible to freeze a woman's eggs or ovarian tissue, but those techniques are still considered experimental and it's not clear how well they work. The total cost of those procedures can run from $8,000 to $24,000, and they are less widely available than sperm banking. Another concern with women is that harvesting eggs generally means using hormonal treatments to stimulate the ovaries. Since that raises a woman's estrogen levels, women with breast or uterine cancer have traditionally not been offered embryo or egg freezing. That is changing, however, said Oktay -- who has developed new regimens for stimulating egg production that do not boost women's estrogen levels. But they are only just coming into use. "The options are out there," Oktay said. But the utility is still patchwork right now. The current findings are based on 484 patients who had chemotherapy for leukemia, lymphoma, or breast, testicular or ovarian cancers between 2003 and 2007. Things might be different now, Lampic's team notes, since there have been advances in fertility preservation for female cancer patients. Recommendations from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) call for doctors to address the possibility of fertility problems in all reproductive-age patients before starting cancer treatment, and to be ready to talk about options like embryo-freezing. But it's been clear for some time that those discussions may or may not take place. According to Oktay, "there are definitely disparities" among cancer centers. He said ASCO is working on new education materials to help ensure that more doctors can talk about the issue. A recently published U.S. survey of women diagnosed with cancer when they were 40 or younger found that more than half said they still wanted to have children at the time of their diagnosis. See Reuters Health story of March 26, 2012. For now, Oktay said, if a cancer patient is concerned about future fertility, and her doctor does not bring up the issue, it's time to ask questions. "Be proactive, and ask "Will this treatment cause problems with my fertility?'" he advised. If your doctor is not comfortable with fertility issues, Oktay added, you can ask for a referral to someone who is. Lampic agreed. Women with cancer who wish to have children in the future should definitively bring up this issue with their doctors and healthcare providers in general. SOURCE: bit.ly/K5EXFw Journal of Clinical Oncology, online May 14, 2012.

The worst-ever one-week spike for California gasoline may be over, for now. Prices dropped by an average of 0.5 cents a gallon overnight, to the still stunning level of $4.666. A week ago, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.232. That was already a record for the day, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report, which tracks prices from the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) from more than 100,000 retail outlets. Then things went "apoplectic," in the words of Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for OPIS. A sudden concern about fuel supplies caused some traders to hold onto what they had, and buy more, perhaps, than they needed, one economist said. Those whose supplies were running out had to bid high to get more. Some gas stations charged nearly $6 a gallon. Other stations closed rather than buy gas at a premium price that might force them to sell at a loss if the market collapsed. Fifteen Costcos suddenly shut down their pumps. A fuel prices expert thinks he might have part of the explanation. A spate of refinery problems cut the state's gasoline supplies by "122,000 barrels, or 2.1%, to 5.77 million in the week ended Sept. That was down 10% from a year ago and the lowest inventory level for that period since 1999," said Bob van der Valk. Gov. Jerry Brown stepped in to allow refiners to process cheaper winter blend fuel three weeks earlier than normal. The state's two U.S. senators--Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--want the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to investigate. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, scoff at the idea that prices might fall quickly to give Californians some much-needed relief. "Forget all those sanguine forecasts for lower prices," said Charles Langley, public advocate for the Utility Consumers' Action Network in San Diego. We saw prices drop 0.5 cents last night. Well, rooty-toot-toot. But you can expect them to stay firm. More scrutiny for BP/Tesoro deal Middle income households in deep hole Four days of gas prices record in California

The blame game - Telegraph It has been almost five years since the first stages of the financial crisis, and still the accusations swirl about who, precisely, was responsible. In a lecture for the BBC this week, Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, set out his side of the story. Predictably, he blamed the banks, for ramping up their borrowing to grotesquely irresponsible levels, and the Labour government, for stripping the Bank of the ability to regulate the system. "Our power," he lamented, "was limited to that of publishing reports and preaching sermons." Sir Mervyn was surely being disingenuous in arguing that the Bank's main fault was not to shout loudly enough about a catastrophe whose outlines it saw coming: that understates his responsibility almost as much as it overstates his foresight. Yet he is right to criticise Labour for its part in events. In his lecture, he cited the old saw about a central banker's job being "to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going" - yet he was forced to work for a prime minister who had mistaken a credit-fuelled bubble for a permanent end to "boom and bust," and was determined to keep refilling the bowl until everyone ended up with an almighty hangover. A wiser note was sounded by Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, who has pointed out that households cannot simply blame "the banks" for the dirt-cheap loans they took out. It is rare for a politician to ask the voters to look to the beam in their own eye, but he is right to do so: the banks might have been the dealers, but we were the addicts (with the regulators cast as the police who looked the other way). This is not an excuse, or a claim that since everyone was to blame, no one really is. But as Sir Mervyn well knows, in the aftermath of such an extraordinary outbreak of mass delusion, there is plenty of guilt to go round.

Quotes from around the NBA Rajon Rondo doesn't want friends on the court. Jared Wickerham / Getty Images / November 10, 2012 November 11, 2012 What about grandma? Boston Celtics guard Rajon Rondo on his dislike for other teams: "We are competing - there's no friends on the court. Even if you were playing against a family member like your mother, you still go out there and try to beat her. Read the clips, please Brooklyn Coach Avery Johnson on his team's credentials, only a few weeks after star guard Joe Johnson said the Nets could beat the Miami Heat to win a title: "Nobody said we're on Miami's level. Nobody ever said it. Smart players for $400 Miami's Shane Battier, who graduated from Duke with a degree in religion, on his mental prowess: "Playing Jeopardy! I like my chances against any power forward in the league. Print that. The Obama rules Former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen on playing basketball with President Barack Obama: "I thought the lanes opened up when Michael Jordan used to drive. I used to be like, 'Wow.' But when I saw the president drive, I thought they were bringing the whole motorcade through the lane, it was so wide.

Rising Labour star Stella Creasy wears heart on her album sleeve for Leeds indie band The Wedding Present Most music fans will confess to an album they clung to during those dark nights of the adolescent soul. Now an MP has revealed the heartbreak and painful rejections of her teenage years after seizing the chance to write new sleeve-notes for her own essential album. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, is a devoted fan of The Wedding Present, the Leeds indie guitar band whose songs of unrequited love led critics to hail them as natural successors to The Smiths in the late 80s. Ms Creasy reserves a special place in her heart for Seamonsters, the band's 1991 album, an unflinching collection of songs detailing the bitterness and recrimination of relationships gone wrong, set to a backdrop of grunge-era distorted guitars. In what appears to have been a cathartic experience, Ms Creasy, a rising Labour star, has written an extended essay to accompany a vinyl 10" edition of the classic album, released next Monday. "There is no more central rite of passage than learning to live with the disappointment of love unrequited," writes the shadow crime prevention minister, whose sleeve-notes relive, with vivid honesty, the "burning confusion of rejection," "the horror of being abandoned unexpectedly" and "the way in which heartache eats you up inside" during her formative years. Recalling the fickle boys who cruelly "stamped on my heart," one song in particular is etched on the self-confessed "awkward teenager""s memory. "To this day I cannot hear the following line from "Blonde" without thinking of the boy who I fell for on a dancefloor many years ago, only to discover myself to be one of many taken in by his charms: I'm just some name in your book / That's why you gave up writing weeks ago / You won't be getting in touch / Oh, do you ever? It is still painful because it is the perfect expression of how you feel when you find yourself discarded by someone you trusted. I wish I had been able to walk up to those who had spurned me and quote verbatim to them some of these lyrics. However the MP, who has won acclaim for her campaign to crack down on legal loan-sharks, has a positive message for adolescents suffering similar pains. I wish I could tell them that it does get better. The MP will watch The Wedding Present play the album in full at Koko in north London on Friday. David Gedge, the Wedding Present singer and songwriter, told The Independent: "It's very flattering. I began a conversation with Stella on Twitter and then I thought, "why not ask a member of Parliament to write the sleeve notes?" To my delight she said "Yes."" Mr Gedge said he found Ms Creasy's essay on the album "quite poignant. I didn't know what to expect. What she wrote was touching. Perhaps she was able to settle a few old scores too! The singer joked: "I haven't been invited to the Commons yet. Maybe I'll get to Downing Street when Stella is Prime Minister. The Seamonsters album, recorded in Minnesota with Nirvana producer Steve Albini, is regarded as the band's best. "It feels like a film or a drama when we are performing it," said Mr Gedge. It is intense and the narrative just unfolds. There's certainly an all-encompassing mood when we play it live. Formed in 1985, The Wedding Present were championed by John Peel and even became Top of the Pops regulars, recording 12 top 30 singles inside one year in 1990. Gedge, 52, is the only ever-present member, driving the band on through numerous line-up changes. Ms Creasy is not the first Labour MP to write sleeve-notes for a favourite album. Former Culture Secretary Andy Burnham declared The Stone Roses 1989 debut "the best album ever" when he penned an essay to accompany the record's 20th anniversary re-release in 2009.

Maurice Sendak: The Pointed Psychology Behind "Wild Things" I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is: How do children survive? Maurice Sendak told Leonard Marcus, a children's book historian, in a 2002 interview. Sendak died today at age 83. In just 10 sentences, Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," illuminated not only the protagonist Max's imagination, but also rage, a reaction to a mother's emotional absence and the overall darker, and neglected, parts of a child's psyche. Clearly, Max, a young and unruly boy who is punished by his mother and sent to his room without dinner, depends on his mom. But his rage is apparent, and soon his room morphs into a strange forest. He takes a private boat to where the wild things are, and, despite their terrible roars and ghoulish features, manages to become their ruler through a magic trick. Max becomes the "most wild thing of all." They play, but soon, Max commands them to stop and go to bed without supper, and he finds himself lonely as the king of the wild things, and wants to be where someone loves him "best of all." He returns to his room, where supper is waiting for him, and, with an added reassurance and charm that maybe only Sendak could pointedly portray, Max finds that the food is still hot. In a 2009 article published in The Psychologist, Richard Gottlieb, a psychoanalyst based in Phoenix, analyzed the influences and motivations behind Sendak's illustrations and writing. "Sendak's work in "Where the Wild Things Are" is of particular interest to psychologists due to his strikingly unusual abilities to gain access to, and to represent in words and pictures, fantasies that accompany childish rage states," Gottlieb wrote in the paper. "It is this capacity, I believe, that contributes to the appeal of his work to children who are unable or unwilling to articulate these states, and to adults who have forgotten them or do not wish to know about them," Gottlieb continued. Sendak's other children's books, including "In the Night Kitchen" and "Outside Over There," focus on child rage and emotional unavailability of a mother. That rage then manifests in an altered state of consciousness, like a dream or fantasy, Gottlieb wrote. Ultimately, that fury and conflict is reconciled and signified through an otherwise innocuous even. In "Where the Wild Things Are," the reconciliation is represented through the warm food that Max finds from his mother has left for him. And it likely could have been the author's own childhood from which he was pulling. Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to parents of Polish descent. In the interview, he told Marcus that his father's family was "destroyed" in the Holocaust. "I grew up in a house that was in a constant state of mourning," he told Marcus. He also described his mother as disturbed, chronically sad and emotionally unavailable. In the paper, Gottlieb noted that Sendak was surrounded by psychological proddings and teachings throughout his life, having underwent psychoanalysis for a period of his adult life. His partner, Eugene Glenn, with whom he lived for 50 years, was also a psychoanalyst. It is disappointments, losses and destructive rage allow children to survive, Gottlieb wrote, and that is what Sendak captured so vividly in "Where the Wild Things Are." The power of art, imagination and daydream allow children to turn traumatic moments into vehicles for survival and growth. Stanton Peele, a licensed psychologist and attorney who has authored several books on addiction, called Sendak's best-selling book, a "model for mindfulness," in an article for Psychology Today. ""What an empowering, psychologically astute parable about a child learning that his anger, while sometimes overwhelming and scary, can be safely expressed and eventually conquered," Steele wrote in the article. When Max leaves his imaginary land, Steele noted in the paper, "he - like the Wild Things - has made substantial progress in resolving his demons and rectifying his relationship with his Mom. And once again, great art has encapsulated a crucial psychological vision. In a story that seems to ring true to Sendak's authentic perspective on childhood emotions, the author told NPR's Terry Gross in a 2011 interview that one particular correspondence with a young fan has always stuck out in his mind. After responding to this child with a postcard and a drawing of a Wild Thing, he told Gross, "I wrote, "Dear Jim, I loved your card." Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, "Jim loved your card so much he ate it." That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Carnival shares tumble on Costa Concordia costs Carnival self-insures for loss of use of the vessel. Micky Arison, chairman and chief executive of Carnival, the parent company of Costa Cruises, said: At this time, our priority is the safety of our passengers and crew. We are deeply saddened by this tragic event and our hearts go out to everyone affected by the grounding of the Costa Concordia and especially to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives.

Brothers Reunited in Japan After 6 Decades Apart They no longer speak the same language, but two brothers separated nearly 60 years each think the other hasn't changed a bit. Japanese-American Minoru Ohye celebrate his 86th birthday Monday with his only brother after traveling to Japan for a reunion with him. The brothers were born in Sacramento, California, but were separated as children after their father died in a fishing accident. They were sent to live with relatives in Japan and ended up in different homes. The reunited brothers hugged in a hotel room and exchanged gifts of California chocolate and Japanese sake. The American brother wore his trademark baseball cap and jeans. The Japanese bother wore a suit and tie. But the same bright eyes and square jaws were a dead giveaway that they were brothers. They both loved golf and had back pains. They thought the other hadn't changed a bit. If we miss this chance, we may never meet. You never know," said Ohye, energetic except for a sore knee. Either he may die, or I may die. Separated across the Pacific, their only prior meeting had been a brief one in the mid-1950s when Ohye stopped by Japan while serving in the U.S. Army in the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula. His brother, Hiroshi Kamimura, 84, was adopted by a Japanese family, grew up in the ancient capital of Kyoto and became a tax accountant. He married and had three sons. Ohye joined the youth group of the Japanese Imperial Army at 13 and went to Russia, where he was sent to a Siberian coal mine when Japan surrendered. He returned to be with his mother in Yuba City, California, in 1951, and worked as a bookbinder and a gardener. He became homeless when he failed to collect payment for a restaurant he ran and later sold in the late 1950s. About 10 years ago, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a welfare service organization for U.S. veterans, found him a spot in the Eskaton Wilson Manor home for the elderly. It was Eskaton's program to grant a wish called "Thrill of a Lifetime" that got Ohye back to Japan. While others wished for rafting trips and football game tickets, the only thing Ohye wanted was to see his brother again. Eskaton administrator Debbie Reynolds put together a fundraiser for Ohye's trip. Kamimura acknowledged it had been difficult to communicate with his brother through telephone calls because he didn't understand English. They would exchange a lot of "hellos" and then their conversations ended, he said. I am happy. He is the only brother I have," Kamimura said after watching Ohye blow out the candles on a birthday cake at a restaurant. This may be our last time together. Brian Berry, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo who was approached by Reynolds to help with the reunion and got Ohye from the Tokyo airport to Kyoto, was relieved the brothers were together at last. "Even over time, with all that has been gone through, still the only thing you are thinking about is your family," he said. Right when you're near the end of your life, you are still thinking about your family. Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yurikageyama

In Health Dept. Ad, PhotoShop, Not Diabetes, Took Leg New York City's health watchdogs warn that drinking too much sugary soda could cost you a leg. But you also might lose a limb if you appear in one of their ads. A poster of a man who supposedly lost his leg to diabetes has been going up in the subways of New York. Follow @NYTMetro Connect with us on Twitter for breaking news and headlines in New York. Image Source, via Getty Images An original image of the man finds him more complete. A blunt new poster from the Bloomberg administration shows an overweight man on a stool, his right leg missing below the knee. A pair of crutches leans against a wall beside him. The advertisement, being placed throughout the subway system, warns that ever-growing portions of fast food and sodas could cause diabetes, which could lead to amputations. But it turns out that the person shown in the advertisement did not need crutches because his legs were intact. The health department confirmed on Tuesday that its advertising agency had removed the lower half of the man's leg from the picture to make its point: the headline over the image reads "Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations. When city officials announced the campaign on Jan. 9, they did not let on that the man shown - whose photo came from a company that supplies stock images to advertising firms and others - was not an amputee and may not have had diabetes. The city did not identify the man, and efforts to reach the agency that supplied the photo were unsuccessful. The photographer who took the picture, Morten Smidt, said he did not know the man's name. Mr. Smidt said on Tuesday that he had not seen the advertisement. In response to a description of it, he said, "Well, it is an illustration now, clearly not the picture I did." In a news release about the campaign, the health department said that in 2006, nearly 3,000 New Yorkers with diabetes were hospitalized for amputations. The advertisements are the latest in a series of attention-grabbing messages about the dangers of smoking, drinking and consuming too many sweets and fatty foods. Other advertisements that the health department sponsored featured a grizzled smoker who talked through a voice box and a woman named "Marie" from the Bronx who showed off what appeared to be fingers whose tips had been lost to smoking. City officials said those advertisements were testimonials that showed real people and real consequences. But they said that doing so was not always feasible. "Sometimes we use individuals who are suffering from the particular disease; other times we have to use actors," said John Kelly, a health department spokesman. We might stop using actors in our ads if the food industry stops using actors in theirs. The American Beverage Association, which opposes the city's efforts against sodas and fast food, called the advertisement overwrought. "This is another example of the "What can we get away with?" approach that shapes these taxpayer-funded ad campaigns," Chris Gindlesperger, the association's director of communications, said in a statement. Bob Garfield, a commentator for Advertising Age and National Public Radio, said that the misrepresentation "was lazy or cheap or silly, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it." Still, he said, "Why people lie when there's no penalty for telling the truth is an absolute mystery to me."

Australia's Tony Abbott 'regrets' derogatory remarks about Julia Gillard "Every time she turns round, you've got that strange horizontal crease, which means they're cut too narrow in the hips," Greer said. "It was an off-the-cuff remark responding to an observation of a member of the public and I shouldn't have said it and I regret it," he said. Miss Gillard is Australia's first female leader and her boyfriend Tim Mathieson has previously hit out at people "bullying" her. "Being a woman, I think she's gets targeted quite a bit by the big boys in town," he said at the time. "Bullying women just doesn't work for me ... calling females names does not get you anywhere," he added.

Trophies justify Chelsea managerial changes says chairman Bruce Buck Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck has defended the number of managerial changes at Stamford Bridge since Roman Abramovich took over the club in 2003 and believes the club's success in that period vindicates their policy of always having "the right manager" in place. The Blues have produced a remarkable end to what has been a difficult campaign to reach the finals of both the Champions League and FA Cup under interim boss Roberto Di Matteo following the departure of Andre Villas-Boas, who had only been appointed in the summer as successor to Carlo Ancelotti. With so many key matches to focus on as the Blues aim to qualify for next season's Champions League via a top-four finish in the Barclays Premier League and secure victory over Liverpool at Wembley before they head to Munich on May 19, a fresh permanent managerial appointment is not on the immediate agenda for Abramovich and the Chelsea board. The Blues have been managed by Avram Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari, caretaker Guus Hiddink, Ancelotti and Villas-Boas since the departure of Jose Mourinho in September 2007, but Buck argues the consistency of the team would appear to prove that those were sound decisions. Speaking to United States satellite radio station SiriusXM as a guest on The Football Show, the American said: "When people talk about instability at Chelsea, they refer to the fact we have changed a lot of managers over the years, and we have. It is probably important to have stability with your manager, but you have to do it with the right manager. We think we have made the right decisions all along, and we have a hell of a lot of trophies to show what we have done over the last eight or nine years, so that is the proof in the pudding. Buck hailed the performance of Di Matteo - who has overseen 10 wins and just one defeat in his 15 games - following their progress to the Champions League final which was secured by an aggregate victory over Barcelona. "It is about the Chelsea spirit, we kept the blue flag flying high, and we just have to be proud of these guys each day," Buck added. We have had a lot of ups and down this season, a lot of criticism, but here we are in the final of the Champions League and the final of the FA Cup, it is a pretty good position to be in. Before their Munich date, the Blues will be out to make up the four-point gap on fourth-placed Newcastle to ensure qualification for the Champions League again regardless of the result in Munich. First up is the small matter of the west London derby against QPR, which Buck concedes has its own added "dynamics" given the renewed debate over whether Anton Ferdinand will snub the pre-match handshake with Chelsea captain John Terry. We have a long way to go. We have to take it one match at a time, as Robbie and the team are doing," Buck continued. We have got QPR this weekend, and that is going to be difficult because the dynamics are difficult, but we have got to snare the three points there. Chelsea are waiting on the fitness of centre-half Gary Cahill, who limped out at the Nou Camp with a hamstring injury. UEFA have yet to clarify whether Blues captain Terry would be able to celebrate with the team on the pitch should they win the Champions League, with the England defender serving a suspension after his red card in the semi-final. Chelsea will also be without Ramires and Raul Meireles as well as defender Branislav Ivanovic for the final because of disciplinary sanctions after bookings against Barcelona, although FIFPro, the international players' union, has called on UEFA to show leniency, with Bayern's first XI also set to be hit. Forward Salomon Kalou has enjoyed a new impetus since Di Matteo's elevation, and with the suspensions could be in line to start in the final. The Ivory Coast forward said: "We have to give credit to Robbie. He brought some energy to the club and to the team. He gave the belief to all the players who were not in the squad before and when you want to win this kind of competition, you have to use everyone and not exclude players. He brought everyone together, the belief for everyone to bring his potential to the team and to try to help the team win a prize.

Met Opera's "Live in HD" Series Outside of New York "La Traviata," with Hei-Kyung Hong as Violetta, is one of the Metropolitan Opera productions that has been part of the "Live in HD" series. IF you visit the Web site of Piedmont Opera in Winston-Salem, N.C., and hover your cursor over the heading "On Stage," a menu drops down. "MetHD," a link to information about the local transmission of the Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" movie theater broadcasts, leads the list of the company's offerings, including two live Winston-Salem productions: Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Robert Ward's "Crucible." With just a mouse click the site illustrates the reality of American opera today, which I observed as I traveled through the country over the last six months, watching the 11 broadcasts in this season's "Live in HD" series. Through the HD broadcasts the Met has attained dominance of the field: not as a standard to which regional companies can aspire, as in the past, but as a permanent and sometimes intrusive presence in their communities. In last week's Arts & Leisure section I wrote about how watching opera in cinematic close-up, with Dolby surround sound, changes the performance in ways large and small. But the most distorted and distorting part of the HD experience comes at the times when a live audience repays a brave performance with enthusiastic applause. Without fail, some watching the broadcasts shout "bravo" with gusto. But most of the audience doesn't quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders. For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental. "Operas in general," the critic Marcel Prawy wrote, "can only be properly enjoyed when audience, orchestra and stage form a compact community." Its history is a history of being there: of applause and booing and rapt silence, the symbiosis between performers and audience. An image, in high definition, 3-D or any other permutation, creates only the illusion of intimacy. It is a cooler, more detached art form. Because the broadcasts so closely mimic the experience of live opera - you join a group of people, some of whom have dressed for the occasion, in a darkened theater at an appointed time - the "Live in HD" series subtly retrains opera audiences in passive consumption rather than active participation. This retraining affects live performances as well, at least at the Met, where politely warm, trailing-off applause is now the norm. At the opening night of the Met's season in September the soprano Anna Netrebko sang the fiendishly difficult title role in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena." As she completed the first part of the final scene, the ravishing aria "Al dolce guidami," she slowly diminished the last note to nothing. After an instant of silence, the audience erupted in cheers that went on far longer than is usual at the Met these days. Ms. Netrebko, who had ended the aria gazing upward, suddenly gave a wide smile, driving the audience to even greater applause. It was a moment of engagement - of human relationship - between artist and audience that was once common but is now noteworthy for its rarity. So rare that many reviews mentioned it, some of them critical of Ms. Netrebko for her supposed lack of dramatic commitment. It's true that actors in movies don't break character like that, and we are increasingly going to the opera as though it were a movie. The HDs are working, at least in terms of the Met's larger strategy. In 2007 a writer for The Guardian told the company's general manger, Peter Gelb, that he found the experience of seeing "The Barber of Seville" in the movie theater better than being at the Met. "Oh, no, that's bad," Mr. Gelb groaned. We must be doing too good a job. The writer added, "Then he allowed himself a smile of well-deserved gratification." When it comes to HD, Mr. Gelb has reason to feel gratified. The broadcasts have been a material success - well attended and profitable - and the Met is quick to argue that they promote a tenuously surviving art form in a way that helps everyone, a rising tide that lifts all boats.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Reviews round-up Screen rate Over at the Den of Geek NP Horton says there's one thing about this film that can't be overlooked (or under-looked or anything but looked-at-in-horror) - the frame rate: at 48 fps instead of a traditional 24, The Hobbit looks like "a cheap soap opera." Most of the film looks "completely unrealistic and fake." These are strong words, and particularly damaging since Orcs, elfs and wizards are prominently featured here. It's altogether a shame, says Norton, as The Hobbit is "a triumph in almost every other regard." Stretched The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab has concerns that the material is overstretched, this being the first part in a trilogy based on what is, when it comes down to it, a fairly slim children's book: "For all the sound and fury, not a great deal actually happens." Swirling camera-work can't hide the fact that producers have made three sandwiches out of the ingredients for two, tops. Friends again Forget the naysayers, booms Metro's Ross McG. There's a lot of the good old fellowship on show here: An Unexpected Journey "has the same camaraderie" that made the first series so great. In fact, this film follows so closely the trajectory of the first Fellowship movie, it almost feels like a retread. And that's no bad thing. Precious Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian enjoyed the crunching battles, Gandalf's re-appearance and Martin Freeman's understated performance as Bilbo. But the final word must be Gollum's. Andy Serkis, playing the part once again, gives an "ineffably creepy" turn. His battle of wits with Bilbo is "where the drama really comes alive." Overall this contains "an enormous amount of fun, energy, and a bold sense of purpose."

BAE gets tactical vest production contract PHOENIX, March 16 (UPI) -- A four-year contract to produce tactical armored vests and their components has been given to BAE Systems by the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency. The initial $48 million in orders are expected to be completed by February 2013. The total value of the contract orders could reach approximately $267 million over the four-year life of the award. "This award reinforces our position as a valued partner in the body armor market," said Don Dutton, vice president and general manager of Protection Systems at BAE Systems Support Solutions. DLA continues to see demand for sustaining these life-saving products, as well as the value and quality that all of our equipment affords. The contract includes Outer Tactical Vests with soft body inserts and Improved Outer Tactical Vests. BAE Systems is a leading provider of protection gear -- helmets as well as vests -- and load carrying equipment for U.S. troops.

Does a lower unemployment rate mean a better labor market? So much for the good news. Even as the unemployment rate is now making encouraging progress toward normalcy, it is less than clear that the same can be said about the labor market. That's because the rapid improvement in the jobless rate is being aided by the large number of Americans who remain out of the labor force. The labor force participation rate - a measure of the share of working-age people who either have a job or are unemployed and looking for one - remains near lows not seen since large numbers of women began entering the world of work decades ago. In November, the participation rate was 63.6 percent, nearly three percentage points below where it stood when the Great Recession hit in December 2007. Republicans have pointed to the shrinking rate to buttress their argument that repeated stimulus and other elements of President Obama's economic policies are ineffective. "If the labor force participation rate were the same as when the president took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent," Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Friday. Liberals also have raised troubling questions about the rate, although their aim is to get policymakers to apply more stimulus funds to get the economy going at full tilt. Analysts agree that a recovery that has left 40 percent of the unemployed out of work for six months or more is discouraging many people from looking from work. Some linger in college or graduate school. Some retire early. Others seek economic refuge on the disability rolls. All lower the rate of labor force participation. But it is also true that the share of Americans in the labor market is declining simply because the nation is aging. Last year, the oldest members of the baby-boom generation turned 65. Experts estimate that 10,000 boomers reach age 65 every day, a trend that will continue for two decades. By 2030, when all members of the boomers have reached that age, 18 percent of the population will be 65 or older - up from the current 13 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. This demographic reality has profound implications for economic growth. It means that fewer people will be in the job market going forward, and economic growth will be slower. Given that, it is reasonable to ask: How much of the current slump in labor force participation job creation is attributable to fewer job opportunities, and how much reflects the reality of an aging nation? Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, has studied this question. After examining the long-term labor force trends, she says that job creation remains so weak that people are not being ""drawn back into" the job market. She concluded that as much as two-thirds of the slump in labor force participation is due to the weak job market. Writing in a policy brief earlier this year, she said: "It is unlikely the missing workers will enter or re-enter the labor market until job prospects are strong enough that they will not face months of fruitless job searching."

University of Wales degrees validation concern at Birmingham Graduate School

Life is a Dream, Argyle Works, Birmingham When the young Pierre Boulez said that opera houses should be blown up, he was attacking, not opera, but its cultural ambience- the snobbery, exclusivity and expense. Nowadays most opera companies work hard to break down those barriers- none more so than Birmingham Opera. For the past 25 years its artistic director, Graham Vick, has shunned conventional theatres in favour of spaces which are both more flexible and more 'ordinary'. And he has consistently broken down the barriers which usually separate the professionals from the amateurs in both music and theatre. For this production of Jonathan Dove's brand new opera, Life is a Dream, the company uses a vast warehouse in industrial inner Birmingham, and employs some 200 'extras' and supplementary chorus. There is no separate stage- audience, singers and actors share a single space. The sense of participation, of closeness to the action, is palpable and exhilarating. Vick's production, in its use of the ample space and its varied and effective lighting (designer- Giuseppe Di lorio) is a tour de force. Even before the music begins, a wedding party and a Christmas party weave their way through the audience as we enter the space, while the orchestra is strategically placed in a central circle. All the complexities of co-ordination and movement seemed to be completely mastered. The conductor William Lacey held everything together, and there were committed and eloquent performances from all six principal singers. It was not their fault if some of the complexities of the plot passed us by. A synopsis in the programme would have helped. Dove has had considerable success as an opera composer. Flight for Glyndebourne, and Pinocchio for Opera North have enjoyed a popular success, unusual for contemporary opera. It is not hard to see why. His command of the orchestra is assured, his sense of drama is acute, and his vocal lines are eminently singable. If anything, too much so. His musical idiom is astoninshingly old fashioned, recalling Respighi, Richard Strauss and occassionally the Bernstein of West Side Story. Britten sounds modern besides this, and the finale is utterly banal - the ending of the musical that Richard Rodgers never wrote. All this undoubtedly makes his work "accessible"- to use a current cant word- and if it induces newcomers to opera to explore further, so much the better. But durable contemporary opera has to be made of sterner stuff. The Stockhausen the Company has scheduled for August will offer a meatier challenge. Running to March 31st

"You can't hold hot glass in your hand and play with it, the way you can with clay or wood," says Tina Oldknow, the curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. You can't throw a pot in your garage. You can't have that even casual acquaintance with the material. Five years ago, to help foster a more productive relationship between designers and this difficult material, Corning developed the GlassLab, a mobile glass-blowing studio that has since made appearances at Design Miami, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan. This summer, it's parked on Governors Island, where Corning is collaborating with the Cooper-Hewitt to put on a series of free public glass-blowing demonstrations on weekends through the end of July. This go-round, the designers invited to participate are all contributors to the exhibition "Graphic Design - Now in Production," also on view on Governors Island as part of the Cooper-Hewitt's off-site programming. As in the past, none of the designers have much, if any, prior experience with glass. But graphic designers, attests Rob Cassetti, the head of the GlassLab program, are particularly good at pushing the limits of the form: "I find graphic designers to be much more experimental. It's not necessarily, Let's go for an object, but like, What would happen if ...? Last week, at a preview of the series, Peter Buchanan-Smith - the designer responsible for both the cover art for Wilco's "A Ghost Is Born," and the whimsically painted axes produced by his firm Best Made Company - put that theory to the test. He brought in a two-dimensional rendering of a glass buoy shaped and colored like an eyeball, with a red ring protruding where the optic nerve might be. "I wanted to create something I could use," he told the crowd. His intention, he proclaimed, was eventually to try the finished product out in the East River. As Buchanan-Smith stood to the side of the stage, three GlassLab gaffers expertly danced around the small workshop, where the air temperature hovered near 110 degrees. They dipped blow rods into a furnace glowing with molten clear glass and applied color in the form of bars of pigmented glass. They shaped the glass with tongs and paddles that licked up flames when they made contact, and with bare hands covered only by wet newspapers, which steamed but did not catch fire. Blowing into the rods, they created orbs of different colors, which they eventually joined, in an elaborate series of miraculously seamless transfers from oven to oven, and rod to rod. The final reveal lasted only seconds before a gaffer dressed in an insulated silver suit tucked the buoy away into an annealing oven, where it would spend all night slowly cooling down and solidifying (any faster and the glass would crack). "These guys are magicians," Buchanan-Smith declared after the demonstration. Was he nervous ceding the driver's seat in the execution of his own design? To the contrary, he seemed exhilarated by the spirit of experimentation. "It's sort of a performance," he said, laughing. If it dropped and exploded, that would be kind of fun, too. GlassLab design sessions take place next to Pershing Hall on Governors Island, on Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., through July 29. A full schedule of sessions is available on the Corning Museum of Glass Web site. For directions and ferry schedule to Governors Island, go to govisland.com/html/visit/directions.shtml.

Gerrard can win 100 caps, says Dalglish Kenny Dalglish, the Liverpool manager, has held out the prospect of Steven Gerrard winning 100 caps for England, despite the disappointment of Scott Parker taking the captain's role against the Netherlands instead of Gerrard. Dalglish's relationship with Stuart Pearce appears to have contributed to a more relaxed outlook on the decision to start with Gerrard against the Netherlands at Wembley on Wednesday night - only for the midfielder to leave the field after 33 minutes with a tight hamstring which may keep him out of Liverpool's side for the vital home match with Arsenal tomorrow lunchtime. Dalglish declared that he trusted the judgment of Pearce - a stark contrast to the fury felt at Melwood in November 2010 when Fabio Capello reneged on an agreement to limit Gerrard's time on the pitch to an hour and he pulled a hamstring against France. Gerrard's struggles with injury have seen him drop off the international map in the last 18 months. Before Wednesday, he had not appeared since the Wembley defeat to France. But Dalglish does not seem to think that the 31-year-old's international career is anywhere near its conclusion after 90 starts. "He obviously must enjoy representing his country if he's done it 90 times," Dalglish said. I was a bit older than Steven when I retired from international duty and we never played as many matches. Mind you, we did qualify for four straight World Cups. I only went to three. But to get 100 caps for your country is a proud achievement. To represent the football club you have supported all your life is an equally proud achievement as well. If he's got a decision to make he's got a decision to make but I couldn't say one way or the other. It's up to the individual. They've also got the European Championships coming up this summer and that is an attraction as well. Asked about Pearce's decision not to make Gerrard captain, Dalglish said: "If I was in charge of the team Steven would have been playing for me as well. It is no surprise for me that anyone picks Steven Gerrard for their team. England is not my team. If I am the manager of any team in the world I am going to select Steven Gerrard for it. Though Pearce said he had planned to limit Gerrard's work to 45 minutes, Dalglish said there had been no prior agreement between club and country. It is common sense that England would look after him having played extra time, penalties and with the emotion of the occasion [ in the Carling Cup final on Sunday]. They had him for three days there and it was their shout. It was just a case of 'look after him', as I'm sure they do all their international players. Don't forget if they come back injured [the Football Association] have to pay their wages. Gerrard's injury against France prompted an instant and angry response from then manager Roy Hodgson's coaching department, one of whom tweeted: "Completely ignored agreement and past history. Completely amateurish and now we pay for their incompetence. Absolutely disgraceful. The former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler is on the brink of completing an unexpected return to English football by signing for Blackpool until the end of the season. Fowler, 36, has not played competitively in England since his three appearances for Blackburn Rovers in the 2008-09 season. He trained with the Blackpool squad yesterday after being handed the opportunity to resurrect his career by manager Ian Holloway. Blackpool were unable to register Fowler in time for him to be available for tonight's game against Hull City at Bloomfield Road.

Kenyan activist launches anti-bribe website NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - One Kenyan had to pay a $24 bribe to a traffic cop for speeding - but then successfully argued that $8 of it should be returned so he could have something left to pay bribes farther down the road. Another resident said policemen only released her husband from a traffic stop after she hopped out of the car while breastfeeding her child. "We wasted about 10 min and i bacame furious as it was already past 9pm at nite.i was breastfeeding and came out with my baby still on the breast and without shoes," she wrote. The traffic officer was so embarassed. Requests for bribes are so frequent that Kenyans like to trade their favorite tips for dealing with them, and now one man fed up with the country's pervasive corruption has launched a website where people can share their stories. Already the site has collected more than 300 stories in less than three weeks, said its founder, Anthony Ragui. A spokesman for Kenya's government-funded Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission said officials would welcome the information being gathered online at http://www.ipaidabribe.or.ke. The fight against corruption calls for concerted efforts from everyone. This kind of initiative is something that would be most welcomed but it is important the information is carefully analyzed," said Nicholas Simani. It is a noble initiative. Almost every Kenyan has a bribery story to tell. Some are punchlines to jokes about the country's corruption. Others, like officials taking bribes to grant licenses to dangerous drivers, have more serious consequences. Ragui, the website's founder, returned to his native Kenya in 2007 after working for the American bank Wells Fargo. "I saw a system that works, where you pay your taxes and get services in return," said the 37-year-old, his eyes shining behind his glasses. I came back and everyone was complaining about corruption here. But no one was doing anything about it. So I decided to take the first step. Ragui's website uses software from an Indian site - also called ipaidabribe - that has collected information on more than 15,000 bribes since it was put up in 2010. The Kenyan site, which Ragui and some web designers are funding themselves, is the first spin-off from the Indian site. But T.R. Raghunandan, who administers the Indian site, said he had had inquiries from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Nepal and the Philippines. The software blocks out the names of payers or receivers of bribes to avoid the service being abused. But Ragui hopes the information he collects will identify where and why bribes are most commonly paid. The site has three main sections. One part collects details on bribes paid. Another part records ways people have avoided paying bribes. And a final part asks readers to send in positive stories about honest officials or services freely and quickly provided. "I want to show the good as well as the bad," Ragui said. I want to create competition between departments and regions, so that leaders want to be rated in the top five and not the bottom five. Not everyone in the system is corrupt. Kenya is ranked 154th out of 182 nations by anti-corruption campaigners Transparency International. Requests for bribes are so frequent that Kenyans like to trade their favorite tips for dealing with them. Environmentalist Brian Harding, a former Nairobi resident, said he kept a stack of tea bags in the car to give out whenever the inevitable request came to buy police 'a cup of tea.' But more frequently, the police get their way. Ben Loyseau was stopped last year for speeding although the police speed gun was broken. When the shirtless Loyseau challenged his fine, he said they fined him $5 instead for driving "naked." Stories on Ragui's website also detail police confiscating driving licenses and demanding payment for their return, or describe police asking for money to blame an innocent party for an accident. "This traffic cop wanted 300 shillings because I hit the car behind me while reversing so as to charge the other guy with the offense," one entry read. Ragui says humorous stories often hide the fact that even petty corruption costs lives. Criminals pay bribes to walk free and drivers pay to get their licenses, then cause fatal accidents. Kenya's driving test requires participants to drive a short distance, often just few hundred feet (100 meters) and then push a toy car around on a board with their fingers, calling out 'checking mirrors or 'indicating' to instructors. When Alice Leslie did her test, she said applicants who went through a driving school passed no matter how badly they did but much better drivers who did their tests independently from a driving school failed. She paid a driving school to book her test but lost control of the car going around a corner and again by hitting a speed bump. She passed anyway and was told: "You'll be a good driver one day." Follow Katharine Houreld at http://twitter.com/khoureld

Chad deploys troops to help fight CAR rebels