Bills' Fitzpatrick agrees to new 6-year deal

/

By JOHN WAWROW

updated 7:36 p.m. ET Oct. 28, 2011

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. - Ryan Fitzpatrick doesn't intend to shed his scraggly beard or lose his large collection of T-shirts after signing a 6-year, $59 million contract on Friday that secures him as the Buffalo Bills franchise quarterback.

Given how much he'll be making and his new high-profile status, Fitzpatrick might have a hard time sticking with the "No-Name" label though.

The one-time journeyman, 2005 seventh-round draft pick and Harvard graduate has formally arrived as a bona fide NFL starter after being rewarded with what could potentially become the most lucrative contract in team history. It's a bold move by a team that's spent much of the past 15 years searching for someone to fill the quarterback role, and a reward for a player who as a first-time starter this season has led a revived offense that has Buffalo off to a surprising 4-2 start.

"It's been a long road. There's been a lot of hurdles and obstacles that I've had to overcome," Fitzpatrick said. "I think we've got this thing headed in the right direction. So to be a part of that, and to be able to continue to be a part of that for years to come, I'm really excited about it."

Fitzpatrick becomes the first starting quarterback since Doug Flutie in 1999 to earn a contract extension with Buffalo. And Fitzpatrick's deal includes $24 million in guaranteed money, according to a person familiar with negotiations, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because the team does not release contract terms.

That's a significant raise over the $3.22 million base salary he was making this season. Fitzpatrick was in the final year of the three-year contract ? worth $7.405 million in base salary ? he signed upon joining the Bills as a free agent in 2009.

"I'm excited about Ryan getting this done. He'll be our quarterback for a long time," general manager Buddy Nix said, who said the key to any team's success depends on having a quarterback in place. "It really makes everything easier for us. It's easy to put good players around him if you've got that position that you feel good about. And we do."

Nix had initially hoped to conduct contract talks with Fitzpatrick this offseason, but was delayed as a result of the lockout.

The deal was reached shortly after practice ended on Friday, as the Bills come out of their bye week to "host" Washington (3-3) in Buffalo's annual game at Toronto.

Until Fitzpatrick's emergence, the quarterback position has been unsettled in Buffalo since Hall of Famer Jim Kelly retired following the 1996 season. The Bills, over that stretch, have gone through the likes of Rob Johnson, Drew Bledsoe, J.P. Losman, Kelly Holcomb and, most recently, Trent Edwards.

Of all those players, Fitzpatrick has the unlikeliest pedigree.

The Bills are his third team since Fitzpatrick was selected 250th overall in the 2005 draft by St. Louis. He later spent two seasons with Cincinnati, including 2008, when he finished the season going 4-6-1 in taking over for injured starter Carson Palmer.

Last season, Fitzpatrick provided the offense some semblance of spark despite the team's 4-12 finish. Going 4-9 as a starter, he finished with 3,000 yards passing ? the first Bill with that many since Losman in 2006. And he threw 23 touchdowns, the most since Bledsoe had 24 in 2002.

With a 13-15 record in Buffalo, Fitzpatrick has been the quarterback for all but one victory over the past two-plus seasons.

With 1,477 yards passing and 12 touchdowns to go with just six interceptions this season, Fitzpatrick ranks in the top 10 in four statistical categories, including being tied for fifth in TDs. More important, he has a fuller command of coach Chan Gailey's offensive approach after replacing Trent Edwards as the starter in Week 3 of last season. Edwards was then cut a week later.

Numbers aside, Fitzpatrick has established himself as a team leader. During the lockout, he helped organize several player workouts, including one at his native Arizona, where he had his teammates stay at his house.

The work has paid off given how the passing attack has remained productive despite a group of no-name receivers after Buffalo lost two regulars to season-ending injuries and traded its most proven threat, Lee Evans, to Baltimore in August. The Bills currently rank 10th in the NFL in yards gained, and third with 188 points scored.

Word of Fitzpatrick's contract drew praise from his teammates, who posted notes on their respective Twitter accounts.

"Congrats to my Dawg FitzMagic on his deal. Good to have him locked back in Buff!!" wrote running back Fred Jackson.

Linebacker Danny Batten called the deal "well deserved," while receiver Stevie Johnson tweeted that Fitzpatrick ? whose last name has been butchered in being referred to as "Fitzgerald" and even "Kilpatrick" on numerous occasions ? might well be "finally famous."

The Bills had such confidence in Fitzpatrick's potential that he essentially awarded him the starting job at the end of last year. The Bills backed up that trust by not selecting a quarterback in the draft, while adding journeyman Tyler Thigpen in free agency in July with the sole intention of using him as a backup.

Don't expect him to change his easygoing demeanor, or suddenly start placing any additional pressure on himself.

"I've been a quarterback my whole life, and that's what it's been for me my whole life," Fitzpatrick said. "I welcome the challenge. It's something that I feel like, throughout my career, I've excelled when the odds were stacked against me, and I've excelled when the pressure has been on me. And I'm looking forward to doing it some more."

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

advertisement

More news

Eagles-Cowboys a tough call

PFT picks: Week 8 has some tough choices, and the Cowboys-Eagles game has Mike Florio and Gregg Rosenthal split.

Karl Walter / Getty Images

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/45078688/ns/sports-nfl/

ohio news caracal beef wellington beef wellington ronnie brown man up man up

Report says security improved in Afghanistan (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Despite improvements to security in Afghanistan, militants operating from safe havens in Pakistan and chronic problems with the Kabul government pose significant risks to a "durable, stable Afghanistan," according to a Pentagon progress report released Friday.

More than a decade since the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the start of the Afghan war, the U.S. and its allies have reversed violent trends in much of the country and the transition to Afghans taking charge of security has begun in seven key areas, including major cities such as Kabul and Herat.

"Security gains during (the past six months) have provided a firm foundation for the transition of security responsibilities to the Afghan government" and its security forces, the report said.

However, cross-border attacks have increased in recent months due to insurgents' safe havens in Pakistan and the support they received from within its borders.

"The insurgency remains resilient and, enabled by Pakistani safe havens, continues to contest" Afghan security forces throughout the country, especially in the east, according to the semi-annual report sent to Congress.

The report also identified chronic problems with the Afghan government, including widespread corruption, delays in reforms and political disputes, as obstacles to U.S. and coalition efforts to get Kabul to take over security for the country.

The Unites States has some 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and plans to bring most forces home by the end of 2014. President Barack Obama announced this past summer that 10,000 troops will be redeployed by the end of the year. The 33,000 troops that Obama sent as a surge force will be out by the end of September 2012, leaving about 68,000 troops.

"Transition remains on track with no demonstrated effort by the insurgency to target the process," the report said.

Overall, the report gives a more upbeat assessment of the military strategy and its future prospects. For the first time in several years, the report does not describe the progress in Afghanistan as "fragile and reversible" ? an omission that a senior defense official said Friday was deliberate.

Instead, the report focused on the continuing risk areas, such as the safe havens in Pakistan and weak governing in Kabul.

The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publically on the issue, said that U.S. and coalition forces will be turning more attention to the eastern border region. But the official could provide no details on what that would look like, or if it will mean a substantial shift in U.S. troops to the embattled region.

The latest progress report ? the last one was in April ? strikes a more critical tone than previous Pentagon reports about Pakistan's failure to crack down on safe havens for militants along the border with Afghanistan, arguing that these havens enable insurgents considered the greatest threat to American troops.

The report said the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan had improved early on, but several events severely strained those ties. Most notably was the May 2 U.S. raid deep inside Pakistan that led to the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Cross-border attacks diminished in August, but high-profile attacks in September, including the assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, were a significant setback.

The report said these attacks "were carried out by the Haqqani network and directly enabled by Pakistani safe haven and support."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who directs day-to-day military operations in Afghanistan, told reporters on Thursday that the attacks are about four times more frequent than they had been in the past year.

The United States in recent weeks has stepped up criticism of Pakistan and its counterterrorism cooperation but has at the same time sought to cajole the increasingly angry and resistant Pakistanis into doing more. As tensions rose between Washington and Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered an unusually blunt warning to the Pakistanis, saying during a visit to Kabul last week that they "must be part of the solution" to the Afghan conflict.

Clinton said the Obama administration expects the Pakistani government, military and intelligence services to "take the lead" in not only fighting insurgents based in Pakistan but also in encouraging Afghan militants to reconcile with Afghan society. She said the U.S. would go it alone if Pakistan chose not to heed the call.

After leaving Kabul, Clinton made the same points to Pakistani officials in Islamabad, where she led a high-level U.S. team, including CIA director David Petraeus, seeking to repair badly strained ties. Those meetings appear to have dulled the intensity of Pakistan's anger but there has not yet been any clear sign that the crisis is over.

Last month, then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said the Haqqani network, which is affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida, "acts as a veritable arm" of Pakistan's intelligence agency. Mullen accused the network of staging an attack against the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on Sept. 13 as well as a truck bombing that wounded 77 American soldiers. He claimed Pakistan's spy agency helped the group.

___

Associated Press reporters Matthew Lee and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this story.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111028/ap_on_go_co/us_us_afghanistan

philadelphia phillies sand dollar sand dollar just dance 3 just dance 3 cliff lee cliff lee

Chernobyl film hits home in post-Fukushima Japan (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) ? The film "Land of Oblivion" may revolve around victims of the Chernobyl disaster a quarter of a century ago, but Japanese audiences will see striking parallels with current-day headlines following the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Environmental damage, exclusion zones and radiation testing are just some of the images in the film that are redolent of the Fukushima catastrophe, which developed after a series of explosions was set off by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Writer-director Michale Boganim said she had wrapped up shooting and was editing the film when she saw the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant unfolding on television.

"It was very disturbing for me, like a repetition of history," she told the post-screening Q&A session at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

"Land of Oblivion" follows Anya, Olga Kurylenko of "Quantum of Solace," whose life is turned upside down when her firefighter husband Piotr is called away on their wedding day to fight a "forest fire" and does not return.

Plants start wilting and soldiers blockade roads but nobody knows what is happening in Pripyat, a city built for workers at the nearby power plant, until the government acknowledges the nuclear accident a couple of days later and the entire population of 50,000 is evacuated.

Ten years later, the once-idyllic Pripyat is a wasteland of abandoned Soviet apartments overrun with weeds, and Anya and other characters must cope with the trauma of having been forced to leave their homeland.

"I think that was a big trauma for many people, even more than the accident itself," said Boganim, who is primarily a documentary filmmaker but this time chose fiction to focus on the people over the events at the power plant.

The movie, produced by French company Les Films du Poisson, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last month.

"We don't see the explosions, it's suggested in the film. I didn't want to show it. I wanted people to feel the sensation of those who experienced Chernobyl. I wanted to show the drama," she said.

STRENGTH OF NATURE

The trauma of lost homeland is very real in Fukushima, where about 80,000 people were forced to evacuate due to the nuclear crisis and don't know when -- or even if -- they will be able to return to their homes within the 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone.

That has taken a heavy psychological toll, on top of lost jobs, fears of the long-term effects of radiation exposure, and even discrimination.

Boganim, who was born in Israel and studied film in Paris and London, said they shot the second half of the film in the actual exclusion zone of Pripyat, and filmed some interior scenes in houses where Chernobyl workers used to stay.

She said she wanted to show the contrast between nature and the industrial, with Pripyat an ideal location because the power plant had been built near abundant forests in what many people had called one of the most beautiful places in Ukraine.

In one scene, a bus rumbling toward the power plant passes by a sign that declares "We are the builders of our happiness" as darkening skies foreshadow the imminent catastrophe.

Animals sensed the disaster long before people had learned of it, and it is nature and wildlife that have returned first, while Pripyat remains a ghost town to this day.

"In a way, even though this power plant was constructed by human beings, in the end nature was stronger," she said.

The film clearly hit home for at least one Tokyo viewer.

"I thought it felt like our movie," a woman said.

(Editing by Elaine Lies and Idayu Suparto)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/japan/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111028/film_nm/us_tokyo_landofoblivion

lettuce recall zanesville ohio zanesville ohio light field camera world series game 1 exotic animals exotic animals

Alaska governor revamps gas pipeline pitch (AP)

JUNEAU, Alaska ? Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell proposed a new way forward on a natural gas pipeline Thursday, saying if demand for gas has shifted from the Lower 48 to Pacific Rim markets, the state must be willing to move with it.

Parnell, in a speech to an oil and gas industry group in Anchorage, said he wants the major North Slope players ? Exxon Mobil Corp., BP and ConocoPhillips ? to coalesce behind a project that would allow for liquefied natural gas to be shipped overseas. He wants them to do this under the framework of the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act. If they do, the state can be flexible, including talking tax and royalty terms, he said.

Parnell said the current proposal, a line that would run into Canada and provide gas for North America markets, appears stalled. And "status quo stalled talks" aren't acceptable to Alaskans, he said.

"We will not wait another legislative session for progress," Parnell said. "We want our gas unlocked for Alaskans' benefit and for the benefit of our children and grandchildren."

Parnell's proposition may be dicey: BP and ConocoPhillips have bristled at the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, going so far as to pursue their own project outside the confines of that act. That joint venture, Denali-The Alaska Gas Pipeline, ended without a successful project earlier this year.

Plus, there's no love lost between the three companies.

And given the frustration many lawmakers have with the lack of progress on a line, Parnell runs the risk of the Legislature doing more than simply changing timelines if he opens the door to revising the gasline inducement act.

Parnell has noted a change in project direction would likely require a change in timelines spelled out under the act.

TransCanada Corp. is working with Exxon to advance a line under the auspices of the gasline inducement act. TransCanada proposed a liquefied natural gas option but so far has generally focused on the longer pipeline, into Canada.

The shorter line, as initially proposed by TransCanada, would lead to Valdez, where gas would be liquefied and then shipped to market.

TransCanada, which won an exclusive license to pursue a line under the gasline inducement act, is moving ahead with a commitment of up to $500 million in reimbursable costs from the state.

It's been over a year since TransCanada ended a three-month "open season," a period of courting gas producers and seeking shipping commitments for a proposed line. TransCanada has cited both the lack of fiscal terms and resolution over disputed leases among its challenges in securing agreements.

Parnell said Thursday that a settlement had been reached with Exxon over the Point Thomson leases but that other interest-owners in the area haven't indicated publicly whether they'd sign off. Those companies include BP and ConocoPhillips.

A BP Alaska spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said his company and other owners asked to be involved in settlement talks but were not allowed. He said the proposed agreement is complex. And, "We are now working with the state and Exxon to understand both the settlement agreement and the development project that is embedded within the agreement."

A ConocoPhillips spokeswoman said she cannot comment on pending litigation.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111027/ap_on_re_us/us_alaska_pipeline

lady liberty the rum diary addams family in time cj wilson statue of liberty gold rush alaska

American Idol News: Kelly Clarkson Says She?s Not A Lesbian, Lauren Alaina?s Lost Some Weight & More!

It’s time for some American Idol news, folks. Yes, AI judge Steven Tyler is on the mend after suffering a fall in his hotel shower while in Paraguay this week. The accident left him with two missing teeth and cuts and bruises to his face. He set the record straight by telling Matt Lauer of ‘Today’ that he did not have a drug relapse and that he simply had a bout with food poisoning, ‘I started to get sick and I fell on my face and I just passed out. I woke up with the water running on me … and the next thing you know my tour manager was calling the American Embassy and we found the best hospital.” Speedy recovery to you, Steven! Kelly Clarkson appeared on ‘The View’ yesterday and once again addressed the rumors of her sexuality. No, she’s not a lesbian, telling the ladies, “I’m from a small town so, like, everyone’s married with children or about to have children. So it’s a little hard when you go home and people are like — and that’s why people think I’m gay — because they’re like ‘Why aren’t you married?’ And I’m like, ‘it doesn’t happen [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RightCelebrity/~3/G3M8kIAEIZc/

merce cunningham mona simpson mona simpson bcs rankings saints tim hightower tim hightower

Activists ask Lady Gaga to pose in lettuce dress (Reuters)

MUMBAI (Reuters) ? First, Lady Gaga wore a dress made of meat. Now, how about one made of lettuce?

Indian animal rights activists have asked pop star Lady Gaga to pose in a lettuce dress and embrace vegetarianism during her visit to India this weekend, where she will be part of the star-studded unveiling of the country's first Formula 1 race.

Lady Gaga, who famously wore a meat dress at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, will be performing at an invitation-only show in a five-star hotel in New Delhi after the race on Sunday.

In a letter to the singer's publicist, PETA India said it hoped she would honor India's reverence for animals by turning vegetarian for the duration of her visit and posing for photos in a lettuce gown to promote the importance of not eating meat.

"If she agrees, we'll make her a dress entirely of lettuce and held together by pins and threads. It will be a full length gown, and we'll make sure it looks sexy," said Sachin Bangera of PETA India.

The dress would be constructed leaf by leaf on the singer's body, taking some five to six hours.

"Someone will be on hand to spray the lettuce with water so that it doesn't wilt," Bangera added.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Indian chat show host Simi Garewal, Lady Gaga said she would like to soak up the local culture by taking an Indian cooking class.

Excitement has been bubbling all week about the country's first Formula 1 Grand Prix, which is seen as a symbol of India's growing global clout while also highlighting its enormous disparities in wealth.

(Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Elaine Lies)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/music/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111028/music_nm/us_india_ladygaga

roasted pumpkin seeds tashard choice tashard choice amityville horror aaron rodgers puss in boots the rum diary trailer

Testimony ends in NY arms trial of ex-Soviet pilot (AP)

NEW YORK ? The government completed presenting evidence Friday in the weapons dealing case against a former Soviet officer known as the Merchant of Death, and defense lawyers called no witnesses, setting the stage for closing arguments next week.

Prosecutors finished with two witnesses who testified that they saw Viktor Bout in the 1990s watching planes being loaded with weapons and soldiers in East Africa for a trip to the Congo.

The testimony seemed meant to buttress the government's portrayal of Bout as a powerful international weapons dealer who eagerly stepped into a 2008 sting operation arranged by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In the sting, the focus of the trial in Manhattan federal court, two DEA operatives posed as anti-American rebels who wanted to buy weapons from Bout for use in Colombia.

One of those operatives, Ricardo Jardenero, testified Friday that he was introduced to Bout at a March 2008 meeting in a Bangkok hotel as The Commandant, a commanding officer of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He testified that Bout drew a picture of a surface-to-air missile to demonstrate a weapon that might be effective against U.S. pilots.

After the meeting, Bout was arrested and held in Thailand prisons until he was extradited to the United States for trial last year over the objections of Russia.

Jardenero, the government's final witness, came immediately after two witnesses testified that they saw Bout overseeing weapons shipments in Africa in 1998.

James Roberts, who lives in Africa, testified that he was working for Bout as a pilot in the fall of 1998 when he saw weapons, ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades being loaded onto planes by soldiers in military uniforms. On one occasion, he said, he saw Bout on the runway near the aircraft. Another time, he said, he watched 200 to 300 soldiers go onto a plane destined for the Congo.

Charles Mukoto, of East Africa, testified that he saw Bout on many occasions in East Africa "supervising" the movement of cargo that included high-powered assault rifles, small tanks and mortars. He said he also saw soldiers boarding planes and Bout meeting with senior military officials.

As defense lawyers objected to efforts by prosecutors to elicit more testimony about the soldiers who boarded the planes, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin stopped Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan McGuire from getting an answer to the question: "What, if anything, were the soldiers carrying?"

"Obviously they weren't carrying pens," defense attorney Albert Dayan said.

The lawyer has maintained that Bout was a legitimate businessman who did not know what was contained in the shipments he brokered before the United Nations in 2004 severely restricted where he could travel, forcing a shutdown of his transport business.

After calling no witnesses, the defense asked the judge to throw out the charges on the grounds that the government had failed to prove its case, a common request defense lawyers make at trials prior to closing arguments. The judge declined.

Bout, 44, has pleaded not guilty. If convicted of conspiracy charges, he could face life in prison.

The Merchant of Death moniker was attached to Bout by a high-ranking minister at Britain's Foreign Office, who had drawn attention to his 1990s notoriety for running a fleet of aging Soviet-era cargo planes to conflict-ridden hotspots in Africa.

The nickname was included in the U.S. government's indictment of Bout, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara referenced it when he announced Bout's extradition last year, saying: "The so-called Merchant of Death is now a federal inmate."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111029/ap_on_re_us/us_arms_suspect

amazing race michael oher showtime the prisoner the prisoner gene simmons my bloody valentine

Japan factory output posts first post-quake slump (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) ? Japanese factory output fell in September for the first time since the devastating March earthquake, a sign the economy's recovery from the disaster is tailing off in the face of slowing global growth, the strong yen and Europe's lingering debt woes.

The 4.0 percent September decline was bigger than expected and the impact of Thailand's floods on some industries may add to the output woes and push the world's third-biggest economy into a fresh soft patch, some analysts say.

Japan's economy had been emerging from a recession triggered by the March disaster as companies restored supply chains damaged in the quake. Manufacturers surveyed by the government expect output to rise in October and November.

But some analysts say the yen's gains, a weak global economy and the Thai floods may mean the forecasts are too optimistic.

"Having rebounded following the March disaster, factory output is likely to stall until the year-end as overseas demand weakens," said Yuichi Kodama, chief economist at Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance.

"There is the possibility that manufacturers' forecasts for October and November will be downgraded as overseas economies including emerging nations are slowing down, which could weigh on Japan's exports in the October-December quarter."

September's fall in industrial output was nearly double a median market forecast for a 2.1 percent decline and followed a 0.6 percent rise in August, data by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry showed on Friday.

It was the first post-quake decline and -- excluding the 15.5 percent slump in March caused by the disaster -- was the biggest fall since February 2009, when the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers hit global demand.

A fall in general machinery output, such as chip production equipment, was a major contributor to the fall, reflecting not only weaker demand growth from overseas but the impact of the strong yen on Japan's export competitiveness, analysts said.

MORE RISKS AHEAD

The ministry cut its assessment on industrial output to say it was flat as manufacturers it surveyed expect production to rise just 2.3 percent in October and 1.8 percent in November, barely enough to offset the steep decline in September.

The forecasts do not take into account the effect of output disruptions caused by the severe flood in Thailand as they were made before it happened, a ministry official told a briefing.

Several Japanese companies with operations in Thailand have been impacted by the floods, with many forced to shut down factories. Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said on Thursday it would suspend Thai production for a fourth week and reduce output as far afield as North America and South Africa.

The Japanese output data underscores the Bank of Japan's view that the yen's strength and slackening global growth are threatening recovery, which led it to ease monetary policy for the second time in three months on Thursday.

It may have to boost monetary stimulus again, possibly in tandem with currency intervention by the finance ministry, if the yen's rise persists or a plan to staunch the euro zone sovereign debt crisis agreed this week fails to produce lasting results.

"Companies are forecasting gains in production in the future, but there is a chance that production could undershoot these forecasts as that has happened in the past few months," said Shuji Tonouchi, senior fixed income strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.

"It is clear that the government and the BOJ are worried about the yen and overseas economies, so there is a chance of intervention or additional easing."

Finance Minister Jun Azumi repeated his warning that Tokyo was prepared to step into currency markets if needed, as the yen hovered near a record high around 75.90 to the dollar.

"Currencies should reflect economic fundamentals. We are very worried about speculative moves and will take decisive measures when necessary," Azumi told reporters on Friday.

Other data also pointed to mounting risks to the recovery.

Energy costs pushed up core consumer prices in September, but a narrower measure showed that costs continued to decline as falling wages and worries about the global economy threaten to dampen consumption. Separate data showed that household spending fell in September from a year earlier, for a seventh consecutive monthly decline.

The BOJ on Thursday cut its economic forecasts because of slowing global growth, but still predicts a moderate economic recovery in the next two years, underpinned by reconstruction spending at home and the resilience of emerging economies.

That is largely in line with a Reuters poll, which forecast this month that Japan's economy would grow 0.2 percent in the fiscal year through next March and 2.2 percent in the following year.

(Editing by Edmund Klamann and Neil Fullick)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111028/bs_nm/us_japan_economy

kia sorento kia sorento james dean tv guide listings buddy holly buddy holly baylor

Internet responsible for 2 per cent of global energy usage

Jim Giles, consultant

(Image: Denis Doyle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

How much energy does the internet use? It's hard to know where to start. There's the electricity consumed by the world's laptops, desktops and smart phones. Servers, routers and other networking equipment suck up more power. The energy required to manufacture these machines also needs to be included. Yet no one knows how many internet-enabled devices are out there, nor how long they are used before being replaced.

That hasn't stopped Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan from trying to answer the question. The pair, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the nearby International Computer Science Institute respectively, estimate that the internet consumes between 170 and 307 GW. Which, of course, raises another question: is that is a big number, or a small one?

Raghavan and Ma came up with their total by conducting a rough internet census. By drawing on previously published research, they estimate that our planet is home to 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers.

They also put figures on the energy that it costs to produce each of these devices (4.5 GJ and 1 GJ for a laptop and smartphone respectively) and the period for which each is used before being replaced (three years for a laptop, two for a smart phone). Estimates for the energy that cell towers and optical switches use when transmitting internet traffic, plus similar calculations for wi-fi transmitters and cloud storage devices, helped complete the picture.

Their final answer sounds big. A gigawatt is a billion watts, so running and maintaining the internet is like illuminating several billion 100W bulbs simultaneously. But it's a small number compared with global energy use across all sectors. That figure is 16 terawatts, so the internet is responsible for less than 2 per cent of the energy used by humanity.

Raghavan and Ma suggest that attempts to create more energy-efficient internet devices, while worth pursuing, will not do much to lower global energy consumption. Instead, they propose that we should think about how the internet can replace more energy-intensive activities. Their calculations show that a meeting that takes place by video-conference uses an average of one hundredth as much energy as one in which participants took a flight so that they could sit down together. Replacing just one in four of those meetings by a video call, they add, would save as much power as the entire internet consumes.

The research will be presented next month at the Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1993298e/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A110C10A0C30A70Egw0Ethe0Emaximum0Eenergy0Ethe0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

lion king 3d lion king 3d the lion king 3d the lion king 3d missoni maker faire the hub

Baidu Q3 beats, sees strong Q4 sales (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Shares of Chinese search engine Baidu Inc surged more than 7 percent on Thursday after the company topped Wall Street financial targets, shrugging off concerns that a weakening Chinese economy could hamper its growth.

Baidu said spending by large customers was significantly better than it expected in the third quarter, and the company's forecast of up to 8.6 percent sequential revenue growth in the fourth quarter outpaced the 4.8 percent increase expected by analysts.

"We are seeing an acceleration in search and Baidu is also gaining share, which is benefiting them," said Collins Stewart analyst Mayuresh Masurekar.

"Baidu should be able to grow strongly despite any slowdown in the China economy because online advertising is gaining share from traditional advertising, it's a secular shift," he said.

Shares of Baidu were up 7.2 percent at $148.50 in after-hours trading on Thursday. Chinese Internet companies Sohu.com Inc and Sina Corp were up more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.

China, with more than 450 million users, is the world's largest Internet market. Yet, with Internet penetration hovering around 30 percent and user sophistication outside the big cities still low, the potential for growth is huge.

Baidu has solidified its position as the dominant search engine in China since Google Inc's decision in 2010 to relocate its search engine to Hong Kong, following a standoff with the Chinese government over Internet censorship.

But Baidu is facing fresh competition from Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings Ltd, two other Chinese Internet giants.

In August, Baidu suffered a barrage of negative publicity after China Central Television ran programs accusing the company of having lax approval processes on its paid-advertising platform and slamming it for not policing its message-board product Tieba for "slanderous" remarks.

Analysts said the criticisms did not have a negative material impact on the company and was driven mostly by competitive pressure.

For the third quarter, Baidu reported net income of $295 million, or 84 cents per share. On an adjusted basis, the company earned 86 cents a share in the period.

Analysts on average expected the company to post a profit of 83 cents a share.

Total revenue rose 85 percent to $654.7 million, above its own forecast of $611.1 million to $626.6 million.

ThinkEquity analyst Henry Guo said Baidu's results and revenue forecast show that advertiser spending on Internet search advertising remains healthy. But he said that there are still concerns about what ad spending will look like in 2012 given the economic uncertainty.

He said he hoped Baidu might provide more details on its views of the economy and the year ahead during a conference call slated for later on Thursday.

Baidu said it expects fourth-quarter revenue of $691.4 million to $711.0 million, above analysts' forecasts of $649.5 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Shares in Baidu, whose name is taken from an ancient Chinese poem, closed up 6 percent at $138.39 on Nasdaq. They have gained 36 percent so far this year.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Soham Chatterjee in Bangalore, with additional reporting by Melanie Lee in Shanghai; Editing by Gary Hill)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/search/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111027/wr_nm/us_baidu_results

boo tonga irb super bowl 2011 super bowl 2011 blackout blackout

Romanian film, theater director Liviu Ciulei dies (AP)

BUCHAREST, Romania ? Liviu Ciulei, a Romanian film and theater director whose career spanned 50 years and included a top award at the Cannes Film Festival, has died. He was 88.

Ciulei ? who also served as the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and taught at universities in New York ? died on Monday night at a hospital in Munich, the German city where he lived, said Romanian actor Ion Caramitru.

"An era has died! A genius had died!" said Caramitru, who heads Romania's UNITER theater union. "Without Liviu Ciulei, there would be no Romanian theater."

No cause of death was given.

As an actor, director and set designer, Ciulei was the most influential figure of Romanian theater and film in a generation. He won the Palme d'Or award at Cannes in 1965 for the film "The Forest of the Hanged," and he made more than 20 movies, both as an actor and a director.

Romanian President Traian Basescu paid homage to Ciulei on Tuesday, saying he belonged to an "elite generation" that created a "valuable and original" drama school, both in Romania and abroad. He called Ciulei's artistic vision "classic and modern, extremely clear and contemporary."

Ciulei studied theater and architecture in Bucharest and began his acting career in 1946 as the character Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He began to direct in 1957.

For 10 years he was artistic director at Bucharest's prestigious Bulandra Theater.

From 1980 to 1985, he held the same position at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. In 1982, the theater received a Tony Award for its outstanding contribution to the American Theater. Ciulei drew national and international attention to the theater and its productions, the organization says on its website.

After that, Ciulei taught at Columbia University and New York University.

He is survived by his son, Thomas Ciulei, and wife, Helga Reiter-Ciulei.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/movies/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111025/ap_en_mo/eu_romania_obit_ciulei

apple update download ios 5 pokey find my mac gumby derrick mason derrick mason

PhotoBlog: 9 die, cars pile up in Italy floods

Fabio Muzzi / AFP - Getty Images

People try to cross a street as water runs through in Monterosso, one of the villages that make up the Five Lands after overnight floods, Oct. 26.

Riccardo Dalle Luche / EPA

Residents view cars piled up after heavy floods in Aulla, Massa Carrara, Italy, on October 26. At least five people were killed in overnight rains and flooding in Italy's northwestern and central regions of Liguria and Tuscany, officials said.

Fabio Muzzi / AFP - Getty Images

A man walks on mud and debris between broken cars in a street of Monterosso, one of the five villages that make up the Five Lands after overnight floods, on Oct. 26, in the Spezia region. The areas worst hit by the floods in Italy were the Spezia region and the picturesque Five Lands tourist destination.

Luca Zennaro / EPA

A distraught woman surveys the scene of devastation in front of a destroyed house in Brugnato, Liguria, Wednesday, Oct. 26, after torrential rain caused flooding and landslides in Liguria and Tuscany. At least seven people have been reported missing. Phone lines have been brought down and there have been power cuts in some areas.

Phaedra Singelis writes

Heavy rains caused sudden flooding in Liguria and Tuscany in northwest Italy. In the hardest hit area of 'Cinque Terre' (or Five Lands), towns were cut off as roads were washed away. At least nine people were killed and more were still?missing.?Full story.

Source: http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/26/8494071-flash-floods-and-mudslides-cause-havoc-in-italy

camaro zl1 bob sanders evan longoria janeane garofalo janeane garofalo neil degrasse tyson neil degrasse tyson

PFT: Bills put Merriman on injured reserve

Getty Images

This week?s Sports Illustrated catches up with JaMarcus Russell to find out how the 2007 first overall draft pick views his failed career, now that he?s out of football at age 26. Among the details: Russell feels some ill will toward former coach Tom Cable, thinks his teammates deserve as much blame as he does for the Raiders? problems, and says the reason he had trouble staying awake in team meetings is that he has sleep apnea.

?In the NFL, my first year, I had to be there at 6:30 [a.m.] before practice and be on the treadmill for an hour,? Russell said. ?Then meetings come, I sit down, eat my fruit. We watch film, and maybe I got tired. Coach Flip [quarterback coach John DeFilippo] pulled me aside and said, ?What are you doing for night life?? I said, ?Coach, I?m just chilling.? He said, ?I need to get you checked out.? I did the sleep test, and they said I had apnea.?

The Raiders went 7-18 in the 25 games Russell started, and he says it upsets him that he?s always singled out as the reason the Raiders were losers during his three-year tenure with the club.

?Things weren?t going right, and it felt sometimes like everything fell back on me,? Russell said. ?I take some responsibility, but I was one guy. . . . I may have missed a throw, but I didn?t give up 42 points, I didn?t miss a block.?

Russell also said his coach, Tom Cable, betrayed him by blaming him for the Raiders? problems.

?I stuck my neck out for him,? Russell said of Cable. ?Didn?t complain when he benched me as the starter. Didn?t complain when he called the same plays five damn times. Didn?t [badmouth] him to other coaches. When the [media] asks me, I say, ?He?s a good coach, a good guy.? Then I hear he says I was the worst thing ever happened to the Raiders, if it weren?t for him we?d be in the playoffs??

If Russell thinks this kind of interview is going to rehabilitate his public image, he?s wrong. The best thing Russell could do now is own up to his failings as the Raiders? quarterback. Or say nothing at all.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/10/25/bills-put-shawne-merriman-on-injured-reserve/related/

mayweather vs ortiz ncaa football 12 ncaa football 12 direct tv lion king photon plane crash

Obama welcomes Europe's plan for dealing with debt

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama says Europe's new debt plan lays a "critical foundation" for a comprehensive solution to the continent's financial crisis.

In a statement, Obama says the U.S. looks forward to the rapid implementation of the plan. European leaders agreed to a deal Thursday to have banks take bigger losses on Greece's debts and to boost the region's weapons against market turmoil.

Obama says he will continue to support European allies in their efforts to address the financial crisis. The president will meet with some European leaders next week in France during the G-20 world financial meeting.

The president has said economic instability in Europe has been a drag on the U.S. economy.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-10-27-Obama-Europe/id-2a878e36c3604977954f04636cc261db

neutrinos autumnal equinox rob bell jaycee dugard meg whitman f8 f8

Fly on wall sees things it wishes it hadn?t

?Where there are humans,

you?ll find flies,

and Buddhas.?

?Kobayashi Issa

Each day, in each country, a housefly is born. Lots of houseflies really. Houseflies have been being born around us for thousands of years. They are born of what everyone else abandons, corpses, cakes, and excrement. And yet their story is inescapably a version of our story. They spread early out of Africa, bound to us. You find them wrapped in mummies, their bodies held tight against the bodies of pharaohs [1]. You find them in ancient latrines, as larvae, tunneling through what we would rather be done with. At picnics they sit on hot dogs. In bedrooms, they look down from walls. In war and tragedy, they mouth what we cannot even countenance. They brushed upon Gandhi, Mother Theresa and Caesar, but also Mussolini and you. And before they brushed upon you (or Mussolini) they brushed upon, well, you don?t want to know.

Fly foot (AKA tarsus)

Actually, you might want to know. Or at least some scientists think you might want to know. So it is that there is now a large book worth of scientific studies of just what can be found living on flies. All of these studies are interesting, some are a bit disgusting, and a new study from a pig farm in North Carolina is the kind of thing that might just change how you live your life.

Although we have seen houseflies for millennia, complained about them in a thousand languages using a hundred thousand adjectives, in some ways they are still among the least known guests at the table. No one knows where they come from (only that they had already found us as of five thousand years ago). No one knows what they did before they found us (though one imagines it involved decay). What we do know about houseflies is that they gather a little bit of life from everything they touch and redistribute it, a sort of Robin Hood of germs.

Some of the bacteria living on houseflies are their partners. Housefly eggs and larvae depend on beneficial bacteria (such as the species Klebsiella oxytoca) bestowed upon them by their mothers. These bacteria produce compounds that kill fungi and, in doing so, help hungry young flies outcompete those same fungi for their otherwise rapidly decaying food [2]. Others though are hangers on, gathered by accident as the flies bump around the world. When a fly lands, its sticky hairs become covered in bacteria, which can then be transferred to whatever the flies land on next (insert image 1 here). Flies also store bacteria (gathered from their food) in their alimentary tract. These germs are brought to new places in fly poop, but also?as one treatise on flies delicately puts it? ?in small droplets of regurgitated matter which have been called vomit spots.?

Just where do houseflies pick up these other bacteria, the ones the give back to us in vomit spots, feces and footsteps? Well, they find them in what we have abandoned, the remains on which they can survive. Once, houseflies emerged from horseshit by the billions (insert image 2 here). When that ran out (thanks to the invention of cars), they turned to our garbage and so we collected it more frequently and took it far away. When the garbage become rare (some places, though not everywhere), they found the dog waste we left behind in cities. And now that New Yorkers, for instance, in their fancy shoes and dark clothes, gather the dog poop in bags, the flies have found those places we have taken our waste to hide it from them (and from ourselves . At garbage dumps flies flock in dense halos. They are born too out of the rough parts of towns?smoke signals of neglect. They have even found the places we have moved our animals, the modern mangers of chickens and pigs where waste is dumped into vast pools (insert image 3 here). Here, their naked children eclose as writhing maggots only to be born again later to their, hairy, adult, flying forms.

It is among these last flies that my friend Coby Schal recently decided to spend some of his days [3]. Coby has studied insects at pig farms for a while. There are probably worse places to study insects, though I can?t think of them right now. Coby has looked at the movement of roaches from one pig farm to another, but what he wanted to study with the flies was something different. Along with colleagues at Kansas State University, Coby wanted to know just what was being carried aloft as those flies rose. Flies, incidentally, take care in their rise. They bend their legs a little and, ever so gingerly, bounce, while flapping their wings.

Horse and housefly. This is not really the relationship I was talking about, but this drawing was too funny to resist. Certainly, the idea of houseflies riding into cities on horses is right, it is just that they would be riding a little further back. From the funny houseflies collection.

Coby and his colleagues found fecal bacteria in 93.7% of the flies at the pig farm (The aptly named Enterococcus faecalis was the most common species). This came as no surprise. Houseflies the world over carry fecal bacteria. The surprise was many of those bacteria were resistant to antibiotics, such as tetracycline and erythromycin, antibiotics used to treat human bacterial diseases [4]. Such resistant forms, so-called superbugs, can kill, and while finding them on flies near pig farms does not guarantee they are making their way from the farms to our bodies via flies, it certainly suggests the possibility.

But why would the flies in pig farms tend to have antibiotic resistant bacteria? Herein lies the secret you might not have heard. Most pigs in the U.S., as well as most farm animals more generally, are fed antibiotics. By some estimates, eighty percent of antibiotics produced in the U.S. are used on animals. The antibiotics are not used to treat infections. Instead they serve solely to promote rapid growth, to make your bacon or burger cheaper and faster. As an evolutionary side effect when pigs are fed those antibiotics their weak bacteria, those susceptible to the antibiotics being used, die. Those most likely to survive are the lineages resistant to antibiotics, the tough mothers. If isolated on pig farms, all of this is imprudent but not tragic in as much as it seems isolated, faraway from our daily lives. Then the flies enter the story.

Canoe ride anyone? This is a typical waste pond at a pig facility. From a distance (or in a photo) it seems pleasant enough, but that pleasantness is an illusion.

Houseflies can fly and they can do so more effectively than you might imagine. They fly with the wind, but even against it. Individual houseflies have been recorded having traveled more than ten miles [5]. Consider the geography of farms. Imagine the flies rising up from them and flying toward you. Whatever new resistant strains of bacteria they bear may be closer than you think. They might be tapping at your window now or, as Chekhov said of them, ?brushing against the ceiling,? their bodies bouncing along as they leave their bacteria behind.

Humans tend to dislike successful animals. We scorn the murders of crows, the flocks of starlings and the even the ants that boil up around and into our houses. Their bodies seem vulgar. The flies though, we conclude, are not just loathsome but dirty and even, in the context of Coby Schal?s new study, potentially deadly. This is one lesson to take from the flies, but the wrong one. The real truth they offer, if we pay attention, is more about the nature of humans than it is the nature of flies. Anopheles mosquitoes are vectors of malaria, but houseflies, well, they are vectors of what we leave behind, carrying it back to us, as though to say, ?Over here! You forgot something?? They are the messenger nobody asked for, bearing the messages nobody wants, whether about the overuse of antibiotics or some other of our failings. And so go ahead and kill the messenger, but heed the message. Meanwhile, billions of fly eggs are ready to hatch out of whatever we leave behind.

1-Panagiotakopulu E, Buckland PC, Kemp BJ (2010) Underneath Ranefer?s floors?urban environments on the desert edge. J Archaeol Sci, 37:474?481

2-Zvereva EL (1986b) Peculiarities of competitive interaction between larvae of the house fly Musca domestica and microscopic fungi. Zoologicheskii Zhurnal 65:1517?1525, Lam K, Thu K, Tsang M, Moore M, Gries G. 2009. Bacteria on housefly eggs, Musca domestica, suppress fungal growth in chicken manure through nutrient depletion or antifungal metabolites. Naturwissenschaften, 96 :1127-1132.

3-Well, and to send his students, postdocs and technicians, to spend theirs.

4-Ahmad A., A. Ghosh, C. Schal, and L. Zurek. 2011. Insects in confined swine operations carry a large antibiotic resistant and potentially virulent enterococcal community. BMC Microbiology, 11:23.

5-Chakrabarti S, Kambhaampati Zurek L. 2010. Assessment of house fly dispersal between rural and urban habitats in Kansas, USA. J Kans Entomol Soc, 83:172-188.

Images:

Image 1. Fly foot (AKA tarsus)

Image 2. Horse and housefly. This is not really the relationship I was talking about, but this drawing was too funny to resist. Certainly, the idea of houseflies riding into cities on horses is right, it is just that they would be riding a little further back. From the funny houseflies collection.

Image 3. Canoe ride anyone? This is a typical waste pond at a pig facility. From a distance (or in a photo) it seems pleasant enough, but that pleasantness is an illusion.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=59652006c462deb0601bb858959b6f37

kim zolciak kim zolciak aziz ansari aziz ansari corn maze icloud kroy biermann

'Junk DNA' defines differences between humans and chimps

ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2011) ? For years, scientists believed the vast phenotypic differences between humans and chimpanzees would be easily explained -- the two species must have significantly different genetic makeups. However, when their genomes were later sequenced, researchers were surprised to learn that the DNA sequences of human and chimpanzee genes are nearly identical. What then is responsible for the many morphological and behavioral differences between the two species?

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have now determined that the insertion and deletion of large pieces of DNA near genes are highly variable between humans and chimpanzees and may account for major differences between the two species.

The research team lead by Georgia Tech Professor of Biology John McDonald has verified that while the DNA sequence of genes between humans and chimpanzees is nearly identical, there are large genomic "gaps" in areas adjacent to genes that can affect the extent to which genes are "turned on" and "turned off." The research shows that these genomic "gaps" between the two species are predominantly due to the insertion or deletion (INDEL) of viral-like sequences called retrotransposons that are known to comprise about half of the genomes of both species. The findings are reported in the most recent issue of the online, open-access journal Mobile DNA.

"These genetic gaps have primarily been caused by the activity of retroviral-like transposable element sequences," said McDonald. "Transposable elements were once considered 'junk DNA' with little or no function. Now it appears that they may be one of the major reasons why we are so different from chimpanzees."

McDonald's research team, composed of graduate students Nalini Polavarapu, Gaurav Arora and Vinay Mittal, examined the genomic gaps in both species and determined that they are significantly correlated with differences in gene expression reported previously by researchers at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

"Our findings are generally consistent with the notion that the morphological and behavioral differences between humans and chimpanzees are predominately due to differences in the regulation of genes rather than to differences in the sequence of the genes themselves," said McDonald.

The current analysis of the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees was motivated by the group's previously published findings (2009) that the higher propensity for cancer in humans vs. chimpanzees may have been a by-product of selection for increased brain size in humans.

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Nalini Polavarapu, Gaurav Arora, Vinay K Mittal, John F McDonald. Characterization and potential functional significance of human-chimpanzee large INDEL variation. Mobile DNA, 2011; 2: 13 DOI: 10.1186/1759-8753-2-13

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/5cuIu0-GIRE/111025122615.htm

michael jackson autopsy michael jackson autopsy liberace liberace repudiate avengers joost

Feds fight producer's bid to overturn extradition (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to reject a reality TV producer's petition to overturn an extradition order on allegations that he killed his wife during a vacation in Mexico.

The filing Monday by prosecutors in Los Angeles argues that attorneys for ex-"Survivor" producer Bruce Beresford-Redman haven't presented credible conflicting evidence that would warrant overturning the order authorizing his return to Cancun to stand trial.

Beresford-Redman filed a brief in September arguing that the magistrate judge's extradition ruling didn't take into account evidence favorable to him. He was charged with aggravated homicide after his wife Monica was found dead at an upscale resort in April 2010.

The latest filing says the judge considered evidence presented by Beresford-Redman, but didn't find it compelling.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111025/ap_en_ot/us_producer_s_wife_killed

miguel cabrera pay it forward pay it forward haunted houses favicon.ico favicon.ico nascar

Communications Associate | IABC

A New Leaf, nonprofit human services agency is seeking a part-time (25-29 hrs weekly) E-Communications Associate for the East Valley based Development office. This position includes writing, maintaining and enhancing the website, blogs and social media facets including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube along with the creation of videos and collateral, analytics and libraries while keeping up on trends and information for the agency?s 20 programs.

Additional responsibilities include public relations and written development projects revolving around fundraising and branding as well as some data entry and general office duties.

Requirements include:
? Bachelor?s degree or a minimum of 3 years experience in a Development, Marketing or Communications position
? Excellent written and oral communications
? Experience with electronic communications including website administration
? Ability to prioritize, meet deadlines and multi-task
? Team player with forethought and insight to take ownership of projects
? Positive attitude with excellent customer service skills

Cover letters and resumes may be submitted to cthompson@TurnaNewLeaf.org
A New Leaf is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Source: http://www.iabcphoenix.com/communications-associate/

the prisoner gene simmons my bloody valentine mario manningham mario manningham holes houston texans

Turkish tanks move on N.Iraq, near PKK camp -sources (Reuters)

ISTANBUL (Reuters) ? Turkish tanks and armored vehicles crossed into northern Iraq headed in the direction of a Kurdish militant camp, Turkish security sources said Monday.

The incursion came as cross-border operations continued in the wake of last week's attack by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters that killed 24 Turkish soldiers.

The armored column was headed in the direction of a militant camp at Haftanin, around 20 km (12 miles) from the Habur border post, and near the Iraqi city of Zakho, the sources said.

(Istanbul newsroom)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iraq/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111024/wl_nm/us_turkey_iraq_armour

rachel zoe gerard butler brady hoke brady hoke scarlett johansson ali lohan new york election

Joe the Plumber plans big news on bid for Congress (AP)

TOLEDO, Ohio ? Joe the Plumber, who became a household name after questioning Barack Obama about his economic policies during the 2008 presidential campaign, will announce Tuesday whether he plans to run for Congress in Ohio.

Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher's statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission earlier this month says he plans to run as a Republican in Ohio's 9th U.S. House district.

The seat is now held by Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving Democratic woman in the House. She's expected to face a primary challenge from Rep. Dennis Kucinich after Ohio's redrawn congressional map combined their two districts into one that appears to heavily tilted toward Democrats.

Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman Rob Frost who had announced he would seek the GOP nomination dropped out last week, clearing the way for Wurzelbacher who recently launched the website http://www.joeforcongress2012.com.

Wurzelbacher, 37, is now an icon for many anti-establishment conservatives and has built a national following that should help him raise money if he runs.

He's also written a book, worked with a veterans' organization that provides outdoor programs for wounded soldiers and traveled the country speaking at tea party rallies and conservative gatherings.

He's shown a disdain for politicians ? both Democrat and Republican.

"Being a politician is as good as being a weatherman," Wurzelbacher said at a tea party rally last year in Nevada. "You don't have to be right, you don't have to do your job well, but you'll still have a job."

Wurzelbacher went from toiling as a plumber in suburban Toledo three years ago to media sensation in a matter of days.

After questioning then-candidate Obama about his economic policies, Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain repeatedly cited "Joe the plumber" in a presidential debate. Wurzelbacher campaigned with McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, but he criticized McCain in his book and said he did not want him as the GOP presidential nominee.

Wurzelbacher also became a target for Democrats.

Ohio's former human services director and others were accused of misusing state computers to illegally access his personal information. A judge dismissed a lawsuit Wurzelbacher filed that said his rights were violated.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/uscongress/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111025/ap_on_el_ho/us_joe_the_plumber_congress

draya michele draya michele ozzie guillen ozzie guillen kevin smith kevin smith washington monument

Women making slow, sure strides in science, math (AP)

For many of the women, the chemistry lab was a home away from home ? a sorority for nerds, of sorts, that hints at the slow but steady shift in technical fields that have been traditionally filled with men.

Rebecca Allred has fond memories of that lab at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. She and her peers spent hours there. They worked into the night for their professor, Elizabeth Harbron, because they wanted to, blowing off steam by dancing to the soundtrack of "Mamma Mia" or taking a break on Fridays to play Putt-Putt golf together.

Harbron was not only their mentor, but often a confidante. They shared their frustrations. They celebrated their successes. Several published their findings with Harbron's guidance, a rarity for undergraduates.

"That lab was a refuge between classes. I loved being there," says Allred, now a second-year doctoral student in the Yale University chemistry department and one of a new generation of young women who are helping change the face of the so-called STEM fields ? science, technology, engineering and math.

Though she was happy to help blaze the path for them, Harbron says she didn't set out to create an all-women's lab. It happened naturally. Students like Allred sought her out because they liked her informal, lively teaching style.

"I don't want to become a female ghetto of over-achieving white girls," Harbron jokes, referring to the general makeup of her lab these days. Then she asks more seriously: "But am I just perpetuating the model that's gotten us where we are?"

In other words, she wonders, has she inadvertently created the female version of the "old boys' network"?

Whatever the answer, it's hard to argue with her results: her lab has become a place where these young women gained confidence to match their abilities, she says.

Many, like Allred, have gone on to graduate programs.

That's a big deal in the STEM fields, which have been slower than other disciplines to integrate women at the highest levels.

With two-thirds of all undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of master's degrees now going to women, many believe it's only a matter of time before that trend influences the upper echelons of the STEM fields.

Already, statistics from the Council of Graduate Schools show that women, overall, earned slightly more than half of the doctorates handed out in all disciplines in the United States in 2009 and 2010. When it comes to the STEM fields, women have been most successful in medicine and biology ? and least successful in engineering, math and computer science.

But experts hope that, too, will change. A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it's 3 to 1.

"You gotta fill up the pipeline and support these good people and, after a while, things get straightened out," says Thomas Pollard, dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which includes Allred's program.

Some would argue that that pipeline is still too leaky in the STEM fields.

"In an ideal world you'd expect that it'd catch up, but it doesn't quite catch up because we're still losing women at every level," says Ted Greenwood, a former director with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds several STEM programs that target women and minorities.

That said, he and others note that women are still making more progress than minorities, particularly black men.

And even in fields like chemistry, engineering and math, the percentages of women who received doctorates still has steadily increased over the last decade, according to the Council of Graduate Schools report.

Rebecca Allred's path to a doctoral program provides a glimpse of how it's happening ? and how crucial access and support can be.

___

It began, she says, with her first role model ? her mother, Janet Mikulas.

Mikulas, who got her engineering degree in the 1970s from Virginia Tech, can hardly imagine what it would be like to have so many women peers, as her daughter did at William and Mary.

"You know," Mikulas remembers her mother whispering to her after she announced her major to her parents, "Dad always said you should be an engineer."

She was stunned. Why didn't she know this? Why hadn't her father told her?

Her mother explained, as best she could, that he had felt it was wrong to encourage her to enter a male-dominated field, that he thought he was supposed to encourage her to be a mother and a secretary.

"He did it with the very best of intentions. He taught me a million things all his life. I was his best buddy," Mikulas said. "But he couldn't quite tell me what he really thought."

Mikulas and her husband, also an engineer, vowed that it would be different for their daughters. "We decided that we'd let them be what they wanted to be," she says.

Some would say there was no way Allred ? known as Rebecca Mikulas before she married her college sweetheart in 2009 ? could have failed. She had educational opportunities that many do not, including a private school in rural Virginia where classes were small and where she was given the chance to study at her own pace. She also had the smarts, skipping kindergarten and second grade and taking college classes by the time she was in middle school.

She finished her high school requirements by age 16 but then decided to take more math and science courses at a public high school, where she also excelled at volleyball, basketball and track.

Her parents always worked to integrate math and science into everyday life on their family farm and during dinnertime conversations.

But she also had teachers who encouraged and challenged her ? another key, experts say, in keeping girls engaged.

Her mother remembers how Rebecca's high school chemistry teacher put off retiring for a year so she could have Rebecca as a student in her advanced-placement class. The teacher was certain she'd be her first student to receive the top score of 5 on the AP chemistry test. And Rebecca did.

She was considering colleges, including Harvard, around the time when Harvard's then-president, Lawrence Summers, made controversial comments questioning women's aptitude for top-level science and math. He later stepped down.

Unfazed, 17-year-old Rebecca went to William and Mary on a track scholarship. There, she took a chemistry class with Harbron ? and applied for a spot in Harbron's lab.

She quickly realized she'd found her next mentor.

"She was so animated and funny ? and into what she was doing," Allred says of her professor. "I wanted to be a part of it."

When she first joined Harbron's lab, she was the only woman student.

"I had to learn my boy social dynamics," Allred says, laughing and noting that, at that point, many of her interactions at her Mormon church and in sports were with other women.

You wouldn't think that would matter much. But Harbron and other professors say there's an interesting dynamic they often see in coed labs. Women tend to hang back, they say, and let men take the lead role.

"They're so afraid of being wrong. I don't think guys have that fear," Harbron says. "If they're admitting they don't know something, then they are admitting a vulnerability.

"But what they don't realize is that other people don't know either."

Christina Davis, another student who was in Harbron's lab when Allred was there, remembers feeling stressed out by her need to be perfect, to have all the answers. She balked, at first, when Harbron refused to tell her what result she should expect in an experiment.

But Davis says she soon learned to love exploring the unknown in experiments, so much so that she, too, eventually decided to pursue a doctorate in chemistry instead of going to medical school.

"I stopped following the plan I had written when I was 7 and opened myself up to new possibilities," says Davis, who's now in the PhD program at the University of Texas and currently studying in South Korea.

Increasingly, some institutions are finding value in more formal all-women's programs in the STEM fields.

The all-women's Smith College in Massachusetts, for instance, bucked its liberal arts tradition and started an engineering program 10 years ago ? a decision other all-women's schools are following.

Some students come to Smith knowing they want to be engineers. Others are drawn into the program by an introductory class called "Engineering for Everyone."

Another interesting result: Most of the students in the Smith program have ended up choosing mechanical or electrical engineering ? specialties within that field that women have tended to avoid.

The program is also growing, averaging 20 students a year until this year, when that number doubled, says Donna Riley, an associate professor of engineering at Smith who helped found the program.

"Our teachers are stretched," Riley says of the uptick. "But it's a good problem to have."

Meanwhile, other institutions are targeting younger students, since research has shown that girls tend to lose interest in science and math in middle school. That research also has shown that income plays a greater role than gender when it comes to students who make it to the highest levels of the STEM fields.

That's why Pamela Clute, a math lecturer who is also assistant vice provost for academic partnerships at the University of California, Riverside, developed summer and after-school math programs for middle school girls ? many of them from low-income neighborhoods.

She calls her program and its participants GEMS ? Girls Excelling in Mathematics with Success.

The curriculum, she says, incorporates topics that the teen girls tell her they're interested in. They might be asked to solve math problems that incorporate questions about fashion and cell phones, for instance. They also are allowed to work in groups.

"If you say, algebra, people tend to vomit," Clute quips. But if you can show them how it applies to real life, she says, that attitude changes.

An interest in science and math was never an issue for Allred. When she was in middle school, she was asking questions at the dinner table that always seemed to spark an answer related to either topic.

Once, noticing that ice cubes get smaller in the freezer over time, she asked, "Where do ice cubes go?" her mother recalled. "And we would have a conversation around the dinner table about sublimation."

Then she'd go to school and tell her teacher about how a solid like an ice cube can turn to gas ? "but never in a braggart way."

"She absorbed everything and liked to share it," her mom says. "And that feeling of success would motivate her to study more."

___

That motivation carried her to Yale, where she is now balancing parenthood with her studies. She and her husband Jacob Allred had a daughter, Anna, this past spring.

Allred hinted at their plan when she interviewed with various doctoral programs.

"Why would you have kids when you're going to school?" was the response she got from an official at one of the schools she considered. Only two schools she visited mentioned policies for parental leave, for any student.

Yale was one of them.

"I think it's being driven by doing the right thing as opposed to being used as a recruiting tool," says Pollard, the dean who oversees Allred's program and others at Yale. "But we all know that if you have good practices, you attract good students."

Pollard also concedes that he is particularly sensitive to parental issues because his own daughter, a junior professor at another institution, just had twins.

Among other things, he hopes the university will improve its day care options.

And he says the university just completed a report that examines how various departments can make sure their students ? female or male ? finish their programs.

Once again, Allred says she feels that crucial support, from her advisor and also her fellow students. Her husband also has agreed to stay home with Anna until Allred gets her doctorate, maybe by the time Anna is in kindergarten.

She jokes that she'll then take on the title of "Dr. Mom," certain that she will be able to add her name to the list of women with PhDs in the STEM fields that is growing ? slowly but surely.

"I'm not sure where this is going to take me," Allred says. "I'm just so grateful that I'm here at a time when I can do this."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111022/ap_on_re_us/us_women_scientists

harp home affordable refinance program s.978 tim tebow beanie wells beanie wells dina manzo

Fed bashing is back in vogue

The Federal Reserve is getting a lot of healthy criticism. But the moves by politicians are worrying.

Some believe the Federal Reserve has done too much ? that two rounds of quantitative easing, the new "Operation Twist," and myriad interventions during the depths of the financial crisis have set the stage for runaway inflation. As evidence, they point to the enormous expansion of bank reserves and the skyrocketing price of gold (at least, until recently).

Skip to next paragraph

Others believe Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues have done too little and that monetary policy remains too tight. They point to the 15 million Americans who are looking for work and the millions more who have dropped out of the labor force. Even more troub?ling, almost half of the unemployed have been without work for six months or more, something Mr. Bernanke rightly labeled a "national crisis."

The Fed's mandate is to strike a balance between these concerns ? to pursue full employment and stable prices. That's a difficult task, especially when the US is struggling to recover from the worst financial shock since the Great Depression.

So the Fed has been receiving a great deal of advice, mostly unsolicited, about what to do. Much of that advice is healthy and constructive. Financial market participants, monetary policy experts, and even economic columnists all bring important insights to the debate. For what it's worth, I think the Fed should continue its efforts to stimulate our moribund economy; unemployment is clearly a bigger threat than inflation.

But I worry when politicians get involved. Lawmakers need to ensure that Fed actions promote the public welfare. It was, after all, created by Congress. That doesn't mean that politicians should meddle in its policymaking.

History shows independent central banks do a much better job of controlling inflation than those that give in to political pressures. When the Fed caved into LBJ's desire for loose money in the 1960s, it set the stage for a decade of high inflation.

Low inflation is not the only benefit of independence. Once they've built a reputation for keeping inflation in check, central banks have greater ability to step in to support a troubled economy.

Unfortunately, a growing number of politicians are leaning on the Fed. Most egregiously, presidential aspirant and Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in August that it would be "almost treasonous" for it to pursue more monetary stimulus. The day before the Fed announced its September policy decisions, House Speaker John Boehner and three other GOP congressional leaders sent a letter discouraging it from "further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy...."

On the other side of the aisle, US Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, is developing a proposal to strip the regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents of their role in monetary policy. (The policymaking committee has 12 seats, seven filled by Senate-confirmed, presidential appointees ? two of which are currently vacant ? and five that rotate among the regional banks.) Mr. Frank floated his proposal after three regional presidents voted against further policy easing, so it's widely viewed as an effort to sway those presidents into being more accommodating.

For all its flaws, the Federal Reserve does a better job of evaluating economic conditions and balancing short- and long-term economic goals than our elected leaders ever could. Politicians on both sides of the aisle should temper their impulse to influence what the Fed is doing. In hard times, its independence is more important than ever.

? Donald Marron is director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/r01FXvRws6Q/Fed-bashing-is-back-in-vogue

xbox live update bloomberg tv bloomberg tv david koch the state republican debate republican presidential candidates