Marine accepts plea deal in Iraqi civilian deaths (AP)

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. ? A Marine sergeant who told his troops to "shoot first, ask questions later" in a raid that killed unarmed Iraqi women, children and elderly pleaded guilty Monday in a deal that will carry no more than three months confinement and end the largest and longest-running criminal case against U.S. troops from the Iraq War.

The agreement marked a stunning and muted end to the case once described as the Iraq War's version of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The government failed to get one manslaughter conviction in the case that implicated eight Marines in the deaths of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha in 2005.

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, 31, of Meriden, Conn., who was originally accused of unpremeditated murder, pleaded guilty to negligent dereliction of duty for leading his troops to disregard rules of combat when they raided homes after a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy, killing one Marine and wounding two others.

The Haditha incident is considered among the war's defining moments, further tainting America's reputation when it was already at a low point after the release of photos of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

"The case doesn't end with a bang, it ends with a whimper and a pretty weak whimper at that," said Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge. "When you have 24 dead bodies and you get dereliction of duty, that's pretty good defense work."

Wuterich, his family and his attorneys declined to comment after he entered the plea that halted his manslaughter trial at Camp Pendleton before a jury of combat Marines who served in Iraq.

Prosecutors also declined to comment on the plea deal. Marine Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Kloppel said the deal was not a reflection or in any way connected to how the prosecution felt their case was going in the trial.

Wuterich, the father of three children, had faced the possibility of life behind bars when he was charged with nine counts of manslaughter, among other charges.

The prosecution implicated him in 19 of the 24 deaths.

The manslaughter charges will be dropped now that Wuterich has pleaded guilty to the minor dereliction of duty charge. As a result, he faces a maximum of three months in confinement, two-thirds forfeiture of pay and a rank demotion to private when he's sentenced.

Both sides will present arguments Tuesday during a sentencing hearing. Seven other Marines were acquitted or had charges dismissed in the case.

The killings still fuel anger in Iraq after becoming the primary reason behind demands that U.S. troops not be given immunity from their court system.

Kamil al-Dulaimi, a Sunni lawmaker from the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, called the plea deal a travesty of justice for the victims and their families.

"It's just another barbaric act of Americans against Iraqis," al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press. "They spill the blood of Iraqis and get this worthless sentence for the savage crime against innocent civilians."

News of the plea agreement came late in the evening in Iraq, just hours before curfew most cities still impose, producing no noticeable public reaction. Government officials didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The issue at the court martial was whether Wuterich reacted appropriately as a Marine squad leader in protecting his troops in the midst of a chaotic war or disregarded combat rules and ordered his men to shoot and blast indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians.

Prosecutors said he lost control after seeing the body of his friend blown apart by the bomb and led his men on a rampage in which they stormed two nearby homes, blasting their way in with gunfire and grenades. Among the dead was a man in a wheelchair.

Wuterich has said he regretted the loss of civilian lives but believed he was operating within military combat rules.

During Monday's hearing, he acknowledged he told the squad before the raids to shoot without hesitation, leading them to believe they could ignore the rules of combat. He told the judge that caused "tragic events."

"I think we all understood what we were doing so I probably just should have said nothing," Wuterich told the judge, Lt. Col. David Jones.

He admitted he did not positively identify his targets, as he had been trained to do. He also said he ordered his troops to assault the homes based on the guidance of his platoon commander at the time.

Wuterich also acknowledged in his plea that the squad did not take any gunfire during the 45-minute raid on the homes or find any weapons.

After Haditha, Marine commanders ordered troops to try and distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The prosecution had several squad members testify, but many said they do not believe to this day that they did anything wrong because they feared insurgents were inside hiding. Several also acknowledged lying to investigators in the past, leaving doubt about their credibility.

The prosecution was further hurt by the testimony of former Lt. William T. Kallop, Wuterich's former platoon commander, who said the squad was justified in its actions because the house was declared hostile. From what was understood of the rules of combat at the time, that meant Marines could attack without hesitation, Kallop said.

Legal experts say the prosecution had an uphill battle because of the delay caused by six years of pre-trial wrangling between the defense and prosecution, including over whether the military could use unaired outtakes from an interview Wuterich gave in 2007 to the CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes."

Prosecutors eventually won that right but overestimated its value, analysts say.

Solis, the former military prosecutor, said the military should have pushed for an earlier trial to ensure witnesses' memories were fresh.

"Six years for a trial is unacceptable," said Solis, who teaches law of war at Georgetown University Law Center. "Delay is always to the benefit of the accused."

He said prosecutors may have been cowed by the Army's missteps in its handling of the death of former NFL star and Ranger Pat Tillman from friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004.

___

Associated Press writers Barbara Surk and Mazin Yahya in Baghdad, and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iraq/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120124/ap_on_re_us/us_marines_haditha

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Epic clash: Silicon Valley blindsides Hollywood on piracy (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? The massive online protest last Wednesday, in which Wikipedia and thousands of other websites closed down or otherwise protested and helped to kill controversial online piracy legislation, was widely heralded as an unprecedented case of a grassroots uprising overcoming backroom lobbying.

Yet a close look at how the debate unfolded suggests that traditional means of influencing policy in Washington had its place too. The technology industry has ramped up its political activities dramatically in recent years, and in fact, has spent more than the entertainment industry -- $1.2 billion between 1998 and 2011, compared with $906.4 million spent by entertainment companies.

The latest chapter in what has become an epic, decades-long battle between the two industries over copyrighted digital content began innocuously enough. Hollywood movie studios, frustrated by online theft that they claim already costs them billions of dollars a year and will only get worse, in 2010 started pushing for a law that would make it possible to block access and cut off payments to foreign websites offering pirated material.

In 2010, longtime industry friend Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, introduced a bill, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously but never went further.

In May last year, Leahy tried again, introducing his Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act. In October, Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a similar bill. The last major piece of copyright law, the Pro-IP Act of 2008, moved through Congress with little controversy, so the industry felt hopeful.

Through the end of September, Hollywood had outspent the tech industry 2-to-1 in donations to key supporters of measures it was backing. More than $950,000 from the TV, music and movie industries has gone to original sponsors of the House and Senate bills in the 2012 election cycle, compared with about $400,000 from computer and Internet companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Tech companies preferred backers of a narrower alternative bill. The computer and Internet industries gave more than $291,000 to supporters of that measure vs. about $185,000 from the content makers.

"They're both very powerful. They're all big players. They give a lot of money to politicians. This has to be a tough choice for many members of Congress," said Larry Sabato, a campaign finance expert who teaches at the University of Virginia.

PAY ATTENTION

The bills had attracted no public attention, but in early September, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman wrote to senators to oppose the bill. Later that month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce marshaled a group of 350 companies to write in supporting it.

The introduction of the House bill in late October prompted more scrutiny. Critics including the Consumer Electronics Association fretted over issues such as whether U.S. websites could be shut down under the bill, and security risks to Internet infrastructure that they said may arise.

By mid November, technology executives were paying close attention. Many watched online as Google copyright counsel Katherine Oyama testified before a House Judiciary Committee hearing November 16. Another, Ben Huh, chief executive of the online media network Cheezburger Inc, would eventually help organize the Web blackout.

Members of Congress "basically beat up Google," said Huh, who tuned in from the office. "We were watching it going, 'This is incredibly unfair.'"

Later that day, he talked over the testimony with Erik Martin, general manager of the social news site Reddit.com. The two would later help lead the online blackout efforts, along with others such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Meanwhile, the White House was taking meetings from both sides. The first week of December, Motion Picture Association of America chief and former Senator Chris Dodd moved the MPAA's board meeting from its traditional site of Los Angeles to Washington, in part so executives could lobby on the issues.

Dodd, along with movie executives including Warner Bros Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer and Fox Filmed Entertainment co-Chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman, met with White House officials including chief of staff Bill Daley and Vice President Joe Biden, according to a person familiar with the situation. They hammered home why the law was needed to go after foreign sites.

TAKING TURNS

The following week, it was the tech companies' turn. Executives including LinkedIn's Hoffman, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalists Brad Burnham and Paul Maeder met with the same officials to press their case.

Major tech companies then took out advertisements in newspapers including the Washington Post and The New York Times, saying the bills would allow U.S. government censorship of the Internet. The ads ran December 14 in the form of an open letter to Washington, signed by heavyweights such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The ads ran as the House Judiciary Committee was turning back the bill. The proceedings streamed live over the Internet, allowing the public to watch many members struggling to fully understand terms such as IP address and DNS server.

North Carolina Rep. Mel Watt, for example, professed that he was "not a nerd and didn't understand a lot of the technological stuff." That opened them up to mockery in the blogosphere, with commentators questioning their ability to craft law around the Internet. "Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works," Motherboard blogger Joshua Kopstein wrote in a widely circulated post.

The weekend after the committee adjourned its hearing, opponents started an online petition to veto SOPA at the White House's "We the People" website. Within days, the petition had acquired 38,500 signatures, far exceeding the 25,000 required for review by the administration. An separate petition started in late October had already gathered more than 52,000 signatures.

A few days before Christmas, the House Judiciary Committee released the names of the many companies that supported SOPA. But that succeeded only in galvanizing further opposition: influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham took the unusual step of saying that any company that supported SOPA would be barred from Demo Day, an industry showcase.

People posting to the social-news site Reddit then suggested a boycott of one of the bill's supporters, the domain-name registrar GoDaddy, asking people to transfer their domains to another registrar. Many sites, among them Huh's Cheezburger, said they would switch. Just before New Year's Day, GoDaddy dropped its support for the bill amid widespread publicity.

Meanwhile, the White House was crafting its response to the online petitions. Three top aides to President Barack Obama, who won election in 2008 supported by online organizing and who has long been friendly to Internet industry concerns, weighed in on the issue in mid-January just as Hollywood was preparing to celebrate the Golden Globe Awards. The officials posted a response to the online petition and voiced concerns about the bills, while calling for improved antipiracy legislation.

That sparked a flood of media coverage and helped expand the Internet blackout to more sites. One popular protest, the brainchild of Instagram engineer Greg Hochmuth and YouTube Product Management Director Hunter Wall, allowed people to add black "Stop SOPA" banners to their Twitter and Facebook profile photos. On Wednesday, some 30 people a minute were adding the banners to their photos, Hochmuth told Reuters.

A FORMIDABLE COMBO

The combination of White House concerns, the impending online protest and the intense pressure on legislators from high-profile Internet industry leaders abruptly changed the dynamic on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, as the blackout unfolded, support for the bills quickly crumbled.

Some Hollywood executives acknowledge their own flat-footedness in trying to marshal public opinion as opposition mounted. While technology companies brandished the power of the Internet, Hollywood relied on old-media weapons such as television commercials and a billboard in New York's Times Square. It proved to be too little, too late.

One entertainment-company lawyer complained that opposing arguments were often inaccurate but spread like wildfire anyway on the Internet, leaving supporters scrambling to correct the information without the benefit of a strong online network.

"We do some of that (online) stuff, but it has to go through a committee of 14 people," he said. "The other side doesn't have conference calls. They just put stuff out there."

Both friends and foes of SOPA and PIPA do not think they have seen the end of this battle.

"Bills are a lot like zombies," said Cheezburger's Huh. "You never know if they're dead or going to come back."

When it comes around again, lobbyists on both sides will have learned some valuable lessons.

(Reporting by Sarah McBride in San Francisco and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles, with additional reporting by Jasmin Melvin and Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Maureen Bavdek)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120123/en_nm/us_congress_piracy

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Women Feel Pain More Intensely Than Men (LiveScience.com)

When a woman falls ill, her pain may be more intense than a man's, a new study suggests.

Across a number of different diseases, including diabetes, arthritis and certain respiratory infections, women in the study reported feeling more pain than men, the researchers said.

The study is one of the largest to examine sex differences in human pain perception. The results are in line with earlier findings, and reveal that sex differences in pain sensitivity may be present in many more diseases than previously thought.

Because pain is subjective, the researchers can't know for sure whether women, in fact, experience more pain than men. A number of factors, including a person's mood and whether they take pain medication, likely influence how much pain they say they're in.

"Whatever the reason, I think it's important to be aware of this pain discrepancy between men and women and look into it further," said study researcher Linda Liu, a doctoral student in Stanford University Biomedical Informatics program.

Future studies, in both people and animals, should analyze their results to see whether sex differences in pain may be present, Liu said. Many studies in animals do not include females, or fail to report the sex of animals used, Liu said.

The study was published online Jan. 12 in the Journal of Pain.

Sex differences

Most human studies examining gender differences in reported pain have compared the number of women with the number of men with a given condition who say they are in pain. But most haven't looked at how intense the pain is, and many have not included enough people to be able to detect differences between the sexes in pain perception, the researchers said.

The new study included information from more than 11,000 patients whose pain scores were recorded in electronic medical records at Stanford Hospital and Clinics between 2007 and 2010. Patients were asked to rate their pain on a scale of zero (no pain) to 10 (worst pain imaginable).

In all, the researchers assessed sex differences in reported pain for more than 250 diseases and conditions.

For almost every diagnosis, women reported higher average pain scores than men. Women's scores were, on average, 20 percent higher than men's scores, according to the study.

Women with lower back pain, and knee and leg strain consistently reported higher scores than men. Women also reported feeling more pain in the neck (for conditions such as torticollis, in which the neck muscles twist or spasm) and sinuses (during sinus infections) than did men, a result not found by previous research.

Pain perception

It could be that women assign different numbers to the level of pain they perceive compared with men, said Roger B. Fillingim, a pain researcher at the University of Florida College of Dentistry, who was not involved with the new study.

But the study was large, and the findings are backed up by previous work, Fillingim said.

"I think the most [simple] explanation is that women are indeed experiencing higher levels of pain than men," Fillingim said.

The reason for this is not known, Fillingim said. Past research suggests a number of factors contribute to perceptions of pain level, including hormones, genetics and psychological factors, which may vary between men and women, Fillingim said. It's also possible the pain systems work differently in men and women, or women experience more severe forms of disease than men, he said.

Future research is needed to find out the exact causes of pain perception differences, and which ones would be best to target for more effective pain control, Fillingim said.

Finding biological markers for pain, such as genes or proteins, would also help take some of the subjectivity out of assessing the experience of pain, Liu said, but the identification of such markers is likely a long way off.

Pass it on: Across many different diseases, women say they experience more pain than men.

This story was provided by MyHealthNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner. Find us on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20120123/sc_livescience/womenfeelpainmoreintenselythanmen

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Lee gets OK to emerge from bankruptcy in January

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) ? Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises Inc. said Monday that a judge had approved its debt refinancing plan, which will allow it to emerge from prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Jan. 30.

The publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and nearly 50 other newspapers filed for bankruptcy protection on Dec.12 to compel a small minority of lenders to go along with a refinancing plan that gives the company more time to repay about $1 billion in debt. The plan extends due dates to December 2015 and April 2017.

Lee CEO Mary Junck said the favorable outcome will give the company nearly four years to improve its balance sheet.

Lee's shares jumped 21 cents, or 24 percent, to close at $1.10 on Monday.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-01-23-Lee%20Enterprises/id-6873e0323be74a2498ffc5be59e0a365

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RIM's Thorsten Heins formally introduced: liveblogging the media call

If you missed it, RIM attempted to interrupt the Giants vs. 49ers matchup last night by dropping a wee bit of news: it's co-CEOs are gone, and taking the solo CEO badge is former COO Thorsten Heins. The new head honcho will be formally introduced in a media call slated to begin at 8:00AM ET on January 23rd, 2012, and we'll be liveblogging every moment of it for those who can't tune in. We've already learned a fair amount about the gentleman's plans courtesy of an introductory video, but we'll be listening in for any hints as to future QNX plans, PlayBook ambitions or BlackBerry wizardry. Join us after the break for the play-by-play!

January 23, 2012 8:00 AM EST

Continue reading RIM's Thorsten Heins formally introduced: liveblogging the media call

RIM's Thorsten Heins formally introduced: liveblogging the media call originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/23/liveblog-rim-thorsten-heins-ceo-introduction-media-call/

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After Laying Off 60 People, RueLaLa Raises $22 Million

Members-only shopping site RueLaLa, a former subsidiary of GSI Commerce (before the eBay acquisition) just cut roughly 60 positions from its workforce of 550 employees, but an SEC filing published yesterday afternoon reveals that the flash sales company also recently completed a $22 million financing round. UPDATE: The company has informed us that the funding is not new. The SEC filing shows the valuation of stock options already granted to parties. RueLaLa was previously part of Retail Convergence, Inc, a company that was acquired by GSI Commerce back in 2009. The Gilt Groupe rival, which is still 30 percent owned by eBay, is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/tVQhJmtEL0M/

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Fiery debate tops bizarre GOP campaign day in SC (AP)

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. ? The race for the Republican presidential nomination took a turn toward the South Carolina surreal Thursday as Rick Perry dropped out, Newt Gingrich faced stunning allegations from an ex-wife and Mitt Romney struggled to maintain a shaky front-runner's standing.

An aggressive evening debate capped the bewildering day.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum played aggressor for much of the night, trying to inject himself into what seemed increasingly like a two-way race with little more than a day remaining until the South Carolina polls open on Saturday. He accused Gingrich and Romney of "playing footsies with the left" when it came to health care. Both men rejected the allegations.

The debate began a few hours after first word that Romney had been stripped of his Iowa caucus victory, only to be stung a few hours later by Perry's withdrawal and endorsement of Gingrich.

Gingrich, in turn, was accused by an ex-wife of seeking an open marriage so he could keep his mistress.

"Newt's not perfect, but who among us is," said Perry, abruptly quitting the race just before the first-in-the-South primary.

His decision to end a once-promising candidacy left Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul the remaining contenders in the race to pick a Republican to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama this fall.

Nine hours after Perry exited one stage, the four remaining contenders walked onto another for a final pre-primary debate.

Gingrich angrily denounced the news media for putting his ex-wife front and center in the final days of the race. "Let me be clear, the story is false," he said. Santorum, Romney and Paul steered well clear of the controversy. "Let's get onto the real issues, that's all I've got to say," said Romney, although he pointed out that he and his wife, Ann, have been married for 42 years.

The audience gave Gingrich a standing ovation when he assailed the media, a reaction he can only hope is reflected in voter sentiment on Saturday.

All four remaining GOP candidates lustily attacked Obama, while Santorum in particular sought to raise his own profile.

Introduced to the audience at the outset, he mentioned his change of fortunes in Iowa, where an evident eight-vote defeat in caucuses on Jan 3 was belated transformed into a 34-vote advantage ? though the Iowa Republican Party did not declare a winner.

Santorum jabbed at both Gingrich and Romney, but seemed to focus more attention on the former. If Gingrich is the party nominee, he said, "you sort of have that worrisome moment that something's going to pop. And we can't afford that in a nominee."

In a reflection of the complex political dynamics of the race, first Gingrich and then Santorum challenged Romney over his well-documented switch of position on abortion. Once a supporter of a woman's life to choose, he now says he is "pro-life."

Gingrich didn't exactly question Romney's change in position, but he didn't embrace it, either, saying, "He had an experience in a lab and became pro-life."

Romney bristled. "I'm not questioned on character or integrity very often. I don't feel like standing here for that."

Recent polls, coupled with Perry's endorsement, suggested Gingrich was the candidate with the momentum and Romney the one struggling to validate his standing as front-runner. Whatever else the impact, the day's events reduced the number of contenders vying to emerge as Romney's principal conservative alternative.

The former Massachusetts governor had other challenges in a state where unemployment approaches 10 percent. He adamantly refused to explain why some of his millions were invested in the Cayman Islands, how much was there or whether any other funds were held offshore.

Under pressure from his rivals to release his income tax returns before the weekend ? a demand first made by Perry in a debate on Monday ? he told reporters it wouldn't happen. "You'll hear more about that. April," he said, a position he renewed during the debate to jeers from the audience.

Gingrich pursued an approach Perry used in the earlier debate.

"If there's anything that's in there that's going to help us lose the election, we should know before the election. If there's not, why not release it?" he said.

Gingrich released his own tax return during the day, reporting that he paid the IRS $613,517 in taxes on more than $3.1 million in income. He also donated about 2 percent of his income to charity.

His effective tax rate, roughly 31.6 percent of his adjusted income, was about double what Romney told reporters earlier this week he had paid.

Gingrich grappled with problems of a different, possibly even more crippling sort in a state where more than half the Republican electorate is evangelical.

In an interview scheduled to air on ABC News, Marianne Gingrich said her ex-husband had wanted an "open marriage" so he could have both a wife and a mistress. She said Gingrich conducted an affair with Callista Bistek ? his current wife ? "in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington" while she was elsewhere.

"He was asking to have an open marriage and I refused. That is not a marriage," she said in excerpts released by the network in advance of the program.

He said his two daughters from the first of his three marriages ? the ex-wife making the accusations was the second of three ? had sent a letter to ABC "complaining about this as tawdry and inappropriate."

In fact, the letter made no such accusations. Instead, Kathy Lubbers and Jackie Cushman wrote ABC that anyone who has endured a failed marriage "understands it is a personal tragedy filled with regrets, and sometimes differing memories of events."

Those weren't the only political events in the run-up to the Saturday primary. Television commercials for the remaining candidates and their allies ran virtually without letup, generally designed to diminish each other's support.

According to information made available to The Associated Press, targeted viewers in most regions of the state were watching an average of about six commercials a day paid for by Romney's campaign and Restore Our Future, a group supporting him. Gingrich, Paul, Santorum and their backers raised the total higher.

Santorum ran commercials likening Romney to Obama; Gingrich's cast the former speaker as the only candidate who could defeat the president this fall. In a sign of the shifting campaign, Restore Our Future stopped attacking Santorum so it could concentrate its fire on Gingrich.

Santorum, whose fortunes have ebbed since what appeared to be a narrow loss in Iowa, pronounced himself the winner there after all when state party officials in Des Moines announced he had finished 34 votes ahead of Romney instead of eight behind.

"There have been two contests. We won one," he said, and he proceeded to ridicule Romney and Gingrich as weak challengers to Obama. "How can you differentiate ourselves on the major issues of the day if we nominate tweedledum and tweedledee instead of someone who stood up and said, `No'?" he said to one audience, referring to his opposition to a requirement to purchase health care coverage.

Iowa Republican chairman Matt Strawn said the party would not name an official winner because the results were so close and some votes couldn't be counted. Results from eight of the state's 1,774 precincts were not certified to the state party by Wednesday's 5 p.m. deadline.

It was Strawn who had stepped before a microphone shortly before 2 a.m. in Des Moines on Jan. 4 to declare Romney the victor.

That announcement propelled the former Massachusetts governor into New Hampshire, where he breezed to victory in the opening primary of the campaign a week later.

He arrived in South Carolina the following day, front-runner then for sure, now more shakily so.

Perry's withdrawal mimicked one earlier in the week by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman in that they both quit a few hours before a debate.

The similarities ended there, though. Huntsman endorsed Romney.

Perry had other thoughts, calling Gingrich a "conservative visionary who can transform our country."

Echoing words Huntsman said of Romney, Perry said he and Gingrich had their differences.

And in saying the former speaker was not perfect, he sought to provide political cover of a type that might reassure South Carolina voters for whom religious values are important.

"The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God and I believe in the power of redemption, for it is a central tenet of my own Christian faith," Perry said.

His decision to withdraw set off a scramble among the remaining contenders for the allegiance of his supporters and donors, both in the state and nationally.

State Rep. Chip Limehouse of Charleston said he was expecting to speak by phone with both Romney and Gingrich later in the day before making up his mind.

"I'm looking and I really do think tonight's debate will determine the next president of the United States. That's how important it is," Peeler said.

Perry's exit marked the end of a campaign that began with soaring expectations but quickly faded. He shot to the head of the public opinion polls when he announced his candidacy last summer, but a string of poor debate performances soon led to a decline in support.

His defining moment came at one debate when he unaccountably could not recall the third of three federal agencies he has promised to abolish. He joked about it afterward but never recovered from the fumble.

In his farewell appearance as a candidate, he said he was bowing out of the 2012 campaign, seemingly a hint he would run again in four years if Republicans fail to win the White House this time.

An aide, Ray Sullivan was more explicit, telling reporters Perry hasn't ruled out running for governor again or for the White House in 2016 if Obama is re-elected.

___

Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont, Beth Fouhy, Philip Elliott, Kasie Hunt and Shannon McCaffrey in South Carolina contributed to this story.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120120/ap_on_el_ge/us_gop_campaign

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Gingrich daughter's teen job may have been illegal

Phil Skinner / AP

Jackie Gingrich Cushman, daughter of Newt Gingrich, speaks at a news conference at the Georgia state capitol last month. Gingrich said in a debate this week that his daughter worked as a church janitor when she was 13.

By Eve Tahmincioglu

During the Republican presidential debate this week, Newt Gingrich shared a story about how his daughter worked as a church janitor when she was only 13.

?I was actually proud of my clean bathrooms,??Jackie Gingrich Cushman said in an telephone interview Tuesday, referring to the janitorial job she held at the First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Ga., in the early 1980s. ?I learned work has value.?

But that work may have been a violation of federal child labor laws that her father has denounced as ?stupid.?

Cushman was 13 when she took the part-time, minimum-wage janitorial job, scrubbing bathrooms two days a week using cleaning supplies and a bucket.?She said working as a janitor was a "great experience."

Asked if she was working legally as a janitor for the church, Cushman said, "I certainly hope so."?

But based on child labor laws in effect now and in the 1980s, 13-year-olds are not allowed to hold janitorial jobs, said Michael Hancock, assistant administrator for policy in the wage and hour division of the U.S. Department of Labor. There are no exemptions for religious organizations and their employees when it comes to child labor laws, according to the agency.

"I definitely see it as a child labor violation," said Reid Maki, coordinator of The Child Labor Coalition, when asked about a 13-year-old working as a janitor. "When you put a kid in a situation that?s designed for adults you're asking for trouble."

Gingrich?s reference to his daughter?s youthful employment is part of an ongoing narrative for the former House speaker: Poor kids should start toiling?as early as 9 years old so they can learn what it means to?make a living. ?I?m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn someday to own the job,? Gingrich said in the debate Monday.

Research has shown that teens who have jobs early in life are more likely to build a strong work ethic. But handing over adult jobs to kids might not be the right way to do that, particularly because there are tasks younger kids are not allowed to perform under U.S. law, including janitorial services.

Under the law 13-year-olds can:

• Deliver newspapers.
• Work as a baby sitter.
• Work as an actor or performer in motion pictures, television, theater or radio.
• Work in a business solely owned or operated by their parents.

It's fine for?14- and 15-year-olds?to?work a janitorial job?in many types of retail and service establishments.?There are restrictions at these ages as well, however,?under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

?They can?t work as janitors in any manufacturing establishment or industries that are deemed too hazardous for the employment of such youth,? according to the Labor Department.

A spokesman for Gingrich seemed unconcerned when informed that 13-year-olds are not allowed to work as janitors.

"Can they work as a clerk in the library?" press secretary R.C. Hammond responded by email.

Gingrich has proposed getting rid of age limits as a way to help build work values and save money because kids can do similar work for less pay than higher-paid adults.

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods in trapping children ? in child laws which are truly stupid," Gingrich said in November talk at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, according to the Los Angeles Times. "OK, you say to someone, 'You shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16 years of age.' Fine. You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school."

Not everyone agrees.

?Substitution of child labor for adult labor is never an economic bargain,? said Hugh Hindman, professor of labor at Appalachian State University, and author of ?Child Labor: An American History.?

?Not only are adults with full-time jobs earning living wages displaced by kids with part-time jobs earning minimum wages, but the competition between children and adults will also depress the wages of those adults who hold on to their jobs,? Hindman said.

Gingrich makes some important points about poor children, however, he said.

?Opportunities for the kind of freelance jobs that teach responsibility and provide pocket money, baby-sitting, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, etc., are disproportionately skewed toward middle- and upper-middle-class kids,? he said. ?Poor kids do need this kind of opportunity, but I'm not sure janitorial service is the ticket.?

Jeylan Mortimer, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who has researched the impact of work on teens and found it helps them build confidence and interpersonal skills, supports?any attempts to help adolescents get jobs.

?The employment market for high school students has collapsed, largely as a result of competition with adults for teen jobs, and teen employment is now at its lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began compiling the data,? said Mortimer, author of ?Working and Growing Up In America.??

The December unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 20.3 percent, well above the 8.3 percent overall jobless rate. For blacks in that age group it's?42 percent.

Mortimer isn't big on proposals she?s hearing from the stump to fix the problem.

In addition to displacing adult workers, it would ?likely expose teens to difficult, and possibly hazardous, work conditions, lots of bending and lifting, exposure to harsh cleaning agents, etc.," she said.

She suggests creating a program where students can assist teachers or tutor at schools depending on their achievement level, and that wouldn't displace adult workers but would relieve "overworked educators."

As for Gingrich's daughter, she sees value in all types of jobs when it comes to helping kids learn about work, but she maintained that unskilled labor may do the most character building.

?Cleaning bathrooms taught me a lot,? Cushman said, adding that she worked many menial jobs, including being a rollerblading waitress for the Sonic Drive-In chain in high school. Such experiences, she added, helped her value hard work and ?appreciate and value the people that do the work as well.

{"contentId":"10182647","totalVotes":"2261"}

Should the nation's child labor laws be relaxed?

Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10182647-gingrich-daughters-teen-work-may-have-violated-law

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Afghan air force learns to fly ? and fix aircraft (AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan ? Twenty years ago, Afghan Air Force pilot Maj. Abdul Aziz was streaking across the sky in the Soviet Union's deadliest fighter-bomber.

Now 45, his new task is less dramatic or flamboyant, yet perhaps even more important: Help build and train a new skilled air force that can keep the planes and helicopters in the air after Western mentors go home.

The challenge of forging a modern, technically proficient air force in a country at war is an immense but essential element in the West's exit strategy. The target date for having an Afghan Air Force able to operate fully independently, with about 8,000 trained personnel and 145 aircraft, is 2016.

The war against the resurgent Taliban has relied heavily on NATO aircraft to fly infantry units to remote outposts, keep them supplied in battle and provide close air support. Missiles fired from drones and exploding roadside bombs may get the media attention, but in a mountainous country with few paved roads, this has largely been a helicopter war.

Schooling a new cadre of pilots and air crews to fly is tough enough. But Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who until last year headed NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, stressed that training the thousands of support and maintenance personnel is even more critical ? if the force is to be sustainable in the long run.

If not, history will repeat itself. In the 1990s, the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance fighters battling the Taliban were flying Soviet-made helicopters left in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

"The Northern Alliance chief of staff told me they had 70 helicopters, mostly Mil Mi-17s," Caldwell said. "Within a one-year period, none of them could fly anymore ? not because they were shot out of the sky, but because the (Afghans) could not maintain and sustain them."

The NATO-led force is due to end its combat role in 2014, when it will hand over responsibility for security to the Afghan military and police. But thousands of troops and advisers will likely remain behind for at least several years to help train and mentor the government's security forces.

Allied nations have already supplied refurbished Italian-built C-27A tactical transports, Mi-35 helicopter gunships and Mi-17 transport choppers. Aside from the attack helicopters, the only dedicated close air support aircraft will be about two dozen A-29 Super Tucano counterinsurgency turboprops.

Afghanistan's air force dates to the 1920s, and reached its zenith during the 1980s Soviet occupation with nearly 500 fighter planes and bombers, transport aircraft and helicopter gunships. But it became little more than a scrap heap, left to decay by the Taliban during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, then destroyed on the ground by U.S. bombing in 2001.

So when the corps was reformed in 2005, it had to start from scratch. Thousands of different specialists ? including crew chiefs, engine and airframe technicians, avionics and communications experts, loadmasters and air base firefighters ? had to be recruited and trained. The force currently has about 5,000 members and 86 aircraft.

"I loved being a pilot, but I chose to become an instructor because I wanted to serve my country," said Maj. Aziz, whose exchanged the cockpit of a Sukhoi Su-22 fighter jet for a classroom. "I am training the trainers who will in the future be able to train all the personnel that the air force needs, without the help of foreign advisers and supervisors."

And the search for the right personnel became the major challenge in developing the service.

In contrast to the effort to reconstitute the Iraqi Air Force in the 1990s, which retained a large cadre of trained and experienced pilots and engineers from before the 2003 U.S. invasion, the task in Afghanistan is much more complicated because it requires that the air force be created from the ground up ? including basics such as teaching recruits how to read and write.

"About 85 percent of our current recruits are illiterate ? and that's on a good day," said Col. Michael T. Needham, commander of the 738th Air Expeditionary Advisory Squadron. The unit's American, Canadian, Jordanian and Portuguese instructors are assisting, training and advising the 230 Afghan staff of the aviation college at Kabul airport to provide general, as well as military, education.

"The goal is really to get them to a point where the mentors are not necessary," Needham said. "We would like to work ourselves out of the job."

A potentially equally serious problem is the air force's annual attrition rate of nearly 20 percent. While not as bad as the rate at which troops are leaving the desertion-ravaged Afghan Army, this makes it difficult to retain a cadre of trained and experienced personnel.

Pilots are being trained in Shindand in western Herat province. The school at Kabul airport is in charge of developing the maintenance skills that the ground crews will need to keep the planes flying.

In a sign of the difficulties faced by the air force in finding reliable personnel, an Afghan military pilot opened fire after an argument last April at Kabul airport, killing eight U.S. trainers and advisers and an American civilian contractor.

U.S. military investigators found no conclusive evidence that the officer, Col. Ahmed Gul, had any ties to the insurgency. But the incident illustrated the dangers faced by military and civilian trainers and advisers who work daily with Afghan forces to prepare for the eventual departure of international troops.

___

Slobodan Lekic can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/slekich

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_air_force

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Video: Betty White turns 90

Tanier: This weekend's tight ends are future of NFL

Tanier: Tight ends are still evolving. Given how athletically gifted they are, it?s not surprising that the 49ers and Patriots are finding new roles for players like Vernon Davis, Delanie Walker, Aaron Hernandez, and Rob Gronkowski.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/46031121#46031121

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PrimeSense Demos A Gesture-Based Next-Gen TV Interface

We've all seen the Kinect, or at least heard about its wonders. Well, the same company that hooked up Microsoft during "Project Natal" development has showed off some pretty wonderful technology at CES last week. It uses a 3D camera on top of your TV to let you interact with your television through gestures. To be honest, it looks a lot like any touchscreen interface you're already used to (with similar transitions and gestures) but you just happen to be 10 feet away from the screen.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/VnCIofUt1Q0/

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Do-It-Yourself Automotive Repairs ? Ways To Study On Your ...

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Source: http://www.triaktilinedeepwrinklefiller.com/do-it-yourself-automotive-repairs-ways-to-study-on-your-downfalls-and-mistakes/

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Drug Duo May Help Fight Aggressive Form of Breast Cancer (HealthDay)

TUESDAY, Jan. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Combining two drugs that target an aggressive type of breast cancer known as HER2-positive appears to work better than using either drug alone, researchers report.

The dual-drug approach greatly boosted the chances of eliminating microscopic signs of early cancer by the time a woman was due to have surgery, said researcher Dr. Jose Baselga, chief of hematology/oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The study was published online Jan. 17 in The Lancet.

The two drugs are Tykerb (lapatinib) and Herceptin (trastuzumab). Using both together resulted in a 51 percent response, compared with a 30 percent response in women given Herceptin alone. Those given Tykerb alone had a 25 percent response.

"What we observed was a massive improvement in response," Baselga said.

GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Tykerb, helped fund the study.

"Lapatinib was approved for advanced breast cancer in 2007," Baselga said. "The question we had was, what is the efficacy if we give it in early-stage breast cancer prior to surgery?"

Baselga and his colleagues conducted a trial treating 455 women from 23 countries. All had HER2-positive breast cancers. All had tumors larger than about three-fourths of an inch.

In HER2-positive breast cancer, test results are positive for a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, which promotes cancer cell growth.

In the study, 154 women got Tykerb, 149 Herceptin and the other 152 both drugs. All had the drug regimen before surgery, with Taxol (paclitaxel), a standard chemotherapy, added after six weeks. After 12 more weeks of treatment, the women had surgery.

At that point, researchers evaluated who had better responses. The women continued the treatments for one more year, allowing researchers to follow them and see how the approaches affected survival.

Baselga stressed that the study looked only at women with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancers, and that the drug Tykerb is approved now only for advanced breast cancers.

The study is well done and important, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. The two drugs, he said, "affect the same pathway but do it in a different way."

While the combination showed a better response rate, "there is also an increased level of side effects," he noted.

While no major heart problems occurred, those on Tykerb alone or the two-drug combination had more diarrhea. Liver-enzyme alterations were also more frequent when Tykerb was used.

GlaxoSmithKline notes that liver toxicity with the drug may be severe and that deaths have been reported, although the cause of the deaths has not been determined.

The important question, however, has not been answered yet, Lichtenfeld said. That's the effect on overall survival in using the two-drug approach. The researchers are continuing to evaluate that.

In another study, published online Jan. 17 in The Lancet Oncology, researchers from Germany reported that Tykerb is less beneficial than Herceptin as a single-drug therapy.

They assigned 620 women with HER2-positive breast cancer to get standard chemotherapy plus Herceptin or Tykerb.

They looked to see which drug was better at eliminating invasive cancer in the breast and metastatic cells in the lymph nodes. While 30 percent of those in the Herceptin group had this response, 23 percent of the Tykerb group did. The study was funded by drug makers GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis.

Baselga reports receiving honoraria from Roche; other co-authors report receiving speaking fees or honoraria from GlaxoSmithKline and fees from other drug companies.

More information

To learn more about breast cancer, including HER2-positive cancers, visit the American Cancer Society.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20120117/hl_hsn/drugduomayhelpfightaggressiveformofbreastcancer

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Drop in Melanoma Deaths Limited to Educated Whites: Study (HealthDay)

MONDAY, Jan. 16 (HealthDay News) -- Recent declines in death rates due to the skin cancer melanoma among white Americans appear to be limited to those with higher levels of education, researchers have found.

The findings reveal a widening education-related disparity in melanoma death rates and highlight the need for early-detection strategies to effectively target high-risk, low-educated whites, the American Cancer Society researchers said.

The investigators noted that overall melanoma death rates among white men and women aged 25 to 64 in the United States have been declining since the early 1990s, but it hasn't been known if death rates among whites might vary depending on a person's socioeconomic status, a term used to describe their levels of income and education.

To examine the issue, the researchers reviewed death certificates from 26 states and found that melanoma deaths declined about 10 percent between 1993-1997 and 2003-2007 in both men and women.

However, reductions occurred only among whites with at least 13 years of education, and there were actually slight increases among those with the least education. As a result, the education-related gap in melanoma death rates rose by nearly 52 percent in men and by almost 36 percent in women between 1993-1997 and 2003-2007, the investigators found.

The study was published in the Jan. 16 online edition of the journal Archives of Dermatology.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to document this education gap in melanoma mortality trends among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S.," study leader Vilma Cokkinides said in an American Cancer Society news release.

"The reasons for the widening of the educational gap in mortality rates are not yet understood, but we do know the cornerstone of melanoma control is recognizing the signs of melanoma early. Lower socioeconomic status is associated with suboptimal knowledge and awareness of melanoma, inadequate health insurance, and lower rates of skin self-examination or physician screening," she explained.

The researchers said there's a need for more vigilant primary and secondary melanoma-prevention education campaigns that target high-risk people with low socioeconomic status and the doctors who care for them.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about melanoma.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20120117/hl_hsn/dropinmelanomadeathslimitedtoeducatedwhitesstudy

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Cruise captain under scrutiny, another body found (AP)

ROME ? The captain of a cruise liner that ran aground and capsized off the Tuscan coast faced accusations from authorities and passengers that he abandoned ship before everyone was safely evacuated as rescuers found another body on the overturned vessel.

The male passenger was found in a corridor of the part of the Costa Concordia still above water, fire department spokesman Luca Cari told state radio. The victim was wearing a life-vest. Six bodies have now been recovered, while 16 people are unaccounted-for after the luxury liner struck rocks or a reef off the tiny island of Giglio.

The number of unaccounted-for was raised after relatives of two Sicilian women who had been listed among those safely evacuated after Friday night's grounding told authorities they not heard from them.

The search of the ship, including a risky inspection of the underwater half of the capsized ship, was continuing Monday, in rough seas.

On Sunday, divers searching the murky depths of the ship found the bodies of two elderly men. Three other bodies were found in the hours after the accident.

Still, there were glimmers of hope: The rescue of three survivors ? a young South Korean couple on their honeymoon and a crew member brought to shore in a dramatic airlift some 36 hours after the grounding late Friday.

Meanwhile, attention focused on the captain, who was spotted by Coast Guard officials and passengers fleeing the scene even as the chaotic and terrifying evacuation was under way.

The ship's Italian owner, a subsidiary of Carnival Cruise lines, issued a statement late Sunday saying there appeared to be "significant human error" on the part of the captain, Francesco Schettino, "which resulted in these grave consequences."

Authorities were holding Schettino for suspected manslaughter and a prosecutor confirmed Sunday they were also investigating allegations the captain abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison.

Schettino insisted he didn't leave the liner early, telling Mediaset television that he had done everything he could to save lives. "We were the last ones to leave the ship," he said.

Questions also swirled about why the ship had navigated so close to the dangerous reefs and rocks that jut off Giglio's eastern coast, amid suspicions the captain may have ventured too close while carrying out a maneuver to entertain tourists on the island.

Residents of Giglio said they had never seen the Costa come so close to the dangerous "Le Scole" reef area.

"This was too close, too close," said Italo Arienti, a 54-year-old sailor who has worked on the Maregiglio ferry between Giglio and the mainland for more than a decade. Pointing to a nautical map, he drew his finger along the path the ship usually takes and the jarring one close to shore that it followed Friday.

Costa captains have occasionally steered the ship near port and sounded the siren in a special salute, Arienti said. Such a nautical "fly-by" was staged last August, prompting the town's mayor to send a note of thanks to the commander for the treat it provided tourists who flock to the island, local news portal GiglioNews.it reported.

But Arienti and other residents said even on those occasions, the cruise ship always stayed far offshore, well beyond the reach of the "Le Scole" reefs.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Filippo Marini said divers had recovered the so-called "black box," with the recording of the navigational details, from a compartment now under water, though no details were released.

Survivors described a terrifying escape that was straight out of a scene from "Titanic." Many complained the crew didn't give them good directions on how to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for all to be released.

"We were left to ourselves," pregnant French passenger Isabelle Mougin, who injured her ankle in the scramble, told the ANSA news agency.

Another French passenger, Jeanne Marie de Champs, said that faced with the chaotic scene at the lifeboats, she decided to take her chances swimming to shore.

"I was afraid I wouldn't make the shore, but then I saw we were close enough, I felt calmer," she told Sky News 24.

___

Malin Rising in Stockholm, Sarah DiLorenzo in Paris, Gregorio Borgia in Giglio and Victor L. Simpson in Rome contributed.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120116/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_italy_cruise_aground

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This Week's Top Downloads [Download Roundup]

Jan 14, 2012 5:00 PM 11,429 0

• Unlock Root Roots Nearly 250 Android Devices in One Click [UPDATED] (Android) If you're looking to root your phone but don't want to pore over complicated instructions, a new program called Unlock Root claims to root a ton of different phones with ease.
• Gym-Pact Rewards You for Going to the Gym with Cash, Charges You when You Skip Out (iOS) If you just signed up for a gym membership, completely convinced that you'll go every day this year, keep in mind you're essentially throwing money away when you don't go. If you need a little more motivation to make the trip and work out, Gym-Pact is a new iOS app and webapp that lets you put your money where your mouth is. Go to the gym and check in with your phone and you'll be rewarded with cash payouts. Skip your workouts, and the service penalizes you and your bank account.
• OldChromeRemover Frees Up Disk Space Used by Old Versions of Chrome (Windows) We've mentioned before that Chrome stores old versions on your hard drive, which can eventually take up lots of space. OldChromeRemover is a simple app that will free that space back up for you.
• Movie Explorer Compiles Details for All Those Movies on Your Hard Drive (Windows) If you have lots of movies ripped or downloaded to your hard drive it can be difficult to keep track of the details. Movie Explorer is a self-executable program for Windows 2000 and up that will scan your hard drive and pull movie posters and details from iMDB. You can use Movie explorer to browse your movies and when you've made a selection you can launch the file directly from the program.
• Void Lock Secures Your Android Phone by Making It Appear Turned Off (Android) Void Lock keeps your phone secure by turning off your screen, as if the phone weren't on at all, and letting you unlock with a gesture.
• Get Linux Compiles Information, Screenshots, and more for Tons of Linux Distributions for Easy Reference (Windows) So you've gotten started with Linux, maybe tried Ubuntu or Mint, but you're ready to move on to another distro. Get Linux is a simple app that helps you browse information on tons of other distros available.
• Dragon Go! Brings Dragon's Superior Voice Search to Android (Android) While Android has a pretty great voice search system built-in, Dragon Go kicks it up a notch, with impeccable speech recognition skills and by automatically detecting what you're searching for and taking you to the correct web page.
• Sparkbox Is a Repository for Your Creative Inspiration (Mac) When you find an image you find particularly inspiring, you often want to save it. If you save a lot of these images, they can be hard to sort through and find as needed. That's where Sparkbox can help. It's a repository for your creative inspiration.
• Mindful Displays iCal Events and Reminders on Your Desktop (Mac) If you use iCal to manage your to-do list you may want to consider Mindful. This app creates a desktop view of your events and reminders for the day similar to the daily view function of most calendars.
• Boycott SOPA for Android Scans Products, Warns You If the Manufacturer Supports SOPA (Android) We've discussed several ways you can stay on top of the fight against SOPA, and ways you can get around it, but Boycott SOPA is an Android app that turns your smartphone into a powerful tool to speak with your dollars, and avoid financially supporting companies that support the bill.

Related Stories

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/DlQSo5QJWzA/this-weeks-top-downloads

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Arrest warrant issued for Griffin O'Neal

Griffin O'Neal is in police crosshairs again.

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A San Diego judge issued a bench warrant on Thursday for the arrest of actor Ryan O'Neal's oldest son after he was MIA at a sentencing hearing in his DUI and weapons case.

No word on his current whereabouts.

RELATED: Redmond's a longtime troublemaker

Per the San Diego Union-Tribune, Superior Court Judge Eugenia Eyherabide granted a request for a $100,000 bench warrant after the former "Escape Artist" star failed to appear and learn his fate stemming from his August head-on crash in San Pasqual, Calif.

O'Neal subsequently pleaded guilty in November to two felony charges of driving under the influence and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon over the accident and faces up to four years in prison.

Thursday's development comes nearly two weeks after the troubled 47-year-old thesp was freed on bail following a Dec. 31 arrest on a separate misdemeanor domestic violence charge so he could check himself into rehab.

PHOTOS: Court Appearances

In that incident, prosecutors allege a drunken O'Neal pushed his wife out of the way when she tried to stop him from getting behind the wheel on New Year's Eve.

His attorney, Heather Boxeth, could not be reached for comment. But the newspaper quoted her as telling the court yesterday that no one was injured in the dust-up and that her client had fallen off the wagon after five years sober and was currently in treatment.

Maybe he'll run into his younger bro, Redmond, who's also in rehab.

GALLERY: Hollywood's Most Dysfunctional Celebrity Dynasties

? 2012 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45987636/ns/today-entertainment/

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Galaxy's Gonzalez has knee surgery

updated 10:15 p.m. ET Jan. 13, 2012

CARSON, Calif. - Los Angeles Galaxy defender Omar Gonzalez will be out seven to nine months after undergoing surgery to repair a torn ligament in his left knee.

Gonzalez had surgery Friday in Los Angeles.

The injury leaves the Galaxy without the player voted MLS' top defender last season after he helped Los Angeles claim the league title. The 23-year-old Gonzalez is the youngest player to win the award.

Gonzalez was injured while on loan to FC Nuremberg of the Bundesliga last week, getting hurt on his first day of training with the club on a trip to Turkey.

Gonzalez has twice been selected to MLS' Best XI while starting 87 games over the past three seasons with the Galaxy.

Gonzalez will begin rehabilitation later this month. Los Angeles opens defense of its title in March.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Convincing with for Man U

Paul Scholes scored his first goal since ending his short-lived retirement to help Manchester United to a 3-0 Premier League win over Bolton on Saturday.

Jamie Squire / Getty Images

Wenger No. 1

Andrew Wenger looked a bit sheepish the moment he was asked what teams and players he followed growing up. He knew his reply wasn't all that daring.

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/45994401/ns/sports-soccer/

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Chris Burden's new work: art imitating the future (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? Chris Burden's latest kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," does more than just imitate life. The colorful display of roads, cars, trains and buildings is art imitating what the artist foresees life being like in five or 10 years.

It will be a time, Burden forecasts, when cars will race across Los Angeles' no-longer-gridlocked freeways and streets, past a skyline of towering buildings and single-family homes, at speeds of 240 miles per hour or more.

That's just what the tiny cars do in "Metropolis II," a colorful contraption composed of 1,100 miniature vehicles, 18 miniature roads, a tiny commuter rail line and dozens of small skyscrapers and other buildings. The cars, which Burden says reach a speed of "240 scale miles per hour," are powered by a complex series of electronic conveyor belts and magnets,

"In essence, it's sort of a complicated roller-coaster system," the artist, one of the pioneers of the Light and Space movement that flowered in Los Angeles in the 1970s, explained after throwing the switch on it earlier this week.

It goes on display to the general public this weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where a separate gallery has been constructed to house it, one with a balcony so people can view the work from either ground level or above. But it will only be powered up on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and, this week, on Martin Luther King Day.

It is to remain on display at the museum for at least 10 years under an agreement with Nicolas Berggruen, the billionaire businessman who sits on the institution's board and who bought it for an undisclosed sum.

By the end of that time, Burden believes, we'll be living a real-life version of "Metropolis II," with real cars racing across the hillsides and over the freeways of Los Angeles, putting an end to traffic gridlock. Oh, and by the way, those cars won't have drivers in them, just passengers.

"I'm personally looking forward to it because I don't like driving in Los Angeles," laughs Burden, an affable man of 65 who looks little different, other than being a bit stockier and better dressed, than he did in 1971 when he shocked the art world with his controversial performance piece "Shoot."

For that work, which can still be viewed on YouTube, Burden had himself filmed being shot in the arm by a friend who stood 15 feet away with a .22 caliber rifle.

For the equally controversial 1974 piece "Trans-fixed," he had himself nailed, Christ-like, to the back of a Volkswagen bug.

More recently, he has gravitated to building large-scale sculptures made out of everyday objects.

In 2008 he built a 65-foot skyscraper out of Erector Set pieces and put it in the shadow of the 70-story General Electric building in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza.

Burden is also the creator of "Urban Light," a collection of 202 lovingly restored antique streetlights that were permanently installed in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's entrance in 2008.

By day they provide a whimsical maze for passers-by to stroll through. By night, they brilliantly illuminate an entire block of Los Angeles' Museum Mile in a stunning display of white light.

"I think Chris Burden is one of the most significant artists, not only of Los Angeles but of this period of time," says Michael Govan, the museum's director and chief executive officer.

Govan said he learned Burden was working on "Metropolis II" about the time "Urban Light" was being installed.

"Even in its very beginnings you could see the outlines of a great work of art," Govan said during an interview at the museum earlier this week.

It took Burden four years to construct "Metropolis II" at his studio in the rustic Topanga Canyon arts colony, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy Rubins.

Nearly 10 feet tall and 30 feet wide, it is made up of, among other things, toy Lego blocks, toy Lincoln logs and HO-scale railroad tracks and trains he picked up at various stores.

He had to have the 1,100 automobiles specially made at a factory in China, however. They include sports cars, sedans, trucks and vans, each one with a little magnet in the chassis, so that they pull and push one another along without ever touching.

Then the whole thing had to be transported to the museum.

"It was an epic effort," says Govan. "It took seven months to disassemble it in the studio and reassemble it here."

When Burden fired it up this week, the cars raced along "Metropolis II's" roads, including its six-lane freeway, at astounding speeds despite the nearly gridlock conditions. And, yes, there were no crashes despite all the tailgating.

Predicting his creation represents the future of automobile traffic, Burden notes Google is already testing driverless cars along San Francisco's famously winding streets and highways.

Advocates say such digitally driven vehicles could race through intersections at high speeds without colliding and without doing the stupid things that drivers do, like passing each other on blind curves.

"I think it's going to happen really quickly," Burden says. "I think people are going to be surprised. In five or 10 years you're going to see such cars."

Until then, however, he will continue to make the 20-mile trip to the museum from his home by driving his BMW. But that's all right with him. He likes having the work at the museum.

Although born in Boston, Burden has lived in LA for more than 40 years. He earned a master's degree in fine art from the University of California, Irvine, in the early 1970s and, along with Ed Ruscha, is arguably one of the city's most famous and accomplished pop artists.

"To have it go to Shanghai or Mumbai or to some Saudi Arabian's palace, it's not ideal for me," he said of his work, adding he had opportunities to sell it to other collectors.

"I like it being in my hometown because I can come down and see it and, you know, I can enjoy it myself," he said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120114/ap_on_en_ot/us_future_metropolis

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