HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


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Jen & Justin: Why They Can't Wait to Wed!















03/02/2013 at 03:00 PM EST



Here's the thing about being Jennifer Aniston and being in love: The universe is invested. On Feb. 24 the star hit the red carpet in scarlet Valentino, her fiancé, Justin Theroux, by her side.

Flashes shimmered, fans roared, and the pair ducked into Hollywood's Dolby Theatre to take in the show. But there, the girl everyone presumes lives next door (who knew we all owned mansions?) was confronted by a friendly but curious employee who boldly asked That Question: Are you pregnant?

"No, I'm not!" replied Aniston, laughing politely. But, "I feel great," she told PEOPLE later that evening. "Wonderful!"

And on the outside? Forget about it. "She looks the greatest she possibly could," says Chris McMillan, her old pal and partner in her new hair-care line Living Proof. "Look at where she is in her life."

There's the man. There's that ring. There's a slate of films and new beauty ventures, renovating a $21 million L.A. estate in hopes of soon "normalizing and nesting," as she recently told PEOPLE, and, yes, planning a wedding.

With her film, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, set to wrap in Connecticut on March 8, "Jen and Justin have a date" set for soon after, says a source close to the actress, noting that the twosome have designed their wedding bands and Aniston has a dress in mind. "It will be a small affair with their closest friends." Likely among them: Aniston BFFs Courteney Cox, Chelsea Handler and Mandy Ingber, all of whom headed to New York to celebrate the actress's 44th birthday at the Greenwich Hotel on Feb. 11.

The bride-to-be "is crazy about Justin and can't wait to be his wife," says the source. "She plans on privately changing her name to
Theroux. She likes the way it sounds and jokes that [Jennifer Theroux] sounds very posh."

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident


LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.


In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.


"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."


The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.


On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.


In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.


Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.


In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.


The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.


Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.


For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."


David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.


Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.


Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.


"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.


WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.


Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.


"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.


Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.


"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.


In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."


Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.


Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.


Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.


"I'm enraged," he said.


___


Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.


__


Online:


WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb


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Riots to Protest Death Sentence Enter 3rd Day in Bangladesh


Associated Press


A car burned in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Saturday. Unrest continued after the leader of an Islamic party was sentenced to death.







DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Demonstrators protesting the death penalty given to an Islamic political party leader clashed with Bangladeshi security forces for a third straight day on Saturday, killing two people and injuring about a dozen, the police said.




Delawar Hossain Sayedee, one of the top leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic party, was sentenced to death on Thursday by a war crimes tribunal for atrocities committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of separation from Pakistan. The sentence set off rioting across the country, killing at least 46 people, including the two in the latest fighting, the authorities said.


Mr. Sayedee, 73, is the third defendant to be convicted by the tribunal, which was set up in 2010 by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government. He was accused of involvement in looting and burning villages, raping women and forcing people to convert to Islam.


An additional seven top leaders of Jamaat, including its chief, Matiur Rahman Nizami, are on trial facing war crimes charges.


Jamaat campaigned against Bangladesh’s nine-month war of independence and formed some auxiliary forces to help the Pakistani troops, but it has denied committing atrocities.


Bangladesh says that during the war, three million people were killed, 200,000 women were raped and millions of others were forced to flee the country.


On Saturday, security forces used tear gas to stop Jamaat supporters from smashing vehicles and blocking roads in Chittagong district, the police said. The area is 135 miles southeast of Dhaka, the capital.


Two men were killed and about a dozen were injured in the fighting, a local police official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.


Dhaka’s private television stations, Ekattor TV and Somoy TV, reported that Jamaat supporters had erected roadblocks and attacked the homes of government supporters in some areas.


Jamaat is an ally of Bangladesh’s main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, and was a partner in Ms. Zia’s government from 2001 to 2006.


Ms. Zia says the war crimes trials are politically motivated to prosecute the opposition, an allegation the government rejects.


Jamaat and Ms. Zia’s party have called for a three-day nationwide general strike starting on Sunday.


Read More..

HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Valerie Bertinelli Pays Special Tribute to Bonnie Franklin















03/01/2013 at 02:55 PM EST



Bonnie Franklin, who died of pancreatic cancer Friday, and Valerie Bertinelli go back nearly 40 years, to the sitcom One Day at a TIme, on which Franklin played her mother, Ann Romano.

Two years ago the actresses reunited professionally, on Bertinelii's series Hot in Cleveland.

Bertinelli said in a statement Friday: "My heart is breaking. Bonnie has always been one of the most important women in my life and was a second mother to me.

"The years on One Day at a Time were some of the happiest of my life, and along with Pat [Harrington Jr.] and Mackenzie [Phillips] we were a family in every way.

"She taught me how to navigate this business and life itself with grace and humor, and to always be true to yourself. I will miss her terribly."

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Leaving North Korea, Rodman Calls Kims ‘Great Leaders’


Jason Mojica/VICE Media, via Associated Press


The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and the former N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman watched an exhibition basketball game in Pyongyang on Thursday.









PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Ending his unexpected round of basketball diplomacy in North Korea on Friday, ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman called leader Kim Jong Un an "awesome guy" and said his father and grandfather were "great leaders" — an assessment that got short shrift from the U.S. government.




Rodman, the highest-profile American to meet Kim since he inherited power from father Kim Jong Il in 2011, watched a basketball game with the authoritarian leader Thursday and later drank and dined on sushi with him.


At Pyongyang's Sunan airport on his way to Beijing, Rodman said it was "amazing" that the North Koreans were "so honest." He added that Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder, "were great leaders."


"He's proud, his country likes him — not like him, love him, love him," Rodman said of Kim Jong Un. "Guess what, I love him. The guy's really awesome."


At Beijing's airport, Rodman pushed past waiting journalists without saying anything.


Rodman's visit to North Korea began Monday and took place amid tension between Washington and Pyongyang. North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test just two weeks ago, making clear the provocative act was a warning to the United States to drop what it considers a "hostile" policy toward the North.


The State Department on Friday distanced itself from Rodman's visit and his praise for Kim, saying he doesn't represent the United States.


"The North Korean regime has a horrific human rights record, quite possibly the worst human rights situation in the world," spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters in Washington. He accused the regime of depriving their people of food, shelter, water and maintaining prison gulags.


Ventrell also took aim at Pyongyang for its grand treatment of the visiting basketball stars.


"Clearly you've got the regime spending money to wine and dine foreign visitors, when they should be feeding their own people," he said.


Rodman traveled to Pyongyang with three members of the professional Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, VICE correspondent Ryan Duffy and a production crew to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series.


Kim, a diehard basketball fan, told the former Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls star that he hoped the visit would break the ice between the United States and North Korea, said Shane Smith, founder of the New York-based VICE media company.


Dressed in a blue Mao suit, Kim laughed and slapped his hands on a table during the game at Jong Ju Yong Gymnasium as he sat nearly knee to knee with Rodman. Rodman, the man who once turned up in a wedding dress to promote his autobiography, wore a dark suit and dark sunglasses, but still had on his nose rings and other piercings. A can of Coca-Cola sat on the table before him in photos shared with AP by VICE.


Smith, after speaking to the VICE crew in Pyongyang, said Kim and Rodman "bonded" and chatted in English, though Kim primarily spoke in Korean through a translator.


Thursday's game ended in a 110-110 tie, with two Americans playing on each team alongside North Koreans. After the game, Rodman addressed Kim in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands of North Koreans and told him, "You have a friend for life," VICE spokesman Alex Detrick told AP.


At an "epic feast" later, the leader plied the group with food and drinks and round after round of toasts were made, Duffy said in an email to AP.


Duffy said he invited Kim to visit the United States, a proposal met with hearty laughter from the North Korean leader.


Kim said he hoped sports exchanges would promote "mutual understanding between the people of the two countries," the official Korean Central News Agency said.


Ventrell said the U.S. wanted North Korea to come into line with their international obligations and to stop ballistic missile tests and their nuclear programs. "We're not going to read into this sort of theater one way or another," he said.


North Korea and the U.S. fought on opposite sides of the three-year Korean War, which ended in a truce in 1953. The foes never signed a peace treaty, and do not have diplomatic relations.


Rodman's trip is the second attention-grabbing American visit this year to North Korea. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, made a four-day trip in January to Pyongyang, but did not meet the North Korean leader.


The Obama administration had frowned on the trip by Schmidt, who was accompanied by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, but has avoided criticizing Rodman's outing, saying it's about sports.


_____


Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.


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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Michelle Williams Was 'Not Ready' to Commit to Jason Segel: Source















02/28/2013 at 03:00 PM EST







Michelle Williams at her Oz premiere Feb. 13


Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP


From the outside, it seemed as though Michelle Williams couldn't get enough of boyfriend Jason Segel. In reality, the actress may not have seen him as forever material.

"She cares a great deal for Jason but is not ready to make a commitment," a source tells PEOPLE. "Maybe if they were together day-to-day, she would have more confidence in a future. But not at this time."

Dating for a year, PEOPLE confirmed on Tuesday that the pair called it quits, citing long distance as the primary reason.

"Jason never got rid of his place in L.A., and Michelle's life with [daughter] Matilda was and has always been in New York," a second source says. "While Jason made every effort to make them a priority in his life – and they were top priority – he still couldn't drop everything and leave his life and career in L.A."

The road to romance has not been an easy one for Williams, 32.

The actress's ex, Heath Ledger, was found dead of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2008, less than a year after they split. Left to care for their daughter alone, Williams stayed out of the spotlight, but began dating director Spike Jonze for about a year. Following their split, she didn't have a public romance again until Segel, 33, in 2012.

Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA and LINDA MARX

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Wall Street edges up; Dow and S&P near records

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose modestly on low volume on Thursday after strong economic data, but the proximity of record highs for the Dow and the S&P 500 gave investors a reason to keep gains in check.


The U.S. economy grew slightly in the fourth quarter, reversing an earlier estimate showing contraction, and a drop in new claims for unemployment benefits last week added to a string of data that suggests the economy improved early this year.


Still, an even higher revision to GDP data was expected, and the jobless claims extended a trend baked into stock prices.


The low volume shows a lack of conviction from new buyers, according to Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities in New York.


Polcari the recent gains are the reaction to Monday's selloff, but there are not enough catalysts to take indexes much higher.


"Don't expect the market to hit new highs today," he said.


In afternoon trading, just over 3 billion shares had changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT.


The Dow was within striking distance of its record high after a year-to-date advance of almost 8 percent. The Dow Jones Transportation Average <.djt>, seen as a bet on future growth, is up 13 percent this year, and the 20-stock index hit a record intraday high earlier on Thursday.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 61.32 points or 0.44 percent to 14,136.69. The S&P 500 <.spx> gained 8.03 points or 0.53 percent to 1,524.02. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 17.14 points or 0.55 percent, to 3,179.67.


The Dow's record closing high, set on October 9, 2007, stands at 14,164.53, while the Dow's intraday record high, set on October 11, 2007, stands at 14,198.10.


The S&P 500 is up 0.25 percent this week and is on track to post its fourth straight month of gains.


Equity markets suffered steep losses earlier in the week on concerns about the impact of an Italian election on the European economy, but stocks bounced back on strong data and recent comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that showed continued support for the Fed's economic stimulus policy.


Gains in Limited Brands and Netflix , both up nearly 4 percent, led the way among consumer stocks. Shares of Limited Brands, the parent of retailers Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, shot up 3.8 percent to $46.21. The stock of video streaming service Netflix jumped 3.8 percent to $191.24.


In contrast, shares of J.C. Penney , however, slid 14.9 percent to $18.01 after the department store operator reported a steep drop in sales on Wednesday. Groupon Inc also fell on weak revenue, with the daily deals company's stock off 19.2 percent at $4.83.


Cablevision shares tumbled 8.8 percent to $14.11 after the cable provider took a $100 million hit on costs related to Superstorm Sandy and posted deeper video customer losses than expected.


On a positive note, Mylan Inc shares were on track to close at their highest ever after the generic drugmaker posted a 25 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit and said it will buy a unit of India's Strides Arcolab Ltd. Mylan's stock gained 4.2 percent to $29.78.


Investors were keeping an eye on the debate in Washington over U.S. government budget cuts that will take effect starting Friday if lawmakers fail to reach agreement on spending and taxes. President Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders arranged last-ditch talks to prevent the cuts, but expectations were low that any deal would emerge.


With 93 percent of the S&P 500 companies having reported results so far, 69.5 percent have beaten profit expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6.2 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.


(The story corrects to show S&P up 0.25 pct this week, not 2 percent, in paragraph 11.)


(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Additional reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Jan Paschal)



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At Ice Age End, a Smaller Gap in Warming and Carbon Dioxide





A meticulous new analysis of Antarctic ice suggests that the sharp warming that ended the last ice age occurred in lock step with increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the latest of many indications that the gas is a powerful influence on the earth’s climate.




Previous research had suggested that as the world began to emerge from the depths of the ice age more than 20,000 years ago, warming in Antarctica preceded changes in the global carbon dioxide level by something like 800 years.


That relatively long gap led some climate-change contrarians to assert that rising carbon dioxide levels were essentially irrelevant to the earth’s temperature — a side effect of planetary warming, perhaps, but not the cause.


Mainstream climate scientists have rejected that view and argued that carbon dioxide, while it did not initiate the end of the ice age, played a vital role in the feedback loops that caused a substantial warming.


Still, a long gap between increases of temperature and of carbon dioxide was relatively hard for the scientists to explain. In the political debate in the United States over global warming, the supposed gap has been invoked repeatedly by climate-change contrarians.


In 2007, for example, Al Gore was testifying to Congress about the science in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” He came under attack by Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas.


“CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose,” Mr. Barton said, citing a scientific paper from 2001. “The temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa. On this point, Mr. Vice President, you’re not just off a little. You’re totally wrong.”


But the paper published online Thursday by the journal Science, together with a string of other recent studies, suggests that Mr. Gore was right all along.


The research was led by Frédéric Parrenin of the University of Grenoble, in France. He and his colleagues took a new stab at sorting out the sequence of events at the close of the last great ice age.


Since the 1980s, scientists have been collecting a climate record from those earlier times by extracting long cylinders of ice from the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.


Air bubbles trapped in the polar ice give direct evidence of the past composition of the atmosphere. And subtle chemical variations in the ice itself give an indication of the local temperature at the time it was formed.


The trouble is that the air bubbles do not get sealed off for hundreds or even thousands of years, as the snow is slowly buried and compressed. Therefore, it is tricky for scientists to put the atmospheric record and the temperature record onto a common time scale.


Early analyses had fairly large error margins. Nonetheless, they produced one of the most striking findings of modern science: an extremely tight association between the temperature and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is consistent with basic physics showing that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas.


But in several reconstructions based on ice cores, local temperature increases at the poles appeared to slightly precede global increases of carbon dioxide. In the 2001 paper that Mr. Barton cited, for example, Antarctic temperature appeared to lead global carbon dioxide levels by 800 years, give or take 600 years.


Using high-precision chemical techniques, Dr. Parrenin and his colleagues have essentially reduced the error margin. Their findings suggest that increases of carbon dioxide lagged temperature increases in Antarctica by no more than about 200 years and may have even preceded the temperature increase.


“It’s a breakthrough in our concept of how past climate evolved,” Dr. Parrenin said in an interview.


It remains to be seen how well the paper will withstand scientific scrutiny. “I’m left with this uneasy feeling that the uncertainties are larger than they claim,” said Eric Steig, a climate scientist at the University of Washington.


Dr. Steig noted that Dr. Parrenin’s paper is the third in recent years to suggest that the gap in the climate records between polar temperature and CO2, if it exists at all, is relatively small. And Jeremy Shakun, a visiting scholar at Harvard, compiled a temperature record for the whole planet, not just Antarctica. He concluded that the carbon dioxide increase preceded the overall planetary warming.


A small gap poses no conceptual problems, scientists said. They have long known that the ice ages are caused by variations in the earth’s orbit around the sun. When an intensification of sunlight initiates the end of an ice age, they believe, carbon dioxide is somehow flushed out of the ocean, causing a big amplification of the initial warming.


That understanding is one of the cornerstones of the scientists’ warning that modern society is running a big risk by burning fossil fuels and pumping enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.


The level has already jumped 41 percent since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, and given the weakness of global efforts to control emissions, scientists say it could eventually double or triple. Even at the current concentration, the evidence suggests that increases in sea level of 25 feet or more may have already become inevitable, albeit over a long period.


“We’re just entering a new era in earth’s history,” Dr. Shakun said. “It will be an unrecognizable new planet in the future. I think the only question is, exactly how fast does that transformation happen?”


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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Matt Damon & Wife Luciana Planning Secret Second Wedding















02/27/2013 at 03:15 PM EST



Better late than never!

More than seven years after saying, "I do" in a private, low-key ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan in 2005, Matt Damon, 42, and wife Luciana are going all out with a top-secret destination wedding celebration in April, a source confirms to PEOPLE.

The pair has sent out "save the date" cards to close family and friends, but even the guests do not know the mysterious location of the event.

"They now want to do something bigger," a source tells Page Six of their planned second wedding.

But "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean the couple's four girls will participate in the ceremony. They are reportedly requesting "no kids" at the destination event.


Reporting by JULIE JORDAN

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Vt. lye victim gets new face at Boston hospital


BOSTON (AP) — The 2007 chemical attack left the Vermont nurse unrecognizable to anyone who knew her.


But now Carmen Blandin Tarleton's face has changed again following a facial transplant this month.


Doctors at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston said Wednesday that the 44-year-old's surgery included transplanting a female donor's facial skin to Tarleton's neck, nose and lips, along with facial muscles, arteries and nerves.


"I know how truly blessed I am, and will have such a nice reflection in the mirror to remind myself what selfless really is," Tarleton wrote on her blog Wednesday.


The Thetford, Vt., woman suffered burns on more than 80 percent of her body and was blinded after her estranged husband attacked her with a baseball bat and doused her with lye in 2007.


Tarleton, who once worked as a transplant nurse, has undergone more than 50 surgeries since the attack, including work to restore some of her vision.


The latest surgery took 15 hours and included a team of more than 30 medical professionals. The lead surgeon, Bohdan Pomahac, called her injuries among the worst he's seen in his career.


"Carmen is a fighter," the doctor said Wednesday. "And fight she did."


Pomahac's team has performed five facial transplants at the hospital. He said the patient is recovering very well and is in great spirits as she works to get stronger.


He said she was very pleased when she saw her face for the first time, and that her appearance will not match that of the late donor's face.


"I think she looks amazing, but I'm biased," he said with a smile.


The donor's family wants to remain anonymous, but released a statement through a regional donor bank saying that her spirit would live on through Tarleton and three other organ recipients.


The estranged husband, Herbert Rodgers, pleaded guilty in 2009 in exchange for a prison sentence of at least 30 years.



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IHT Rendezvous: Will Turkey Make Peace With the Kurds?

LONDON — There is growing optimism that a ceasefire in Turkey’s three-decade war with Kurdish guerrillas will be declared to coincide with the Kurdish New Year in three weeks.

Under a draft plan reported on Wednesday, the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., would lay down its arms on March 21 and withdraw its forces from Turkish territory by August.

The potential for a breakthrough in ending the conflict, which has claimed 40,000 lives since 1984, came when the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened talks late last year with Abdullah Ocalan, the P.K.K.’s jailed leader.

Intelligence agents made a series of visits to the prison island of Imrali near Istanbul to negotiate with the former guerrilla chief, who was once Turkey’s most wanted man.

In their latest visit, last weekend, they accompanied a delegation of Kurdish legislators from the Peace and Democracy Party, or B.D.P.

Selahattin Demirtas, the B.D.P. co-chairman, said this week that there was already a de facto ceasefire. The P.K.K. was not carrying out armed action and the Turkish army was not conducting significant military operations against the rebels.

He quoted a letter from Mr. Ocalan in which he expressed the belief that the process would lead to an eventual resolution of the Kurdish issue. “Neither we nor the state can abandon that process,” he quoted the letter as saying.

The P.K.K. has abandoned its previous demands for independence but continues to seek equal rights for Kurds within the Turkish state.

Mr. Erdogan meanwhile dramatically underlined his own good intentions by telling his parliamentary colleagues he was prepared to drink poison if it meant achieving peace.

There are reports that the P.K.K. is preparing to release 16 Turkish prisoners, possibly as early as this weekend, as part of the peace moves.

Mr. Ocalan has sought the backing of P.K.K. exiles in Europe for the peace initiative, as well as that of guerrilla fighters based in the north of Iraq.

Duran Kalkan, a senior P.K.K. commander based in Iraq, said this week that he is open to the idea of a prisoner release. “However, nobody should expect us to make a unilateral move.”

In what appeared to be a positive response to the peace moves, he told the Kurdish Firatnews: “If everybody does what is required to do, I can say on behalf of the P.K.K. that the Kurdish armed movement will never pose an obstacle to the democratization of Turkey and the solution of the Kurdish question.”

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Anne Hathaway Apologizes for Last-Minute Oscar Dress Switch









02/26/2013 at 03:30 PM EST







Anne Hathaway (left) and the Valentino dress that appears to have been her first choice


John Shearer/Invision/AP; Marcus Tondo/InDigital


What's a girl to do?

Best Supporting Actress winner Anne Hathaway's pale pink (and hotly debated) Prada gown wasn't the actress's first choice for the Academy Awards last Sunday.

"It came to my attention late Saturday night that there would be a dress worn to the Oscars that is remarkably similar to the Valentino I had intended to wear, and so I decided it was best for all involved to change my plans," she tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement.

Anne Hathaway Apologizes for Last-Minute Oscar Dress Switch| Oscars 2013, Anne Hathaway, Actor Class

Amanda Seyfried

Kevin Mazur / WireImage

The actress, 30, is indeed a longtime fan of Valentino and has worn his designs for many years including when she wed Adam Shulman last September.

"Though I love the dress I did wear, it was a difficult last minute decision as I had so looked forward to wearing Valentino in honor of the deep and meaningful relationship I have enjoyed with the house and with Valentino himself," Hathaway continues.

"I deeply regret any disappointment caused."

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C. Everett Koop, 'rock star' surgeon general, dies


NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. C. Everett Koop has long been regarded as the nation's doctor— even though it has been nearly a quarter-century since he was surgeon general.


Koop, who died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H., at age 96, was by far the best known and most influential person to carry that title. Koop, a 6-foot-1 evangelical Presbyterian with a biblical prophet's beard, donned a public health uniform in the early 1980s and became an enduring, science-based national spokesman on health issues.


He served for eight years during the Reagan administration and was a breed apart from his political bosses. He thundered about the evils of tobacco companies during a multiyear campaign to drive down smoking rates, and he became the government's spokesman on AIDS when it was still considered a "gay disease" by much of the public.


"He really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," said Chris Collins, a vice president of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.


Even before that, he had been a leading figure in medicine. He was one of the first U.S. doctors to specialize in pediatric surgery at a time when children with complicated conditions were often simply written off as untreatable. In the 1950s, he drew national headlines for innovative surgeries such as separating conjoined twins.


His medical heroics are well noted, but he may be better remembered for transforming from a pariah in the eyes of the public health community into a remarkable servant who elevated the influence of the surgeon general — if only temporarily.


"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," said Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade later under President George W. Bush.


Koop's religious beliefs grew after the 1968 death of his son David in a mountain-climbing accident, and he became an outspoken opponent of abortion. His activism is what brought him to the attention of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who decided to nominate him for surgeon general in 1981. Though once a position with real power, surgeon generals had been stripped of most of their responsibilities in the 1960s.


By the time Koop got the job, the position was kind of a glorified health educator.


But Koop ran with it. One of his early steps involved the admiral's uniform that is bestowed to the surgeon general but that Koop's predecessors had worn only on ceremonial occasions. In his first year in the post, Koop stopped wearing his trademark bowties and suit jackets and instead began wearing the uniform, seeing it as a way to raise the visual prestige of the office.


In those military suits, he surprised the officials who had appointed him by setting aside his religious beliefs and feelings about abortion and instead waging a series of science-based public health crusades.


He was arguably most effective on smoking. He issued a series of reports that detailed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and in speeches began calling for a smoke-free society by the year 2000. He didn't get his wish, but smoking rates did drop from 38 percent to 27 percent while he was in office — a huge decline.


Koop led other groundbreaking initiatives, but perhaps none is better remembered than his work on AIDS.


The disease was first identified in 1981, before Koop was officially in office, and it changed U.S. society. It destroyed the body's immune system and led to ghastly death, but initially was identified in gay men, and many people thought of it as something most heterosexuals didn't have to worry about.


U.S. scientists worked hard to identify the virus and work on ways to fight it, but the government's health education and policy efforts moved far more slowly. Reagan for years was silent on the issue. Following mounting criticism, Reagan in 1986 asked Koop to prepare a report on AIDS for the American public.


His report, released later that year, stressed that AIDS was a threat to all Americans and called for wider use of condoms and more comprehensive sex education, as early as the third grade. He went on to speak frankly about AIDS in an HBO special and engineered the mailing of an educational pamphlet on AIDS to more than 100 million U.S. households in 1988.


Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.


Koop's speeches and empathetic approach made him a hero to a wide swath of America, including public health workers, gay activists and journalists. Some called him a "scientific Bruce Springsteen." AIDS activists chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances and booed other officials.


"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."


Koop angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.


He got static from some staff at the White House for his actions, but Reagan himself never tried to silence Koop. At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day.


After his death was reported Monday, the tributes poured forth, including a statement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made smoking restrictions a hallmark of his tenure.


"The nation has lost a visionary public health leader today with the passing of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was born and raised in Brooklyn," Bloomberg said. "Outspoken on the dangers of smoking, his leadership led to stronger warning labels on cigarettes and increased awareness about second-hand smoke, creating an environment that helped millions of Americans to stop smoking — and setting the stage for the dramatic changes in smoking laws that have occurred over the past decade."


Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health taught Koop what was known about AIDS during quiet after-hours talks in the early 1980s and became a close friend.


"A less strong person would have bent under the pressure," Fauci said. "He was driven by what's the right thing to do."


Carmona, a surgeon general years later, said Koop was a mentor who preached the importance of staying true to the science in speeches and reports — even when it made certain politicians uncomfortable.


"We remember him for the example he set for all of us," Carmona said.


Koop's nomination originally was met with staunch opposition. Women's groups and liberal politicians complained Reagan had selected him only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.


Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."


But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed as surgeon general after he told a Senate panel he would not use the post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word and eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy.


Koop was modest about his accomplishments, saying before leaving office in 1989, "My only influence was through moral suasion."


The office declined after that. Few of his successors had his speaking ability or stage presence. Fewer still were able to secure the support of key political bosses and overcome the meddling of everyone else. The office gradually lost prestige and visibility, and now has come to a point where most people can't name the current surgeon general. (It's Dr. Regina Benjamin.)


Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.


"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.


In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."


He maintained his personal opposition to abortion. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.


Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.


Worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, Koop opened an institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.


Koop was the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats. He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.


He received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it. In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children. Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.


He was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.


Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.


___


Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Wilson Ring in Montpelier, Vt.; Jeff McMillan in Philadelphia; and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington.


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Immigrants Released Ahead of Automatic Budget Cuts





In a highly unusual move, federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country, an effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.




The government has not dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants, however. The detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases continue in court, officials said.


But the move angered some Republicans, including Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who said the releases were a political gambit by the Obama administration that undermined the continuing negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform and jeopardized public safety.


“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” said Mr. Goodlatte, who is running the House hearings on immigration reform. “By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives.”


While administration officials did not explain how they selected detainees for release, they suggested that the population did not include immigrants who were the focus of the administration’s stated enforcement priorities, including those convicted of serious crimes.


“Priority for detention remains on serious crminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety,” said Gillian M. Christensen, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.


The releases, which began several days ago and continued on Tuesday, were intended “to make the best use of our limited detention resources in the current fiscal climate,” Ms. Christensen said. “As fiscal uncertainty remains over the continuing resolution and possible sequestration, ICE has reviewed its detained population to ensure detention levels stay within ICE’s current budget.”


The government-wide budget cuts, known as the sequester, are scheduled to take effect on Friday. Immigration officials declined to say whether they intended to make any further cutbacks in detention programs this week.


The agency, Ms. Christensen added, “is continuing to prosecute their cases in immigration court and, when ordered, will seek their removal from the country.”


Officials did not reveal precisely how many detainees were released or where the releases took place, but immigrants’ advocates around the country have been reporting that hundreds of detainees were freed in numerous locations, including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Texas; Broward County, Fla.; and New Orleans; and from centers in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia and New York.


While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, this mass release — so many in such a short span of time — appears to be unprecedented in recent memory, immigration advocates said.


Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at their regional ICE office as well as electronic monitoring, immigration officials said.


Immigrants’ advocacy groups, citing the cost of detaining immigrants, have for years argued that the federal government should make greater use of practical and less expensive alternatives to detention for low-risk defendants being held on administrative charges.


The National Immigration Forum estimated last year that it cost the federal government between $122 and $164 per day to hold a detainee in its immigration system. In contrast, the organization said, alternative forms of detention could cost 30 cents to $14 per day per immigrant.


Advocacy groups applauded the releases but pressed the Obama administration to do more, including adhering more closely to its declared enforcement priorities like focusing on serious criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety, rather than immigrants accused of misdemeanors and administrative immigration violations.


“It shouldn’t take a manufactured crisis in Washington to prompt our immigration agencies to actually take steps towards using government resources wisely or keeping families together,” said Carolina Canizales, a leader of United We Dream, the nation’s largest organization of young illegal immigrants.


At a White House news briefing on Monday, Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary, seemed to hint at the move. “All I can say is, look, we’re doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester,” she told reporters. “But there’s only so much I can do. I’m supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those?”


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Music service Spotify hooks up with Ford in first vehicle foray






(Reuters) – Streaming music service Spotify has partnered with Ford Motor Co to allow its subscribers to listen to music in more than one million Ford vehicles in North America.


Owners of Ford models with SYNC AppLink can access Spotify’s catalog of more than 20 million songs through voice activation using its smartphone app.






The deal, announced by both companies on Monday, is Spotify’s first collaboration with an automaker.


Spotify is a free on-demand streaming music service that also offers a subscription package that allows listeners to hear music without interruptions from commercials and gain access to play lists and preferences from any device anytime.


Spotify says it has 20 million active users worldwide, with 25 percent of them paying for subscriptions.


Music services like Spotify and Pandora Media Inc


are striking partnerships with automakers to make their music available to drivers, especially as Internet access improves in vehicles.


Pandora is available in 75 vehicle models and has deals with automakers like General Motors Co , Ford, BMW and Chrysler Group LLC , allowing drivers to plug in their Pandora-enabled mobile devices and use car dashboards to control the service.


More than 1 million people have used Pandora’s dashboard integration, it said.


Separately on Monday, GM said it was switching to AT&T Inc from Verizon Wireless to provide high-speed wireless service for its 2015 vehicle models.


(Reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Jennifer Lawrence Changes Into Second Oscar Gown









02/25/2013 at 03:45 PM EST







Jennifer Lawrence in Christian Dior Couture (left), and Calvin Klein Collection


Getty(2)


What actress won't go for a costume change? Especially when it means wearing two gorgeous gowns. After winning the Best Actress Oscar at Sunday's 85th Annual Academy Awards, Jennifer Lawrence pulled off a dramatic switch.

The Silver Linings Playbook actress, 22, made the change from her over-the-top Christian Dior Couture gown – which luckily cushioned her fall as she made her way up to accept her Oscar – to a sexy, form-fitting Calvin Klein Collection dress for the party circuit.

The slinky metallic dress showed off the actress's fit physique as she posed for photos at Vanity Fair's after-party.

As the face of Miss Dior, Lawrence has worn the designer's creations several times this awards season, but has also worn Calvin Klein in the past. In 2011, when the actress was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Winter's Bone, she chose a super sexy red Calvin Klein stunner.

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Mediterranean-style diets found to cut heart risks


Pour on the olive oil, preferably over fish and vegetables: One of the longest and most scientific tests of a Mediterranean diet suggests this style of eating can cut the chance of suffering heart-related problems, especially strokes, in older people at high risk of them.


The study lasted five years and involved about 7,500 people in Spain. Those who ate Mediterranean-style with lots of olive oil or nuts had a 30 percent lower risk of major cardiovascular problems compared to those who were told to follow a low-fat diet but who in reality, didn't cut fat very much. Mediterranean meant lots of fruit, fish, chicken, beans, tomato sauce, salads, and wine and little baked goods and pastries.


Mediterranean diets have long been touted as heart-healthy, but that's based on observational studies that can't prove the point. The new research is much stronger because people were assigned diets to follow for a long time and carefully monitored. Doctors even did lab tests to verify that the Mediterranean diet folks were consuming more olive oil or nuts as recommended.


Most of these people were taking medicines for high cholesterol and blood pressure, and researchers did not alter those proven treatments, said one study leader, Dr. Ramon Estruch of Hospital Clinic in Barcelona.


But as a first step to prevent heart problems, "we think diet is better than a drug" because it has few if any side effects, Estruch said. "Diet works."


Results were published online Monday by the New England Journal of Medicine and were discussed at a nutrition conference in Loma Linda, Calif.


People in the study were not given rigid menus or calorie goals because weight loss was not the aim. That could be why they found the "diets" easy to stick with — only about 7 percent dropped out within two years. There were twice as many dropouts in the low-fat group than among those eating Mediterranean-style.


Researchers also provided the nuts and olive oil, so it didn't cost participants anything to use these relatively pricey ingredients. The type of oil may have mattered — they used extra-virgin olive oil, which is minimally processed and richer than regular or light olive oil in the chemicals and nutrients that earlier studies have suggested are beneficial.


The study involved people ages 55 to 80, just over half of them women. All were free of heart disease at the start but were at high risk for it because of health problems — half had diabetes and most were overweight and had high cholesterol and blood pressure.


They were assigned to one of three groups: Two followed a Mediterranean diet supplemented with either extra-virgin olive oil (4 tablespoons a day) or with walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds (a fistful a day). The third group was urged to eat a low-fat diet heavy on bread, potatoes, pasta, rice, fruits, vegetables and fish and light on baked goods, nuts, oils and red meat.


Independent monitors stopped the study after nearly five years when they saw fewer problems in the two groups on Mediterranean diets.


Doctors tracked a composite of heart attacks, strokes or heart-related deaths. There were 96 of these in the Mediterranean-olive oil group, 83 in the Mediterranean-nut group and 109 in the low-fat group.


Looked at individually, stroke was the only problem where type of diet made a big difference. Diet had no effect on death rates overall.


The Mediterranean diet proved better even though its followers ate about 200 calories more per day than the low-fat group did. The study leaders now are analyzing how each of the diets affected weight gain or loss and body mass index.


The Spanish government's health research agency initiated and paid for the study, and foods were supplied by olive oil and nut producers in Spain and the California Walnut Commission. Many of the authors have extensive financial ties to food, wine and other industry groups but said the sponsors had no role in designing the study or analyzing and reporting its results.


Rachel Johnson, a University of Vermont professor who heads the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, said the study is very strong because of the lab tests to verify oil and nut consumption and because researchers tracked actual heart attacks, strokes and deaths — not just changes in risk factors such as high cholesterol.


"At the end of the day, what we care about is whether or not disease develops," she said. "It's an important study."


Rena Wing, a weight-loss expert at Brown University, noted that researchers provided the oil and nuts, and said "it's not clear if people could get the same results from self-designed Mediterranean diets" — or if Americans would stick to them more than Europeans who are used to such foods.


Dr. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., said he would give the study "a positive — even glowing — comment" and called it "the best and certainly one of the largest prospective dietary trials ever done."


"The data are sufficiently strong to convince me to move my dietary pattern closer to the Mediterranean Diet that they outline," he added.


Another independent expert also praised the study as evidence diet can lower heart risks.


"The risk reduction is close to that achieved with statins," cholesterol-lowering drugs, said Dr. Robert Eckel, a diet and heart disease expert at the University of Colorado.


"But this study was not carried out or intended to compare diet to statins or blood pressure medicines," he warned. "I don't think people should think now they can quit taking their medicines."


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Online:


Journal: http://www.nejm.org


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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP


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Lens Blog: The Largely Unknown Photography of Lola Álvarez Bravo

The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Capa’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanish Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The find, known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, had prints and original photomontages by Lola, as well as some beautifully printed images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to whom she had been married for several years. The find also included work by some of Lola’s students who had gone on to become noted photographers, Mariana Yampolsky and Raul Conde, among them.

Though overshadowed by her more famous partner, who had resisted her foray into photography, Lola ranks among Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, having done portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals as well as work among the indigenous and poor, whom she portrayed with a sense of compassion and social criticism. Her images provide a window in what she — a working photographer and teacher most of her life — valued as an artistic statement.

“It’s what an art historian dreams about, finding the missing pieces,” said James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who was among the first to inspect the images in Mexico. “The material fleshes out some aspects of her work, giving us original titles and dates that radically change the meaning and interpretation of a work of art. And the original photomontages give an idea how she created them.”

Born Dolores Concepcion Martinez in 1903, she grew up in a wealthy family, although she had to move in with relatives when her father died. She first met Manuel in her youth, marrying him in 1925. As an accountant, he was sent to work in Oaxaca, where the couple began to take pictures, Mr. Oles wrote in his recently published book, “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era.”

The area’s poverty struck her, and it elicited a compassion in her work that was different from her husband’s more complex images.

“Lola was maybe a little more natural,” Mr. Oles said. “She was interested in more candid and less intrusive images. She was certainly more interested in people than things.”

The couple separated in 1934, divorcing in 1949. Throughout, she kept his name and did not remarry. She supported herself as a photographer working for government agencies, as well as teaching, where she influenced many.

“I think Lola was a remarkable photographer, especially given all the challenges she faced,” said Elizabeth Ferrer, who published “Lola Álvarez Bravo” with Aperture. “There were women artists, though women were not supposed to be working in the street but in the studio. But the kind of photography done at the time involved a greater public interface, and the fact that she did that showed her incredible strength and desire to photograph the world around her.”

Although she found her own path apart from her more famous husband — she was more gregarious, enjoying the company of artists, writers and intellectuals — work and circumstance worked against her. It was not until the 1980s, Mr. Oles said, that her work as an artist came to the fore.

Mr. Oles visited her in the early 1990s, around the time when the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired an archive of her work. Lola was moved by her son to another apartment, and she died in 1993.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Oles got a call from a museum in Mexico City. Relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had purchased her old apartment, had been safeguarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints.

“She didn’t sell anything or have it framed in her apartment, but just organized it,” Mr. Oles said. “When I went there, it was amazing. It showed what had been separated at some time by Lola, and God knows when or why, there were a lot of her own photos. Many were by students of hers as well as a group of extraordinary vintage photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”

Her photos — including some vintage prints that were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1943 — shed new light on her work. In some cases, original titles gave new meaning to old images. One shot of an indigenous woman seated against a wrought-iron fence that had long been titled “By the Fault of Others” turned out to have “Death Penalty” (Slide 6) as its original title.

“That changes how we interpret this photo of this woman who looks trapped by this grille,” Mr. Oles said. “You can go into the archive of any major photographer and find images they never printed and exhibit them after their death without knowing what they mean. Finding this material tells us these are the photos she chose which she thought were the key images that she was interested in during that era.”

While her photomontages are well known, the archive has the originals, which she made by gluing together cut-out images she would later photograph for the final montage.

“In Mexico, photomontage was mainly a strategy of media and advertising, not an artistic project,” Mr. Oles said. “What Lola was trying to do was elevate it to the realm of high art and view it as equivalent to muralism. The multiple perspectives of photomontage and the fragmented images resolved into a whole are what a muralist like Diego Rivera does when he shows multiple perspectives of a factory and resolving them together. Lola understood that.”

Among the greatest finds in the archive are works by her students. Even in death, though, Lola’s own images prove to affect a current generation. Mr. Oles said her photos of prostitutes, titled “Triptych of the Martyrs,” has a powerful element of feminist criticism.

“Their faces are obscured with wound-like shadows,” he said. “There is this undercurrent of social critique. Whenever my students see those pictures, they are moved sometimes to the point of tears. I don’t think any of Manuel Álvarez Bravos’s photos move them to tears.”


The exhibit “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era” will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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Live Twitter surgeries hit with hospitals, public






HOUSTON (AP) — Amy Shireman logged into Twitter early Wednesday to join thousands of people from 60 countries watch live something she had experienced but never seen: a baby boy delivered by cesarean section, in all its graphic imagery.


The live Twitter broadcast brought to viewers by Houston’s Memorial Hermann Health System was the medical institution’s latest foray into a growing trend to gain exposure by showing the world via social media routine procedures that happen daily in operating rooms.






While the Internet and social media have been a part of the medical industry for years, hospitals and doctors are now using it to gain leverage in a competitive market. And what better way to do that than provide people with an authentic online version of the kinds of surgeries they’ve been watching for years on fictional TV shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” ”House” and “ER?”


“It’s fascinating to pull back the curtain on the mystery of the OR,” said Natalie Camarata, the social media manager at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital who helped broadcast Wednesday’s C-section as well as two other procedures, including a brain surgery done by Dr. Dong Kim, who gained notoriety when he treated former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011.


Through a variety of matrices that help track online activity, Camarata estimated that 72,000 watched the C-section live on Twitter, while an additional 11,000 viewed it in another format. The viewers were from 60 countries, she said, with the most international followers coming from Germany, Norway and Israel.


During the procedure, viewers tweeted questions, and doctors or staff responded. One viewer from Norway asked about the difference in how the umbilical cord is treated in a C-section. Several tweeted congratulations. In the two hours the hospital was live, it gained more than 600 followers, dozens of them in the first few minutes. Several noted the images were gory, joking they wouldn’t watch it over breakfast.


Shireman, a 35-year-old mother of two from Pittsburgh, was intrigued to see “what was happening beyond the curtain” after having two C-sections herself. While she had hoped the hospital would focus more on the risks, she said she would watch it again, and would consider watching other surgeries.


“The pictures of watching that baby come out of the womb were just amazing” Shireman said. “I know it was delayed a bit … but it did have that live feel like you were right there in the OR.”


Previously, when Memorial Hermann live tweeted a brain surgery, more than 235,000 watched, more than 280,000 viewed photos and video and the hospital gained 7,000 new followers. With each event, the hospital finds more and different people participating, Camarata said.


“When hospitals did it several years back, the online audience wasn’t fully engaged,” she said. “Now people are living Twitter, living Facebook. It’s part of their everyday life.”


Tyler Haney, the vice president of digital marketing at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said his hospital system has not live tweeted a surgery but also has not ruled it out. For now, it is focusing on innovative things at the center, like providing the online audience an opportunity to interact with a brain computer interface, which increased traffic from social media outlets by 120 percent.


This trend — which the medical industry latched on to later than others — will only grow, he said, quoting statistics that found 57 percent of people saying a social media connection would have a “strong impact” on their decision to seek treatment at a given hospital.


The Mayo Clinic has been a leader in the field, said Lee Aase, the clinic’s social media director but has opted not to do live events from the OR, feeling that it is voyeuristic and does not provide additional benefits. The clinic has focused instead on question-and-answer sessions on specific topics.


“People are taking their social network connections with them wherever they go and we certainly are seeing building interest in this,” he said.


Dr. Anne Gonzalez, one of the surgeons who participated in the C-section and is affiliated with the system’s women’s hospital, said social media helps doctors navigate a competitive market.


“There’s a lot of challenges with trying to make patients understand what you think is best for them in a very non-paternalistic way, and I think Twitter helps with that,” she said.


Swedish Health Services, which has five hospitals and more than 100 clinics in the Seattle area, recently live tweeted an ear surgery, said Dana Lewis, manager of digital marketing and internal communications, using only words and photos to reach a hearing-impaired audience.


The hospital also live tweeted a patient going through a sleep clinic and had some 10,000 people follow it in the middle of the night, she said.


“It’s about reaching people where they are, so it doesn’t make sense to have a seminar in the afternoon about not being able to sleep. Why not do it in the middle of the night … when they can’t sleep and they want to find out more about how they can get help?” Lewis said. “That’s the beauty of social media.”


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Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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