Son of Nick Van Exel sentenced to 60 years on murder conviction

...

Read More..

The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly...

Read More..

Afghan singer’s star is rising, as are the threats

KABUL (Reuters) – With a scarf loosely covering a fancy television hairstyle, Latifa Azizi raised her arms in victory after surviving another elimination round on the hit talent show, “Afghan Star“.But the victory pales into insignificance when compared with the larger battle 17-year-old Azizi is fighting – to pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer despite the censure of ultra-conservative Afghan...

Read More..

Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90. The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap...

Read More..

Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik. REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with...

Read More..

BofA online and phone service disrupted

Bank of America Corp. scrambled to restore service late Friday to its enormous customer base — 40 million households — which...

Read More..

Twitter Hacked; Company Says 250K Users May Have Been Affected

Following a string of revelations this week from several media companies who announced they had been recently hacked, Twitter announced on Friday that it had also been the target of a sophisticated attack.The company wrote in a blog post ironically titled “Keeping our users secure” that it detected unusual patterns this week that led it to identify attempts to access user data.“We discovered...

Read More..

Julia Stiles Joins Mary Pickford Biopic ‘The First’

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Julia Stiles has joined the cast of the Mary Pickford biopic “The First” to play famed screenwriter Frances Marion, Poverty Row Entertainment announced Thursday.Marion was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, taking the prize in 1930 for “The Big House.” She collaborated often with Pickford, writing the scripts for “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and “The...

Read More..

Birth Control Rule Altered to Allay Religious Objections

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday proposed yet another compromise to address strenuous objections from religious organizations about a policy requiring health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives, but the change did not end the political furor or legal fight over the issue. The proposal could expand the number of groups that do not need to pay directly for birth control...

Read More..

The Week’s Business News in Pictures

Reflecting diminishing fears over mad cow disease, Japan eased its decade-old restriction on imports of American beef on Monday. Ranchers cheered the news, but the beef industry still faces challenges, including high feed prices and drought. Here, cattle are herded through the Torrington Livestock Markets in Torrington, W...

Read More..

Hagel hearing reopens Senate wounds

WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel, who was twice wounded as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam, came under withering attack Thursday as he...

Read More..

Is PlayStation 4 Nearly Here? Sony Plans Mysterious Feb. 20 Press Conference

Is the next next-generation console almost here? Wired just received an invitation to “PlayStation Meeting 2013,” a press briefing to be held in New York City on Feb. 20, beginning at 6 p.m. Eastern time. It was accompanied by the cryptic video above and contained no further information.With Sony heavily rumored to be announcing (and possibly releasing) its next-generation...

Read More..

“Gomer Pyle” actor Jim Nabors weds longtime male partner

SEATTLE (Reuters) – American actor Jim Nabors, the star of 1960s television comedy “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” married his longtime male partner at a Seattle hotel this month.Nabors, 82, also a singer, wed 64-year-old Stan Cadwallader, his partner of some 38 years, in a ceremony before a judge on January 15 at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where the couple traveled after same sex marriage became legal in...

Read More..

Hip Implant’s Risks Inadequately Assessed, DePuy Report Found in 2010

A review conducted internally by Johnson & Johnson soon after it recalled a troubled hip implant found that the company had not adequately assessed the device’s potential risks before it was used in more than 90,000 patients, court testimony on Thursday showed. The engineering report, which was done in 2010, also found that Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedic unit had used inadequate...

Read More..

Hip Implant’s Risks Inadequately Assessed, DePuy Report Found in 2010

A review conducted internally by Johnson & Johnson soon after it recalled a troubled hip implant found that the company had not adequately assessed the device’s potential risks before it was used in more than 90,000 patients, court testimony on Thursday showed. The engineering report, which was done in 2010, also found that Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedic unit had used inadequate...

Read More..

Giffords testifies at heated Senate hearing on gun control

WASHINGTON — "Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important," former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords told her onetime...

Read More..

Kim Dotcom's Mega Gets Third-Party Search Engine

The file-sharing site Mega, introduced two weeks ago by infamous file-sharing kingpin Kim Dotcom, just became a lot more useful to content pirates, thanks to a community-fed search engine of links to content hosted on Mega’s servers.The search engine doesn’t crawl Mega content — which is not possible because of Mega’s architecture. Instead, it relies on Mega users voluntarily...

Read More..

Final cut: The gems and stars left off the Oscars list

(Reuters) – If I could remove any word from Oscar conversations, it would be “snubbed.” It’s catchy and makes good headline fodder, but it implies that a cabal of Academy members sat in a room and consciously decided to ostracize this actor or that moviemaker. These ballots are filled out by 6,000 to 7,000 voters, ranging from visual effects experts to screenwriters to studio chiefs. I can’t envision...

Read More..

During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

When Johnson & Johnson announced the appointment in 2011 of an executive to head the troubled orthopedics division whose badly flawed artificial hip had been recalled, the company billed the move as a fresh start. But that same executive, it turns out, had supervised the implant’s introduction in the United States and had been told by a top company consultant three years before the device...

Read More..

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese After...

Read More..