Defying Putin: 7 Russians to watch - Yahoo! News Skip to navigation ? Skip to content ? By Fred Weir Fred Weir ? Thu?Dec?29, 1:34?pm?ET Follow Yahoo! News on , become a fan on Facebook
Obama says he is the 4th best prez in the history of the USA.
Better than George Washington. Better than James Madison. Better than Theodore Roosevelt. Better than John F. Kennedy. Better than Ronald Reagan.
That's Barack Obama's opinion of his accomplishments during the first couple years of the eight years he plans to be president.
The revelation about Obama's opinion of his own presence in the Oval Office came during an interview for "60 Minutes," where the network reported Obama described himself as a "good captain" of the ship of state.
But the aired footage of the comments that his own accomplishments surpass those of every president ? with only a couple of exceptions ? did not reach the airwaves and were available on the online video.
That prompted several pundits, including P.J. Gladnick of NewsBusters to write:
"Such was the laughably absurd claim of President Obama on 60 Minutes last Sunday. What? You didn't see it? That was because 60 Minutes conveniently left it out of its broadcast. If you want to see Obama engage in this latest bit of over the top braggadocio you can only see it at the online 60 Minutes Overtime which has a video of the entire interview. You can catch Obama's excessive praise of himself at the tail end of the interview starting with Steve Kroft's question just before the 55 minute mark."
Acer already spilled the beans on its Iconia Tab A200, a 10.1-inch slab powered by NVIDIA's 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, but whatever happened to that Tegra 3 touting A700? It went to Russia, of course. According to NoMobile.ru, the A200's slimmer, but more powerful brother will debut at CES 2012 next month. The Ruskie site pegs the tablet's 1920 x 1200 resolution screen at 10.1-inches, which is bordered by SIM and micro-USB slots, a dedicated rotation lock switch, the standard volume rockers, an audio jack and a micro-HDMI port. On its rear they found a textured back garnished with a five megapixel camera sporting a built-in flash -- the whole unit weights 650 grams (1.43 pounds) and boasts a ten hour battery life. When can we see it? At CES, says NoMobile.ru, or in stores if you're willing to wait until March. We'll poke around Acer's offerings next month and let you know what we find. Can't wait? Follow the source link below for a few more pictures.
BERLIN ? Werner Otto, the founder of the mail-order company that bears his name and a prominent figure in West Germany's post-World War II economic resurgence, has died. He was 102.
The company, Otto Group, said Tuesday that he died in Berlin on Dec. 21 in the presence of his family.
Otto opened a shoe factory in Hamburg in 1945, but it didn't last long in the face of tough competition from southern Germany.
So in 1949, with four employees, he turned to selling shoes by mail order ? the start of what became Otto Group, which now employs 50,000 people and has annual revenues of euro11.4 billion ($14.9 billion).
Its first, hand-produced, catalog appeared in 1950, offering 28 styles of shoes. The business then grew rapidly during the 1950s, expanding its range and establishing itself with the help of shoppers from outside major cities who didn't have ready access to stores; in 1963, Otto introduced telephone orders and went online in 1995.
Otto handed over the company's operational management in 1965 and founded another enterprise, ECE, which builds and manages shopping malls in Europe.
He also set up Paramount Group, Inc., to invest in U.S. real estate.
Otto dedicated himself to a range of social causes, including his Werner Otto Foundation, founded in 1969, which supports medical research.
Among other projects, his company said he also donated a new museum building to Harvard University, the Werner Otto Hall, to showcase expressionist art from the German-speaking world.
Otto was born in the eastern German town of Seelow on Aug. 13, 1909, the son of a merchant.
He is survived by his third wife, Maren, and his five children. His oldest son, Michael, is now Otto Group's supervisory board chairman and his youngest son, Alexander, is the chief executive of ECE.
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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? "Whale Wars" star Capt. Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherds are returning to Animal Planet for another whale defense campaign in June.
A fifth season of "Whale Wars" will revolve around Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's "Operation Divine Wind" campaign.
The engagement, which is already under way, includes Watson, his crew, nearly 100 volunteers and three ships -- the Steve Irwin, Bob Barker and Brigitte Bardot -- taking on the Institute of Cetacean Research, the Japanese whaling group.
The ICR and the Sea Shepherd gang butted heads throughout the fourth season of the show. The Japanese government backs the ICR's whale harpooning and processing, and the Sea Shepherds say their activities violate agreements that ban whaling in international waters.
Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but the Japanese reportedly hunt in the Antarctic and Northwest Pacific under an exception allowing some kills for research.
"Whale Wars," one of Animal Planet's highest-rated series, has received five Emmy nominations.
As 2011 winds down, one thing seems destined for more connections in 2012: social networking, with sites that?reach 1.2 billion users, 82 percent of the world?s online population.?A recent report has the potential of blowing any doubts away about the influence of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others of its ilk with the revelation that social networking accounts for nearly 1 in every 5 online minutes.
The global Web analytics company comScore just released the report, "It's a Social World:?Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It's Headed." According to it, Facebook rules the rest, reaching "more?than half of the world's global audience (55 percent)" and having accounted for "approximately 3 in every 4 minutes spent on social networking sites and 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world."
Its world dominance is profound, with only seven countries where it doesn't have the largest audience in this category: Brazil, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Vietnam and China, some of which currently block the site.
Right along with Facebook, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with that "reaches?1 in 10 Internet users worldwide to rank among the top social networks, and posted an impressive growth rate of 59 percent over the past year." But its Chinese equivalent, Sina Weibo, posted the highest growth at 181 percent since October 2010.
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comScore
The report also breaks down social networking's reach into different age groups, and reveals that the group with the biggest gain is the 55 and older set, which showed that nearly 80 percent are connected through such sites now, up from a little over 70 percent in July 2010. But, younger people still tend to spend the most time on social media, with the 15- to 24-year-old women spending 8.6 hours on average (1.1 hours more than their male counterparts).
And more people are using their phones to reach those sites: "In October 2011, nearly one-third (32 percent) of the total U.S. mobile population age 13 and older reported accessing social networking sites on their phone at least once in the past month." Interaction goes up even higher for smartphone users:?64 percent "reported accessing social networking sites once in the previous month and nearly 40 percent reported doing so almost every day." The top two activities they do on the go shouldn't come as any surprise: reading posts from personal friends and posting status updates.?
Google+ does get a mention in the report as a potential "disrupter" to the social network world order, with its?65 million global visitors, or 5 percent of the global social networking audience. The report makes some cautious predictions about where it may go:
While this early adoption bodes well for Google+, whether or not the network can sustain this growth and a strong level of engagement among users will be better indicators of its success in the future. Google+ might emerge as a social networking leader in its own right in the years to come, but exactly how big it will be remains to be seen.?
More stories:
Check out Technolog on?Facebook, and on Twitter, follow?Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the?Google+?stream.
Artist Adel Abdessemed?s Music Box was featured in his 2009 Rio exhibition at New York?s David Zwimer gallery. You can see it moving, and hear it playing in the background, of the embedded video interview with Abdessemed. Clicking above should take you right to the relevant section.
Duchess Kate Middleton certainly looked festive on Christmas in her plum-colored coat and coordinating hat as she joined Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Charles, Duchess Camilla and Queen Elizabeth II for church services in Sandringham, Norfolk, UK.
Here's a nice shot of the royal family members ...
Queen Elizabeth, 85, took a car, while the rest of the family walked. Her husband Prince Philip, 90, underwent emergency surgery Friday for a blocked coronary artery.
Saturday, members of the royal family visited Philip in the hospital. Buckingham Palace officials issued an update, saying he had "a good night" following his procedure.
The royal family spent Christmas day at the Queen's Sandringham estate. Today, Pippa Middleton will join her sister and the royal family for a pheasant shoot.
Kate, William and Pippa will then travel to the Middleton family's home in Bucklebury.
The big question: Will Kate Middleton pregnancy rumors or gossip about Pippa and Prince Harry hooking up become the UK tabloid story of the week? Stay tuned!
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My broken English/Chinese accent is thicker around the holidays... Despite the fact that I don't speak a word of Chinese. #okThankYouIl y a environ 4 heuresvia Twitter for iPhone from Toronto, Ontario??
Browse > Home / / Love My Pets GPS Lowers The C... 2011-12-25 17:17:00 (GMT) (Caymanmama.com - News Providers News)
/EINPresswire.com/ Love My Pets GPS LLC has just lowered the cost of its Award Winning GPS Pet Tracking device. Now with No Activation Fee and No Monthly Fees, tracking pets has never been easier.
?Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.? So said the great Irish poet Oscar Wilde. For some people understanding the value of something can be difficult, however, Love My Pets GPS understands the value and worth of pets. Love My Pets GPS has been dedicated to affordable pet safety products that help to prevent accidents and prevent loss of our pets.
Pet visibility is critical this time of year when the days are shorter and the nights are longer. Love My Pets GPS has long been know for its exclusive reflective glow in the dark dog collars. The collar provides excellent protection not only for pet but also the pet owner. Using the reflective glow in the dark dog leash also adds another layer of pet protection during this time of year while we walk our pets. A Reflective Dog Leash can help make a pet owner and pet more visible to traffic thus making the walk much safer.
Love My Pets GPS now announces new pricing for the award winning GPS Dog Collar and Dog Harnesses. Mary Ann McNutt, Director of Marketing And Sales for Love My Pets GPS notes: ?In order to reduce cost of entry in using one of these devices that enables one to track your pet in real time online, Love My Pets GPS has removed all activation fees and monthly fees in using the GPS pet tracking device. Love My Pets GPS knows that losing ones pet can be devastating. Having this additional protection for your pet enables one to track a pet online, establish a geo-fence that will alert a pet owner when the pet has strayed past a predefined point. Love My Pets GPS has now made the ultimate pet safety device affordable.?
Most pet owners know the value of their pets and how much they mean to them. Understandably, doing everything possible to protect dogs is a priority. Helping pet owners to protect pets is what Love My Pets GPS pet safety products do. Love My Pets GPS provides all the tools to help pet owners safely protect pets. A holiday special of only 179.95 For a Pet safety collar with a GPS device is now available while supplies last. The Pet safety Reflective Dog Harness with GPS Device sells for 189.95. Please visit LoveMyPetsGPS.com for more information.
About Love My Pets GPS, LLC, is a SC limited liability company with its corporate offices located in Louisville, KY. Love My Pets offers the revolutionary Love My Pets GPS Pet Safety Collar, a Web-based pet recovery system featuring a GPS locating and tracking solution and safety collar designed to support the owner?s immediate recovery efforts of lost pets. The collar also helps protect the pet from darkness-related accidents, with superbly engineered glow-in-the-dark banding and a material with one of the highest reflective values on the market. The system?s award-winning GPS unit locates and tracks both outdoors and in?even in heavily wooded areas and inside buildings?using both state-of-the-art GPS technology and cellular signals. To order, visit www.lovemypetgps.com or call 1-888-LUV-R-PET (1-888-588-7738). For media questions, contact Mary Ann McNutt 941-468-6643 or e-mail maryann@lovemypetgps.com.
Mary Ann McNutt Love My Pets GPS 1-888-588-7738 http://www.lovemypetsgps.com
PR Courtesy of Online PR Media: http://bit.ly/vkqANL
CaymanMama.com - Press Release Distribution Service
Back in the day, you could shove all sorts of goods containing that miracle chemical radium in your body. There were radium-infused beers, chocolate, and suppositories. But radium-mania didn't stop with quack remedies.
An advertisement in the May 17, 1918 edition of the New York Observer touted the benefits of radium-infused golf balls. Was this just hogwash by hucksters looking to ride the radium wave?
According to the radium-good archivers at Oak Ridge Associated Universities, "An analysis by gamma spectroscopy clearly shows that it does indeed contain radium: approximately 150 Bq (4 nCi)."
It's not entirely clear if the radium was enough to harm old-timey golfers looking to improve their range, but hey, at least no one was shoving them up their rectums. Presumably, at least.
HONG KONG (Reuters) ? A court in southern China has rejected a lawsuit by Apple Inc, accusing a Chinese technology company of infringing its iPad trademark, a newspaper reported on Tuesday, the latest move in a protracted tug-of-war over the name.
Apple confirmed the lawsuit but declined to comment further.
The consumer device giant -- a market leader in both smartphones and tablets -- has had to face some roadblocks in China, which is a key growth region for the company. Earlier this year, fake Apple stores were discovered in southwestern Yunnan province.
The company is also constantly battling counterfeiters.
In the lawsuit over the use of the iPad name, the Intermediate People's Court in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen rejected Apple's complaint against Proview Technology (Shenzhen). Proview, it said, lawfully registered the iPad trademark as long ago as 2000 for products in a number of countries including China, the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper reported, citing court documents.
Apple, which launched its iPad tablet computer some years after that, was initially panned by many on Twitter and other online forums for picking a name that was synonymous with a woman's hygiene product.
But the jokes died after the roaring success of the product that no other company has been able to beat in sales.
The right to use the iPad name in China is crucial for Apple, where the company is in the process of opening more stores. Executives have said they have just scratched the surface in China in terms of sales.
Proview Technology (Shenzhen), and the Shenzhen court were not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.
Proview was also taking legal action, seeking 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in compensation from Apple for copyright infringement, Caixin Online reported in October.
(Reporting by Twinnie Siu in Hong Kong and Melanie Lee in Shanghai; Editing by Andrew Callus, Bernard Orr)
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) ? Tobacco company Philip Morris USA Inc. must pay Oregon 60 percent of a $79.5 million award in a long-running lawsuit filed by the family of a Portland smoker, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The cigarette maker's parent company, Altria Group Inc., said it will lower its full-year earnings expectations based on the costs tied to the payments for this and a separate case by a former smoker.
Under Oregon law, 60 percent of punitive damage awards must go to a state fund to compensate crime victims. Philip Morris paid the family its share of the judgment but contested the requirement to pay the state.
The company argued that the state released its right to collect that money with the company's master settlement agreement in 1998 with 46 states, five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia over claims about smoking.
The Supreme Court's ruling Friday reversed a lower court decision and said the state's share of punitive damages is due no matter what sort of lawsuit led to the award.
The money at stake is from a 1999 jury award in a lawsuit filed by the family of Jesse Williams, a janitor who had died two years earlier of lung cancer.
After years of appeals, Philip Morris paid the family in 2009, according to the Supreme Court's decision. The payment, it said, was more than $61 million, which includes economic damages, the 40 percent share of punitive damages, interest and costs.
A state official said there was no ready estimate of how much the state's 60 percent share is worth today, including interest and costs, and there was little anticipation it will be collected soon.
"We don't actually expect this to be the end of the litigation," said Tony Green, spokesman for Attorney General John Kroger.
A message seeking comment was left for Altria. In a statement, the Richmond, Va.-based company said it expects to record a pre-tax charge of $62 million related to judgments in the two cases and $57 million in related interest costs. As a result, Altria expects to earn $1.58 to $1.64 per share for the 2011 fiscal year. It earlier expected to earn $1.60 to $1.66 per share.
Excluding several other one-time items, the company expects to earn $2.01 to $2.07 per share for the year. Analysts polled by FactSet expect Altria to report adjusted earnings of $2.03 per share for the fiscal year.
The company's shares fell 6 cents in after-hours trading. They closed Friday at $28.41, down 27 cents.
___
AP Business Writer Sarah Skidmore contributed to this report.
Kellan Lutz is challenging a prevailing theory among Twihards around the globe: does the muscle-bound hunk look good in anything?
The Breaking Dawn star took to Twitter yesterday and asked: "Movember equals Mohawk month, right?" He then proceeded to post a photo of his new hairstyle, one with just a little bit taken off both sides:
"Out with the old and in with the new!" the 26-year-old star added. "Goodbye dark hair. It's been fun."
But was this a wise decision for the actor? Sound off now: What do you think of Kellan Lutz with a mohawk?
Strange new 'species' of ultra-red galaxy discoveredPublic release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Christine Pulliam cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu 617-495-7463 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.
"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Huang is lead author on the paper announcing the find, which was published online by the Astrophysical Journal.
Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light - light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.
Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors (a process known as redshifting). All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.
All four galaxies are grouped near each other and appear to be physically associated, rather than being a chance line-up. Due to their great distance, we see them as they were only a billion years after the Big Bang - an era when the first galaxies formed.
"Hubble has shown us some of the first protogalaxies that formed, but nothing that looks like this. In a sense, these galaxies might be a 'missing link' in galactic evolution" said co-author Giovanni Fazio of the CfA.
Next, researchers hope to measure an accurate redshift for the galaxies, which will require more powerful instruments like the Large Millimeter Telescope or Atacama Large Millimeter Array. They also plan to search for more examples of this new "species" of extremely red galaxies.
"There's evidence for others in other regions of the sky. We'll analyze more Spitzer and Hubble observations to track them down," said Fazio.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Strange new 'species' of ultra-red galaxy discoveredPublic release date: 1-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Christine Pulliam cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu 617-495-7463 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.
"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Huang is lead author on the paper announcing the find, which was published online by the Astrophysical Journal.
Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light - light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.
Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors (a process known as redshifting). All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.
All four galaxies are grouped near each other and appear to be physically associated, rather than being a chance line-up. Due to their great distance, we see them as they were only a billion years after the Big Bang - an era when the first galaxies formed.
"Hubble has shown us some of the first protogalaxies that formed, but nothing that looks like this. In a sense, these galaxies might be a 'missing link' in galactic evolution" said co-author Giovanni Fazio of the CfA.
Next, researchers hope to measure an accurate redshift for the galaxies, which will require more powerful instruments like the Large Millimeter Telescope or Atacama Large Millimeter Array. They also plan to search for more examples of this new "species" of extremely red galaxies.
"There's evidence for others in other regions of the sky. We'll analyze more Spitzer and Hubble observations to track them down," said Fazio.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
By Fred Weir Fred Weir ? Thu?Dec?29, 1:34?pm?ET Follow Yahoo! News on , become a fan on Facebook 
chanian 
Back in the day, you could shove all sorts of goods containing that miracle chemical radium in your body. There were radium-infused beers, chocolate, and suppositories. But radium-mania didn't stop with quack remedies.
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Public release date: 1-Dec-2011
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