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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Betty White's 90th Birthday: 4 highlights (The Week)

New York ? The Hot in Cleveland star is feted by Amy Poehler, Carol Burnett, and even President Obama in an NBC special in honor of her decades-long career

America's Golden Girl rang in her 90th birthday with a splashy NBC special Monday night. Amy Poehler, Mary Tyler Moore, Hugh Jackman, and Tina Fey turned out to toast ? and roast ? White, recalling favorite memories from the star's seven decades in show business, praising her talent, and, more often than not, cracking wise about her old age. (Watch a clip below.) Here, four highlights from the big birthday bash:

1. President Obama, the stand-up comic
In a taped message to White, President Barack Obama delivered a cheeky birthday greeting: "I can't believe you're 90 years old. Will you please produce a copy of your long-form birth certificate?" Look,?says Margaret Eby at?Flavorwire. The "'birth certificate' gag is a little tired," but Obama's cameo "was charming, as was the closing shot of him putting a picture of White next to framed ones of Michelle and the kids."

2. The many, many old lady jokes
An entire red carpet's worth of celebrities dropped by to deliver glowing speeches in honor of White, says Sarah Anne Hughes at The Washington Post. But more often than not, they were there "for a night of jokes about age." Amy Poehler kicked things off by calling White a pioneer: "I call her a pioneer because 90 years ago she literally [traveled] to California on stage coach." Carol Burnett chimed in, "Like many of you, I first heard about Betty White from the wonderful stories told to me by my grandmother."

3. "Thank You for Being a Friend"
The special ended with a star-studded singalong, with those in attendance serenading White with a rendition of the Golden Girls theme song, "Thank You for Being a Friend." After a standing ovation, a clearly moved White "ended the night on a high note," says Hollywood Life. She said, "To be able to spend a lifetime in the business you love with the people you love ? and get away with it ? is marvelous!"

4. A preview of White's next gig
The special concluded with a preview of a new prank show produced by White, called Betty White's Off Their Rockers, which features senior citizens playing hidden camera tricks on youngsters. The "feel-good" series puts a fresh spin on the tired prank show genre, says The Huffington Post, because none of the victims in the clip actually got mad at the senior pranksters. Instead, the common response was "amusement, delight, or a shaking of the head with a smile." Actually, says Verne Gay at Newsday, this show looks?"worse than awful, painful, and sad." It was embarrassing, and "White's spectacular career shouldn't be reduced to this."

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

XE.com - Dutch launch new tribunal for finance disputes

THE HAGUE, Jan 16 (Reuters) - A new tribunal for the resolution of disputes involving complex financial instruments opened in The Hague on Monday, a bid by the Netherlands to win more business in the financial and legal services sectors.

The Panel of Recognised International Market Experts in Finance - or PRIME Finance - is intended to settle disputes in the global financial markets, such as those arising from the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the subsequent financial crisis.

Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Nout Wellink, who was president of the Dutch central bank at the time of the financial crisis, are on the new tribunal's advisory board.

The panel's experts cover areas such as market practice, arbitration and mediation, and have worked at financial institutions, leading law firms, regulatory agencies and universities, specialising in derivatives, structured products, and collateralised debt obligations.

The Hague has a reputation as a centre for international justice, particularly in instances where crimes against humanity cannot be tried in their home countries. The city is already home to several world courts including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other war crimes tribunals,

But the Netherlands' position as an international financial centre was dealt a severe blow in the 2008 financial crisis, when the state had to stump up nearly 40 billion euros to rescue several financial institutions.

Leading bank ABN AMRO had to be nationalised while ING Groep is still in the process of repaying state funds.

The global crisis prompted some experts to call for a specialist tribunal to handle disputes arising from financial transactions involving more than one jurisdiction.

'The PRIME Finance project emerged against the backdrop of financial market crisis and legal uncertainty,' said Jeffrey Golden, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who is on the panel's management board.

'The amounts at stake are staggering, the legal and contractual issues are complicated, and the volume of complex product cases is increasing,' he said in a statement.

Golden said that national courts and ad hoc arbitration have not yet been able to build a unified, authoritative body of law.

'Decisions are unpredictable, too decentralized, often taken too slowly, and not always enforceable in the parties' home jurisdictions.'

However, some legal experts consider it unlikely that investment banks and financial institutions in the United States and United Kingdom will want to try out a new tribunal, rather than use existing courts in New York or London with which they are already familiar.

(Reporting by Sara Webb. Editing by Jane Merriman) Keywords: FINANCE DISPUTES/

(sara.webb@thomsonreuters.com)(+31 20 504 5000)(Reuters Messaging: sara.webb.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net)

The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.

Source: http://www.xe.com/news/2012/01/16/2404077.htm?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=TL&utm_content=NOGEO&utm_campaign=News_RSS_Art4

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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Pennsylvania 'castle doctrine' protects man who shot his romantic rival

No charges were filed against a Pennsylvania man who shot his wife's lover with a bow and arrow.

A man who fatally shot his wife's lover with a bow and arrow won't face criminal charges, in part, because the state's expanded "castle doctrine" makes it legal to use deadly force on one's porch or deck, a prosecutor said Tuesday, Dec. 27.

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State police have repeatedly said they believed the 38-year-old Central City man acted in self-defense when he killed Tony Bittinger, 43, of Salisbury, on Oct. 9.

Somerset County District Attorney Jerry Spangler formally announced Tuesday that he agreed with police and that no criminal charges should be filed against the shooter, who has not been named by authorities.

Quiz: Do you know your Second Amendment rights?

The woman has told police and the media that she was still living with her husband, but hoped to marry Bittinger, at the time of the fatal confrontation outside the married couple's home.

Trooper Joseph Dzral said at a news conference that Bittinger, accompanied by two brothers, drove nearly 40 miles to the home and had been drinking. Toxicology results from Bittinger's autopsy put his blood-alcohol content at 0.18 percent, or more than double the state's legal limit for drivers.

Drzal said Bittinger had left a voice mail for the wife threatening "to put a hole in (her husband's) head." He approached the house and was swinging a 32-inch wooden club as he climbed the stairs to the porch, where he was shot with a compound bow and arrow, Drzal said.

Spangler said prosecutors would have had to prove the woman's husband wasn't acting in self-defense to convict him of killing Bittinger. That would have been even more difficult given changes to the castle doctrine law earlier this year, Spangler said.

The law formerly permitted deadly force against an intruder in one's home, but required a resident to prove he had attempted to retreat or flee before using such force outside the home. The revised law permits self-defense without retreat outside the home, which is where police said Bittinger was shot in the chest with an arrow.

Quiz: Do you know your Second Amendment rights?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/s5NeLgIf63Y/Pennsylvania-castle-doctrine-protects-man-who-shot-his-romantic-rival

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Afghanistan arrests British contractors with guns (AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan ? Afghan police arrested two British private security contractors and two Afghan colleagues and ordered their company closed down after finding a cache of weapons in their vehicle, an official said Thursday. They are being held for investigation into illegal arms transport.

Their detention spells the latest trouble for Afghanistan's dozens of private security companies that guard supply convoys, development projects and private businesses. President Hamid Karzai has ordered all the protection companies shut down by March, to be replaced by a unified government-run protection force.

Police who stopped the contractors' vehicle at a Kabul checkpoint Tuesday found more than two dozen AK-47 rifles in a metal box covered by a blanket, Ministry of Interior spokesman Sediq Sediqi told a press briefing.

All 30 weapons had their serial numbers scratched off, and the men had no permits for them, so police arrested all four men on suspicion of illegal arms transport, Sediqi said. He said the case has been sent to Afghanistan's attorney general for investigation.

Authorities ordered the immediate shutdown of Afghanistan operations of their company, the international security consulting firm GardaWorld, and are questioning other company employees.

"They have to pay all the dues they owe to the government of Afghanistan, and they cannot operate any more after that," Sediqi said.

GardaWorld specializes in high-risk areas around the world, with offices in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Haiti. It provided security for Afghanistan's 2005 National Assembly elections.

The firm said Thursday that it was cooperating with the Afghan investigation. A statement indicated it did not own the AK-47s but was in the process of buying them through legal channels.

"The weapons in question were being taken to be tested at a firing range before being purchased and properly licensed by GardaWorld," the company said. "We fully comply with all laws and regulations in our Afghanistan operations and are making every effort to work closely with the Afghan authorities to rectify the situation as soon as possible."

A spokesman for the British Embassy said it was monitoring the case and providing consular services to the two British citizens.

Afghanistan has been scrambling to train guards for its own government security service ? called the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF ? since Karzai late last year ordered all 103 private security companies closed by March 2012.

Karzai has said the private security firms undermine the Afghan police and army forces, creating effective militias that often flout Afghan laws and regulations.

Controversies caused by some contractors' behavior, ranging from violence to cultural insensitivity, has given the industry a bad name among many Afghans.

In 2008, guards from the American security giant Blackwater Worldwide ? now known as Xe Services ? forced an Afghan soldier to the ground and handcuffed him after he refused to let their vehicle pass through a checkpoint.

And in 2005, three DynCorp International guards assigned to Karzai's own protective detail caused a scene in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight. "They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious," according to an internal company report. DynCorp, also a U.S. firm, fired the three guards.

So far, 57 of the private security companies have been shut down in Afghanistan, Sediqi said Thursday. Another 46, half of them Afghan firms and half international, are still operating but officials have vowed to close them by March, according to the Interior Ministry.

The new Afghan force will need to train 25,000 guards to take over all the work performed by privately contracted guards, according to a U.S. government report released in October.

Recruitment has been slow. As of late last year, the APPF had only about 6,500 guards trained, the U.S. report said. The NATO force in Afghanistan has offered help to speed up the training of the Afghan guards.

If the Afghan government is not ready to take over by March, there is a provision for 12-month extension that would allow the private firms to continue operating. Karzai originally set a deadline to shut down private contractors by the end of 2010, but it was pushed back to this year.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120105/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_contractors_arrested

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UK police: Body found on queen's estate was murder (AP)

LONDON ? British police are treating the discovery of a body on the queen's Sandringham estate as murder.

A woman's body was found on the vast estate in eastern England on New Year's Day, and Detective Chief Inspector Jes Fry said authorities are examining missing person reports and unsolved cases around the country to see if there are any links.

"We are at the very early stages of the investigation and it could be a complex inquiry," Fry said Tuesday. "The body had been there for some time."

Authorities were doing a post-mortem Tuesday on the body.

A member of the public found the body in a woodland at Anmer, a tiny village 115 miles (185 kilometers) northeast of London. The village is part of the Sandringham estate where the royal family spends some of its holidays.

The hamlet of Anmer is home to several dozen people and sits around three miles (4.8 kilometers) from Sandringham House, which has served as a private residence for British monarchs since 1862. Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip spent part of the holiday season there and were at Sandringham House on New Year's Day.

Sandringham Estate's website says the entire estate is spread over 8,000 hectares (19,768 acres) in Norfolk. Sandringham House and its gardens make up 24 hectares (59 acres), and there are 240 hectares (590 acres) of woods and open countryside in a section that is open to the public free of charge all year.

There are also two stud farms and a fruit farm. The estate employs over 100 full-time staff.

Buckingham Palace referred all questions about the body's discovery back to police.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120103/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_human_remains

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kikolani: How Google+ Uses SEO to Steal Search from Facebook and Twitter http://t.co/lC4bwZbe via @seomoz by @cyrusshepard

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So far, battery cars coming up short

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

Nissan Leaf electric car.

By Paul A. Eisenstein, TheDetroitBureau.com

If the White House hopes to meet its ambitious goal of putting 1.5 million battery cars on the road by mid-decade it better hope that 2011 wasn?t a good indication of what Americans think of electric vehicles.

Add them all up, hybrids, plug-ins and pure battery-electric vehicles, or BEVs, and they accounted for little more than 2% of the U.S. automotive market last year.? Remove conventional gas-electric models, such as the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion Hybrid, from the equation and more advanced battery vehicles generated barely 20,000 sales.

?I?d say they failed,? proclaims Joe Phillippi, chief analyst with AutoTrends Consulting.

For his part, David Sullivan, of AutoPacific, Inc., isn?t quite ready to go that far, but he sees 2012 as the really critical year.? The limited demand for electric vehicles, so far, has largely been driven by the early adopters, contends Sullivan.? ?Now we?ll see if there?s broader consumer demand.?

That?s going to be critical as the industry ramps up battery car production capacity and an assortment of new models charge into showrooms.

While there are a variety of products already on the market, most come from niche manufacturers that barely even register on the sales charts.? Last year brought the introduction of two closely watched mainstream models: the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid and the Nissan Leaf BEV.

General Motors had declared a goal of selling 10,000 Volts but will likely end the year at around 7,000.? The good news for the maker was that momentum had been building during the final quarter but then Chevy found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why several Volts caught fire weeks after being subjected to federal crash tests.

Though there have been reports that last month?s sales were down sharply, GM spokesman Rob Peterson contends, ?December sales are solid ? definitely not ?down sharply? as reported.?

But there?s no question the timing of the news was bad, coming just as GM was getting ready to boost production to 60,000 for all of 2012, 45,000 of those earmarked for the U.S.? The results of an investigation into the problem by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could clear Volt ? or cause it significant problems if a redesign of its battery pack proves necessary.

Nissan came closer to its 2011 target, though it will likely fall a little short of the 10,000 mark when December sales are revealed later this week.? The maker can explain at least some of that away by pointing to the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami that interrupted production for several months.? But Leaf sales have been slipping for several months, a worrying sign as Nissan prepares to open a new facility in Smyrna, Tennessee capable of churning out 200,000 battery cars annually.

There are a number of reasons why proponents believe American buyers aren?t plugging into battery cars.? For one thing, there?s still a relatively limited range of choices available.? But that won?t be an excuse in 2012.

The options coming to market are broad, ranging from the Fisker Karma, a plug-in sports car, to the Ford Focus Electric.? There are electric minicars, like the new Mitsubishi i, and big SUVs, including the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Mercedes-Benz ML350 that Ohio-based Amp Electric is converting to run on battery power.? There will be mainstream offerings, such as the Toyota RAV-4 Electric, and products from aggressive start-ups, such as Tesla?s new Model S sedan.

The Model S will aim to overcome one of the biggest drawbacks of battery power, offering buyers a choice of a base Model S with a range of 160-miles, or optional 230- or 300-mile battery packs, the latter adding $20,000 to the price tag.? Most other pure BEVs are limited to less than 100 miles per charge.

Even then, they aren?t cheap, battery vehicles saddled by price tags that are thousands ? in some cases, tens of thousands ? of dollars more than comparable gasoline vehicles.

That might make sense had fuel prices held at the near-record levels seen in early 2011, but gas has dropped sharply since then.? Meanwhile, manufacturers have been making major strides when it comes to the fuel efficiency of conventional, gas-powered vehicles.? In the compact segment where Ford will compete with the Focus Electric, for example, 40 mpg on the highway is the new norm.

Both government bureaucrats and electric vehicle manufacturers, says analyst Sullivan, ?aren?t giving consumers credit for being able to do the math.? It just doesn?t make economic sense? to buy an electric vehicle ? at least if your primary goal is to save money by reducing your energy bills.

There are, of course, other reasons.? There?s the desire to clean up the air and to curb oil imports, especially from the Mideast.? But whether that can be used to draw more buyers into the market remains to be seen.? Especially in this economy, value is the big motivator, rather than politics and social concerns.

So, the industry will have a big challenge ahead finding ways to lure customers into the showroom and getting them to drive off in a hybrid, plug-in or battery-electric vehicle. The past year certainly didn?t live up to expectations.? So, the coming year will be the big test.

More from The Detroit Bureau:

Late Upturn in 2011 Likely to Set Stage for Stronger 2012

A Second Opinion: the 2012 Volkswagen Passat

Mopar Plans High-Profile Presence at NAIAS

Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/03/9922196-is-the-battery-car-a-failure-or-will-the-real-test-come-in-2012

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