LONDON, Dec 13 (Reuters) - The departure of Spanish strugglers HRT from Formula One still leaves the sport with one team too many, commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone said on Thursday. Madrid-based HRT have not been included on the official 2013 entry list published by the governing International Automobile Federation, a move that leaves 11 teams and 22 cars on the starting grid. "I'd rather have 10," Ecclestone told Reuters. "I never wanted 12. "It's just that 10 is easier to handle, for the promoters, for transport. We'd rather have 10...so long as we don't lose Ferrari. ...
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SAG Award Nominations Go to Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Downton Abbey
Label: Lifestylefrom left: Maggie Smith (in Downton Abbey) and Nicole Kidman (in The Paperboy)
Getty; Millennium Entertainment
The 2013 Award Season officially kicked off Wednesday morning with the announcement of the 19th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations – and double nominees Nicole Kidman (for HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn and the movie The Paperboy) and Maggie Smith (for PBS's Downton Abbey and the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), as well as Kevin Costner, Julianne Moore, Jim Parsons, Alec Baldwin, Betty White, Tina Fey, Javier Bardem and Anne Hathaway all have reasons to be smiling.
In the theatrical motion picture division, the SAG/AFTRA nominated the following for outstanding performance for a cast (SAG's version of the best picture prize):
• Argo
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• Les Misérables
• Lincoln
• Silver Linings Playbook
The nominees for outstanding performance by a male actor in a leading role are:
• Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook
• Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln
• John Hawkes in The Sessions
• Hugh Jackman in Les Misérables
• Denzel Washington in Flight
Nominees for outstanding performance by a female actor in a leading role are:
• Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty
• Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone
• Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook
• Helen Mirren in Hitchcock
• Naomi Watts in The Impossible
In the TV divisions, the shows in the running for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series are:
• Boardwalk Empire
• Breaking Bad
• Downton Abbey
• Homeland
• Mad Men
In a comedy series (a tie in the balloting resulted in six nominees):
• 30 Rock
• The Big Bang Theory
• Glee
• Modern Family
• Nurse Jackie
• The Office
For a complete list of nominees, go to sagawards.org.
On Thursday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will name its nominees for the Golden Globes. Oscar nominations will be announced Tues., Jan. 15, 2013.
The 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will air live on TNT and TBS on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013, at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. PEOPLE Magazine and the Entertainment Industry Foundation are sponsors of the event.
Wall Street opens higher ahead of Fed announcement
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street opened higher on Wednesday, after five straight days of gains, as investors anticipated the U.S. Federal Reserve will announce a fresh stimulus plan to support the economy at the end of a two-day monetary policy meeting.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 25.24 points, or 0.19 percent, to 13,273.68. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> added 3.72 points, or 0.26 percent, to 1,431.56. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> climbed 9.97 points, or 0.33 percent, to 3,032.27.
(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Allies of Egypt’s Morsi Beat Protesters Outside Palace
Label: World
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
Yehia Negm said he was in a group detained by Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Morsi. “It was torment for us,” he said.
CAIRO — Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Morsi captured, detained and beat dozens of his political opponents last week, holding them for hours with their hands bound on the pavement outside the presidential palace while pressuring them to confess that they had accepted money to use violence in protests against him.
“It was torment for us,” said Yehia Negm, 42, a former diplomat with a badly bruised face and rope marks on his wrists. He said he was among a group of about 50, including four minors, who were held on the pavement overnight. In front of cameras, “they accused me of being a traitor, or conspiring against the country, of being paid to carry weapons and set fires,” he said in an interview. “I thought I would die.”
The abuses, during a night of street fighting between Islamists and their opponents, have become clear through an accumulation of video and victim testimonies that are now hurting the credibility of Mr. Morsi and his allies as they push forward to this weekend’s referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution.
To critics of Islamists, the episode on Wednesday recalled the tactics of the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, who often saw a conspiracy of “hidden hands” behind his domestic opposition and deployed plainclothes thugs acting outside the law to punish those who challenged him. The difference is that the current enforcers are driven by the self-righteousness of their religious ideology, rather than money.
It is impossible to know how much Mr. Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, knew about the Islamists’ vigilante justice. But human rights advocates say the detentions raised troubling questions about statements made by the president during his nationally televised address on Thursday. In it, Mr. Morsi appears to have cited confessions obtained by his Islamist supporters, the advocates said, when he promised that confessions under interrogation would show that protesters outside his palace acknowledged ties to his political opposition and had taken money to commit violence.
Khaled el-Qazzaz, a spokesman for Mr. Morsi, said Monday that he had ordered an investigation into the reported abuses and asked the prosecutor to bring charges against any involved. He said that Mr. Morsi was referring only to confessions obtained by the police, not by his supporters.
But human rights lawyers involved in the cases of the roughly 130 people who ended up in police custody Wednesday night, all or most of them delivered by the Islamists, say the police obtained no confessions. “His statement was completely bogus,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher on policing at Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights, whose lawyers were on hand about an hour after the speech when prosecutors released all the detainees without charges. “There were no confessions; they were all just simply beaten up,” he said. “There was no case at all, and they were released the next day.”
Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood said the group opposed such vigilante justice and did not organize the detentions. And in at least one case one victim said a senior figure of the group rescued her from captivity. But the officials also acknowledged that some of their senior leadership was on the scene at the time. They said some of their members took part in the detentions, along with more hard-line Islamists.
Gehad el-Haddad, a senior Brotherhood official, defended the group’s decision to call on its members and other Islamist supporters of the president to defend the palace from a potential attack by the protesters. He said Mr. Morsi could not rely on the police force left over from Mr. Mubarak’s government. By keeping the protesters from trying to storm the palace walls, Mr. Haddad contended, the Brotherhood and the president’s supporters had prevented a bloodier conflict with the armed presidential guard. “We will protect the sovereignty of the state at any cost.”
Ian McKellen Has Prostate Cancer
Label: LifestyleIan McKellen
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that he suffers from prostate cancer.
McKellen – who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and reprises the role in the soon-to-open The Hobbit – tells the Daily Mirror that he's had "prostate cancer for six or seven years."
But the 73-year-old says the diagnosis is far from a death sentence.
"When you have got it you monitor it and you have to be careful it doesn't spread. But if it is contained in the prostate, it's no big deal," he says.
"Many, many die from it, but it's one of the cancers that is totally treatable so I have 'wasteful watching.' I am examined regularly and it's just contained, it's not spreading. I've not had any treatment," he adds.
Although prostate cancer can pose a serious health risk if left untreated, the X-Men actor maintains that detection is key.
"I have heard of people dying from prostate cancer, and they are the unlucky ones, the people who didn't know they had got it and it went on the rampage. But at my age if it is diagnosed, its not life threatening," he says.
He recalls his diagnosis, saying, "You are told what the situation is: you can have an operation but there is no point [in] me having an operation because there is no need for it," he says. "What they are concerned about is the cancer going to spread outside the prostate? If it doesn't you are fine. How do you know if it is spreading? You keep being tested."
New tests could hamper food outbreak detection
Label: HealthWASHINGTON (AP) — It's about to get faster and easier to diagnose food poisoning, but that progress for individual patients comes with a downside: It could hurt the nation's ability to spot and solve dangerous outbreaks.
Next-generation tests that promise to shave a few days off the time needed to tell whether E. coli, salmonella or other foodborne bacteria caused a patient's illness could reach medical laboratories as early as next year. That could allow doctors to treat sometimes deadly diseases much more quickly — an exciting development.
The problem: These new tests can't detect crucial differences between different subtypes of bacteria, as current tests can. And that fingerprint is what states and the federal government use to match sick people to a contaminated food. The older tests might be replaced by the new, more efficient ones.
"It's like a forensics lab. If somebody says a shot was fired, without the bullet you don't know where it came from," explained E. coli expert Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that losing the ability to literally take a germ's fingerprint could hamper efforts to keep food safe, and the agency is searching for solutions. According to CDC estimates, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from foodborne illnesses each year, and 3,000 die.
"These improved tests for diagnosing patients could have the unintended consequence of reducing our ability to detect and investigate outbreaks, ultimately causing more people to become sick," said Dr. John Besser of the CDC.
That means outbreaks like the salmonella illnesses linked this fall to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter might not be identified that quickly — or at all.
It all comes down to what's called a bacterial culture — whether labs grow a sample of a patient's bacteria in an old-fashioned petri dish, or skip that step because the new tests don't require it.
Here's the way it works now: Someone with serious diarrhea visits the doctor, who gets a stool sample and sends it to a private testing laboratory. The lab cultures the sample, growing larger batches of any lurking bacteria to identify what's there. If disease-causing germs such as E. coli O157 or salmonella are found, they may be sent on to a public health laboratory for more sophisticated analysis to uncover their unique DNA patterns — their fingerprints.
Those fingerprints are posted to a national database, called PulseNet, that the CDC and state health officials use to look for food poisoning trends.
There are lots of garden-variety cases of salmonella every year, from runny eggs to a picnic lunch that sat out too long. But if a few people in, say, Baltimore have salmonella with the same molecular signature as some sick people in Cleveland, it's time to investigate, because scientists might be able narrow the outbreak to a particular food or company.
But culture-based testing takes time — as long as two to four days after the sample reaches the lab, which makes for a long wait if you're a sick patient.
What's in the pipeline? Tests that could detect many kinds of germs simultaneously instead of hunting one at a time — and within hours of reaching the lab — without first having to grow a culture. Those tests are expected to be approved as early as next year.
This isn't just a science debate, said Shari Shea, food safety director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
If you were the patient, "you'd want to know how you got sick," she said.
PulseNet has greatly improved the ability of regulators and the food industry to solve those mysteries since it was launched in the mid-1990s, helping to spot major outbreaks in ground beef, spinach, eggs and cantaloupe in recent years. Just this fall, PulseNet matched 42 different salmonella illnesses in 20 different states that were eventually traced to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter.
Food and Drug Administration officials who visited the plant where the peanut butter was made found salmonella contamination all over the facility, with several of the plant samples matching the fingerprint of the salmonella that made people sick. A New Mexico-based company, Sunland Inc., recalled hundreds of products that were shipped to large retailers all over the country, including Target, Safeway and other large grocery chains.
The source of those illnesses probably would have remained a mystery without the national database, since there weren't very many illnesses in any individual state.
To ensure that kind of crucial detective work isn't lost, the CDC is asking the medical community to send samples to labs to be cultured even when they perform a new, non-culture test.
But it's not clear who would pay for that extra step. Private labs only can perform the tests that a doctor orders, noted Dr. Jay M. Lieberman of Quest Diagnostics, one of the country's largest testing labs.
A few first-generation non-culture tests are already available. When private labs in Wisconsin use them, they frequently ship leftover samples to the state lab, which grows the bacteria itself. But as more private labs switch over after the next-generation rapid tests arrive, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene will be hard-pressed to keep up with that extra work before it can do its main job — fingerprinting the bugs, said deputy director Dr. Dave Warshauer.
Stay tuned: Research is beginning to look for solutions that one day might allow rapid and in-depth looks at food poisoning causes in the same test.
"As molecular techniques evolve, you may be able to get the information you want from non-culture techniques," Lieberman said.
___
Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
Wall Street gains on German data; Fed eyed
Label: BusinessIf you're not already aware of the bull-headed CIA agent whose persist pressure to track Al Qaeda couriers helped lead the way to bin Laden's compound, you're about to be. The main character of Zero Dark Thirty, the soon-to-be released Oscar bait that portrays the story of the Bin Laden raid, is based on said agent, "is based on a real person" whose identity remains classified as she's still working for the CIA. Things at Langley haven't been going so well for said secret, soon-to-be an anonymous celebrity spy, though. ...
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Plane Wreckage of Mexican-American Singer Jenni Rivera Found
Label: World
A plane carrying the Mexican-American singer and television star Jenni Rivera crashed early Sunday morning, Mexican officials said, adding that they feared there were no survivors.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
Ms. Rivera recently won two Billboard Mexican Music Awards: Female Artist of the Year and Banda Album of the Year. More Photos »
In addition to Ms. Rivera, there were four passengers and two pilots aboard the American-registered Learjet 25. There was no immediate indication as to what caused the crash.
Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico’s transportation and communications minister, said that the authorities found what remained of the plane in mountainous terrain in northeastern Mexico, just south of Monterrey, on Sunday night. He cautioned that a more-thorough inspection would have to be completed before any deaths could be confirmed.
“There is nothing recognizable, neither material nor human in the wreckage,” Mr. Esparza told the Mexican network Televisa, according to a translation by The Associated Press.
“This is what’s so regrettable, that it was so badly destroyed that there’s nothing recognizable,” he said.
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Ms. Rivera, 43, was born and raised in Long Beach, Calif., and had legions of fans on both sides of the border.
She gained initial acclaim for her interpretations of a Mexican regional style of music known as banda. Traditionally, it is a style of music dominated by men, so her success was something of a rarity, according to a profile of the singer on Billboard.com.
She recently won two Billboard Mexican Music Awards: female artist of the year and banda album of the year for “Joyas Prestadas: Banda.”
Ms. Rivera sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, including 1.2 million albums and 349,000 digital tracks in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Ms. Rivera was also one of NBCUniversal’s best-known bilingual television stars, appearing in her own reality show, “I Love Jenni,” on the Mexican cable channel Mun2.
On Sunday, she was flying from Monterrey to Toluca, near Mexico City, where she was to tape an episode of the Mexican version of the NBC show “The Voice,” on which she was one of the judges.
The plane took off from Monterrey around 3:30 a.m. and was in the air for 10 minutes before it lost contact with air-traffic controllers, according to the Mexican authorities.
As word of the crash spread Sunday night, there was an immediate outpouring of condolences from fellow artists, including Ricky Martin and Gloria Estefan.
“Praying for her and her family during this difficult and uncertain time,” Ms. Estefan wrote on Twitter.
The mother of five children, Ms. Rivera recently announced that she was seeking a divorce from her third husband, Esteban Loaiza, a pitcher for several Major League Baseball teams, including the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.
After her concert in Monterrey on Saturday, she spoke about her personal struggles.
“I can’t get caught up in the negative because that destroys you,” she said, according to The Associated Press. “Perhaps trying to move away from my problems and focus on the positive is the best I can do. I am a woman like any other, and ugly things happen to me like any other woman.”
#OccupyCheerios: A Facebook Revolt
Label: TechnologyIt wasn’t an obvious forum for an anti-GMO protest.
A YouTube video posted on Cheerio’s Facebook page depicts an elderly woman leaning over the highchair of her infant grandchild, cooing about family and the holidays, drawing a map with pieces of cereal representing relative’s far-flung houses. “But don’t you worry,” the grandmother says, pushing two Cheerios together, “we’ll always be together for Christmas.”
More than 1,200 users have commented on the vintage Cheerios commercial since it was posted last week, expressing outrage over the General Mills-owned brand’s use of genetically modified ingredients. Commenters have also been critical—like heavy-exclamation-points-use critical—of General Mills’ significant financial support of Prop. 37, California’s defeated GMO-labeling ballot initiative
Comments like “Can you please inform the public exactly why it is that General Mills spent $ 1.2 million to keep consumers in the dark about GMOs????” and “Nostalgic old commercials are no substitute for healthy ingredients. I won’t buy Cheerios until they are GMO-free” are a far cry from the stories of spending holidays with family—and perhaps a bit of Cheerios nostalgia—the post was surely intended to elicit.
The protest campaign was stoked by GMO Inside, an organization born of the failed Yes on 37 campaign. The group also called on people to comment-bomb a Cheerios app, which has since been removed from the company’s Facebook page. But beyond that, Cheerios’ response to the criticism has been . . . nothing. Anti-GMO comments are still piling up on the post, and no new material has been added to page in order to bury the video in the timeline.
Do 1,256 comments (and counting) cancel out $ 1.2 million of anti-Prop. 37 funding? Of course not. But just as the Occupy-style tactics being employed by protesters at Cooper Union and the Michigan State Capitol exhibit, showing up and voicing an opinion can be a powerful gesture, even if it’s not overpowering.
Similar stories on TakePart
• Will GMOs Spell the End of Mexican Maize?
• Kellogg Recalls 2.8 Million Boxes of Cereal Due to Hazardous Metallic ‘Surprise’
• Anna Breslaw’s 600-Word Sprint: Nude Protests, Stripped Down
Willy Blackmore is the food editor at TakePart. He has also written about food, art, and agriculture for such publications as Los Angeles Magazine, The Awl, GOOD, LA Weekly, The New Inquiry, and BlackBook. Email Willy | TakePart.com
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Jenni Rivera's Family: 'We Are Feeling Devastated'
Label: LifestyleWhile fans far and wide share their sympathy over the death of singer Jenni Rivera, her family members are expressing their grief over the personal loss.
"We are feeling devastated. It's a devastation to the family," the 43-year-old's brother, Pedro Rivera Jr., told E! News outside the Lakewood, Calif., home of the Riveras, while her father, Pedro Rivera Sr. told Telemundo and NBC News that, despite their sadness, the family is grateful for the support Jenni's fans have shown her over the years.
Reliving the nightmare of Sunday, her brother said, "We were having a beautiful morning, and then we received the news from my brother [Gustavo]. 'Go see mom because we can't find Jenni's plane, we don't know what's happened to her.' "
Pedro Jr. continued, "That's when it started, really early at 9 in the morning. I came to my mom's house. We started getting the news. Then at around 5 p.m., we got confirmation that she was gone. It was so painful."
The family, soon to be joined by brother Lupillo (who was in North Carolina, E! reports), is still awaiting further details on what happened, Pedro Jr. said Sunday.
What has been reported so far is a Learjet carrying the performer and six others lost contact with air traffic controllers after it took off for Toluca, outside Mexico City, from Monterrey, Mexico, at 3:15 a.m. Sunday. Mexican authorities confirmed that evening that wreckage had been found in Nuevo Leon state and there were no survivors.
"When we do find out what has happened with the body, because they have to get it out of the woods there," said Pedro Jr. "As soon as they get the bodies out and we receive the news that they're there, all the family is going to fly over there and bring our sister back."
He also thanked fans for "all the love you gave to Jenni and to all the family. It is just so special to have you guys as fans."
Rivera, who is Senior Pastor at Iglesia Primer Amor in Long Beach, Calif., then went on to say, "We may be sad, but when God has the last word for all of us in our last days, it's time to go. And this was the way Jenni had to go."
Pastor Pedro Rivera Jr.
Patrick T. Fallon / AP
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