The Voice

‘The Voice’: On the scene for the season 2 finale

by EW staff 5/9/2012

By Whitney Pastorek

Stuck in traffic on the way to the finale of The Voice tonight, I felt a palpable excitement, PopWatchers. Last night’s epic battle of Jermaine Paul, Chris Mann, Juliet Simms, and Tony Lucca had featured such fireworks – both literal and (yes, Adam) metaphorical – I felt certain that I was about to bear witness to a dramatic spectacle! Would Christina punch Adam in the face? Would Tony Lucca’s wife rip out Christina’s weave? Would audience members spontaneously combust in the heat? I did not know, but I was prepared for anything.

Sadly, the answer turned out to be: none of the above. It was a somewhat languid finale for those of us there in person, as the heat in the soundstage led not to combustion, but

Sun spot

Sun spot AR1476 setting sights on Earth, solar flares and aurora borealis possible this week

• Mark Johnson, newsnet5.com 5/9/2012

The sun is active again. A very large sun spot has rotated around the sun and is now about to face directly toward the Earth.

This sun spot, known as AR1476, burped out a pair of solar eruptions on May 7 and hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth.

CMEs are massive bursts of solar wind and magnetic fields. Coronal mass ejections release huge quantities of matter and electromagnetic radiation into space. The ejected material is a plasma, consisting mainly of protons and electrons. They also contain small quantities of helium, oxygen and even iron. These bursts of energy strike the Earth's magnetic field, causing colorful auroras or, worse, major disruptions to the world's electrical grid.

Forecast tracks prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab suggests that clouds will

Hamilton hits four homers

Hamilton hits four homers in Rangers' win

Associated Press May 9, 2012

Josh Hamilton became the 16th player to hit four home runs in a game, launching a quartet of two-run drives against three different pitchers in a history-making performance that carried the Texas Rangers to a 10-3 victory over the Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday.

Hamilton homered off Jake Arrieta in the first and third innings, added another off Zach Phillips in the seventh and topped it off with a shot against Darren O'Day in the eighth. During the last at-bat, Hamilton took a hack and missed, lined a foul into right-field seats and then sent the 0-2 pitch over the center-field wall.

Hamilton also doubled in the fifth inning. His 18 total bases is a new single-game American League record, and his eight RBIs are a career high.

The last player to hit four home runs in a game was Carlos Delgado on Sept. 25, 2003, for Toronto against Tampa Bay. Two of the 16 players to hit four homers in a game did it before 1900. Hamilton is the sixth AL

Nuggets avoid elimination, hold off Lakers 102-99

From cbs news

5/9/2012

LOS ANGELES — JaVale McGee went out with the attitude that Game 5 was the last game of his life. The other Denver Nuggets played their own mental games, some drawing inspiration from Lakers center Andrew Bynum's comment about how closeout playoff games can sometimes be easy.

The Nuggets went deep into their motivational wells for an impressive win at Staples Center, and not even Kobe Bryant could prevent the Lakers from getting on a plane back to Denver.

Andre Miller scored 24 points, including two free throws with 12.8 seconds left, and Denver survived Bryant's late scoring barrage in a 43-point performance, avoiding playoff elimination with a 102-99 victory over Los Angeles on Tuesday night and trimming the Lakers' series lead to 3-2.

Twitter news

Twitter says accounts hackers posted were mostly banned spammers

Shane McGlaun, May 9th 2012 

This week hackers claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous posted details from about 55,000 twitter accounts. The hackers claim to have broken into twitter servers to steal the data. Twitter is now claiming that most of those 55,000 accounts are bogus. In fact, twitter says that most of those accounts that were published were for accounts that are banned for spamming.

The details published by the hackers on Pastebin included five pages of twitter usernames and passwords.

Against Obama, even a jailbird gets some votes

By LAWRENCE MESSINA, Associated Press

5/9/2012

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia's Democratic presidential primary.

The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999. Obama received 59 percent of the vote to Judd's 41 percent.

For some West Virginia Democrats, simply running against Obama is enough to get Judd votes.

"I voted against Obama," said Ronnie Brown, a 43-year-old electrician from Cross Lanes who called himself a conservative Democrat. "I don't like him. He didn't carry the state before and I'm not going to let him carry it again."

Republican Party's

Republican Party's Latino outreach off to a stumbling start

By Paul WestTribune Washington Bureau

 May 9, 2012

WASHINGTON _ A top staffer for the Republican National Committee got the party's election-year outreach to Latino voters off to a disastrous public start Monday when she told a roomful of reporters that likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a hard-liner on immigration, was still formulating his position on the issue.

"As a candidate, to my understanding, that he's still deciding what his position on immigration is," said Bettina Inclan, who became the RNC's director of Hispanic Outreach in January. "I can't talk about something that I don't know what the position is."

Inclan, a former executive director of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly who worked

Two arrested in case of missing Tennessee family

Emily Le CozReuters

 May 8, 2012

TUPELO, Mississippi (Reuters) - The mother and wife of the prime suspect in the kidnapping of a Tennessee family have been also been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, officials said on Tuesday.

Two members of the Tennessee family - the mother and one daughter - have been found dead and two other daughters were missing and presumed held by Adam Mayes, who remained at large and was considered by theFederal Bureau of Investigation to be armed and dangerous.

Adam Mayes' wife, Teresa Mayes, and mother, Mary Mayes, were jailed at Hardeman County

Found Gun parts

Gun parts found in boy's stuffed animals at Rhode Island airport

By Jim Barnett, CNN

 Wed May 9, 2012

Washington (CNN) -- A man traveling with his 4-year-old son claims he didn't know that the three stuffed animals his little boy put on a conveyor belt at T. F. Green International Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island, contained parts that could be assembled into a loaded handgun, the Transportation Security

Millions of Europeans

Posen: Millions of Europeans face long slog

By Kim Clark @Money May 9, 2012

(MONEY Magazine) -- These are migraine-inducing times for anyone trying to set aside a little money for the future. If you're investing, you worry that Europe's game of debt-default chicken will wreck your portfolio. Yet you also can't get a decent yield if you try to keep your money completely safe.

All of which makes Adam S. Posen a very interesting man to talk to right now. He's an American economist -- his résumé includes a Harvard Ph.D. and a book on Japan's slump -- but since 2009 he has served at the Bank of England, where he is a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, which sets Britain's interest rates and money supply. That committee's next meeting is slated for Thursday.

Posen's post at the Bank of England has given him a close-up view of the crisis in Europe (although

Double agent ...

Double agent hands al-Qaida its 3rd failed bombing

By ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press

5/9/2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past three years, al-Qaida bomb makers in Yemen have developed three fiendishly clever devices in hopes of attacking airplanes in the skies above the United States.

First, there was the underwear bomb that fizzled over Detroit on Christmas 2009. Next, terrorists hid bombs inside printer cartridges and got them on board cargo planes in 2010, only to watch authorities find and defuse them in the nick of time.

Then last month, officials say, al-Qaida completed a sophisticated new, nonmetallic underwear bomb — and unwittingly handed it over to the CIA.

Julia Orayen

Julia Orayen, former Playboy Playmate, steals the show at Mexican debate

By Claudine Zap | The Upshot  5/8/2012

The buzziest moment during the first debate among Mexico's four candidates for president this Sunday happened before anyone had said a word.

At the debate's start, a curvy model wearing a form-fitting white dress with a revealing cutout showing off her generous cleavage, presented a box for candidates to draw papers that would determine who would go first.

Yahoo CEO ...

Yahoo CEO apologizes for bogus college degree

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE | Associated Pres

5/8/2012

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is sorry for allowing an inaccuracy about his education to appear in his official bio, but not remorseful enough to heed calls for him to resign.

Thompson apologized for the uproar caused by the misinformation in a memo sent Monday to the troubled Internet company's employees. Yahoo Inc. provided a copy of the memo to The Associated Press.

The memo didn't offer any explanation why Thompson's bio has periodically listed a bachelor's degree in computer science that he never received. The exaggeration was most recently repeated in documents that 

warmed the Earth

Dinosaur gases 'warmed the Earth'

By Ella DaviesReporter, BBC Nature5/8/2012

Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, say researchers.

British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.

By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs - as a whole - produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually.

They suggest the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago.

David Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moore's University, and colleagues from the University of London and the University of Glasgow published their results in the journal Current Biology.

Sauropods, such as Apatosaurus louise(formerly known as Brontosaurus), were super-sized land animals that grazed on vegetation during the Mesozoic Era.

obesity epidemic may be slowing

No end to obesity’s rise, forecast shows

By LAURAN NEERGAARD - The Associated Press

 Tuesday, May 8, 201

WASHINGTON – The obesity epidemic may be slowing, but don’t take in those pants yet.

Today, just over a third of U.S. adults are obese. By 2030, 42 percent will be, says a forecast released Monday.

That’s not nearly as many as experts had predicted before the once-rapid rises in obesity rates began leveling off. But the new forecast suggests even small continuing increases will add up.

“We still have a very serious problem,” said obesity specialist Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Worse, the already obese are getting fatter. Severe obesity will double by 2030, when 11 percent of

 Spurs finish sweep of Jazz

Ginobili steps up in ousting Jazz

ASSOCIATED PRESS 

  MAY 08, 2012

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich shrugged when asked about Manu Ginobili’s mini-shooting slump.

“I don’t even think about it. He’s Manu,’’ he said.

True to form, the Spurs’ invaluable sixth man led the charge off the bench when San Antonio needed it most.

He hit consecutive 3-pointers after the Utah Jazz had pulled to 61-58 late in the third quarter in Game 4 of the first-round Western Conference series.

And after the Jazz rallied from 21 points down to get within 4 in the final minute, Ginobili turned a steal by Tony Parker into a layup that sealed an 87-81 victory in Salt Lake City and series sweep.

US, India call for Pakistani terror crackdown

US, India call for Pakistani terror crackdown

By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press 5/8/2012

NEW DELHI (AP) — The United States and India on Tuesday called for Pakistan to do more to stop terrorism and pledged to keep up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program.

However, the two countries remained divided over the future of India's large oil imports from Iran, which the U.S. wants to see drastically reduced to put pressure on Tehran to negotiate over its nuclear program.

"We don't believe Iran would be back at the negotiating table unless there had been the unrelenting pressure of international sanctions. And this pressure must stay on if we want to see progress toward a peaceful resolution," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a press conference in the Indian capital.

About 9 percent of India's oil imports come from Iran, and though it has reduced those imports recently, it could still face U.S. sanctions next month if Washington determines it has not done enough under a law

Dancing With the Stars Recap

Dancing With the Stars Recap: William Levy Foxtrots to the Top

May 8th, 2012 6:13 AM by Free Britney

"You bring these performances to life," Carrie Ann Inaba said. "There was care in technique and flare in the movement," added Len Goodman.

In a close second were Fegan and Chelsie Hightower, who barely survived last week. Their foxtrot earned 29 points and had Bruno Tonioli gushing.

"The sweetest of sweethearts," he called them.

After earning a perfect score last week, Maria Menounos and Derek Hough earned 28 points for what Bruno called an "amazing" Viennese waltz.

HSBC cost cuts

HSBC profit up on strong investment bank, cost cuts

Tue May 8, 2012

May 8 (Reuters) - HSBC , Europe's biggest bank, beat expectations with an underlying profit of almost $7 billion in the first quarter thanks to a strong rebound in investment banking income and a fall in U.S. bad debts.

The bank said on Tuesday it had made good progress on all areas of strategy, including cost savings, and had shed 14,000 jobs since last year as part of Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver's plan to boost profitability.

With $100 Million...

George Soros and Other Rich Guys to Infuse Democrats With $100 Million for Grass-Roots Efforts

• By Brett Smiley

• 5/8/2012

• 

  Billionaire investor George Soros will be supplying $2 million to independent Democratic groups focused on grass-roots election efforts as part of a greater donorinitiative to enhance outreach and voter registration operations. Soros will divide his donation equally between America Votes, a group that provides coordination andcampaign support to progressive organizations; and American Bridge 21st Century, a super-PAC that focuses on communications and election-oriented research. Soros's contribution will be part of a nearly $100 million boost from other major liberal donors to like-minded causes and efforts. According to a New York Times report, Soros and others are pledging funds to grass-roots-type groups in part because they don't believe they can match the massive Republican super-PAC-funded negative television ad bombs, but also as a symbolic rejection of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which gave birth to super-PACs that may spend on