U.S. gun website sued for alleged ties to slayings

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A prominent U.S. gun control group on Wednesday sued a gun auction website it says is linked to a mass shooting at a Wisconsin spa in October and the stalker slaying of a woman near Chicago in 2011.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence alleges that the design of armslist.com facilitates illegal online sales to unlawful gun buyers with no background checks, and enables users to evade laws that permit private sellers to sell guns only to residents of their own state.

“We as a nation are better than an anonymous Internet gun market where killers and criminals can easily get guns,” said Jonathan Lowy, the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project Director, in a statement.

The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel, 36, an immigrant from the Czech Republic who was shot and killed last year by Demetry Smirnov, a stalker.

The suit, which the Brady Center says is the first of its kind, alleges that Smirnov illegally bought the gun from a private seller he located through armslist.com.

Vesel was killed in the parking lot of the Chicago-area Czechoslovak Heritage Museum, where she was a volunteer preparing for a celebration in memory of Czech-American Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Cermak was slain with a handgun during an attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

A representative for website owner Armslist, LLC was not immediately available for comment. The company is based in Noble, Oklahoma, according to public records.

The website includes a “terms of use” page on which users must promise they are age 18 or older and will not use the site for illegal purposes.

The Brady Center said that the case does not infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, noting that 74 percent of National Rifle Association members believe that no guns should be sold without a criminal background check.

A representative for the NRA was not immediately available for comment.

Radcliffe Haughton, who killed his estranged wife and two other women and wounded four others before killing himself in a shooting in a Milwaukee suburb on October 21, also got his weapon through armslist.com, according to Wisconsin officials.

Haughton, who was under a restraining order for domestic violence, avoided a background check through a “lethal loophole” by buying a gun through the website, according to a letter to Armslist sent by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Wisconsin U.S. Representative Gwen Moore on October 26.

Sales conducted over the Internet also have been linked to mass killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. In 1999 eBay announced it was prohibiting online gun sales, according to the Brady Center lawsuit.

Craigslist did the same in 2007. Amazon.com and Google AdWords also prohibits the listing of firearms for sale, the suit says.

An undercover investigation of online gun sales by New York City last year found that 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a firearm to a buyer who said he probably could not pass a background check.

(Reporting By Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Greg McCune and Xavier Briand)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Donald Faison Marries Cacee Cobb

By Lesley Messer

12/15/2012 at 08:25 PM EST

Cacee Cobb and Donald Faison

Dr. Billy Ingram/WireImage

It's official!

After six years together, Donald Faison and Cacee Cobb were married Saturday night at the Los Angeles home of his Scrubs costar Zach Braff.

Cobb's friend Jessica Simpson was a bridesmaid. Sister Ashlee Simpson also attended.

"What a happy day," Tweeted groomsman Joshua Radin, a singer, who posted a photo of himself with Faison and Braff in their tuxedos.

The couple got engaged in August 2011. At the time, Faison Tweeted, "If you like it then you better put a Ring on it," and Cobb replied, "If she likes it then she better say YES!!"

Since then, the couple had been hard at work planning their wedding. On Nov. 12, Faison, who currently stars on The Exes, Tweeted that they were tasting cocktails to be served on the big day.

"Alcohol tasting for the wedding!" he wrote, adding a photo of the drinks. "The [sic] Ain't Say It Was Going To Be Like This!!!"

This is the first marriage for Cobb. Faison was previously married to Lisa Askey, with whom he has three children. (He also has a son from a previous relationship.)

Read More..

Currents: School Takes New Tack on Work Study

NEW YORK — “I was raised into believing that money is everything,” said Maire Mendoza, 19, crying at her own tale.

Her parents are near-invisibles in this city that they’ve heard called a city of dreams. They left Mexico before Maire was born and have toiled anonymously ever since — her mother a baby sitter these days, her father a restaurant worker.

They raised their girls as pragmatic survivors. So it was startling when Maire came to them not long ago with an epiphany: “I now know that I don’t want to work for money,” she said, to bafflement. But her father, sensing his limitations, deferred. “You’re probably right,” she remembers him saying, “and it’s because you go to school and you know things that we don’t know.”

Ms. Mendoza’s self-discovery was no accident. Such discoveries are the goal of an audacious experiment in New York that seeks to improve the fortunes of community college students by demolishing and rebuilding their perceptions about work.

Community colleges are the bedrock of American higher education. They often take all comers — clever teenagers, 25-year-old ex-drifters, middle-aged downsizees in need of retraining — and let them study as needed: a class at a time or a full load, for a degree or for fun. In a nation whose mythology declaims that all who try can make it, community colleges are among the last hopes of proving the mythology true.

But their anything-goes approach has come under fire in recent years, in part because of dismal graduation rates, which can hover in the twenties, teens or even single digits in some cases.

“The job the country needs community colleges to do now (better success) is different from the job needed from them (broader access) when the community college movement began,” said Allan C. Golston, president of the U.S. program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pressed for major reforms.

Thanks in part to the reformers’ pressure, the New Community College opened here this autumn, with Ms. Mendoza in the inaugural class. It is an experimental institution within the City University of New York, with a mission to take the students whom community colleges usually fail — they’re still taken first-come, first-serve, not by application — and hugely lift their trajectories.

The college pulls on many levers to achieve that goal — requiring students to be full-timers; limiting courses of study to six fields with proven job prospects; offering abundant counseling. But the most intriguing idea may be a mandatory first-year class called “Ethnographies of Work.”

The course grew out of findings that students who attend community colleges — who in New York come overwhelmingly from low-income or minority backgrounds — often harbor negative associations with work, said Nancy Hoffman, an education scholar who has advised the new college. In these students’ communities, work may be primarily experienced as soul-crushing or exploitative or elusive or illegal.

“Mostly in my community, it’s just to survive,” said Jesus A. Paredes, 18, another first-year student at the New Community College. “Nobody really followed their passion. Or if they did follow their passion, it didn’t go right.”

And so, for their ethnography class this autumn, students fanned out across New York to investigate work. They sat in offices and recorded observations (how workers dressed, their mood, how authority was expressed). They interviewed lawyers, social workers, techies. They kept journals about their own attitudes. The purpose was to reach a deeper understanding of what work is (the topic of their final paper), and how — as Ms. Mendoza was seeking to do — to reconcile the impulse to survive with one’s passions.

“Work is something people do and get paid for,” one student wrote in her final paper. “Work is the foundation of purpose,” said another.

For Jeslyn Ruiz, 18, the class gave her the courage to tell her grandmother that, no, she won’t be a nurse; she wants to be a lighting director for concerts. Her grandmother, who came to the United States from Puerto Rico, laughed in her face. “Oh, no, you’ll be a nurse,” she said, not commanding, just mournfully predicting.

Sherine Smith, 21, came to the course with the notion that “I have to make the most money possible” doing the least possible work. Meeting real-life workers had convinced her that money may not leave you better off and was forcing her to reconsider.

Out of nine students who gathered to meet with a reporter, six said they emerged from the class persuaded that job and passion must align. Derek Norman, a 22-year-old musician who wants to join the Fire Department and confine his music to after-hours gigs, spoke for the keep-them-separate camp: “I don’t feel that you need to take the two of them and mend them together.”

Some of the students seemed less sure of their ultimate direction but were still savoring a strange and stirring semester. For Mr. Paredes, a denizen of this most vertical of cities whom fate has kept close to the ground floor, the homework to interview a successful lawyer delivered on a long-deferred dream: “I’ve never been to a 52nd floor,” he said. He quite liked it up there.

Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly; Follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites

Read More..

Games top App Store revenue in 2012

Read More..

Gunman's Father and Brother Are 'in Shock,' Says a Source

By Diane Herbst

12/14/2012 at 08:50 PM EST

State police personnel lead children to safety away from the Sandy Hook Elementary School

Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee/Reuters/Landov

The father and older brother of the gunman who was blamed for the Connecticut school shooting are being questioned by authorities but are not suspects, a law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

The Associated Press reports that the gunman has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza.

His unidentified father, who lives in New York City, and his older brother, Ryan, 24, of Hoboken, N.J., are "in shock," the law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

They were being questioned by the FBI in the Hoboken police station but "are not suspects, they have no involvement," the source says.

"Imagine the 24 year old – he's lost his mother. Imagine the father, his son killed 20 kids," the source says."   

As for Adam, "It looks like there's mental history there," the law enforcement source says.

Adam Lanza died at the scene of the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

His mother, Nancy Lanza, was found dead at her home, according to CNN.

The source describes the weapons used by Lanza as "legitimate." According to CNN, Lanza used two hand guns that were registered to his mother and a rifle.

Adam's parents were no longer together, the source says.   

Read More..

Wall St Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."

Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.

"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."

With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.

Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.

"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.

"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."

Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.

BEWARE OF THE WITCH

This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.

"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.

RETHINKING APPLE

Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.

Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.

On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.

"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.

But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

Read More..

World Briefing | Africa: Mali: Interim Prime Minister Sworn In

Mali swore in an interim prime minister on Thursday, just days after soldiers behind this year’s military coup arrested his predecessor and forced his resignation. The new prime minister, Diango Cissoko, officially took office in the capital, Bamako, where he said the former prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, would be available as needed during the political transition. In recent weeks though, Mr. Diarra had taken stances that sometimes conflicted with the coup leader, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo. Captain Sanogo has maintained his hold on Mali since the coup in March, and the political instability has raised concerns about a proposed military intervention to retake Mali’s north from radical Islamists. The African Union on Thursday welcomed Mr. Cissoko’s appointment despite the circumstances under which Mr. Diarra left office.

Read More..

U.S. drops China’s Taobao website from “notorious” list

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States on Thursday dropped a website owned by China‘s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba Group, from its annual list of the world’s most “notorious markets” for sales of pirated and counterfeit goods.

Taobao Marketplace, an online shopping site similar to eBay and Amazon that brings together buyers and sellers, “has been removed from the 2012 List because it has undertaken notable efforts over the past year to work with rightholders directly or through their industry associations to clean up its site,” the U.S. Trade Representative‘s office said in the report.

The move came just before an annual high-level U.S.-China trade meeting next week in Washington.

Taobao Marketplace is China’s largest consumer-oriented e-commerce platform, with estimated market share of more than 70 percent. The website has nearly 500 million registered users, with more than 800 million product listings at any given time. Most of the users are in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called Taobao “one of the single largest online sources of counterfeits.”

The Chinese Commerce Ministry strongly objected to Taobao’s inclusion on the USTR’s 2011 notorious markets list. A ministry spokesman said it did not appear to be based on any “conclusive evidence or detailed analysis.

Alibaba hired former USTR General Counsel James Mendenhall to help persuade USTR to remove Taobao from its list.

The Chinese company’s bid to shed its “notorious” label won support from the Motion Picture Association of America, a former critic of Taobao, which praised its effort to reduce the availability of counterfeit goods on its website.

But U.S. software, clothing and shoe manufacturers urged USTR to keep Taobao on the list.

To stay off in the future, USTR urged “Taobao to further streamline procedures … for taking down listings of counterfeit and pirated goods and to continue its efforts to work with and achieve a satisfactory outcome with U.S. rights holders and industry associations.”

USTR said it also removed Chinese website Sogou from the notorious markets list, based on reports that it has made “notable efforts to work with rights holders to address the availability of infringing content on its site.”

U.S. concerns about widespread piracy and counterfeiting of American goods in China are expected to be high on the agenda at next week’s meeting in Washington of the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade.

The 2012 notorious markets list includes Xunlei, which USTR described as a Chinese-based site that facilitates the downloading and distribution of pirated movies.

Baixe de Tudo, a website hosted in Sweden but targeted at the Brazilian market, was also put on the list along with the Chinese website Gougou.

Warez-bb, which USTR described as a hub for pre-release music, software and video games, was also included. The forum site is registered in Sweden but hosted by a Russian Internet service provider, USTR said.

The full report can be found on USTR’s website at: http://www.ustr.gov/sites/default/files/121312%20Notorious%20Markets%20List.pdf

(Reporting by Doug Palmer; Editing by Will Dunham, Dan Grebler and Jim Marshall)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

The X Factor Reveals Season 2 Finalists

TV Watch

The X Factor

12/13/2012 at 09:10 PM EST

Carly Rose Sonenclar, Emblem3, Tate Stevens and Fifth Harmony

Ray Mickshaw/FOX (4)

Sparks will fly at the finale!

On Thursday, The X Factor revealed its top three acts, who will perform next week in the final night of competition – in hopes of taking home the $5 million recording contract.

Simon Cowell said it would take a miracle to get his girl group, Fifth Harmony, to the finale after they performed Shontelle's "Impossible" and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" on Wednesday. Keep reading to find out if their dream came true ...

Apparently, miracles do happen! Fifth Harmony was the first act to be sent through to the finale.

They will compete against departing judge L.A. Reid's country singer, Tate Stevens, and Britney Spears's only remaining contestant, Carly Rose Sonenclar.

That means Simon's promising boy band, Emblem3, are out of the running for the big prize.

"This is the way it goes on competitions," Simon said. "I'm gutted really for them ... But it happens."

Read More..

IHT Special: Internet-Driven Fame and Fortune for Mideast Comedians

DUBAI — While the world watched the demise of Egypt’s political leadership last year, some Egyptians were tuning online to YouTube clips lampooning the Egyptian state channel’s fumbling version of the events.

In early 2011, Bassem Youssef began filming clips in his laundry room to provide comic relief amid a crumbling political situation in his home country. His work struck a chord with a wide audience. A year and tens of millions of views later, Mr. Youssef — a heart surgeon by profession — is now the host of Egypt’s first live political satire show on television.

His bold show — modeled after Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — tackles topics that were once taboo under the regime of the ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, including political corruption and religious extremism.

Money has been quick to follow the success. At one point, he received financial backing from the Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris while his show aired on ONtv, a liberal Egyptian channel. Since then, the show “El Bernameg,” meaning “The Program” in Arabic, has moved to CBC, another Egyptian channel with a wider audience, airing an episode every Friday. It has secured sponsors and a brand-new venue.

“We were always afraid, and when we started, there were always problems with the military, because we use satire and humor as stinging weapons of truth,” Mr. Youssef said via a Skype call from Cairo.

“We’re doing something right because now we get bigger budgets that have gone to renovating the theater where we film and to our researchers and writers,” he said.

When he appeared as a guest on “The Daily Show” this year, Mr. Youssef said there was more money in comedy than in cardiology. It seemed like a joke, but similar examples of Internet-driven fame and fortune are cropping up across the region, from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates, as political satire and sophisticated forms of comedy turn into widely watched and profitable entertainment.

“Stand-up content is what feeds into movies, talk shows and witty sitcoms,” said Jamil Abu-Wardeh, managing director of J.A.W. Media, a creative agency that produces original content for Web, television and stage, and founder of www.standub.com, a resource for all things funny in the region.

Mr. Abu-Wardeh also produced the Axis of Evil comedy tour, which introduced stand-up comedy to the Middle East.

“Stand-up comedy is evolving into a real industry today,” he said.

Comedy has always had a role in Arab entertainment. Egyptian and Kuwaiti theater plays were the most popular — featuring popular actors. Slapstick sketches dominated television comedy.

Since being introduced by the Axis tour and Mr. Abu-Wardeh’s team, a stand-up culture featuring a quick-witted comic on stage with a microphone, slowly evolved and gave rise to the variety now seen in the region today, including political satire.

This shift happened in parallel with the rise of YouTube over the past several years, giving audiences the opportunity to choose between entertainment programmed by broadcasters on television and unknown funny clips by random people online.

The changes have penetrated even the most conservative countries. While experimenting with small, local stand-up events in Saudi Arabia, Fahad Albutairi and his producer, Ibraheem al-Khairallah, began a YouTube channel called La Yekthar last year, on which they posted satirical clips.

They created an alligator mascot that has become a branding tool. Millions of views online led to ticketed events, and eventually, the team started a full-fledged video and events production company called Luxury Events KSA. Mr. Khairallah, whose day job is in advertising, managed to convince the telecommunications operator Mobily to sponsor a full month of comedy events.

Now, soft drink and electronics brands want to be in their coveted “presenting sponsor” slots. Comedy is winning a big chunk of the audience. Statistics from Argaam.com, which is an online statistics portal with data on different sectors, including media and stock markets, show that comedy attracts an average of 40 percent of the four million Saudi YouTube views per day.

Comedy has become a serious business.

Read More..