Agency changes name of building to replace towers destroyed on 9/11

NEW YORK - The Freedom Tower is out. One World Trade Center is in.

The agency that owns the site says that the signature 1,776-foot skyscraper replacing the towers destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, will be known as One World Trade Center.

The building under construction at the site was named the Freedom Tower in the first master plan. Officials at the time said the tallest, most symbolic of five planned towers at the site would demonstrate the country’s triumph over terrorism.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman Anthony Coscia says the agency refers to the building as One World Trade Center. He says it’s the building’s legal name and “the one that’s easiest for people to identify with.”

“As we market the building, we will ensure that it is presented in the best possible way — and 1 World Trade Center is the address that we’re using,” said Coscia.

“It’s the one that is easiest for people to identify with — and frankly, we’ve gotten a very interested and warm reception to it.”

Sharp rebuke
According to the New York Daily News, the name change for the 102-story, $3.1 billion skyscraper, unveiled after a PA board meeting, drew a sharp rebuke from former Gov. George Pataki, whose April 24, 2003, speech gave the building its brand.

“The Freedom Tower is not simply another piece of real estate and not just a name for marketing purposes,” Pataki said.

“In design and name, it is symbolic of our commitment to rise above the attacks of Sept. 11. Where 1 and 2 World Trade Center once stood, there will be a memorial with two voids to honor the heroes we lost — and, in my view, those addresses should never be used again.”

The newspapers said the change came after board members voted to sign a 21-year lease deal with Vantone, a Chinese real estate giant, which will become the first commercial tenant at Ground Zero.

The negotiations with Vantone, which is closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist government, had nothing to do with the name change, Port Authority officials told the News, but was based primarily on bottom-line marketing considerations.

Source: AP / MSNBC.msn.com
CREDIT: TheTopNews.net

WASHINGTON — Call it Round Two of the news conference, with a big Internet twist.

President Barack Obama took questions from the White House press corps on Tuesday in a prime-time, East Room session that represented the most formal and time-honored of president-and-reporter interactions. On Thursday, he is taking to that same room for another public grilling _ this time by regular folks armed with questions submitted via the Internet and in person, as part of a political strategy to engage Americans directly.

“It’s a way for the president to do what he enjoys doing out on the road, but saves on gas,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday.

By 7 a.m. Thursday, the White House Web site had already logged more than 77,000 questions.

Obama used the Internet to build a grass-roots movement that delivered the presidency and raised unheard-of money. Now in power, he is employing the same online network and style to speak _ unfiltered _ with Americans.

The president already has taken that tactic on the road, spending two days on the West Coast last week at town hall-style meetings and appearing on Jay Leno’s late-night talk show. It offered easier questions and a chance to get his message to the widest possible audience.

“It’s not a whole lot different than were we in California doing the meeting,” Gibbs said. “It’s just we’ll have people hooked up from a lot of different places all over the country, but he’ll be able to do all that from the East Room.”

Already, the White House is connecting the old-school press conference with the new-media event. It will be an easy contrast between skeptical reporters and supporter-selected questions.

Political operatives say the White House’s strategy is a way to reach a demographic key to Obama’s election.

“In the new world of online media, formal press conferences are just one element or program to get the message out _ to those, usually older, who watch such things on TV. The online version he is doing is an alternative way to get out the same message, in this case on the budget, targeted toward a different audience, usually younger,” said Morley Winograd, a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore who now runs the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the University of Southern California.

“In both cases the questioners are just props _ or, in some cases, foils _ for the star, Obama, to deliver his message. But in the latter case, they get to self-nominate instead of be selected by elites,” Winograd said.

In a way, it’s part campaign-style politics and part “American Idol,” said political strategist Simon Rosenberg.

“Barack Obama is going to reinvent the presidency the way he reinvented electoral politics,” said Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network and a veteran of presidential campaigns. “He is allowing everyday people to participate in a way that would’ve been impossible in the old media world.”

Obama’s campaign allowed supporters to organize themselves to go door-to-door and raise money. Because of that, many felt an ownership of the campaign and devoted countless hours to giving Obama the Democratic Party’s nomination and then the presidency.

Obama’s aides are taking that step forward, incorporating tools that let visitors to the White House Web site pick the questions Obama will answer, turning the president’s Thursday event into a democratic press conference.

“Average people get to shape the outcome, like ‘American Idol,’” Rosenberg said. “This is not a couch-potato age. Average people are expecting to be part of the process.”

Yet the process lends itself to softer questions and ones the White House is eager to answer, Republicans noted.

“The president is going back to the safe confines he was always most comfortable with, in this case a friendly audience where the focus is on the sale rather than the substance,” GOP strategist Kevin Madden said.

Obama remains a popular figure, although the country and Congress are reluctant to embrace his budget proposals. Aides say that the more the president talks about his plans _ and frames his budget proposal through real-world needs _ the more Americans would be swayed.

In that vein, Obama aides want to keep the questions about energy, health care and education, the three key priorities in his first budget document. Some of the questions will be from the Web site, others via YouTube and some from an audience of about 100 people representing teachers, nurses and small-business employees.

“The president just thinks it’s another opportunity to talk directly with the American people about the challenges that we have, the choices and the decisions that we’re making, and the path that we’re taking to get us back to prosperous days,” Gibbs said.

___

On the Net:

White House online town hall: http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

“It’s a way for the president to do what he enjoys doing out on the road, but saves on gas,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday.

By 7 a.m. Thursday, the White House Web site had already logged more than 77,000 questions.

Obama used the Internet to build a grass-roots movement that delivered the presidency and raised unheard-of money. Now in power, he is employing the same online network and style to speak _ unfiltered _ with Americans.

The president already has taken that tactic on the road, spending two days on the West Coast last week at town hall-style meetings and appearing on Jay Leno’s late-night talk show. It offered easier questions and a chance to get his message to the widest possible audience.

“It’s not a whole lot different than were we in California doing the meeting,” Gibbs said. “It’s just we’ll have people hooked up from a lot of different places all over the country, but he’ll be able to do all that from the East Room.”

Already, the White House is connecting the old-school press conference with the new-media event. It will be an easy contrast between skeptical reporters and supporter-selected questions.

Political operatives say the White House’s strategy is a way to reach a demographic key to Obama’s election.

“In the new world of online media, formal press conferences are just one element or program to get the message out _ to those, usually older, who watch such things on TV. The online version he is doing is an alternative way to get out the same message, in this case on the budget, targeted toward a different audience, usually younger,” said Morley Winograd, a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore who now runs the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the University of Southern California.

“In both cases the questioners are just props _ or, in some cases, foils _ for the star, Obama, to deliver his message. But in the latter case, they get to self-nominate instead of be selected by elites,” Winograd said.

In a way, it’s part campaign-style politics and part “American Idol,” said political strategist Simon Rosenberg.

“Barack Obama is going to reinvent the presidency the way he reinvented electoral politics,” said Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network and a veteran of presidential campaigns. “He is allowing everyday people to participate in a way that would’ve been impossible in the old media world.”

Obama’s campaign allowed supporters to organize themselves to go door-to-door and raise money. Because of that, many felt an ownership of the campaign and devoted countless hours to giving Obama the Democratic Party’s nomination and then the presidency.

Obama’s aides are taking that step forward, incorporating tools that let visitors to the White House Web site pick the questions Obama will answer, turning the president’s Thursday event into a democratic press conference.

“Average people get to shape the outcome, like ‘American Idol,’” Rosenberg said. “This is not a couch-potato age. Average people are expecting to be part of the process.”

Yet the process lends itself to softer questions and ones the White House is eager to answer, Republicans noted.

“The president is going back to the safe confines he was always most comfortable with, in this case a friendly audience where the focus is on the sale rather than the substance,” GOP strategist Kevin Madden said.

Obama remains a popular figure, although the country and Congress are reluctant to embrace his budget proposals. Aides say that the more the president talks about his plans _ and frames his budget proposal through real-world needs _ the more Americans would be swayed.

In that vein, Obama aides want to keep the questions about energy, health care and education, the three key priorities in his first budget document. Some of the questions will be from the Web site, others via YouTube and some from an audience of about 100 people representing teachers, nurses and small-business employees.

“The president just thinks it’s another opportunity to talk directly with the American people about the challenges that we have, the choices and the decisions that we’re making, and the path that we’re taking to get us back to prosperous days,” Gibbs said.

Source: Huffingtonpost.com
Credit: TheTopNews.net

There was more than one whip at last night’s Britney Spears concert in Washington DC.

GOP aides confirmed to the Huffington Post that House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) attended the pop concert at the Verizon Center, where Britney appeared on stage brandishing a leather lash.

One House GOP leadership aide said Cantor went at the request of a fundraiser. “If suffering through a Britney Spears concert will raise one more dime to help Republicans take back the House, then I’m glad Cantor’s willing to do it.”

A House Democratic aide shot back, “Looks like Eric Cantor’s not that innocent.”

The gossip blog Wonkette first reported the Cantor sighting on Wednesday afternoon, and subsequently ran a quote from Cantor’s office alleging that Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu was also in attendance.

But Landrieu’s office denies the charge. An aide insists that numerous witnesses can place the Senator at Matchbox during that time (a bar/restaurant that is suspiciously close to where Spears performed).

But the aide held firm. “I can assure you she was not at the concert,” he said. Nor did she attend the show after the meal. Instead, she went to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual spring reception, he said.

Source: HuffingtonPost.com / BritneySpearsBlackout.com
CREDIT: TheTopNews.net

About 700 swimmers taking part in a race Sunday off Sydney, Australia, seemed oblivious that danger was lurking just a stone’s throw away. A hammerhead shark was swimming near them, and another, smaller shark was in the water under them.
This video below, from ITN, captures the drama. The camera was able to pick up the hammerhead, but it wasn’t able to get an image of the other interloper.

Most of the competitors appeared to be unaware of the sharks’ presence. Race winner Chris Allan did see authorities put up a shark signal as he was swimming, but he seemed to take it in stride. “I figure [the sharks] had 700 of us to choose from and they couldn’t decide, by the looks of things,” he told ITV.com.
The gallery below includes three shots from the race. Keep clicking for photos from recent and notable shark attacks, including information on a spate of attacks earlier this year off Australia’s coast.

Source:CNN
Credit:THETOPNEWS.COM

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Lindsay Lohan’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, released a statement on Saturday (March 14) about the warrant for the actress’ arrest, calling the situation a “misunderstanding.”

“Since her case was resolved, Ms. Lohan has been in compliance with all the terms and conditions of her probation and all orders of the court,” the statement reads, according to People.com. “The warrant issued on Friday was, in our view, born out of a misunderstanding which I am confident I can clear up next week.”

A hearing for Lohan is set for Monday morning in a Beverly Hills, California, court, the site reported. “The judge apparently has indicated that Ms. Lohan should be in attendance,” said Los Angeles District Attorney spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. Lohan, 22, is serving a three-year probation term for a 2007 DUI incident.

“We are not actively looking for Ms. Lohan at this time,” Beverly Hills Police Lieutenant Mark Rosen said at a Saturday press conference. “We are not anticipating her surrender this weekend. But if she comes in contact with police, she’s subject to arrest. As for why we’re not actively looking for her, that’s not our procedure for this type of warrant. Her attorney is hoping to resolve this issue in the coming week. If it’s not resolved, I’m sure we’ll negotiate her voluntary surrender.”

Gibbons said the hearing “apparently has something to do with Ms. Lohan’s probation. We don’t know exactly what it’s about. The court contacted the defense directly, not us.” Unidentified sources reportedly told TMZ.com that the warrant was issued after Lohan failed to comply with the terms of her probation, specifically with regard to an alcohol-education program in which she is enrolled.

TMZ also reported that police were called to Lohan’s girlfriend Samantha Ronson’s house after a disturbance involving a broken window was reported on Saturday, but left without apprehending Lohan. The actress reportedly spent Friday evening with friends at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, and then the group made a late-night visit to the house of Jack Nicholson.

The Beverly Hills Police Department reportedly released the following statement regarding the warrant on Friday evening: “In response to media inquiries, [the] Beverly Hills Police Department is confirming a warrant was in fact issued today [March 13] for the arrest of Lindsay Lohan. The $50,000 warrant issued by the Beverly Hills Superior Court stems from a May 2007 arrest of Miss Lohan for DUI and hit-and-run. The circumstances leading to the issuance of the warrant by the court are not readily available at this time. It is our hope that Miss Lohan will surrender herself so that this matter will be resolved in a timely manner.”

In August 2007, Lohan pleaded guilty to two counts of being under the influence of a controlled substance (cocaine), and no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above .08 percent and one count of reckless driving. She served 84 minutes in jail in November 2007 and was placed on three years probation and ordered to complete an 18-month alcohol education program.

Source:MTV

Credit:THETOPNEWS

Under pressure from the Treasury, AIG scaled back the bonus plans and pledged to reduce 2009 bonuses — or “retention payments” — by at least 30 percent. That did little to temper outrage at the initial plan, however.

“There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what’s happened at AIG is the most outrageous,” Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council, told ABC’s “This Week.”

“What that company did, the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching, what’s proved necessary, it is outrageous.”

And on “Fox News Sunday,” White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was “really upset by the news.”

“He stepped in and berated them, got them to reduce the bonuses following every legal means he has to do this,” Goolsbee said.

In a letter to Geithner, obtained Saturday by CNN, AIG Chairman and CEO Edward Liddy said his company was taking steps to limit compensation in AIG Financial Products — the British-based unit responsible for issuing the risky credit default swaps that have brought the company to the brink of collapse. The default swaps amount to insurance against losses from bad loans, which have increased dramatically since the U.S. housing boom peaked.

In the letter to Geithner, Liddy said the unit’s 25 highest-paid contract employees will reduce their salaries to $1 this year and all other officers in the unit will reduce their salaries by 10 percent. Other “non-cash compensation” will be reduced or eliminated. But he told Geithner that some bonus payments are binding legal obligations of the company, and “there are serious legal, as well as business consequences for not paying.”

Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told Fox that bailout recipients should have to follow stricter compensation rules, and said Congress should look into whether the bonuses are “legally recoverable.”

“We can’t just violate legal obligations, I understand that,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “But I do want to find out at what point these legal obligations were incurred. Who said, and at what point, ‘We’re going to give these bonuses no matter what?’ And I do think it’s inappropriate for those people to stay in power at that company.”

Frank said that if banks complain that the Obama administration has made things too tough, “They can give the money back. We made that easy.”

Goolsbee said AIG was following “a policy that’s really not sensible, is obviously going to ignite the ire of millions of people.”

“We’ve done exactly what we can do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again,” Goolsbee said. Summers told ABC that the administration was taking “every legal step possible to limit those bonuses.”

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, told “Fox News Sunday” he believes it’s important to know whether the bonuses are actually commission payments for products sold by brokers, saying he would withhold judgment until that is clarified.

However, “I do think that these entities that are receiving government money, our money, I do think they have to play by a different set of rules,” Corker said. Hopefully, those different rules will discourage companies from accepting bailout funds, he said.

Liddy, however, makes clear in the letter that he took steps to limit his employees’ compensation with trepidation. He said the company will have trouble attracting and retaining “the best and the brightest … if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.”

AIG lost a record $62 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. It has more than 74 million insurance policies issued in 130 countries around the world.

Source:CNN

Credit:THETOPNEWS

NEW YORK, March 10 - The dollar slid against most major currencies on Tuesday as comments by Citigroup’s chief executive that the bank was profitable in the first two months of 2009 boosted stocks and prompted investors to pare back safe-haven bids on the greenback.

The improvement in risk appetite spurred a bounce in the euro, which rose to two-week highs versus the dollar. But analysts cautioned the euro’s gains could be fleeting as the global macroeconomic environment and worries about banking systems worldwide remain supportive of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The yen rose and fell against the dollar over the session, with doubts about the Japanese currency’s status as a safe haven keeping trading in tight ranges, traders said.

“We’re seeing a general rebound in risk appetite given improving stock performance,” said Omer Esiner, senior market analyst at Ruesch International in Washington.

“The Citigroup memo assuaged fears about the health of the banking sector, undermining the dollar’s safe-haven appeal. But this could be all temporary and the market is just probably booking profits on the dollar’s recent gains,” he added.

In late afternoon New York trading, the euro rose 0.4 percent to $1.2665, after hitting a roughly two-week high at $1.2821 , according to Reuters data. The euro was also 0.7 percent firmer against sterling at 92.16 pence  after earlier touching a five-and-a-half week high at 92.47 pence.

U.S. stocks .SPX .DJI gained sharply after the comments by Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit fueled optimism. Pandit, in an internal memo seen by Reuters, said the company was profitable in the first two months of the year and confident about its capital strength.

BUY DOLLAR ON DIPS

Some analysts, however, were skeptical the Citigroup-inspired rally in equities and currencies such as the euro would last.

“The market is talking about the Citigroup news, but at the same time the U.S. government is readying a fourth contingency plan for Citigroup,” said Adam Fazio, senior currency strategist at CIBC World Markets in New York.

“The government wouldn’t be putting a fourth plan in place if it didn’t think there was some chance that it would be needed. … So I think we’re going to get another round of bad news and I would be a buyer on dips here in the dollar.”

The euro, meanwhile, gained despite remarks from European Central Bank Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, who was quoted as saying the bank was prepared to cut interest rates to zero if deflation threatens and the economic situation worsens.

Lower rates typically make securities in that currency less attractive and reduce demand for the currency to buy them.

The market showed little reaction to comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that sustainable economic recovery is out of reach until the U.S. financial system is stabilized . But Bernanke’s comments reminded investors that a lot needs to be done by governments worldwide to emerge from the downturn.

The pound initially gained against the dollar in early trading, rising as high as $1.3905, but the rebound was always on shaky ground and sterling last traded down 0.2 percent at $1.3740, a six-week low.

The currency shed 2 percent on Monday when Lloyds Banking Group intensified sector worries with its announcement the British government was taking a stake of up to 77 percent.

The dollar, meanwhile, reversed early gains against the yen and was last down 0.1 percent at 98.71 yen. The Japanese currency stayed weaker versus a broadly stronger euro at 124.99 yen .

The yen has fallen in the past month as Japan grapples with diving exports and the worst recession of the postwar era. Its current account balance swung to the largest deficit on record in January, adding to selling pressure.
Source: Reuters

Credit:THETOPNEWS

The risk went up by 7.5% for every five degree Celsius increase in
temperature revealed the study of more than 7,000 patients, published
in Neurology.

The same applied to people who suffer from non-migraine headaches too.

Although you can’t alter the weather, people can watch the forecast and pop a pill to avert attacks, the authors say.

As well as temperature, people might want to check
air pressure too, as lower barometer readings over the past couple of
days were also linked with migraines, although less strongly.

The study looked at people attending the emergency department of a
large US hospital for advice about a headache at any point during a
seven year period.

Overall, 2,250 were diagnosed with migraine and 4,803 with “tension” or “unspecified” headaches.

Using meteorological and pollutant monitors, the researchers
then compared measurements of a number of environmental factors during
the days leading up to and again some weeks after a patient’s hospital
visit.

When they averaged the temperature for the day, taking into
consideration night time lows and midday highs, the researchers found
every five degree Celsius rise in temperature was linked to a 7.5% hike
in headache risk.

Storm brewing

Lower barometric air pressure, which typically brings cloudy or
stormy skies, within two or three days leading up to a person’s
hospital visit also increased headache risk.

Air pollution had no effect.

Researcher Dr Kenneth Mukamal, of the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, said: “These findings help tell us that the environment
around us does affect our health and, in terms of headaches, may be
impacting many, many people on a daily basis.”

He said headache patients should see their doctor to identify the triggers that lead to their symptoms.

Dr Brendan Davies, consultant neurologist and spokesman for the
Migraine Trust, said: “This adds scientific validity to what we have
suspected for some time. Up to 50% of patients believe weather may
trigger their migraine.

“It looks like it is the change in the air temperature, and to a lesser extent the change in air pressure that is important.

“It would be interesting to see if the same environmental
factors apply to workers in an office. It also adds more to our
understanding that migraine is a sensitivity problem.”

He warned that people should not become over-reliant on medication, taking it just in case.

“This does not mean that just because there is a hot day people
are going to have a migraine the next day, although it is more likely.
We do not want people taking too many painkillers too often because
that carries its own risks.”

Professor Peter Goadsby, from the University of California, San
Francisco and Institute of Neurology, London, said: “The challenge for
clinical science is to link this seemingly odd trigger to the brain
mechanisms involved in migraine.”

Lee Tomkins, director of Migraine Action, said: “Although the
study has some flaws, including the fact that most people with headache
would not attend a casualty department, this study is very interesting
in demonstrating how weather conditions can adversely affect migraine.

“It is another example of science ‘catching up’ with the
anecdotal evidence that many of our members give us about everyday
living with migraine.”

Source:BBC

Credit:THETOPNEWS

North Korea says it has put its military on full combat alert in advance of a big military exercise by US and South Korean forces.

The official news agency called the maneuvers a dangerous provocation.

North Korea has warned that any attempt to shoot down a satellite it says it plans to launch will result in war.

The South and the US believe Pyongyang could be preparing to test-fire a long-range missile under the guise of a satellite launch.

On Friday, the North said that the risk of conflict meant it could no longer guarantee the safety of commercial flights through airspace it controls off the east coast.

A number of airlines have already re-routed their flights as a precaution.

‘Counter strikes’

In a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency on Monday, the Korean People’s Army warned that it was ready to use force against the South, the US and Japan.

Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war North Norean army statement

“We will retaliate any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counter strikes by the most powerful military means,” it said.

“Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war.”

The army earlier issued a separate statement saying all military personnel had been ordered “to be fully combat ready” in order to defend the nation.

It described the joint military exercise as “unprecedented in the number of the aggressor forces involved and in their duration”.

The army added that it would cut off North-South military communications during the exercise period.

The 12-day military exercise involves about 50,000 US and South Korean troops, in what the two allies say is a rehearsal for the defence of the peninsula, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Seoul says.

But North Korea is always rankled by the annual drill, our correspondent says, claiming that it is a dry run for an invasion and dangerously provocative.

Some observers in South Korea, though, believe the North may be using the exercise as a pretext to clear the skies, our correspondent adds.

It announced recently that it was in the advanced stages of preparation for a satellite launch, something that both Washington and Seoul believe will, in reality, be a cover for a long-range missile test, he concludes.

Last week, North Korea raised objections to the annual exercise at a rare meeting between its generals and the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) in the South.

Tensions have risen since South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak began taking a harder line approach to the North on taking office a year ago.

On 30 January, Pyongyang scrapped a series of peace agreements with the South over Seoul’s decision to link bilateral aid to progress on denuclearisation. Six-nation talks on the aid-for-disarmament deal have stalled.

Source:BBCNEWS

Credit:THETOPNEWS

North Korea says it has put its military on full combat alert in advance of a big military exercise by US and South Korean forces.

The official news agency called the maneuvers a dangerous provocation.

North Korea has warned that any attempt to shoot down a satellite it says it plans to launch will result in war.

The South and the US believe Pyongyang could be preparing to test-fire a long-range missile under the guise of a satellite launch.

On Friday, the North said that the risk of conflict meant it could no longer guarantee the safety of commercial flights through airspace it controls off the east coast.

A number of airlines have already re-routed their flights as a precaution.

‘Counter strikes’

In a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency on Monday, the Korean People’s Army warned that it was ready to use force against the South, the US and Japan.

Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war North Norean army statement

“We will retaliate any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counter strikes by the most powerful military means,” it said.

“Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war.”

The army earlier issued a separate statement saying all military personnel had been ordered “to be fully combat ready” in order to defend the nation.

It described the joint military exercise as “unprecedented in the number of the aggressor forces involved and in their duration”.

The army added that it would cut off North-South military communications during the exercise period.

The 12-day military exercise involves about 50,000 US and South Korean troops, in what the two allies say is a rehearsal for the defence of the peninsula, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Seoul says.

But North Korea is always rankled by the annual drill, our correspondent says, claiming that it is a dry run for an invasion and dangerously provocative.

Some observers in South Korea, though, believe the North may be using the exercise as a pretext to clear the skies, our correspondent adds.

It announced recently that it was in the advanced stages of preparation for a satellite launch, something that both Washington and Seoul believe will, in reality, be a cover for a long-range missile test, he concludes.

Last week, North Korea raised objections to the annual exercise at a rare meeting between its generals and the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) in the South.

Tensions have risen since South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak began taking a harder line approach to the North on taking office a year ago.

On 30 January, Pyongyang scrapped a series of peace agreements with the South over Seoul’s decision to link bilateral aid to progress on denuclearisation. Six-nation talks on the aid-for-disarmament deal have stalled.

Source:BBCNEWS

Credit:THETOPNEWS

Lady Gaga looking great is getting ready for her new Tour. Go Gaga GO!!
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While Chris Brown is spending late nights in the recording studio, girlfriend Rihanna is also focusing on new music, one month after being brutally attacked by her longtime love.

Her Grammy-winning producer Adonis Shropshire tells Hiphollywood.com that the 21-year-old “Disturbia” singer is easing back into her work.

“You have to remember, she’s a kid still,” he says. “So with anybody who goes through something in the world, you have to bring yourself out of it, so I guess her refuge is her music.”

Shropshire, who has worked with Brown, Gwen Stefani, Mariah Carey and Usher, says fans can expect to hear something similar to Rihanna’s current sound.

“She always brings her best whenever she steps onto the stage or the studio,” he says. “This is definitely going to be an eclipse of what she’s done before. It’s going to be hot.”

Credit:E-Online

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While Chris Brown is spending late nights in the recording studio, girlfriend Rihanna is also focusing on new music, one month after being brutally attacked by her longtime love.

Her Grammy-winning producer Adonis Shropshire tells Hiphollywood.com that the 21-year-old “Disturbia” singer is easing back into her work.

“You have to remember, she’s a kid still,” he says. “So with anybody who goes through something in the world, you have to bring yourself out of it, so I guess her refuge is her music.”

Shropshire, who has worked with Brown, Gwen Stefani, Mariah Carey and Usher, says fans can expect to hear something similar to Rihanna’s current sound.

“She always brings her best whenever she steps onto the stage or the studio,” he says. “This is definitely going to be an eclipse of what she’s done before. It’s going to be hot.”

Credit:E-Online

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The global economy is likely to shrink for the first time since World War II, and trade will decline by the most in 80 years, the World Bank said today.

The World Bank’s assessment is more pessimistic than an International Monetary Fund report in January predicting 0.5 percent global growth this year. The Washington-based World Bank didn’t provide a specific estimate in its report.

World growth will be 5 percent below its potential, the bank said. Developing nations will bear the brunt of the contraction. They will face a shortfall of between $270 billion and $700 billion to pay for imports and service debts, the bank said.

“We need to react in real time to a growing crisis that is hurting people in developing countries,” said World Bank President Robert Zoellick in a statement. Action is needed by governments and multilateral lenders “to avoid social and political unrest.”

East Asia will be hit the hardest by the decline in global commerce, the bank said. Global industrial production is expected to be as much as 15 percent lower than in 2008.

The World Bank said that a surge of debt issuance by rich nations risks “crowding out many developing country borrowers, both private and public.” Emerging nations that can access capital markets will be forced to pay higher rates of interest.

The report said that 94 out of 116 developing countries had experienced a slowdown in economic growth, with poverty increasing in 43. The result, the bank said, would be growing dependence on foreign aid.

Justin Lin, the bank’s chief economist, said that developed nations should funnel part of their stimulus spending to poorer countries where it would be more effective at boosting demand. Channeling infrastructure investment to the developing world can have a “bigger bang for the buck,” he said.

Credit: Bloomberg

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Churchgoers outside the Maryville First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill., after a shooting on Sunday.

A pastor was shot to death and two congregants were stabbed Sunday at a church in this village near St. Louis, the police said.

A man strode down the aisle of First Baptist Church shortly after 8 a.m. and briefly spoke with the Rev. Fred Winters, then pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and began firing until it jammed, said Larry G. Trent, director of the Illinois State Police.

Churchgoers wrestled the gunman to the ground as he waved a knife, slashing himself and two other people, Mr. Trent said.

None of the 150-or-so congregants seemed to recognize the gunman. Investigators do not know details of Mr. Winters’s conversation with him but plan to review an audio recording of the service, Mr. Trent said. The service was not videotaped.

The police said Mr. Winters deflected the first of the gunman’s four rounds with a Bible, sending a confetti-like spray of paper into the air.

“We thought it was part of a drama skit,” said a congregant, Linda Cunningham, whose husband is a minister of adult education at the church. “When he shot, what you saw was confetti. We just sat there waiting for what comes next, not realizing that he had wounded the pastor.”

Ms. Cunningham said Mr. Winters had stood on an elevated platform to deliver his sermon about finding happiness in the workplace and managed to run halfway down the sanctuary’s side aisle before collapsing.

Two congregants tackled the gunman as he pulled the four-inch knife, and all three were stabbed, the police said.

Mr. Winters was pronounced dead at Anderson Hospital, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The gunman and a congregant underwent surgery at St. Louis University Hospital and were in serious condition Sunday evening, while the other victim was treated at Gateway Regional Medical Center and released.

The authorities did not know whether Mr. Winters, a married father of two who had led the church for nearly 22 years, knew the gunman. The police described him as a 27-year-old from nearby Troy but would not release his name pending possible charges.

The Rev. Mark Jones, another pastor at First Baptist, said he had briefly seen the gunman but did not witness the shooting, though he said he heard a sound like miniature firecrackers. “We have no idea what this guy’s motives were,” Mr. Jones said.

First Baptist had an average attendance of 32 people when Mr. Winters became senior pastor in 1987; it now has about 1,200 members, according to the church’s Web site.

Mr. Winters was also a former president of the Illinois Baptist State Association and an adjunct professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, according to the site.

“Our great God is not surprised by this, or anything,” Nate Adams, executive director of the Baptist association, said in a statement. “That he allows evil and free will to have their way in tragedies like this is a mystery in many ways.”

The red brick church sits along a busy two-lane highway on the east side of Maryville, a village of more than 7,000. “We’ve lost one of the pillars of our community, one of our leaders,” Mayor Larry Gulledge said.

Sharla Dryden, 62, pulled into the church parking lot for a 9:30 a.m. service Sunday to see “just a lot of chaos, lot of police, fire, and people just devastated.”

“They just said there had been a shooting,” Ms. Dryden said. “I would have been devastated if anyone had been shot, but to hear it was the pastor was terrible.”

A statement on First Baptist’s Web site asked for prayers for Mr. Winters’s family, the congregants who tackled the gunman, the gunman and his family, and church members.

Credit:THENYTIMES

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We’re told Brown’s people have consulted with outside legal eagles — including law school professors — who have said Rihanna’s own aggressiveness takes it out of the felony category. Sources say Rihanna was the first one to strike — slapping and striking Brown “numerous times” while he was driving, after seeing the text message from another woman. And Rihanna was fighting Brown as he punched and hurt her. We’re told much of this is reflected in the official police report based on what Rihanna told cops. As a result, they say, this is not a case that demands a felony plea.

On the other side, there are plenty of cases in which the woman engages the man in a fight but the jury convicts the male because it was an unfair fight and the man could have walked away. The photographs of Rihanna — the most graphic of which have not been seen by the public — demonstrate Brown’s superior strength. Add to that the fact that Brown had no significant injuries and it presents problems for him.

Perhaps worse for Brown, sources tell TMZ Rihanna told cops he had beaten her before and the violence had been escalating.

And there’s this. According to the detective’s note filed with the search warrant papers, Brown sent a text message to Rihanna’s assistant in which he apologized for what he had done to Rihanna and said he was getting help. That would be admissible in court and extremely damaging — as a legal admission.

Credit:TMZ

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Credit:Mike from Astoria

THETOPNEWS

Commuters in The UK Love Their Commute . Here they are shown dancing on there way to work during a T-mobile commercial filming. I’m sure New Yorker’s have better moves but with the pending rate increases it will take lot’s more to get the New Yorkers dancing in the streets.

Credit:Mike From Astoria/THETOPNEWS

Alex Rodriguez didn’t want to surrender to a surgeon. For the glory of the pinstripes, he was ready to play with pain, an indication he was hoping that fate had a much smarter plan for the restoration of A-Rod’s image than his army of well-paid spin merchants.

But the labrum tear in his right hip will require arthroscopic surgery on Monday and a prolonged stay on the disabled list. For the Yankees, a vacation from A-Rod may be just what the proverbial doctor ordered. If only temporarily, the face of the team will again belong to Derek Jeter, not Rodriguez, whom we have come to recognize in a variety of poses as the deer caught in the limelight.

Maybe the Yankees will hold their own with improved pitching, for which there was no shortage of off-season expenditure, and the brand of baseball that won them four World Series during a five-year stretch almost a decade ago. This is not to say that A-Rod is fundamentally unsound; it’s more his all-thumbs approach to life, his exceedingly unsubtle presence as the reigning clubhouse hub.

One day, he is mobilizing his public-relations machine in response to steroid revelations. Another he is deploying his children as props in a training camp photo opportunity. Rodriguez’s chronic transparency and heavy-handedness has become a metaphor for the Yankees’ inelegance and inconsistency dating to the American League Championship Series in 2004, when they dominated the Red Sox for three games only to be ghost-busted into a state of championship-identity disrepair.

The story of the Yankees since has been 16 runs one night, one run on three hits the next. What they need now is a better appreciation of nuance and timing. They need Mark Teixeira and C. C. Sabathia to add to what Jeter has brought to the ballpark for 13 years, qualities so difficult to quantify. You just know them when you see them, or hear them, because they galvanize rather than self-glorify.

For the first glaring example of what Jeter has that Rodriguez sorely lacks, go back to spring training 2001, when A-Rod was with Texas and he made the startling claim in Esquire that Jeter — at that point considered his good friend — was a player who is “never your concern” and who “never had to lead.”

In one of life’s delicious ironies, Jeter was presented with the opportunity to demonstrate precisely why he has most often been the opposition’s concern, primarily because of his capacity to lead.

“I’ll ask him tonight,” he said when cornered by reporters. “I’ll talk to him and let you know.”

By embracing restraint, saying nothing, Jeter passed responsibility for the uproar back to Rodriguez, where it belonged. He gave Rodriguez a chance to edit himself — as A-Rod had to do again after recently implying to reporters that he’d rather have José Reyes playing for his team than Jeter — and defuse a potential public feud between two of baseball’s glamour players. It was the verbal equivalent of laying down the perfect sacrifice bunt to put the winning run in scoring position.

Many people would argue the public genius of Jeter is really just a strict policy of avoiding incendiary issues. Some members of the news media have extrapolated on that to call him boring. But boring is in the eye or ear of the beholder. To me, Jeter is not boring. When it comes to quotations, he just isn’t obsequious, or self-destructively dense.

His aura says: if keeping the back-page headline writers on 24-hour alert is the shallow measure of one’s commercial appeal, we can elect someone else most popular in class.

If asked a thoughtful question, Jeter will invariably provide a printable answer. But that’s only part of an overall evaluation. We live in a video culture, and when you think of Jeter, provocative imagery comes to mind — the flip play to nail Jeremy Giambi in the playoffs, the headfirst leap into the stands to catch a foul fly against the Red Sox, a thousand slides into second followed by a hard clap of the hands.

What is talk if you can’t be believed? Last summer, Rodriguez charmingly entertained waves of reporters for the full 50-minute player availability session before the All-Star Game at the retiring Yankee Stadium. Just a few feet away, Jeter made his exit in half the time.

Both repeatedly extolled the Stadium as a baseball shrine — but on the night of the game, A-Rod left well before it dragged into extra innings, while Jeter ran on the field like a delirious 12-year-old when the American League finally won in the bottom of the 15th.

No one will ever accuse A-Rod of not playing hard, but he does so with a self-imposed burden that weighs on people around him. That Seattle and Texas improved immediately after he left is hardly empirical evidence. But after all that has happened since the turn of the year, something tells me the Yankees won’t crumble while A-Rod is recovering for six to nine weeks. Given a break from all things A-Rod and good pitching, they may even thrive.

Credit:NYTIMES

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Closed Garment Factory

As government data revealed that 651,000 more jobs disappeared in February, a sense took hold that growing joblessness may reflect a wrenching restructuring of the American economy.

The unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent, from 7.6 percent in January, its highest level in a quarter-century. In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business.

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

This dynamic has proved true in past recessions as well, with fading industries pushed to the brink during downturns before others emerged to create jobs when economic growth inevitably resumed. But with job losses so enormous over such a short period of time, some economists argue that the latest crisis challenges the traditional American response to hard times.

For decades, the government has reacted to downturns by handing out temporary unemployment insurance checks, relying upon the resumption of economic growth to restore the jobs lost. This time, the government needs to place a greater emphasis on retraining workers for other careers, these economists say.

The grim scorecard of contraction in the American workplace released by the Labor Department on Friday largely destroyed what hopes remained for an economic recovery in the first half of this year, and it added to a growing sense that 2009 is probably a lost cause.

Most economists now assume American fortunes cannot improve before the last months of the year, as the Obama administration’s $787 billion emergency spending program begins to wash through the economy.

“The current pace of decline is breathtaking,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “We are now falling at a near record rate in the postwar period and there’s been no change in the violent downward trajectory.”

The monthly snapshot of the national employment picture revealed an even bleaker picture as the government revised upward the job losses in December and January. The economy has shed at least 650,000 jobs for three straight months, the worst decline in percentage terms over that length of time since 1975.

Since the recession began, the economy has eliminated a net total of roughly 4.4 million jobs, with more than half of those positions — some 2.6 million — disappearing in the last four months alone. This rapid deterioration has prompted talk that some industries are being partly dismantled. Layoffs are multiplying because of dysfunction in the financial system, which is prompting even healthy companies to shed workers and shut down operations out of concern they may soon lose access to credit.

“Everybody is so fearful that companies are thinking, ‘What can we hang on to and what should we liquidate?’ ” said Martin N. Baily, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of the reduction in employment is businesses deciding to close down operations or get out of a line of certain activity.”

American car sales have dropped to an annual pace of nine million, from some 17 million in 2007. Even if sales increase considerably, that is likely to leave a lot of unneeded auto factories.

“The decimation of employment in legacy American brands such as General Motors is a trend that’s likely to continue,” said Robert E. Hall, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We have to stimulate the economy to create jobs in other areas.”

In February, 168,000 more manufacturing jobs were eliminated, bringing losses over the last year to 1.2 million. In Michigan, where the troubles of the auto industry have been particularly traumatic, the unemployment rate sits at 10.6 percent, the highest of any state in the nation.

“The people who do what I do in the Detroit area are a dime a dozen,” said Kim Allgeyer, 46, a machine toolmaker in Westland, Mich., who was laid off in January from a company that makes assembly lines for the automakers. Unable to find another full-time job, he is subsisting on day labor and one-week stints for contractors. “Who’s going to put me to work?” he asked. “Where’s the work at? It’s just a great big black hole.”

Much the same can be said for financial services, which gave up 44,000 jobs in February. During the housing boom, banks hired tens of thousands of well-compensated traders, analysts and marketers to sell mortgage-backed securities and other investments. That industry is unlikely to return to its former shape.

Retailers are shuttering stores as the era of easy money fueled by rising house prices and abundant credit gives way to a period in which millions of households are forced to confine their spending to their paychecks. The economy lost 39,500 retail jobs in February, and has eliminated more than 500,000 in the last year.

President Obama pointed to the latest evidence of distress as justification for a muscular, government-led effort to generate jobs quickly.

“This country has never responded to a crisis by sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best,” the president said in an appearance in Columbus, Ohio. “Throughout our history we have met every great challenge with bold action and big ideas.”

The stimulus spending bill signed last month includes $4.5 billion for job training. That only begins to address an area long neglected, said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project in New York. In current dollars, the nation devoted the equivalent of $20 billion a year to job training in 1979, compared with only $6 billion last year, Mr. Stettner said.

“We have to seriously look at fundamentally rebuilding the economy,” he said. “You’ve got to use this moment to retrain for jobs.”

Friday’s report reinforced how much the economy is being assailed at once by falling household spending power and the financial crisis, with companies resorting to wholesale layoffs after months of merely declining to hire.

Transportation and warehousing lost 49,000 jobs in February. Employment services shrank by 88,000 jobs. Hotels and restaurants lost 32,000 jobs. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 30,000 jobs.

Some suggested the job cuts reflected the anxiety that gripped the financial system after Lehman Brothers failed. Borrowing costs have spiked for American companies, making businesses reluctant to expand and hire. And many companies remain spooked by the Wall Street collapse.

“There was a huge increase in uncertainty and a huge hit to confidence which caused a large rethinking among businesses,” said Ethan Harris, co-head of United States economics research at Barclays Capital.

In similar crises, like the stock market crash of 1987 and the near collapse of the enormous hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, dysfunction continued for about six months, Mr. Harris said. But history also shows that when fear lifts, the economy returns to wherever it was when the crisis began, he said, suggesting the recession is likely to continue for many more months.

Credit:NYTIMES

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The bank predicts the price of a barrel of oil will rise to $50 in the second quarter and to $76 by the fourth, Justin Hyde, director overseeing commodities sales in Asia, said in Hong Kong. He recommends investing in commodity markets at current prices.

“We have seen most of the aggressive contraction in these markets,” said Hyde. “We are starting to form a bottom and are in the late stages of a recession.”

Oil has fallen about 70 percent from a record $147.27 a barrel reached in July last year as consumption drops amid the worst global economic slowdown since the Great Depression. Demand from China, the world’s second-biggest user, may rise after Premier Wen Jiabao pledged today his government will “significantly increase” investment to boost the economy, on top of the $586 billion stimulus package announced last year.

“The China stimulus package and the support for the domestic economy generally is going to be an important driving factor to ensure that stabilization in commodity prices stays in place and we start the turn around in demand,” said Hyde.

The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 commodities has fallen to the lowest level since June 2002 this year. Benchmark crude oil in New York was trading at $45.20 a barrel at 3 p.m. in Hong Kong.

“Investors have been nervous about the commodity markets, but the reality now is it’s a potentially a very good time to consider investment in these commodities,” said Hyde.

Sinopec Sees Recovery

The prospects for the energy sector in emerging economies like China are also likely to be strong in the coming years because of the huge potential future demand for oil and gas, he said.

Su Shulin, the chairman of China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., China’s biggest oil refiner, said today domestic oil demand has shown signs of recovery. Daily fuel sales have risen to about 310,000 metric tons, compared with a record low of 280,000 barrels in December, Shu said.

“We have certainly seen a reduction in the contraction for demand in China,” said Hyde.

The Chinese government plans to tap its $1.95 trillion currency reserves, the world’s largest, to secure resources, China National Petroleum Corp., the country’s biggest oil producer, said last month.

Chinese state-run companies have been told to acquire resources abroad as prices of commodities, led by energy and industrial metals, decline.

Credit:Bloomberg

THETOPNEWS

According to an audio message Ciara left for her fans, she is “so excited,” saying it “will be a lot of fun!”

Source: BreatheHeavy.com
CREDIT: BH / BritneySpearsBlackout.com

THETOPNEWS

According to an audio message Ciara left for her fans, she is “so excited,” saying it “will be a lot of fun!”

Source: BreatheHeavy.com
CREDIT: BH / BritneySpearsBlackout.com

THETOPNEWS

Mr. Obama pointed to the success in peeling Iraqi insurgents away from more hard-core elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a strategy that many credit as much as the increase of American forces with turning the war around in the last two years. “There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region,” he said, while cautioning that solutions in Afghanistan will be complicated.

In a 35-minute conversation with The New York Times aboard Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Obama reviewed the challenges to his young administration. The president said he could not assure Americans the economy would begin growing again this year. But he pledged that he would “get all the pillars in place for recovery this year” and urged Americans not to “stuff money in their mattresses.”

“I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future,” he said. “I don’t think that people should suddenly mistrust all of our financial institutions.”

As he pressed forward with ambitious plans at home to rewrite the tax code, expand health care coverage and curb climate change, Mr. Obama dismissed criticism from conservatives that he was driving the country toward socialism. After the interview, which took place as the president was flying home from Ohio, he called reporters from the Oval Office to assert that his actions have been “entirely consistent with free-market principles” and to point out that large-scale government intervention in the markets and expansion of social welfare programs began under President George W. Bush.

Sitting at the head of a conference table with his suit coat off, Mr. Obama exhibited confidence six weeks into his presidency despite the economic turmoil around the globe and the deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He struck a reassuring tone, saying Americans should not be frightened of the future, and he said he had no trouble sleeping at night.

“Look, I wish I had the luxury of just dealing with a modest recession or just dealing with health care or just dealing with energy or just dealing with Iraq or just dealing with Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said. “I don’t have that luxury, and I don’t think the American people do, either.”

The president spoke at length about the struggle with terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, staking out positions that at times seemed more comparable to those of his predecessor than many of Mr. Obama’s more liberal supporters would like. He did not rule out the option of snatching terrorism suspects out of hostile countries.

Asked if the United States was winning in Afghanistan, a war he effectively adopted as his own last month by ordering an additional 17,000 troops sent there, Mr. Obama replied flatly, “No.”

Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.

“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said.

At the same time, he acknowledged that outreach may not yield the same success. “The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge.”

For American military planners, reaching out to some members of the Taliban is fraught with complexities. For one thing, officials would have to figure out which Taliban members might be within the reach of a reconciliation campaign, no easy task in a lawless country with feuding groups of insurgents.

And administration officials have criticized the Pakistani government for its own reconciliation deal with local Taliban leaders in the Swat Valley, where Islamic law has been imposed and radical figures hold sway. Pakistani officials have sought to reassure administration officials that their deal was not a surrender to the Taliban, but rather an attempt to drive a wedge between hard-core Taliban leaders and local Islamists.

During the interview, Mr. Obama also left open the option for American operatives to capture terrorism suspects abroad even without the cooperation of a country where they were found. “There could be situations — and I emphasize ‘could be’ because we haven’t made a determination yet — where, let’s say that we have a well-known Al Qaeda operative that doesn’t surface very often, appears in a third country with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship or would not be willing to prosecute, but we think is a very dangerous person,” he said.

“I think we still have to think about how do we deal with that kind of scenario,” he added. The president went on to say that “we don’t torture” and that “we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges.”

Aides later said Mr. Obama did not mean to suggest that everybody held by American forces would be granted habeas corpus or the right to challenge their detention. In a court filing last month, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration position that 600 prisoners in a cavernous prison on the American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to seek their release in court.

Instead, aides said Mr. Obama’s comment referred only to a Supreme Court decision last year finding that prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

Mr. Obama signaled that those on the left seeking a wholesale reversal of Mr. Bush’s detainee policy might be disappointed. Mr. Obama said that by the time he got into office, the Bush administration had taken “steps to correct certain policies and procedures after those first couple of years” after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He credited not Mr. Bush but the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael V. Hayden and the former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, who “really had America’s security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.”

Turning to domestic affairs, Mr. Obama indicated that the end was not in sight when it came to the economic crisis and suggested that he expected it could take another $750 billion to address the problem of weak and failing financial institutions beyond the $700 billion already approved. Maintaining support for the additional costs of bailouts is quite likely to be among Mr. Obama’s biggest challenges, given the anger that many Americans feel toward Wall Street executives who they believe are being unduly rewarded with bailout money.

The budget plan he released last month included a placeholder estimate of $250 billion for additional bank bailouts — an amount that represents the projected long-term cost to taxpayers of a $750 billion infusion into the financial sector — and in the interview Mr. Obama indicated that those figures were what he was likely to seek from Congress.

“We have no reason to revise that estimate,” he said.

Addressing the fear and uncertainty among Americans as job losses mount and stock markets sink, Mr. Obama urged Americans to “be prudent” in their personal financial decisions, but not to hunker down so much that it would further slow the recovery.

“What I don’t think people should do is suddenly stuff money in their mattresses and pull back completely from spending,” he said.

Still, he avoided guessing when the situation might begin to turn around. “Our belief and expectation is that we will get all the pillars in place for recovery this year,” he said. “How long it will take before recovery actually translates into stronger job markets and so forth is going to depend on a whole range of factors.”

He added that “part of what you’re seeing now is weaknesses in Europe that are actually greater than some weaknesses here, bouncing back and having an impact on our markets.”

Mr. Obama’s uncertain forecast about when the economy will begin to rebound contrasted with the projections embedded in the budget he recently released.

That plan rested on the assumption that the economy would shrink by 1.2 percent this year, a projection that many economists, including some in his administration, consider overly optimistic because it implies the economy would bounce back in the second half of this year.

As he settles into his new job, Mr. Obama said he spent much of his time reading briefing books, but still tried to stay in touch by perusing newspapers and thumbing through weekly news magazines. But he said he did not watch much television, except basketball games.

Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

Credit:NYTIMES

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As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama spoke out in favor of the research, so his apparent intention to undo the curbs put in place by former President George W. Bush is not surprising. But it is still momentous, involving a long-controversial intersection of science and personal moral beliefs.

Because stem cells are capable of developing into any type of cell in the body, some scientists believe that they may one day be able to provide tissues to replace worn-out organs or nonfunctioning cells, and thus offer powerful new treatments for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. Some researchers say the stem cells might even be used someday to treat catastrophic injuries like damage to the spinal cord.

But many people have a moral problem with embryonic stem-cell research, because creation of the cells entails destruction of human embryos. For that reason, President Bush ordered in 2001 that federal research be limited to lines of cells that were already in existence, since the embryo destruction for those had already taken place.

Advocates of unrestricted stem cell research, in touch with one another on Friday afternoon, were being told that President Obama would pledge to “keep politics out of science,” said one research advocate, who asked not to be identified by name until more particulars are known. The advocates have called for lifting all restrictions and letting the National Institutes of Health guide the research.

Among the lawmakers invited to the White House on Monday are Senators Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, both Republicans who support embryonic stem-cell research.

The main suspense about what President Obama would do centered on whether he would seek to undo the Bush-era restrictions through legislation or by executive order. The event set for Monday indicates he has decided on an executive order.

Credit:NYTIMES

THETOPNEWS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the jobless rate rose from 7.6 percent in January to 8.1 percent in February, the highest rate in more than 25 years. An estimated 12.5 million Americans were unemployed in February, the data show, an increase of 851,000 since January.

The government also revised sharply upward the number of jobs the economy lost in December and January to show a total of nearly 2 million jobs disappearing in the last three months. December saw the most job losses, according to the revised figures, with 681,000, significantly more than the previous estimate of 524,000. The number of jobs lost in January rose to 655,000, up from a prior estimate of 598,000.

An additional 651,000 jobs disappeared last month, the government said, illustrating the profound challenges of launching an economic recovery as employers continue to slash payrolls in a desperate effort to control costs.

Each of the last three months now shows more jobs lost than in any single month since October 1949, when the country was just pulling out of a painful recession, the government data shows. Economists say direct comparisons are difficult, however, because the labor force has grown significantly since the post-World War II period.

The Obama administration has moved to stifle the job losses, primarily by approving a fiscal stimulus plan designed to plow money back into the economy. But the allocation of the money is just beginning, and the full effect of the spending likely will not be seen for some time. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters yesterday that Obama will address the jobs figures today when he visits a group of newly trained police recruits in Columbus, Ohio.

The stock market fell sharply yesterday as investors braced for the jobs report, and Asian markets were down overnight. But U.S. futures were up this morning, suggesting that investors may have expected even worse results, or might believe the market has finally hit bottom.

Analysts say the pace of job cuts is likely to remain brisk for at least a few more months, because the demand for goods and services seems likely to remain very low as more consumers find themselves out of work. According to newly released data, the nation’s productivity, a measure of goods and services produced per hour, fell at the end of last year. That suggests that demand for goods has fallen even faster than employers have been shedding jobs.

Those who have lost their jobs are not eager to open their wallets, analysts while many of those who remain employed are cutting back because of fears about job security.

The new jobless numbers show that blacks and Hispanics are unemployed at higher rates than the national average, with 13.5 percent of blacks and 10.9 percent of Hispanics looking for work in February. The unemployment rate for whites was 7.3 percent.

Credit:AP/Washington Post

THETOPNEWS

I just prefer to call it the new Shea. In my eye’s it will never be CITI FIELD because SHEA was built on the love of the game not big corporate sponsors.In fact if big business did not get involved in baseball maybe it would of kept the players honest instead, greed just took over like a bat out of Heck and things just don’t seem the same but one thing remains I will not be calling it CITI FIELD. What happens if CITI goes under the METS will have the CHITI curse. So if your a Met fan and you see another Met fan just ask them are you going to the New Shea. Lets keep the legacy alive not erased by nuances and gimmick’s.

Credit:Mike from Astoria/THETOPNEWS

Mr. Obama spoke at a White House forum on health care, where he bluntly warned lobbyists and “special interests” not to stand in the way of efforts to rein in costs and guarantee coverage for all Americans. He said he intended to achieve those goals this year.

“During the campaign,” Mr. Obama said, “I put forward a plan for health care reform. I thought it was an excellent plan. But I don’t presume that it was a perfect plan or that it was the best possible plan.”

As a candidate, Mr. Obama said he would establish a public insurance program to compete with private insurers and would require employers to contribute to the cost of coverage for their employees or to the cost of the public plan. Insurers oppose the idea of a new public plan.

Since the election, Mr. Obama has not restated the details of his campaign proposal, and he indicated Thursday that he would be pragmatic.

“If there is a way of getting this done,” he said, “where we’re driving down costs and people are getting health insurance at an affordable rate and have choice of doctor, have flexibility in terms of their plans, and we could do that entirely through the market, I’d be happy to do it that way. If there was a way of doing it that involved more government regulation and involvement, I’m happy to do it that way as well.”

Liberals say the public option would be an essential element of legislation to rein in costs and achieve universal coverage.

Five senior Republican senators, including Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, and the minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, warned the president on Thursday that the public option would face opposition from many Republicans.

In a letter to Mr. Obama, they said that “forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition.”

“Ultimately,” the letter said, “we would be left with a single government-run program controlling all of the market.”

At the White House forum, Mr. Obama defended the idea of a new public insurance program but said he understood the objections to it.

“The thinking on the public option has been that it gives consumers more choices and it helps keep the private sector honest, because there’s some competition out there,” Mr. Obama said.

But, he added, “I recognize the fear that if a public option is run through Washington and there are incentives to try to tamp down costs,” then “private insurance plans might end up feeling overwhelmed.”

The conference drew more than 150 participants, including members of Congress, doctors and leaders of labor unions, business groups, hospitals, insurance companies and consumer organizations. The day ended with tributes to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has made health care one of his top legislative priorities in more than 46 years in the Senate.

Mr. Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer and was greeted with sustained applause, said he had witnessed many efforts to overhaul the health care system. But, he said, “they haven’t been the kind of serious effort that I think we’re seeing right now.”

“This time we will not fail,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Obama provided no new details of how he would extend coverage to the 46 million people who have no health insurance. Instead, he expressed hope that a “transparent and inclusive” process would produce a bipartisan consensus and overcome the objections of those who had a financial stake in the status quo.

“Those who seek to block any reform at all, any reform at any cost, will not prevail this time around,” he said.

In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said he would require that all children have coverage, while his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said everyone should be required to be covered.

A wide variety of speakers at the White House conference expressed support for an individual obligation.

Speakers who endorsed such a requirement included Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan; Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri; Kendall J. Powell, the chief executive of General Mills and a member of the Business Roundtable, which represents large companies; Representative Allyson Y. Schwartz, Democrat of Pennsylvania; and Scott P. Serota, the president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Ms. Emerson said it was essential to “get the entire population in an insurance pool and spread the risk.”

Likewise, Mr. Serota said, “an enforceable mandate is the cornerstone to getting everybody covered.” Health insurance will not work if people can buy it when they are sick and drop it when they are healthy, he said.

Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association, said the word “mandate” seemed to alarm some people, so he suggested using a term like “responsibility.”

Insurance should be viewed as “a responsibility on every individual, every institution and every enterprise in our society,” Mr. Umbdenstock said.

One of Mr. Obama’s ideas to finance the expansion of health insurance coverage has run into opposition from powerful Democrats. The president has proposed limiting the value of deductions that affluent taxpayers can take for expenses like mortgage interest, charitable gifts and state and local taxes.

The objections came from Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, and Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Baucus said the administration should “dig down deeper to try to find viable savings.” Mr. Rangel said he was concerned that the proposal could discourage charitable giving.

Credit:NYTIMES

THETOPNEWS

Monitoring the opening kinks and experiments of a new talk show is a spectator sport, and this entry comes with an added “American Idol” edge: NBC had the last word during the auditions, but Internet users are now expected to comment and cavil interactively and build — or diminish — Mr. Fallon’s television audience.

Mr. Fallon was cute and funny on “Saturday Night Live,” but he is not necessarily the ideal choice for the “Late Night” core audience of young males: his humor is mischievous, not anarchic. (If fans had a call-in vote, they might have elected Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.)

Still, Mr. Fallon is engaging and has an antic, quick-witted charm. He seemed more confident by the show’s third night and, oddly enough, had better comic chemistry with Cameron Diaz on Wednesday than with Tina Fey, his former “Weekend Update” co-anchor on “SNL,” the night before. Most of his skits and routines, however, seemed written for the Web, not for broadcast.

It’s still too soon to pass judgment on Mr. Fallon’s talents as a talk show host, but it’s a perfectly good time to examine NBC’s latest test of synergy, the marriage of the Internet and a television show.

Almost all shows nowadays have Web sites with extraneous videos, fan blogs and viewer e-mail exchanges. But Mr. Fallon has gone further to co-opt the Internet than either of his two network rivals, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Craig Ferguson on CBS, or even cable upstarts like Chelsea Handler, the host of “Chelsea Lately” on E! In the months leading up to his debut on Monday, Mr. Fallon tried to pump up younger viewers’ interest with “Late Night” Webisodes. He has pages on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Perhaps accordingly, many of the routines he worked into the show in its first nights might have been better suited to YouTube. And that youth-oriented material clashes with the highly conventional, even fusty jokes in his opening monologue (“Everybody’s cutting back, everybody: Madonna’s now down to one teenage boyfriend”), as well as with the choice of a veteran actor, Robert De Niro, to be his first guest.

Twitter is so overexposed that it has become a joke, but Mr. Fallon apparently isn’t in on it. He interviewed Ms. Diaz by posing questions submitted via Twitter. Those turned out to be as dull and anodyne as any taken from a live audience. (“If Cameron wasn’t acting, what would her dream job be?” Ms. Diaz didn’t have a ready answer, so Mr. Fallon supplied it: “Forest ranger.”)

Wednesday’s quite funny parody of romance novels, “bromance novels,” came with a link on the show’s Web site (latenightwithjimmyfallon.com) that allows users to watch a video of the shooting of the cover art.

Mr. Fallon consistently tried to incorporate a wackier Web spirit into his on-air performance, even picking random people in the studio audience and assigning them made-up Facebook identities. None were very funny.

Remarkably, given how many months he has had to prepare, many of his supposedly wacky, Web-style pranks were oddly plodding and unimaginative. On the first night three audience members were invited onstage to lick something in exchange for $10. The things were all inanimate objects: a lawn mower, a copier, a fishbowl. The slow-motion “super-sexy replay” was funny once, not three times.

Mr. Fallon does not have a sidekick, but he does have a cool band, the Roots, whose musicians are deadpan and steadfastly underwhelmed by his jokes, and over time that could serve as a comic foil to his eager-to-please persona.

There were other amusing moments, including a random, bizarre video of German soccer players dancing that was found on the Web and a mock charitable appeal for laid-off Wall Street workers, a Save the Bankers Foundation, that could have just as easily been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

And Mr. Fallon got better, and more relaxed, after his debut, though he joked with Tina Fey about his “flop sweat” moment with Mr. De Niro. (When performers admit to being nervous, it’s a little like a woman on a date bemoaning how fat she is: nobody wants to hear it.)

The first days are tough because large audiences tune in to see what all the prepremiere fuss was about, boosting ratings and expectations, then quickly turn away if not instantly amused. And most hosts go through a trial-and-error period. Mr. Kimmel started out more loutishly and live; now he is more buttoned-down, and his show is taped, even though it is still called “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Mr. Ferguson began with a very conventional “Tonight Show” format, then slowly allowed more of his own offbeat storytelling and Monty Pythonesque eccentricities into his act.

NBC picked Mr. Fallon, and he can sometimes seem like an old person’s notion of a hip young comic, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t funny or that he cannot hold his own on “Late Night.” Only time, not Twitter, will tell.

Credit:NY TIMES

THETOPNEWS

Jackson didn’t exactly get things off to a rousing start. He was more than 90 minutes late to his own press conference, which was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. ET. Not even the promotional film started without a glitch — though, given that it was chock-full of ‘80s and ‘90s clips, it succeeded in reminding viewers of the genuine excitement Jackson could convey.

And then a skeletal figure sauntered off a silver bus and made his way to the stage.

All that apparent cosmetic surgery notwithstanding, Jackson seemed healthy. “Thank you all,” he said. “This is it.”

He’ll be performing 10 concerts, beginning July 8, at London’s 20,000-seat O2 Arena. “This is it” has a double meaning: Besides, presumably, being a must-see ticket, Jackson said that these will be his last shows in London.

He hasn’t announced any other shows, but you never know. So, if there were more, would you see him? And would you go to see a Michael Jackson performance or a Michael Jackson freak show?

Credit:– Todd Leopold, CNN.com Entertainment Producer

THETOPNEWS

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s push to reset U.S.-Russian relations took a huge stride when he signaled the Kremlin he might forgo an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe if Moscow uses its clout with a troublesome Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

The back-channel diplomatic gambit was one of the few tools Obama had for unknotting the stalemated relationship — one that suffered under former Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.

Details of the Obama proposal, a letter responding to one from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, have not been disclosed, but the U.S. president has clearly enticed the Kremlin into a dialogue that could pay significant benefits to both sides.

While Medvedev said the two leaders were not negotiating a quid pro quo, improved relations rest on a deal that bundles the proposed missile shield and Iran, where Moscow holds considerable sway.

Obama concurred there had been no blatant trade offer, but he also said Tuesday that reducing Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons would lessen the need for a missile defense system. Given the three decades of U.S.-Iranian estrangement, Russia would serve as an obvious and powerful entree for putting the U.S. case to Tehran.

In an Oval Office meeting with Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Obama told reporters it was clear that the U.S. needed to “reset or reboot” its relationship with Russia.

The Kremlin has been equally clear that it is not prepared to ease tensions unless Washington moves away from the anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. But Medvedev said Tuesday he was heartened by a change in American tone.

“Our American partners are ready to discuss this problem, and that’s already positive,” Medvedev said at a news conference in Madrid after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. “Several months ago we were hearing different signals: ‘The decision has been made, there is nothing to discuss, we will do what we have decided to do.’”

The Bush administration signed agreements to install the missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, maintaining it was needed to defend European allies against a potential strike by a nuclear-tipped Iranian missile. Washington insists the system was not directed at Russia.

Aside from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s perceived drive to develop nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them is the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the new U.S. president.

Russian help in deterring Iran is seen as invaluable, so important, in fact, that the White House now may be ready to shift gears on the missile system deployment and, perhaps, on broader U.S. policy toward the Kremlin.

Since shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization has pursued an agenda of poaching former Soviet satellite countries and even former Soviet republics into the alliance. The Kremlin has not forgotten that NATO was formed specifically at the start of the Cold War as a counter-threat to perceived Soviet expansionist ambitions.

Moscow has felt a genuine security threat as a heavily armed NATO moved to present-day Russian borders. What’s more, an unconfident Kremlin still is smarting over its loss of superpower status and the collapse of its empire. For Moscow, NATO was clearly baiting the Russian bear.

Since a deal always benefits both sides, who will gain what if this one comes off?

_Washington would obviously gain a major ally in persuading Iran to step back from a nuclear program that the U.S. contends would otherwise end with Tehran — which has advocated the destruction of U.S. ally Israel — having a nuclear weapon.

_Moscow’s Medvedev would gain bragging rights for having persuaded the Americans to reverse course on the missile shield, collecting a major diplomatic coup at a time when some believe he is trying to diminish the power of Putin, who hand-picked him for the presidency. Russia is heavily invested in national pride, and many argue its dustups with the U.S. have arisen directly from a latent sense of Kremlin inferiority and illegitimacy.

_Beyond that, Washington may hope to reverse a decision by Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet Central Asian republic, to end American use of an air base that is a major U.S. tool in supplying the American war effort in nearby Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan pulled the plug on the U.S. lease of the base within hours of Moscow having announced a huge fund of aid to the impoverished nation.

_That in turn could deepen U.S.-Russian cooperation in Afghanistan and more largely throughout the region. Moscow suffers a perpetual anxiety about the spread of militant Islam into its territory from its former Central Asian republics on the Afghan border.

_Russia’s economy is failing badly in the global economic downturn, suffering especially under the recent drop in the price of oil, its major export. If Medvedev could win deeper inclusion in U.S.-led efforts to stop the financial slide worldwide, Russia might alleviate a calamitous economic failure while gaining stature as a more important player in the world economy.

The potential benefits to both sides are enormous, and the nations may be nearing or at the brink of a diplomatic “grand bargain” that has been much talked about since Obama’s election last November. Both sides are moving carefully to avoid a miscue at this delicate stage, but the fact that both Obama and Medvedev are talking publicly about their contacts suggests a deal is now more — rather than less — likely.

Credit :AP

THETOPNEWS

The trouble is, unlike recessions, which are easy to define, there are no firm rules for what makes a depression. Everyone at least seems to agree there hasn’t been one since the epic hardship of the 1930s.

A Depression doesn’t have to be Great — bread lines, rampant unemployment, a wipeout in the stock market. The economy can sink into a milder depression, the kind spelled with a lowercase “d.”

And it may be happening now.

The trouble is, unlike recessions, which are easy to define, there are no firm rules for what makes a depression. Everyone at least seems to agree there hasn’t been one since the epic hardship of the 1930s.

But with each new hard-times headline, most recently an alarming economic contraction of 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter, it seems more likely that the next depression is on its way.

“We’re probably in a depression now. But it’s not going to be acknowledged until years go by. Because you have to see it behind you,” said Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland.

Credit:AP TOM RAUM and DANIEL WAGNER

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Following a brief thaw last week, New Yorkers will have to pull their sweaters back off the shelf — and a shovel out of the garage — as the season’s first major snowstorm bore down on the region.

The National Weather Service predicted about a foot of snow for New York City overnight, with the heaviest snowfall starting at 9 p.m. and continuing until 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. Monday. Periods of snow were likely to continue throughout Monday afternoon.

“It’s the first of March, which you know is the month that we say comes in like a lion and out like a lamb,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Sunday, “and while it is too soon to be counting sheep, it’s pretty clear that the lions are getting ready to roar, if you like that.”

The looming storm has sent the city scurrying to prepare.

The Port Authority plans to dispatch more than 300 pieces of heavy-snow equipment, including melters and plows at the airports, and approximately 60 for bridges and tunnels, including 28 for the George Washington Bridge alone. Officials have made more than 4,000 tons of salt and sand available for airport roads and parking lots, bridges and tunnels.

Vito A. Turso, the Department of Sanitation’s deputy commissioner for public information and community affairs, estimates that 4,500 sanitation workers will be on duty over the next 24 hours, as well as more than 2,000 pieces of equipment, which include 365 salt spreaders and close to 1,600 plows attached to garbage vehicles.

Because salting the roads is the first defense in these scenarios, he said the city was prepared to dip into 130,000 tons of rock salt on reserve.

“I think the city is very, very prepared to deal with it, and if people cooperate, then it makes our job easier,” Mr. Turso said.

At a news conference on Sunday, Mayor Bloomberg urged commuters to take public transportation and leave their cars at home.

“I will be taking the subway, as I do most days,” he said, “Particularly in a snowstorm, it’s the only way to get around.”

Mr. Bloomberg also asked residents to check in on the elderly.

New York City-area courts planned to remain open Monday, but thousands of new jurors were told not to report for duty in New York, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess and Orange counties, said David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state office of Court Administration.The jurors hearing pending cases may come to court if the judge orders, he said.

Alternate-side parking has been suspended for Monday, and there will likely be delays at the airports. According to the F.A.A.’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center, Newark International Airport was experiencing delays of about two hours late Sunday afternoon.

“A foot of snow is significant and will cause significant travel problems late tonight and into tomorrow morning,” said Michael Silva, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y.

Winds could also be a factor. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were gusts of 35 m.p.h.,” he said. “We have to keep our eye out for blizzard conditions.”

The weather service defines a blizzard not by the amount of snowfall — even though they tend to be accompanied by significant snow — but by three consecutive hours of winds blowing at 35 miles an hour and visibility of less than a quarter-mile. Since last October, New York has only had 19.3 inches of snow, as measured in Central Park, slightly higher than the norm of 18.7 inches for the entire winter.

“Last year we lucked out,” Mr. Silva said, alluding to the 11.7 inches of snow that fell last winter. “This will probably rank up there with some of the major events, but it won’t be like 2006,” Mr. Silva said.

On Feb. 13, 2006, Central Park was blanketed in 26.9 inches of snow in a matter of hours, the biggest snowstorm since record keeping began 1869.

Mr. Turso remembers the clean-up from that storm. “Every city street had been salted and plowed within 24 hours,” he said, “which is an incredible accomplishment.”

Credit:NY Times

TTN

Ringleader Britney Spears

The elaborate costumes are packed. The 16 semis filled

with magic props and big-top sets are on the road.

When Britney Spears takes the stage at the New Orleans Arena on March 3 – the opening night of her Circus tour.

According to sources, Spears, 27, who left Friday for Louisiana, has been hard at work preparing for the show, which will feature her signature sexy dance moves, a stage filled with three circus rings, and magic tricks.

“She’s pretty determined,” a friend tells PEOPLE. “She missed singing and performing and the freedom of that. It gives her an escape and it’s what she loves to do, so she’s definitely thankful to be doing that again.”

Though the pop star seemed to be back in old Britney form when she sang “Womanizer” on Good Morning America in December, the concert will be her biggest performance since her appearance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.

“I’ve got to believe she’s ready and will do a professional show,” Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of the concert trade magazine says Pollstar.

Spears last tour, in 2004, was canceled after the singer injured her knee during a video shoot. (She spent her newfound free time with then-boyfriend Kevin Federline; they were engaged that summer.) So far, the buzz for the upcoming 31-city outing is strong.

“In general, the tickets have sold very well. Some shows are already sold out,” Bongiovanni says. “Obviously, it means there is significant fan interest in seeing her do her live show. That fact that she’s been off the scene for a while helps with the pent-up demand.”

Britney’s current manager, Larry Rudolph, told PEOPLE in November that dancing and singing is what helped the singer get her life back on track. “She identifies with her career in a lot of ways and getting her career back is a great therapeutic thing for her,” he explained.

Seconds the pal, “She’s better when she puts her energy into that.”

Still, legal experts say her father could remain in control for months or even years. She’ll only regain her independence once she proves to the court – backed by doctors’ opinions – that she can handle her own affairs.

What will make the trip easier is that Federline is taking the couple’s kids on the road so they can keep up their regular visitation schedule with Mom.

“Having the boys with her is going to make all the difference,” says a source. “They are the reason she can do this.”

Source: People.com
CREDIT: BritneySpearsBlackout.com (Edited)

Ringleader Britney Spears

The elaborate costumes are packed. The 16 semis filled

with magic props and big-top sets are on the road.

When Britney Spears takes the stage at the New Orleans Arena on March 3 – the opening night of her Circus tour.

According to sources, Spears, 27, who left Friday for Louisiana, has been hard at work preparing for the show, which will feature her signature sexy dance moves, a stage filled with three circus rings, and magic tricks.

“She’s pretty determined,” a friend tells PEOPLE. “She missed singing and performing and the freedom of that. It gives her an escape and it’s what she loves to do, so she’s definitely thankful to be doing that again.”

Though the pop star seemed to be back in old Britney form when she sang “Womanizer” on Good Morning America in December, the concert will be her biggest performance since her appearance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.

“I’ve got to believe she’s ready and will do a professional show,” Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of the concert trade magazine says Pollstar.

Spears last tour, in 2004, was canceled after the singer injured her knee during a video shoot. (She spent her newfound free time with then-boyfriend Kevin Federline; they were engaged that summer.) So far, the buzz for the upcoming 31-city outing is strong.

“In general, the tickets have sold very well. Some shows are already sold out,” Bongiovanni says. “Obviously, it means there is significant fan interest in seeing her do her live show. That fact that she’s been off the scene for a while helps with the pent-up demand.”

Britney’s current manager, Larry Rudolph, told PEOPLE in November that dancing and singing is what helped the singer get her life back on track. “She identifies with her career in a lot of ways and getting her career back is a great therapeutic thing for her,” he explained.

Seconds the pal, “She’s better when she puts her energy into that.”

Still, legal experts say her father could remain in control for months or even years. She’ll only regain her independence once she proves to the court – backed by doctors’ opinions – that she can handle her own affairs.

What will make the trip easier is that Federline is taking the couple’s kids on the road so they can keep up their regular visitation schedule with Mom.

“Having the boys with her is going to make all the difference,” says a source. “They are the reason she can do this.”

Source: People.com
CREDIT: BritneySpearsBlackout.com (Edited)

–Victor “Marquis” Cooper–

DETROIT — Coast Guard crews off Florida’s Gulf Coast are searching for four missing boaters, including Detroit Lions defensive end Corey Smith.The Coast Guard issued a statement saying Smith and Victor “Marquis” Cooper were among the boaters reported missing Sunday morning.Sports agent Ron Del Duca confirmed to the Associated Press that his client, Detroit Lions defensive end Corey Smith, and Oakland Raiders linebacker Marquis Cooper were two of the four boaters.Smith owned the 21-foot boat and he and Cooper had been on fishing trips before, said Ron Del Duca, Smith’s agent. The pair had been teammates on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2004.They boat left from the Seminole Boat Ramp in Clearwater Pass at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning for a fishing trip and did not return as expected, the Coast Guard said.The Coast Guard said it was alerted at about 1:30 a.m. Sunday and is searching the area about 50 miles west of Clearwater Pass.Nick Skyler is listed by the Coast Guard as the third boat passenger along with an unidentified fourth person.Smith, 29, had 30 tackles, including three sacks, and an interception in 12 games last season for the winless Lions. Smith, who is 6-foot-2, 250 pounds, also played for the San Francisco 49ers and played college ball at North Carolina State. He started with the Lions in 2006.Del Duca called Smith one of the “good guys” of the league and was planning to start visiting teams as a free agent this week. He said he has spoken with Smith’s family and is also in touch with Coast Guard officials.”They’ve assured me that they’re deploying all available resources to look for these guys and get them back,” he said.Cooper, 26, has played sparingly in five seasons with the Buccaneers, Seahawks, Jaguars, Steelers and Raiders. Cooper, who is 6-foot-3, 230 pounds, played college ball at Washington.

Credit:CNN

Thetopnews.net

Until recently, the idea that the world’s most powerful nations might come together to tackle global warming seemed an environmentalist’s pipe dream.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.

But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”

That treaty, officials and climate experts involved in the negotiations say, will significantly differ from the agreement of a decade ago, reaching beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions and including financial mechanisms and making good on longstanding promises to provide money and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change.

The perception that the United States is now serious has set off a flurry of diplomacy around the globe. “The lesson of Kyoto is that if the U.S. isn’t taking it seriously there is no reason for anyone else to,” said Bill Mckibben, who runs the environmental organizationwww.350.org.

This week the United Nation’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, will make the rounds in Washington to discuss climate issues. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon is organizing a high-level meeting on climate and energy. Teams from Britain and Denmark have visited the White House to discuss climate issues. In China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made climate a central focus of her visit and proposed a partnership between the United States and China. And a special envoy from China is coming soon.

But a global treaty still faces serious challenges in Washington and abroad, and the negotiations will be a test of how far the United States and other nations are prepared to go to address climate change at a moment when economies around the world are unspooling. The global recession itself is expected to result in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as manufacturing and other polluting industries shrink, lessening the pressure on countries to take action.

“The No. 1 thing will be for everyone to see that the U.S. is on an urgent and transformational path to a low carbon economy — that would have a galvanizing effect,” said John Ashton, the British foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change.

The Obama administration has said that it will push through federal legislation this year to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States — a promise that Mr. Obama reiterated Tuesday in his speech to Congress.

The Kyoto Protocol has been a touchstone of the environmental movement. Thirty-seven developed countries, including Japan, Australia and nations in the uropean Union, ratified the accord, agreeing to reduce or limit the growth of carbon dioxide emissions by specified amounts. President George W. Bush, pressed by the Senate, rejected the accord, because countries like China were not also subject to mandatory emission levels. China and India also refused to ratify the protocol.

At the tail end of his administration, Mr. Bush made tentative overtures toward China and other countries on climate matters. In 2007, he convened a meeting of countries that were major emitters of greenhouse gases. Later, in bilateral economic talks, China and the United States agreed that they would cooperate on clean technology development and some other climate issues.

But Kyoto was shaped largely by climate scientists and environment ministers, not the higher-level officials now laying the groundwork. And even many who participated in the earlier accord now say they see it as weak and naïve about political and economic realities. Of the countries that signed, more than half are not on track to meet their targets according to 2008 United Nations data, including Germany, Ireland and Canada.

“In Kyoto we made a lot of promises to each other, but we hadn’t done the domestic politics,” Mr. Ashton said, “and that is why Kyoto — though a valuable step forward — has ultimately been so fragile.”

The talks on the new treaty, said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “provides an opportunity to fill this gap that we’ve seen, and this time perform up to expectations.”

The 1997 protocol was a narrow accord about the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses linked to global warming. The new agreement will need to address how those reductions can be achieved in a way that takes account of their effects on energy supplies and economies — especially at a time of global recession.

Negotiating the treaty when countries are under extreme economic stress presents challenges, Mr. de Boer acknowledged. Politicians in Italy and Canada have complained that it will be difficult to clean up industries to meet their Kyoto goals because of the economic downturn. But others say a global industrial recession, in which emissions tend to drop anyway and countries are poised to spend billions to stimulate economies, is the time to craft a global effort to combat global warming.

With developing countries like China and India emerging as major carbon dioxide emitters in the past few years, experts said that if the new treaty was to be effective, every nation would have to accept emissions limits. “If one part of the world acts and the other does not, that doesn’t really generate a climate benefit,” said Mr. de Boer, who is responsible for organizing the December meetings.

Developed countries would most likely get binding numerical targets, as some did in Kyoto. Developing countries, which were exempt under Kyoto, would probably be given less stringent goals, though it is not clear if these will be longer-term numerical targets or some other mechanism that ties allowable emissions to economic growth.

Mr. Obama has said the United States will lead the effort, but over the next months, he will have to show what exactly that means. A good first step, environmentalists say, would be to commit to trying to limit warming to two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures, an ambitious goal that the European Union has adopted but that the Bush administration steadfastly avoided. It could also pledge to reduce emissions by 50 or 80 percent by 2050.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that humans could largely adapt to two degrees of warming, but that a greater temperature increase could cause far more serious consequences, from a dangerous rise in sea levels to mass extinctions.

Climate experts added that the United States did not need to have in place national legislation to limit greenhouse gasses, a process that could take months, to negotiate in Copenhagen. “It’s not just about analyzing a piece of legislation,” Mr. Ashton said. “It’s about the feeling you get if you’re a leader sitting in Beijing. It’s like love; you know it when you feel it.”

A more complex issue is whether negotiators will retain the system of trading carbon credits that is central to the Kyoto Protocol, a kind of global commodities market for carbon.

That system allows developed countries that produce more than their allotted share of emissions to balance their emissions budget by investing in projects that curtail emissions elsewhere. Such projects might include the cleaning up of a coal power plant in China, planting trees in Africa or converting pig manure to electricity in the Netherlands. The same cap and trade concept is now used in Europe’s emissions.

But as the European Union and the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol have tried such projects over the past few years, problems have emerged. Most notably, it is hard to determine the emissions-reducing value of carbon credit projects, making it easy to game the system. The new treaty, experts say, will also have to broaden Kyoto’s focus beyond industrial emissions to activities like airline travel, one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. In the end, it will also have to include financial mechanisms and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change.

“This is not just about emissions but about creating a massive investment in a new global energy economy” that includes forests, oceans and the transfer of technology, said Angela Anderson, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Global Warming Campaign.

American negotiators were limited in Kyoto by a Senate resolution saying that the United States would not accept numerical caps unless China did as well. But Senator john Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, “There has been a sea change in the Senate,” and he added that he believed that there were enough votes — Democratic and Republican — to ratify a strong treaty.

What is unclear is whether politicians will be willing to commit to large enough changes to have a significant effect on global warming. “The Bush administration set the bar very low,” Mr. McKibben said.

Credit :Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.

Thetopnews.net

Grey’s Anatomy actress and Katherine Heigl
won two awards


America Ferrera of Ugly Betty

Helen Mirren


Sally Field

Drama series The Soranos HBO

Reality-Competition Program:
“The Amazing Race,” CBS.

Actor, Drama Series Janes Spader
Boson Legal ABC

Supporting Actor, Drama Series:
Terry O’Quinn, “Lost,”
ABC.

Supporting Actor, Comedy Series:
Jeremy Piven, “Entourage HBO

Supporting Actress Drama Series:
Katherine Heigl, “Grey’s Anatomy,”
ABC.

Supporting Actress, Comedy Series:
Jaime Pressly, “My
Name Is Earl,” NBC.

Supporting Actress, Miniseries or Movie:
Judy Davis, “The Starter Wife USA

Pics splashnews

People Magazine asked Paris Hilton
about the rumor  going around that
she
wants to adopt four blonde babies.
The ever poignant Paris said, “That’s
 retarded. No, I’m not.”  Well put.

Image Splash

Is Jlo finally pregnant!? Everyone
was
congratulating her and Zombie backstage
at her fashion show
for the launching of
her line, JustSweet!  And this picture
taken at the show
only adds to the news!

Ryan Gosling has a scruffy beard.
[Bricks
& Stones]

Tommy Lee gives his side of the story on his blog!
ICYDK

Fred Durst ,David Arquette working on a secret
-Celebritypuke

Dina Lohan Firing Back at Jodie Foster
dSpot@dotspotter

Kim kardashian hangs out with Jenna Jameson
 Anythinghollywood

Love it or hate it Chelsea Handler-dSpot@dotspotter

Strangest Celebrity Rumor Ever about Hayden!
Genosworld

Britney VMA Perfomance Video below provided by Just Jared!

VMA ARRIVALS
Sarah Conner

Rihanna

Shar Jackson

Beyonce

Beyonce                           Rihanna

Ashlee Simpson                            Jennifer Garner

LC    Lauren Conrad                                              Paris Hilton

Nelly Furtado                                Elicia Keys

    Mary J Blige                                                  Hayden Paneitierre

           Eve                                              Lil Mama

MTV Video Music Awards 2007 winners:

Video of the Year: Rihanna - ‘Umbrella’

Male Artist of the Year: Justin Timberlake

Female Artist of the Year: Fergie

Best New Artist: Gym Class Heroes

Best Group: Fall Out Boy

Most Earth-Shattering Collaboration: Beyoncé
Knowles and
Shakira - ‘Beautiful Liar’

Quadruple Threat of the Year: Justin Timberlake

Monster Single of the Year: Rihanna - ‘Umbrella’

Best Director: Justin Timberlake - ‘What Goes Around
…
Comes Around’ (Samuel Bayer)

Best Editing in a Video: Gnarls Barkley - ‘Smiley
Faces’
(Ken Mowe)

Best Choreography in a Video: Justin Timberlake
- ‘My
Love’ (Marty Kudelka

Britney Spears climbs over a booth as
she leaves the 50 Cent record release
party at The Hard Rock Casino in Las
Vegas, Saturday Sept. 8, 2007.

Shar Jackson was there too!

Britney Spears, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, 50 Cent,
Paris Hilton and Floyd
Mayweather Jr. attend
the 50 Cent record release party at The Hard
Rock
Casino on Sept. 8, 2007 in Las Vegas,
Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007. The Hard Rock
is
celebrating Rolling Stone Magazine’s 40th
Anniversary during MTV
Video Music Awards
weekend.

People Magazine is reporting that Brit
started the night with four friends at
a
Cirque du Soleil, Mystere performance.

From there, Spears slipped off to Body
English, in the Hard Rock Hotel for the
50 Cent album release party. Diddy
was
there, as well and they both ended
up slipping into 50’s booth with Paris
Hilton.

Spears was seen bobbing her head in
unison with
Hilton to Lil Jon’s “Snap Yo
Fingers” as the deejay announced Spears
to the
crowd.

Around 1:30 Spears, Diddy, and the gang
moved to Tao. Spears met up with
Alli
Sims where the two were seen drinking
vodka and sugar-free energy drinks.

The group only hung out there for 45
minutes, though while they were there
a
source states that “She (Britney) was
having her assistant order drinks for
her.”

The group rounded out the night at Jet
where Cassie was celebrating her 21st
birthday.

Spears and Diddy headed to the VIP table
where the birthday girl was,
to congratulate
her, and Spears was seen drinking Belvedere
vodka as she wore
sunglasses in the club.

Right before 3 AM, she headed back to her
hotel room
with Sims in tow.

Source People Magazine

Megan Fox hates Lindsay Lohan.

The ‘Transformers’ Star made her
acting debut in
‘Confessions of a
Teenage Drama Queen’ alongside
Lindsay but the pair didn’t
get along,
and Megan can’t stand comparisons
being made between them.

Megan, 21, told Arena magazine: “
Lindsay and I
were never friends
when we starred together. I mean,
we were two 16-year-old
girls, it’s
rare for two girls of that age to get
along, and we didn’t.

Megan was quoted as saying…

“I can’t believe people think we’re
alike?! Ugh!”

Source Arena magazine:

Paris Hilton enjoys the perks of freedom
with
a dash in the ocean while on a post-jail
Hawaiian vacation on Friday.

As if she hasn’t had enough solitude over the
past
three weeks, the heiress was photographed
swimming all by her lonely self.
 SOURCE FADED YOUTH

Caroline D’Amore Paris’s BFF celebrated her 23rd
birthday in The Tropicana, West
Hollywood, L.A.. Among
her guests,  Kim Kardashian as expected.
Another
interesting one, Bobbi Billard, the bikini
model & professional wrestler!
Look at those
implants! Paris Hilton couldn’t make it she was busy
coniving her way out of jail last night. But her double
Natalie Reed the “fake Paris was there with Carson
Daly as her date!

Wow, Its really amazing. 
Two alleged teenage girls in Acworth,
GA clad in

sunglasses walked into
a Bank of America inside a grocery store and

handed the teller a note demanding
cash. They got it and walked out.

Cops say that the girls are probably
only 16-years-old.

“This is something totally new to us,” Cobb
County police spokesman officer

Wayne Delk said of the robbery at a Bank of
America branch inside a grocery

store. The girls approached the teller inside the
Kroger store shortly after noon,

and witnesses were unable to tell
investigators whether they left in a car.

Their only disguise was the sunglasses, and they
were clearly pictured in

surveillance camera shots.

“The pictures are too good. Someone’s got to
know them,”

REHAB REVOLVING DOOR!!!