SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Zynga Inc‘s chief financial officer, David Wehner, will leave the company for an executive position at Facebook Inc, the gaming company announced Tuesday as it reshuffled its upper ranks.
David Ko, chief mobile officer, has been elevated to become Zynga‘s new chief operations officer.
Mark Vranesh, Zynga’s top accounting executive, will replace Wehner as CFO, Zynga said.
(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – One of Charlie Chaplin’s iconic bowler hats and canes, the staple of Hollywood silent-era comedy, will go under the hammer in Los Angeles this weekend, auction house Bonhams said on Tuesday.
Chaplin’s hat and cane – synonymous with his trademark “Little Tramp” character in films such as “City Lights” and “Modern Times” – are expected to fetch between $ 40,000 and $ 60,000 in the November 18 auction.
It is unknown how many of Chaplin’s bowlers and canes still exist, said Lucy Carr, a memorabilia specialist at Bonhams. The ones up for auction come from a private collection but have a direct link to Chaplin, Carr said.
The waddling and bumbling Little Tramp character propelled Chaplin to global fame. The character, which Hollywood legend says was created by accident on a rainy day at Keystone Studio, first appeared in 1914′s “Kid Auto Races at Venice” and lastly in 1936′s “Modern Times.”
Chaplin’s hat and cane are the highlights of an auction of popular culture artifacts including a saxophone that belonged to jazz pioneer Charlie Parker ($ 22,000-$ 26,000) and a handwritten letter from John Lennon in which The Beatle sketched himself and wife Yoko Ono nude ($ 18,000-$ 22,000).
Other items hitting the block range from an archive of Marilyn Monroe photographs ($ 15,000-$ 20,000), an early Charles Schulz “Peanuts” comic strip ($ 10,000-$ 15,000) and a wicker chair from Rick’s Cafe in “Casablanca” ($ 5,000-$ 7,000).
(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The combination of a past serious head injury and pesticide exposure may be linked to an extra-high risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, a new study suggests.
The findings don’t prove being knocked unconscious or exposed to certain chemicals directly causes Parkinson’s, a chronic movement and coordination disorder.
But they are in line with previous studies, which have linked head trauma and certain toxins – along with family history and other environmental exposures – to the disease.
“I think all of us are beginning to realize that there’s not one smoking gun that causes Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. James Bower, a neurologist from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota who wasn’t involved in the new research.
“There might be many paths to the ultimate development of Parkinson’s disease,” he told Reuters Health.
For example, Bower said, some people who are genetically predisposed might need just one “environmental insult” – such as a blow to the head – to set them up for Parkinson’s. Others who aren’t naturally susceptible to the disorder could still develop it after multiple exposures.
Head trauma and contact with pesticides “may not be directly related, and may be two independent stresses,” Columbia University neurologist David Sulzer, who also wasn’t part of the study team, told Reuters Health in an email.
About 50,000 to 60,000 older adults in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease each year, according to the National Parkinson Foundation.
For the new study, researchers led by Pei-Chen Lee from the University of California at Los Angeles compared 357 people with a recent Parkinson’s diagnosis to a representative sample of 754 people without the disease, all living in central California, which is a major agricultural region.
The study team asked all of them to report any past traumatic head injuries – in which people had been unconscious for at least five minutes – and used their home and work addresses to determine their proximity to pesticide sprayings since 1974.
Those surveys showed that close to 12 percent of people with Parkinson’s had been knocked unconscious, and 47 percent had been exposed to an herbicide called paraquat near both their home and workplace.
That’s in comparison to almost seven percent of control-group participants with a history of head injury and 39 percent with pesticide exposure.
On their own, traumatic brain injury as well as living and working near pesticide sprayings were each tied to a moderately increased risk of Parkinson’s disease. Combined, they were linked to a tripling of that risk, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Neurology. That was after taking into account people’s baseline risk based on their age, gender, race, education, smoking history and family history of Parkinson’s.
Lee’s team didn’t know which came first in people who’d had both head trauma and paraquat exposure.
It makes sense, the researchers noted, that a head injury would increase inflammation in the brain and disrupt the barrier that separates circulating blood and brain fluid. Those changes could then make neurons in the brain more vulnerable to the effects of pesticides, ultimately increasing the risk of Parkinson’s.
But that’s just a theory.
“There are all kinds of hypotheses,” Bower said. But the study “is more evidence that traumatic injury to the brain can lead to later problems that are usually neurodegenerative,” he added. “We need to be increasingly careful about preventing these traumatic brain injuries.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TD3OA9 Neurology, online November 12, 2012.
Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Holly Petraeus and Gen. David Petraeus walk past a seated Paula Broadwell (rear right) at his confirmation hearing …The White House said Tuesday that it was "up to Congress" whether to call former CIA Director David Petraeus to testify about the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya.
"Congress [makes] decisions about who is called to testify," press secretary Jay Carney told reporters at his daily briefing.
The Intelligence Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives had been set to hear from Petraeus about the attack on the American compound in separate closed-door hearings on Thursday. But aides to both panels indicated that the retired Army general would be replaced by Mike Morrell, the acting CIA director.
"The president is confident that Acting Director Morrell is fully informed and capable of representing the CIA in a hearing about the incidents in Benghazi," Carney said.
Still, key senators have made it clear that Petraeus, whose shocking resignation came after the public disclosure of an extramarital affair, will ultimately need to be heard. The attack claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, told MSNBC on Monday that her panel "should go ahead with Mike Morell and the way it is now set up."
"But I also think that the community should know that this is not sufficient," she continued. "And I have no doubt now that we will need to talk with David Petraeus. And we will likely do that in closed session, but it will be done one way or the other."
CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The fate of a handful of liquefied natural gas projects planned for Canada’s Pacific coast may depend on the Canadian government‘s willingness to spell out rules for foreign investment in the country’s energy sector, according to a study released on Thursday.
Apache Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Petronas, BG Group Plc and others are in the planning stages for LNG projects that would take gas from the rich shale fields of northeastern British Columbia and ship it to Asian buyers.
But the federal government’s decision last month to stall the C$ 5.2 billion ($ 5.2 billion) bid by Malaysia’s state-owned Petronas C$ 5.2 billion for Canada‘s Progress Energy Resources Corp could lessen the appetite of Asian buyers for Canadian LNG, energy consultants Wood Mackenzie said.
“Some potential off-takers of Canadian LNG like the idea … because it’s perceived as having low political risk, and another reason is because they see the potential for investment opportunities,” said Noel Tomnay, head of global gas at the consultancy.
“If there are going to be restrictions on how they access those opportunities, if acquisitions are closed to them, then clearly that would restrict the attractiveness of those opportunities. If would-be Asian investors thought that corporate acquisitions were an avenue that was not open to them then Canadian LNG would become less attractive.”
The Canadian government is looking to come up with rules governing corporate acquisitions by state-owned companies and has pushed off a decision on the Petronas bid as it considers whether to approve the $ 15.1 billion offer for Nexen Inc from China’s CNOOC Ltd.
Exporting LNG to Asia is seen as a way to boost returns for natural-gas producers tapping the Montney, Horn River and Liard Basin shale regions of northeastern British Columbia.
Though Wood Mackenzie estimates the fields contain as much as 280 trillion cubic feet of gas, they are far from Canada’s traditional U.S. export market, while growing supplies from American shale regions have cut into Canadian shipments.
Because the region lacks infrastructure, developing the resource will be expensive, requiring new pipelines and multibillion-dollar liquefaction.
Still Wood Mackenzie estimates that the cost of delivery into Asian markets for Canadian LNG would be in the range of $ 10 million to $ 12 per million British thermal units, similar to competing projects in the United States and East Africa.
($ 1 = $ 1.00 Canadian)
(Reporting by Scott Haggett; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Canada News Headlines – Yahoo! News
I am happy to share that HP Cloud Compute now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 instances in addition to the variety of Linux distributions that are already available. Windows Server instances can now be launched in our US-West region. Since HP Cloud Compute is in public beta, all customers receive a 50% discount (see pricing below).
It is a priority for us to provide the tools that enable developers to quickly build, test, deploy and scale their applications in the cloud. That is why we created our CLI for Windows so that developers working in a Windows Server environment can quickly launch and manage their instances using the command line.
The three Windows Server images available are the Enterprise Editions of Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32 bit), Windows Server 2008 SP2 (64 bit) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit). All Windows Server instances are created with a randomly generated password, which is then encrypted. You can create and manage your Windows Server instances from our console, UNIX CLI and Windows CLI. For information about how to access your Windows Server instances using Remote Desktop (RDP), please review our documentation here.
The licenses for a Windows Server instance are included in the hourly rate for your instance, so you can spin up a server and get started without needing to worry about any additional licensing concerns. Please see the table below for details about the hourly fees for both standard HP Cloud Compute Linux Instances and HP Cloud Compute Windows Server Instances. While HP Cloud Compute continues in public beta, all customers receive a 50% discount off the prices listed below.
| HP Cloud Compute Instance Types | Linux (per hour) | Windows (per hour) |
| Extra Small (1GB RAM, 1 core, 30GB disk) | $ 0.04 | $ 0.06 |
| Small (2GB RAM, 2 cores, 60GB disk) | $ 0.08 | $ 0.12 |
| Medium (4GB RAM, 2 cores, 120GB disk) | $ 0.16 | $ 0.24 |
| Large (8GB RAM, 4 cores, 240GB disk) | $ 0.32 | $ 0.48 |
| Extra Large (16GB RAM, 4 cores, 480GB disk) | $ 0.64 | $ 0.96 |
| Double Extra Large (32GB RAM, 8 cores, 960GB disk) | $ 1.28 | $ 1.92 |
Our team has been working hard to ensure that we are able to support all of your public cloud needs and appreciate all those that participated in our private and public betas. We are very excited about the launch of Windows Server instances. Stay tuned as we plan to launch support for additional versions of Windows Server including Windows Server 2012 in the coming months. As always, feel free to leave a comment, connect with us on chat or email or find us on twitter (@hpcloud) if you have any questions.
Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Irish rocker and anti-poverty campaigner Bono will appeal to Democrats and Republicans during a visit to Washington this week to spare U.S. development assistance programs from cuts as Congress tries to avert the looming “fiscal cliff” of tax hikes and spending reductions early next year.
The U2 lead singer’s visit comes as the Obama administration and congressional leaders try to forge a deal in coming weeks to avoid the economy hitting the “fiscal cliff” – tax increases and spending cuts worth $ 600 billion starting in January if Congress does not act.
Analysts say the absence of a deal could shock the United States, the world’s biggest economy, back into recession.
Kathy McKiernan, spokeswoman for the ONE Campaign, said Bono will hold talks with congressional lawmakers and senior Obama administration officials during the November 12-14 visit.
During meetings he will stress the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance programs and the need to preserve them to avoid putting at risk progress made in fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, she said.
Bono, a long-time advocate for the poor, will argue that U.S. government-funded schemes that support life-saving treatments for HIV/AIDS sufferers, nutrition programs for malnourished children, and emergency food aid make up just 1 percent of the U.S. government budget but are helping to save tens of millions of lives in impoverished nations.
The One Campaign would not elaborate which lawmakers and senior Obama administration officials Bono will meet.
On Monday, Bono will discuss the power of social movements with students at Georgetown University. He will also meet new World Bank President Jim Yong Kim for a web cast discussion on Wednesday on the challenges of eradicating poverty.
(Editing by W Simon)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Terminally-ill cancer patients are less likely to get aggressive end-of-life treatment, such as chemotherapy in the last two weeks of life, when they talk with their doctors early on about how they want to die, according to a new study.
Treatment aimed at keeping those patients alive at the end is often expensive and may not improve patients’ quality of life or comfort. Such therapies usually involve more time in the hospital rather than at home or in hospice care.
“Aggressive care at the end of life for individual patients isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that most patients who recognize they’re dying don’t want to receive that kind of care,” said Dr. Jennifer Mack, the study’s lead author from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
“We should at least consider having these discussions soon after diagnosis if we know that a patient has incurable cancer,” she told Reuters Health.
Her team’s analysis involved 1,231 people with advanced lung or colon cancer who died over a 14-month period during a larger cancer study. Researchers interviewed patients or their caregivers about whether and when the patients had discussions with their doctors about end-of-life care.
Mack and her colleagues also checked medical records for signs of those discussions and for any treatment and hospitalizations cancer patients had in their last month of life.
They found that most patients – 88 percent – had end-of-life discussions, but more than one-third of those took place less than a month before the patient died, when their health was likely already deteriorating. Close to two-thirds of the talks happened while patients were in the hospital.
Almost half of study participants received aggressive, life-prolonging care, Mack’s team reported Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Those who’d had end-of-life discussions more than a month before dying were 50 to 60 percent less likely to get that extra treatment than patients who put off those talks or didn’t have them at all.
Patients (and their caregivers) who reported having the discussions with doctors were almost seven times more likely to end up in hospice than those who didn’t recall end-of-life talks.
“A lot of patients don’t want (aggressive treatment), but they don’t recognize that they’re dying or that this is relevant for them,” said Dr. Camilla Zimmermann, head of the palliative care program at University Health Network in Toronto.
But, she told Reuters Health, “The earlier you discuss these things, the more options you have. If you wait too long, you end up having these discussions with someone you don’t know, that you just met, in an inpatient setting,” instead of with your primary doctor.
Mack agreed.
“If we start these conversations early, then patients have some time to process this information, to think about what’s important to them (and) to talk with their families about that,” she said.
Aggressive end-of-life care is also expensive. According to data from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, 32 percent of total Medicare spending goes to caring for very sick patients in their last two years of life, often because those people are in and out of the hospital. In the early 2000′s, that spending was equal to about $ 46,000 per chronically-ill patient.
Zimmermann, who wasn’t involved in the new research, believes it’s never too early for doctors, patients or caregivers to initiate discussions about end-of-life preferences – even if it can be an uncomfortable topic.
“There are many opportunities while that incurable illness is still being treated… to also focus on what happens if this doesn’t work,” she said.
“I think people are afraid that bringing up these discussions is going to make them die. Bringing up these discussions is really going protect them from an outcome they don’t want in the end.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/gPtMdm Journal of Clinical Oncology, online November 12, 2012.
Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Former CIA Director David Petraeus and author Paula Broadwell pose for a photo. (AP)A recent University of Denver address by Paula Broadwell has set off a torrent of speculation as to whether her affair with Gen. David Petraeus resulted in a leak of classified national security information.
New York magazine got things started by posting a video of Broadwell, author of Petraeus' biography, "All In," discussing details of the Sept. 11 attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, at the Oct. 26 talk.
In the video, since posted by several sources to YouTube, Broadwell states: "Now, I don't know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually, had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that's still being vetted."
That clip has led some to speculate whether Broadwell was exposing previously unreported details about the attack.
Other major media outlets, including CBS News and The Daily Beast, have picked up on the video clip. Wired goes a step further, stating as fact that Broadwell did reveal new information, writing: "It was a surprising disclosure, given the deep classification of the CIA's detention policies—and the enormous political stakes surrounding the Benghazi assault. But in many ways, it was only natural for Broadwell, given her evolution from Petraeus protegee to biographer to paramour and unofficial spokesperson."
And Politico points to a July panel discussion at the Aspen Security Forum during which Broadwell claims to have had access to classified information and to have attended high-level security meetings with Petraeus.
However, Broadwell's sound bite could be entirely innocuous, New York magazine notes: "It's also possible that she just misunderstood something she heard on Fox News."
The Fox News Channel reference concerns a report FNC reporter Jennifer Griffin made earlier the same day as Broadwell's university address, in which Griffin cited sources claiming that the CIA was holding high-value detainees in the Benghazi facility at the time of the attack.
You can watch an excerpt from Broadwell's University of Denver address below:
Griffin has since updated her reporting, noting that a well-placed Washington source confirms that Libyan militiamen were being held at the CIA annex and may have been a possible reason for the attack. Multiple intelligence sources, she also reported, said, "There were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location."
The CIA has denied keeping militants at the facility. CIA spokesman Preston Golson said, "Any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless."
Basically, so far we have a lot of speculation, with individuals commenting on a potential national security leak concerning details of a situation the government says never took place. Stay tuned.
LONDON (Reuters) – The BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said on Sunday, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician.
Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.
“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron‘s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.
“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”
George Entwistle resigned as director general on Saturday, just two months into the job, to take responsibility for the child sex allegation on the flagship news programme Newsnight.
The witness in the report, who says he suffered sexual abuse at a care home in the late 1970s, said on Friday he had misidentified the politician, Alistair McAlpine. Newsnight admitted it had not shown the witness a picture of McAlpine, or approached McAlpine for comment before going to air.
Already under pressure after revelations that a long-time star presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile, Entwistle conceded on the BBC morning news that he had not known – or asked – who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.
The BBC, celebrating its 90th anniversary, is affectionately known in Britain as “Auntie”, and respected around much of the world.
But with 22,000 staff working at eight national TV channels, 50 radio stations and an extensive Internet operation, critics say it is hampered by a complex and overly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure.
THOMPSON’S LEGACY
Journalists said this had become worse under Entwistle’s predecessor Mark Thompson, who took over in the wake of the last major crisis to hit the corporation and is set to become chief executive of the New York Times Co on Monday.
In that instance, both director general and chairman were forced out after the BBC was castigated by a public inquiry over a report alleging government impropriety in the fevered build up to war in Iraq, leading to major organisational changes.
One of the BBC’s most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from programme budgets.
“He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.
Prime Minister Cameron appeared ready to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, believing that “one of the great institutions of this country” could reform and deal with its failings, according to sources in his office.
Patten, who must find a new director general to sort out the mess, agreed that management structures had proved inadequate.
“Apparently decisions about the programme went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks – and still emerged,” he said.
“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC … was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC then there were in the Chinese Communist Party.”
Patten ruled out resigning himself but other senior jobs are expected to be on the line, while BBC supporters fear investigative journalism will be scaled back. He said he expected to name Entwistle’s successor in weeks, not months.
Among the immediate challenges are threats of litigation.
McAlpine, a close ally of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has indicated he will sue for damages.
Claims for compensation are also likely from victims who say Savile, one of the most recognisable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, sexually abused them as children, sometimes on BBC premises.
INQUIRIES
Two inquiries are already under way, looking at failures at Newsnight and allegations relating to Savile, both of which could make uncomfortable reading for senior figures.
Police have also launched a major inquiry into Savile’s crimes and victims’ allegations of a high-profile paedophile ring. Detectives said they had arrested their third suspect on Sunday, a man in his 70s from Cambridgeshire in central England.
Funded by an annual licence fee levied on all TV viewers, the BBC has long been resented by its commercial rivals, who argue it has an unfair advantage and distorts the market.
Murdoch’s Sun tabloid gleefully reported Entwistle’s departure with the headline “Bye Bye Chump” and Patten said News Corp and others would put the boot in, happy to deflect attention after a phone-hacking scandal put the newspaper industry under intense and painful scrutiny.
He said that “one or two newspapers, Mr. Murdoch’s papers” would love to see the BBC lose its national status, “but I think the great British public doesn’t want to see that happen”.
Murdoch himself was watching from afar.
“BBC getting into deeper mess. After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as paedophile,” he wrote on his Twitter website on Saturday.
It is not just the BBC and the likes of Entwistle and Patten who are in the spotlight.
Thompson, whom Entwistle succeeded in mid-September, has also faced questions from staff at the New York Times over whether he is still the right person to take one of the biggest jobs in American newspaper publishing.
Britain’s Murdoch-owned Sunday Times queried how Thompson could have been unaware of claims about Savile during his tenure at the BBC as he had told British lawmakers, saying his lawyers had written to the paper addressing the allegations in early September, while he was still director general.
(Editing by Kevin Liffey and Sophie Hares)
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