Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/yNC0PCr-TVE/Coming at us with a brand new featurette for "Thor: The Dark World," Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman bring us up to speed on the relationship between the God of Thunder and his leading lady, Jane Foster.
The video shows us some new scenes featuring the universe-separated lovers, detailing the woes of world saving, while also describing the conflicts - both physical and emotional - that they both encounter on their journey.
According to the synopsis, "Faced with an enemy that even Odin and Asgard cannot withstand, Thor must embark on his most perilous and personal journey yet, one that will reunite him with Jane Foster and force him to sacrifice everything to save us all."
Directed by "Sopranos" superstar, Alan Taylor, "Thor: The Dark World" hits theaters in the United States on November 8th of this year. Check out the featurette below, and enjoy!
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — A grand jury found enough evidence to indict the parents of JonBenet Ramsey for child abuse and accessory to first-degree murder in the 6-year-old's death, newly unsealed documents revealed Friday, nearly a decade after DNA evidence cleared the couple.
But the 1999 documents shed no light on who was responsible for the child beauty queen's death, and 14 years later, authorities are no closer to finding her killer.
The documents confirmed reports earlier this year that grand jurors had indeed recommended an indictment in the case, contrary to the long-held perception that the secret panel ended their work without deciding to charge anyone.
At the time, then-District Attorney Alex Hunter didn't mention an indictment, saying only that there wasn't enough evidence to warrant charges against the Ramseys, who had long maintained their innocence.
The grand jury met three years after JonBenet's body was found bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, the day after Christmas in 1996. Lurid details of the crime and striking video footage of the child in adult makeup and suggestive pageant costumes propelled the case into one of the highest-profile mysteries in the U.S., unleashing a series of true-crime books and TV specials.
Many tabloid headlines later, tests in 2008 on newly discovered DNA left behind by someone who touched JonBenet's long underwear pointed to the involvement of an "unexplained third party" in her slaying, and not the Ramseys or their son, Burke.
The tests led Hunter's successor, Mary Lacy, to clear the Ramseys, two years after Patsy Ramsey died of cancer. In a letter to John Ramsey, she called the couple "victims of this crime."
Finding a match in the nation's growing DNA database could hold the best hope for someday solving the killing of JonBenet, who would now be 23. Her slaying is considered a cold case, open but not under active investigation.
One of John Ramsey's attorneys, L. Lin Wood, said the documents released Friday are "nonsensical" and the grand jurors didn't have the benefit of having the DNA results.
"They reveal nothing about the evidence reviewed by the grand jury and are clearly the result of a confused and compromised process," he said.
While the killer's identity is still unknown, Wood said there's no mystery about the Ramseys' role.
"The Ramsey family is innocent," he said. "That part of the case, based on the DNA evidence, is a done deal."
Boulder police, who were criticized for their handling of the investigation, issued a statement saying the documents show the grand jury agreed with investigators that probable cause existed to file charges. However, the statement acknowledged that the evidence would have to meet a higher standard than probable cause for prosecutors to take the case to trial.
The current district attorney, Stan Garnett, declined to comment but will publish an op-ed piece on Sunday, given the complexity of the case, a spokeswoman said.
David Lane, a defense attorney not involved in the case, said prosecutors may have handed it over to grand jurors because problems in the investigation could have made it difficult to prosecute. But he said that could have backfired with a "runaway grand jury" that reached its own conclusions.
He said the indictments could have been an attempt to force the parents to turn against each other, which he said was unlikely because both were protected by laws that limit testimony of one spouse against another.
"Somebody killed JonBenet Ramsey," Lane said. "It sounds like they were accused of aiding and abetting each other, with the hope someone would crack and break. That didn't happen, and prosecutors may have decided not to go forward."
Although the grand jury foreman signed the 1999 indictments, prosecutors decided not to bring charges.
Christina Habas, a retired judge who oversaw grand juries in Denver, said it's at the discretion of the district attorney whether to file charges because prosecutors have to consider whether they can convince a trial jury of someone's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The indictments might have been a compromise among jurors who were divided on what counts should be approved, said Nancy Leong, an assistant law professor at the University of Denver. The release of only four of 18 charging pages, and the numbering of the charges, suggest other possible charges were passed over. The charge of accessory to a crime might have been an attempt to "meet in the middle," Leong said.
"And that would also explain why the prosecutor didn't want to continue with the prosecution of the crime, because there might not have been enough evidence to prove the parents helped someone else cover up the crime," she said.
Whatever the motivation behind them, the documents add little or nothing to the public understanding of what happened to JonBenet, Leong said.
"We don't know much more factually, if anything, than we did in 1996," she said.
The Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder reported earlier this year that the grand jury had issued indictments, and the documents were released in response to a lawsuit filed by its reporter, Charlie Brennan, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
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Associated Press writers Steven K. Paulson and Dan Elliott contributed to this report.
Microsoft has renamed, or partially unnamed its Surface RT tablet to merely the “Surface.” The Surface RT struggled in the market through its first year in the wild. It has been mostly replaced by the new, and quite nice, Surface 2.
However, Microsoft intends to continue selling the Surface RT for some time, perhaps getting rid of unsold inventory, at a reduced price. You can now purchase three different Surface devices: The Surface [RT], the Surface 2, and the Surface Pro 2.
Why the name change? Consumers were confused as heck at what it was, how it was different from the Surface Pro, and so forth. Microsoft admitted as much earlier this month. Microsoft provided a statement on the name change to Tom Warren of The Verge, stating that “To stay consistent with the naming structure of our new offerings, Surface RT is now referred to as ‘Surface,’” Right, then.
Tom also found out something else that I am working to confirm: The desktop tile is gone on new Windows RT 8.1 devices. Microsoft appears to have hidden it. I don’t like this. Microsoft is moving to kill the desktop on Windows RT 8.1.
Here’s what this looks like next: Microsoft releases a Metrofied version of Office. Now, you don’t get kicked to the desktop when you fire up Office. Now, the average consumer never goes to the desktop on Windows RT 8.1, unless they add the tile to their Start Screen. For all intends and practical purposes, that means desktop is over for Windows RT 8.1.
Call me sentimental if you will, but that just doesn’t feel right from a product perspective. I’m working to confirm the change with Microsoft, and will update this post when I get said affirmation.
Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
Her brand new album Prism hit stores yesterday, and last night (October 22) Katy Perry celebrated with a very special shindig in Los Angeles.
The “Roar” singer joined host Mario Lopez on stage at the iHeartRadio album release party, and during her interview she made some interesting admissions.
When asked what she keeps in her purse, Katy confessed, “The first time I was at the Grammys, I shared a dressing room with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift
Tea Leoni. I asked for a lock of hair from each. I put little bows around them and put them in my empty purse and carried it around with me. That was really creepy, but awesome. And that’s my secret. And I’m a freak.”
And it turns out, the “Hannah Montana” actress’ digits are the most high-profile in Katy’s phone. “She’s the most famous person in the world right now.”
As we all know, Americans are living longer. Women especially.
But here's what you may not know: French, German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, British, Dutch and Canadian women are living longer too, but their lives are getting longer faster than ours. Take a look at this from the National Academy of Sciences.
This is a comparative life expectancy chart. The red dots show the average lifespan of American women compared to women in nine other well-off countries (represented by the black dots.) As you can see, we aren't doing so well. Or, rather, American women since 1979, compared to those other countries, are underperforming. We are at the bottom of the improvement pile.
That happy little dot dancing higher and higher above each pile since 1989 is Japan. That's where women live longest on Earth. As of 2006, when the data were collected, the average Japanese female died at 85.98 (just short of an 86th birthday). American females, on average, died six years earlier, at 80.2. It's a gap that seems to be widening. French women come up second (84.39), Italian women third (84.09).
Here's the chart for men:
American men are also falling behind. The longest lived males on Earth are Australians (at 79.27 on average), followed by Japanese (79.20) then Swedes (78.92). The average American guy departs at 75.64. The lag is not as drastic as for women. The ladies have the bigger problem.
Back in the '60s, American women were among the longest-lived in the world. But then, between 1980 and 2006, female life expectancy grew at about 60 percent the rate for comparative countries and we are now ranked 28th.
What happened?
In 2011, the National Institutes of Health issued a report that tried to make sense of it all. Right away, they found our weak spot. "U.S. women have relatively high mortality rates at the younger older ages," they said, which means when women hit their 55th birthdays, for the next almost 20 years, roughly 55 to 75, they will die more often than women in comparable countries. Americans get more lung disease, more heart disease, more diabetes. If Americans reach 75, they get competitive again, but that early old age is where we lose ground. American men showed pretty much the same weakness at roughly the same times.
The authors declared themselves puzzled. "The relatively poor performance of the United States," they wrote, is "perhaps all the more surprising in light of the fact that the United States spends far more on health care than any other nation in the world, both absolutely and as a percentage of gross national product."
So what's causing this difference? The panel explored the usual suspects. Are Americans too obese? Do they smoke too much? Exercise too little? Eat poorly? Have too many poor people? Too much hormone therapy? Is the health care system itself to blame?
Good questions, all, but the panel was unable to discover any special culprit. To my surprise, they found our health disadvantage "could not be explained simply by reference to problems associated with an inefficient health care system, the lack of universal health care coverage, or large racial and socioeconomic disparities in the United States." Which left them pretty much where they started — puzzled. "To date," the authors conclude, "no satisfactory explanation of these patterns has been proposed."
The Super-Old ...
Whatever it is we're doing wrong hasn't yet compromised our population of very old or super-old people. We have a highly competitive group of Americans in their late 80s, 90s and early 100s. The dangling question is how old can today's babies expect to be? Will there be lots and lots of centenarians at the turn of the next century?
For the moment, all we know is that the oldies keep getting older. The NIH report says that in 2002, 2003 and 2004, life expectancy in France increased by 10 months, which is a crazy pace (and I'm guessing it hasn't stayed that way). At some point, one imagines, we will hit a wall. The Japanese, the French, the Australians can't keep it up forever, but where that wall is, or who will hit it first, I don't know.
... Get Even Older ...
In July, 2010, The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare suggested Japanese women may be averaging 86.44 years, while Japanese men are closing in on 80. "Remarkably," says the NIH report, "these levels represent increases in average life spans of almost five months for women and four months for men compared to the previous year." The race to get older, apparently, gallops on. But Americans, alas, aren't keeping up.
War photographs aren't grainy, blurry, or dark anymore. Now they are so damn crispy, clean and dramatic that my brain has problems admitting they are real. Or are they? This collection of awesome combat images are a good example of that. They feel like perfect special effects shots taken out of sci-fi movies or video games.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/gY355MxJjzs/@barrett
