NEWS CAN AFFECT YOU

The Gates of Hell Just Opened In Guatemala

2010-06-01T20:22:00.001-07:00

Gizmodo.com

By Jesus Diaz

"This can't be real" was my first thought. Then I checked the source: The Guatemalan government. This sinkhole appeared last sunday in a street intersection of Ciudad de Guatemala. Just looking at the photo gives me vertigo.

Click on the images to see the high resolution version.

A sinkhole is a natural depression caused by the removal of underground soil by water. Usually, it happens when the substrate is formed by limestone, carbonate rock, salt beds or any other rock that is easily eroded by water streams. The process could be slow, but sometimes the land just cracks open without notice. In this case, it happened suddenly, swallowing an entire house. The cause: Massive underground water torrents created by tropical storm Agatha.

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image by Flickr/Boing-boing/Gizmodo

When It Comes to PR, Facebook Does Know What a Real ‘Friend’ Is Read More

2010-05-26T03:06:00.001-07:00

Wired.com

By Ryan Singel

Facebook will be rolling out its promised “simplified” privacy controls to its users starting Wednesday, Facebook vice president Chris Cox announced Tuesday.

Cox made the announcement from the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.

The venue is hardly surprising and in keeping with Facebook’s recent reliance on sympathetic media outlets to combat the backlash against its overweening ambitions and abysmal privacy practices. TechCrunch’s founder and head Michael Arrington recently came to the company’s defense, chastising the media for being too hard on Mark Zuckerberg.

On Monday, the Washington Post gave the company free space on its Op-Ed page to write a nearly content-free post on how it was listening to users. In fact, the company is promising little to its users and seems set to continue its new practice of turning over user data to third parties without getting prior permission.

Coincidentally, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham is on Facebook’s board and is a mentor to Zuckerberg. As Ryan Tate at Valleywag puts it: “An opinion piece in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers carries more moral authority than a blog post on Facebook.com,” and that Graham has been a sort of “press consigliere for the startup founder.”

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Image by Wired

Has Voyager 2 spacecraft been hijacked by aliens?

2010-05-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

Bild.de

By ATTILA ALBERT

With a golden record on board, it left the Earth 33 years ago.

NASA installed the 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the Voyager 2 spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format!

The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?

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image: Voyager 2 by NASA

Will NASA ever return to the moon?

2010-02-03T19:58:00.001-08:00

By John D. Sutter

CNN.com

Yes, says NASA, but maybe not in a government-built spaceship -- and maybe not any time soon.The future of American space exploration came into question on Monday as President Obama released his 2011 budget. If passed by Congress, the budget would eliminate Constellation -- NASA's project to send humans back to the moon by 2020.

Constellation was to follow NASA's space shuttle program, which, after about 30 years of taking astronauts to space, is scheduled to end later this year, following five more flights.

Instead of building new spacecraft of its own, NASA, under the proposal, would invest in space technology research and spend $6 billion to pay private space groups to develop and build new rockets to take astronauts into orbit.

The plan leaves many open questions about the future of U.S. space travel, including if and when NASA will ever build rockets of its own again, when astronauts will return to space and in what kind of spacecraft.

"It's almost like a reboot of NASA's human space flight program," said Tariq Malik, managing editor of Space.com.

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images: Space technology, including this crew module, is already in development for NASA's moon-exploration program. (By Getty Images/AFP)

iPhone Game Developer Reports $1M in Sales Per Month

2009-12-21T21:36:00.000-08:00

By Brian X. Chen

Wired.com

Plenty of iPhone programmers whine about their failure to strike it rich in the App Store, but Tap Tap Revenge developer Tapulous can’t complain. The maker of the popular rhythm game reported sales nearing $1 million per month.

The Palo Alto, California startup told Reuters that it generates the revenue through sales of its games, ads and selling songs inside games.

Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhone OS devices (iPhones and iPod Touch units) to date. Earlier this year, research firm ComScore estimated that one-third of iPhone OS users had installed Tap Tap Revenge, Tapulous’ most popular game title. Many compare the game to Rock Band or Dance Dance Revolution. (In Tap Tap Revenge, you tap glowing dots as they hit the bottom of the screen.)

Tap Tap Revenge 3, the latest version of Tapulous’ game, is $1 in the App Store. There are free tracks, but mobile gamers have to buy some major artists’ songs for 50 cents apiece. The strategy seems to be working for artists, as well as for Tapulous.

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image by Wired.com

Obama’s Speech on Afghanistan to Envision Exit

2009-11-30T00:50:00.000-08:00

Senior administration officials said that the timetable will not be tied to particular conditions on the ground in Afghanistan.

By PETER BAKER, ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER

NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces, senior administration officials said Sunday.

Although the speech was still in draft form, the officials said the president wanted to use the address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night not only to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but also to convey how he intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government.

“It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”

The officials would not disclose the time frame. But they said it would not be tied to particular conditions on the ground nor would it be as firm as the current schedule for withdrawing troops in Iraq, where Mr. Obama has committed to withdrawing most combat units by August and all forces by the end of 2011.

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image by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Building a Better Alien-Calling Code

2009-11-23T18:43:00.000-08:00

By Brandon Keim

Wired.com

Alien-seeking researchers have designed a new, simple code for sending messages into space. To a reasonably clever alien with math skills and a bit of astronomical training, the messages should be easy to decipher.

As of now, Earthlings spend much more time searching for alien radio messages than broadcasting news of ourselves. We know how to do it, but relatively little attention has been paid to “ensuring that a transmitted message will be understandable to an alien listener,” wrote California Institute of Technology geoscientist Michael Busch and Rachel Reddick, a Stanford University physicist, in a study filed online Friday on arXiv.

According to Busch and Reddick, neither the Arecibo message, beamed at star cluster M13 in 1974, nor the Cosmic Calls sent in 1999 and 2003 were tested for decipherability. So the pair devised their own alien-friendly messaging system: Busch invented the code, and Reddick role-played the part of an alien trying to decode it.

Like the earlier codes, Busch’s used radio to send a string of ones and zeroes. But whereas those messages were meant to be translated into pictures, Busch’s code is supposed to be turned into mathematical equations.

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image by wired.com

LinkedIn and Twitter link up

2009-11-11T01:08:00.000-08:00

Reuters.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - LinkedIn and Twitter have linked up. Starting immediately, users of LinkedIn and Twitter can cross-file to each other's services, by checking a box on either Twitter or LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the largest professional social network, with 50 million members around the world who post information about themselves, such as resumes, to help find jobs or employees, and to stay in touch with each other.

Twitter allows people to broadcast short messages up to 140 characters to subscribers, who are called "followers."

LinkedIn also has an update box, which happens to be 140 characters.

Allen Blue, a co-founder of Twitter who is its vice president of product strategy, said LinkedIn members would be able to automatically post recent Tweets if they wanted.

Blue said users will have the option of sending only selected materials to Twitter.

He said that in addition to the obvious advantage of increasing the audience for either tweets or LinkedIn information there were two other advantages to the new system.

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photo: A Twitter page is displayed on a laptop computer in Los Angeles October 13, 2009 (REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni)

Why People Love Horror Movies

2009-11-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

They are quite popular with audiences

By Tudor Vieru, Science Editor

Softpedia.com

Horror films are not the standard in cinema, and are sometimes considered to be something of a niche genre. In spite of this, they cash sufficiently large sums of money at the box office, and have dedicated fans that form strongly bound communities. In recent months, a number of horror movies have taken theaters by storm, showcasing the supernatural and the frightening. Experts have been puzzled at what makes these films popular for many years, and finally decided to investigate the matter thoroughly.

In fact, the question that had scientists scratching their heads was why people keep coming back to the theaters when these movies are running, if they were scarred out of their minds the first time around. Ask a horror buff, and they will tell you that, as soon as they get up from the edge of their seats, they are ready to go at it again. If we find the sequences in these movies so repulsive, why do we keep watching them?

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Image: Horror movies gross big at the box office even if they are a niche genre (Flickr / insertinanename)

Windows 7 operating system makes its debut

2009-10-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft hopes people like Windows 7 more than its predecessor, Vista

By Jessica Mintz

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. put a new edition of Windows on sale Thursday, hoping for a fresh start after a bad reception for the previous version of the software that runs most of the world's personal computers.

Windows 7 is now available on new computers, and as a software upgrade for some older PCs.

A Fry's Electronics store in Renton, Wash., several miles south of Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, opened at midnight to give customers an early shot at buying a new PC or a disc that they could use to put Windows 7 on their existing computers. Such upgrade discs start at $120.

"We're geeks, that's what geeks do. This is our excitement," said Mike Naramor, 55, who runs a consulting business called My Computer Guy and was one of about 50 people who were waiting outside the store when it opened.

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photo: A salesman works behind new Windows 7 software in a store in Rosenheim, southern Germany. Microsoft Corp. put a new edition of Windows on sale Thursday, hoping for a fresh start after a bad reception for the previous version of the software that runs most of the world's personal computers.(By Christof Stache / AP)

The Future of Wi-Fi is Routerless

2009-10-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

A new wireless standard could challenge Bluetooth for peer-to-peer sharing supremacy.

By Corinne Iozzio

PopSci.com

Routers are the middle-men of our wireless networks; without them, our Wi-Fi gadgets (laptops, hard drives, cameras, printers, whathaveyou) can't talk to each other. But routers, like most intermediaries, don't make anything easier -- not at all. A new Wi-Fi standard is on the horizon that will let our devices talk to each other directly. Ain't that sweet?

The new specification, which the Wi-Fi Alliance hopes will start showing up in devices in mid 2010, is called Wi-Fi Direct. But that's not all, a new Wi-Fi Direct device will be backwards compatible with any previously released Wi-Fi Certified gadget you have.

We've been salivating over technologies that allow for instant transfers for a year now. At this year's CES, Sony demonstrated a new technology called TransferJet, which let data "jump" from one device to another when the two were placed within a few inches of each other. Wi-Fi Direct is the same idea, but on a broader scale; in addition to data sharing for media files like video and photos (TransferJet's forté), Direct can work with all kinds of data and software apps.

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photo: Wi-Fi Direct Môsieur J./Flickr

Airline Asks Passengers to Pee Before Flying to Save Energy

2009-10-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

By Ariel Schwartz

FastCompany.com

Sure, one person's deposits into an airplane toilet don't weigh much, but what about the pee from 200 people? Japanese airline ANA thinks full bladders lead to airplanes being weighed down by excrement, so it is implementing a wacky new policy: pee before you fly.

The airline is putting up signs at airport gates asking passengers to go to the bathroom. So-called "loo attendants" stand guard as well, asking potential pee-ers if they need to take a trip to the restroom. Bathrooms will still be on the plane, of course, in case of emergency. But ANA hopes that its shaming tactics will cut down on passengers' overall weight, in turn reducing the weight of the plane and lowering fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

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image by FC

Acer to launch 3D notebook at end of October

2009-06-09T20:03:00.000-07:00

By Jennifer Bergen

ZDNet.com

Do not attempt to adjust your screens. Acer is planning to launch a 15.6-inch 3D notebook at the end of October 2009. It will have software for you to covert your boring old 2D movies into exciting new 3D adventures. It will also directly support 3D movies.

You won’t need any wonky headgear for it either, just a pair of steroscopic glasses. According to Digitimes, Campbell Kan, vice president of Acer’s mobile computing business unit, says Acer is developing a model that won’t even require glasses.

The 3D notebook will come with Windows 7 installed, which means Microsoft will not officially announce this product until it launches the OS.

photo by Digitimes

Hugh Jackman slashes his way back in "Wolverine"

2009-04-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

Reuters.com

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hugh Jackman on Friday slashes his way back to his starmaking role as a razor-clawed mutant in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" after his glitzy turn hosting the Oscars and starring in romance "Australia" that flopped at U.S. box offices.

The change is good for the Aussie star because of the exposure it brings, but despite the box office appeal of the "X-Men" movies, Jackman said these days he leans more toward starring on Broadway, where he won a Tony.

It's Jackman's fourth turn as tough-talking Wolverine, a role he won in the 2000 film "X-Men," fresh from starring in a London stage production of the musical "Oklahoma!"

"There's no doubt that as soon as this movie came out, that my career was like a Great Dane dragging me down the street," Jackman told Reuters about the last nine years of his career.

The 2000 "X-Men" made $296 million at worldwide box offices and helped usher in the latest wave of comic book movies. The 2003 "X2" topped that with $408 million, and the 2006 "X-Men: The Last Stand" burst past it at $459 million.

Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Media by Numbers reckons "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" could fetch from $85 million to $100 million at U.S. box offices on its debut weekend -- the first weekend of Hollywood's summer season.

Jackman, 40, said playing Wolverine has been a challenge because of the "sustained energy" he needs while shooting.

"Underneath you've got to feel he's ready to explode all the time," he said of the character.

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photo: Actor Hugh Jackman gestures as he attends the premiere of the movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" in Tempe, Arizona, April 27, 2009 (REUTERS/Joshua Lott).

Google rolls out search changes

2009-04-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

News.BBC.co.uk

Google has launched two experimental products it hopes will change the way users search for pictures and news.

A feature known as Similar Images uses a picture rather than text to find other matching images.

Timeline presents information already available in Google News but organised and displayed chronologically.

Alongside these features is a new version of Google Labs, in which users can take a peek at what its thousands of engineers are working on.

Amid past criticism that Google has wasted too much time and effort on projects that have little impact, the aim of the Labs upgrade is to make prototypes available earlier.

"The idea we are trying to build here with Labs and the culture of innovation is to close the gap at the point of which a new idea is hatched and the time it takes to get into the hands of users for feedback," said Google director of product management R J Pittman.

This means engineers can find out at a much earlier stage what does and does not work in a new feature or product allowing them to either reshape it or scrap it altogether.

Google said that in the present economic climate this approach made complete sense.

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image: The Timeline archives date back to the 1400s (By BBC.co.uk)

Study: Online Radio Gaining in Popularity

2009-04-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

By Paul Heine, Radio and Records

MediaWeek.com

There is good news in the radio industry: online radio is gaining in popularity. The number of Americans that tune in weekly to online radio grew to 42 million, up from 33 million in 2008. Stuck in the 11 percent to 13 percent range for the past three years, weekly online listening now reaches 17 percent of the population, according to Arbitron and Edison Research, which released their 17th annual Infinity Dial study Thursday (April 16).

The number of monthly online listeners is 69 million or 27 percent of the population. And nearly half of the population, or 49 percent, an astounding 125 million, have ever listened to online radio.

The Arbitron/Edison survey, conducted this year from January 16 to February 15 with 1,858 participants, also showed the demographics of online radio listeners don’t skew as young as they once did, more closely resembling the audience composition of traditional radio. Twenty percent of adults 25-54 said they listened to Web radio in the last week, up from 15 percent a year earlier.

"The sharp growth in weekly usage of online radio in this year's study provides compelling evidence that radio's digital platforms may be reaching critical mass," said Bill Rose, senior vp of marketing for Arbitron. "The growth of online radio is reinforced with what we are seeing in the portable people meter. We are beginning to see encoded streams of AM/FM broadcasts with significant audience in local markets."

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image by mediaweek.com

Windows 7 Looks Like a Vista Nightmare, Repeated

2009-04-14T03:03:00.000-07:00

By Chris Dannen

FastCompany.com

InformationWeek published results from an 1100-company survey suggesting that businesses will be extremely reticent to upgrade to Windows 7.

According to the report, 83% of the companies surveyed will delay their Win-7 upgrade until at least 2011, which means Microsoft might suffer another Vista-level adoption debacle if it doesn't move decisively to convince users to upgrade. Support for Windows XP, Microsoft's popular legacy OS, officially ends tomorrow, April 14.

The data cited by InformationWeek, which was collected by KACE, suggests that Microsoft's version confusion could be contributing to its incremental slips in marketshare. Linux, meanwhile, has seen adoption inch upward, likely at Windows' expense.

"Only a small percentage of businesses plan to migrate to Windows 7 in its first year of availability," says the KACE report. "Economic concerns and worries about compatibility" will be chief factors to blame. Only 42% of the businesses surveyed said they'd use Windows 7 after 2011, and 17% said they'd wait longer than three years before adopting.

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image by FastCompany.com

'Star Trek': What people are saying after the surprise screening

2009-04-07T19:39:00.001-07:00

By Chris Nashawaty

EW.com

Last night, some very lucky Star Trek fans who believed they were walking into a screening of 1982's Wrath of Khan instead got a surprise sneak peek at J.J. Abrams' new enterprise. While Abrams' reboot/prequel, Star Trek, isn't scheduled to officially hit theaters until May 8, those fortunate enough to be on hand at the Alamo Draft House in Austin, Tex., were the giddy victims of a blockbuster bait and switch. And nudging the event into total nerdvana territory, the hotly anticipated summer tentpole was reportedly introduced by the film's writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, its producer Damon Lindelhof (Lost), and (get this) Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy.

Needless to say, those in attendance -- no doubt very familiar with making their sci-fi opinions known in cyberspace -- immediately posted early reviews of the film on the Internet. And so far, the reactions range from wildly ecstatic to only barely less ecstatic. On his AICN site, Austin's blogging poobah Harry Knowles dedicated about 40,000 words to the screening, reporting that it concluded with a standing ovation that lasted five to six minutes. "After the film, the audience was a collective smile, some crying they were so happy," Knowles wrote.

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Photo Credit: Industrial Light and Magic

Model Sarah Hannon's alleged mid-air rage on plane over cheating boyfriend

2009-04-06T03:40:00.000-07:00

By Anthony France

News.com.au

Armed police boarded a flight at London's Heathrow Airport and arrested a trio involved in mid-air argument over a sex act.

The incident involved a model who allegedly flew into a drunken rage on a plane after catching her boyfriend engaging in a sex act with a woman sitting next to him.

Magazine covergirl Sarah Hannon, 35, is said to have woken from a nine-hour flight onboard Kingfisher Airlines to London from the Indian city of Bangalor to find partner Daniel Melia enjoying a sexual act, The Sun reports.

A police source said Ms Hannon fell asleep after drinking with Mr Melia before and during the flight.

Mr Melia then “got on well” with Ms Irby underneath a blanket but was stopped by hostesses – at which point Sarah awoke and started screaming.

“They certainly put the bang into Bangalore,” the source said.

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image: Shock ... model Sarah Hannon allegedly saw her partner enjoying a sex act with a woman next to him mid-flight (image by news.com.au)

Hidden Planet Discovered in Old Hubble Data

2009-04-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

By SPACE.com staff

SPACE.com

A new technique has uncovered an extrasolar planet hidden in Hubble Space Telescope images taken 11 years ago

The new strategy may allow researchers to uncover other distant alien worlds potentially lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble archival data.

The method was used to find an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Astronomers knew of the planet's existence from images taken with the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in 2007 and 2008, long after Hubble snapped its first picture of the system.

The planet is estimated to be at least seven times the mass of Jupiter. It is the outermost of three massive planets known to orbit the dusty young star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away from Earth. NICMOS could not see the other two planets because its coronagraphic spot — a device that blots out the glare of the star —blocked its viewof the two inner planets.

"We've shown that NICMOS is more powerful than previously thought for imaging planets," said the scientist who found the planet, David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto in Canada. "Our new image-processing technique efficiently subtracts the glare from a star that spills over the coronagraph's edge, allowing us to see planets that are one-tenth the brightness of what could be detected before with Hubble."

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image by space.com

How dare you?! When mom and dad disagree

2009-04-01T03:48:00.000-07:00

Kids may benefit from watching their parents resolve problems, study finds

By Linda Carroll
msnbc.com contributor

MSNBC.com

Quarreling couples, relax. It may be OK to argue in front of your kids — as long as you fight fair.

Experts have long cautioned that children can experience serious psychological harm if they witness their parents fighting. But a new study, published in the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, suggests that children might actually benefit from watching their parents sort problems out.

“In some ways, kids benefit from seeing their parents disagreeing — and even being mildly angry,” says study co-author Patrick Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. “It gives them a lesson on how you can come to a mutually acceptable solution through compromise.”

The new study may ease the guilt of well-meaning parents who aren’t able to hide every dispute from their children. “I think the conclusion of this study — that not all marital conflict is destructive to children — may come as a relief to parents,” says Alan E. Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University.

That’s true for Brett Moshure, a 45-year-old executive consultant in Morgan Hill, Calif. Moshure and his wife agreed early on that they would never argue about the kids in front of the kids. But every other topic was fair game.

Sometimes things get heated, but Moshure wouldn’t do it any other way.

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image by Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com

Skype to launch service for iPhone, BlackBerry

2009-03-31T01:50:00.000-07:00

By Sinead Carew

Reuters.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Skype, the Internet telephone unit of eBay Inc, is planning to launch its service for iPhone users on Tuesday and for BlackBerry in May as part of its effort to expand beyond desktop computers.

Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.

Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durchslag said he has high hopes for the application's success on Apple Inc's popular iPhone as he expects Skype's most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to new and existing customers.

"The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There's a pent-up demand," Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday.

In May it will launch Skype for Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, which popularized mobile email. It has already announced Skype for Nokia phones and for phones based on Android, Google Inc's mobile system, and Windows Mobile, from Microsoft Corp.

CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp's MySpace.

One of Skype's unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers use to the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need duplicate lists.

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photo: An Apple iPhone sits on a display stand during its launch at a Singtel store in Singapore August 22, 2008. (REUTERS/Vivek Prakash)

Obama Tells GM Boss, 'You're Fired'

2009-03-30T20:24:00.001-07:00

By Tony Borroz

Wired.com

The Obama administration, as part of the government's ongoing bailout of the auto industry, has ushered General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner out of the building and replaced him with board member Fritz Henderson.

The president, in an address this morning, said Wagoner's ouster was not a reflection on his stewardship of the beleaguered automaker but "rather a recognition that it will take a new vision and new direction to create the GM of the future." Considering GM's stock plunged from around $90 a share to less than $3 a share since Wagoner moved into the corner office eight years ago, maybe the ouster was a reflection of his leadership.

Still, the move stunned a lot of people, with Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm speaking for them when she called Wagoner "a sacrificial lamb." But Wagoner, who is known for optimism, remained upbeat.

"GM is a great company with a storied history," he said in an e-mail to employees. "Ignore the doubters, because I know it is also a company with a great future."

The press is going nuts with the story. The New York Times said the administration's move "amounts to a do-or-die ultimatum for the struggling automobile industry." The Detroit News is blunt in saying, "Obama tells automakers: No more excuses." In an editorial, the News slammed the ouster as a political move by a president who "needs a scalp to wave before both a Congress growing queasy about federal bailouts and the automaker's bondholders, who aren't happy about granting a huge discount on their GM debt."

The bottom line is Uncle Sam told Wagoner he'd have to take a hike if the floundering automaker was to get any more cash out of taxpayers. In addition to telling Wagoner to hit the bricks, the Obama administration wants to push Chrysler into a shotgun wedding with Fiat — or any other suitor that comes along.

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Photo: Wagoner with the Volt concept (General Motors)

Thai fireman in 'spider-man' rescue of autistic boy

2009-03-25T02:43:00.000-07:00

Yahoo.com

BANGKOK (AFP) – A Thai fireman turned superhero when he dressed up as comic-book character Spider-Man to coax a frightened eight-year-old from a balcony, police said Tuesday.

Teachers at a special needs school in Bangkok alerted authorities on Monday when an autistic pupil, scared of attending his first day at school, sat out on the third-floor ledge and refused to come inside, a police sergeant told AFP.

Despite teachers' efforts to beckon the boy inside, he refused to budge until his mother mentioned her son's love of superheroes, prompting fireman Sonchai Yoosabai to take a novel approach to the problem.

The rescuer dashed back to his fire station and made a quick change into a Spider-Man costume before returning to the boy, he said.nakin (Oakland Police Dept via Getty Images)

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photo: A sufing "Spider-man". A Thai fireman turned superhero when he dressed up as comic-book character (AFP/File)

Bond Girls: The Best and Worst

2009-03-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

"Quantum of Solace'' hits DVD today, so we're rating the bombshells -- and bombs -- of Bond girls past, from Octopussy to Honey Ryder, with a special shout-out to the newest girls on the block, Gemma Arterton and Olga Kurylenko

By Joshua Rich

EW.com

Two newly minted Bond babes, Gemma Arterton (left) and Olga Kurylenko, star with Daniel Craig in the latest 007 flick, Quantum of Solace.

In the Marc Forster-helmed movie, Arterton (RocknRolla) plays the doomed Agent Fields while Kurylenko (Max Payne) takes on the role of Bond's fiery love interest with a score to settle. Take a gander through our best and worst Bond-babe galleries, and then vote on whether or not you think the newbies make the grade or simply fade.

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photo: Dave Hogan/Getty Images; Patrice Lapoirie/Maxppp /Landov