The carcass of a 40-foot sperm whale that apparently died as it neared the shore off of Pompano Beach on Sunday afternoon later drifted back out to sea, ending a drama that had drawn the attention of beachgoers and scientists alike.
The whale was spotted about noon offshore near the 600 block of North Ocean Boulevard, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
Read the full story at Sun-Sentinel.com.
Apple (AAPL) sold 42.8 million iPad tablets into channels through the first three quarters of 2012 and the most recent estimates suggest the company could ship 26 million more iPads during the holiday quarter. If Apple does manage to hit that record, total iPad shipments on the year would reach 68.8 million units. As impressive as that would be, however, DisplaySearch analyst David Hsieh thinks 2013 iPad sales could climb as high as 100 million units as iPad mini demand explodes.
[More from BGR: Has the iPhone peaked? Apple’s iPhone 4S seen outselling iPhone 5]
In 2012, Hsieh estimates that 9.7-inch iPad panel shipments — that is, shipments of iPad displays from suppliers to Apple’s manufacturing partners — will have totaled 70 million units, including 23 million iPad 2 displays and 47 million third- and fourth-generation iPad panels. He also believes Apple’s suppliers will ship 13.6 million iPad mini displays by the end of the year.
[More from BGR: Sony’s PlayStation 4 could lose to the next Xbox before it’s even released]
Next year, however, the analyst sees Apple hitting a major milestone.
“In 2013, it is likely that Apple will adjust its product portfolio to meet the strong demand for the iPad mini,” Hsieh wrote in a post on DisplaySearch’s blog. ”We believe that Apple is targeting total iPad shipments of 100 million in 2013, half accounted for by the iPad mini, and 40 million new iPad and 10 million iPad 2, as production continues at least until the middle of 2013.”
DisplaySearch estimates that more than 170 million tablets will ship in 2013 and Apple’s iPad will account for 60% of the market.
This article was originally published by BGR
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
President Obama last night told the stricken residents of Newtown, Conn., who lost 20 children and six educators to a madman’s gunfire, “We can’t tolerate this anymore.”
“These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change,’’ he added, grimly noting it was the fourth time in his presidency he’d spoken to the nation about a mass shooting.
“The fourth time we’ve hugged survivors,’’ he said. “The fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims.”
He did not mention the mounting calls for stronger gun controls in the wake of the tragedy, but noted, “There have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children. Much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’’
AFP/Getty Images
The president addresses the devastated community
of Newtown, Conn., at a
vigil yesterday
for grieving
families.
Reuters
Shocked kids clung tightly to plush toys donated by the Red Cross.
He predicted, “We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. . . .But that can’t be an excuse for inaction.”
He added, “If there is even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town . . . surely, we have an obligation to try.’’
He vowed to “use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens . . . in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this . . . We can’t accept events like this as routine.’’
The president asked, “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is the price of our freedom?”
He told his grief-stricken audience, “I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone . . . that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you.”
Loud sobbing was heard from the audience throughout the speech.
The president cited the heroics of the six Sandy Hook Elementary School educators who gave their lives trying to shield the children.
He closed by reading of the names of all those murdered.
Before speaking to about 1,000 people at the interfaith service in the auditorium of the town’s high school, Obama met privately with relatives of about 15 of those killed by 20-year-old Adam Lanza.
Additional reporting by Lia Eustachewich and Julia Marsh in Newtown, Conn., and Gerry Shields in Washington, DC
Five years ago this month, the Great Recession began. Which leads to this question: How much longer until South Florida can erase the damage?
Officially, the recession ended in June 2009. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the national economy began contracting in December 2007 and did not grow again for 19 months. Using taxable sales figures, it’s probably safe to say South Florida experienced a longer downturn. Overall spending contracted for the first time in South Florida in March 2007 and didn’t post a year-over-year gain until February 2010.
“Miami was at the forefront of the housing boom and bust,’’ said Karl Kuykendall, an economist who follows South Florida for IHS Global Insight. “It’s no surprise Miami was early into the recession and somewhat late coming out.”
But whatever the actual duration of the downturn, it doesn’t take much math to realize the economy still feels shaky. South Florida lost its first net job in more than two years in October, when a tiny decline of 300 payroll slots interrupted 26 months of consistent expansion. The upcoming November report out Friday will show whether the losing streak continues.
And while unemployment is off near-record highs set in April 2010, more than 180,000 South Floridians were listed as officially out of work in the last count. That’s almost 90 percent more than the 98,000 people listed as out of work in the first month of the recession.
Tourism posted an early recovery, particularly in Miami-Dade, where foreign visitors helped hotels shake-off a sharp drop in U.S. vacationers and business travelers. But the recession lingers in Broward’s tourism industry, which is just now retiring past records.
Housing suffered the most dramatic crash throughout the recession and was also the last of the major indicators to begin its recovery. The Case-Shiller real estate index pegs May 2006 as the peak of the bubble in South Florida. Although each neighborhood is different, the average South Florida house worth $200,000 that month would have fallen down to $97,600 by the time the market hit bottom just over a year ago, in November 2011.
Values have recovered 9 percent since then, meaning the same house should be worth just over $105,0000. That’s a loss of 47 percent over six years.
Recovering from that kind of crash takes time, and five years clearly isn’t enough. To give a hint of the progress underway, Business Monday checked into businesses and residents on the frontlines of the recovery. The reports follow:
Housing
After fending off a foreclosure and battling to get out from under an onerous option ARM mortgage, Marie and Wilson Destin recently worked out a loan modification on their 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house near Miami Lakes.
With the help of Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida, a nonprofit agency that helps people navigate the Byzantine home financing landscape, the Destins cut their monthly mortgage payment to $1,500 from $1,900 under a new fixed-rate loan.
In 2006, when the housing market was booming, the Haitian-American couple had taken out an option ARM loan on the property, which they had owned for several years.
“Somebody came to the house and approached me with an option ARM loan,’’ said Wilson Destin. “They said I would pay less.’’
The option ARM — which has triggered financial woes for thousands of homeowners during the downturn — allowed for flexible payments and negative amortization, practically encouraging people to defer payments.
Police were investigating an accident involving a 7-year-old who was struck by a vehicle in a Lauderhill neighborhood late Saturday, Lauderhill Police spokesman Rick Rocco said.
The vehicle and its driver, who has not yet been identified, remained on scene after the incident near the intersection of Northwest 27th Court and 56th Avenue.
The child was transported to Broward Health Medical Center in critical condition immediately after the incident, police said.
Details of the accident were not immediately available.
This post will be updated as we receive more information.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – A prominent U.S. gun control group on Wednesday sued a gun auction website it says is linked to a mass shooting at a Wisconsin spa in October and the stalker slaying of a woman near Chicago in 2011.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence alleges that the design of armslist.com facilitates illegal online sales to unlawful gun buyers with no background checks, and enables users to evade laws that permit private sellers to sell guns only to residents of their own state.
“We as a nation are better than an anonymous Internet gun market where killers and criminals can easily get guns,” said Jonathan Lowy, the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project Director, in a statement.
The wrongful death lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel, 36, an immigrant from the Czech Republic who was shot and killed last year by Demetry Smirnov, a stalker.
The suit, which the Brady Center says is the first of its kind, alleges that Smirnov illegally bought the gun from a private seller he located through armslist.com.
Vesel was killed in the parking lot of the Chicago-area Czechoslovak Heritage Museum, where she was a volunteer preparing for a celebration in memory of Czech-American Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
Cermak was slain with a handgun during an attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
A representative for website owner Armslist, LLC was not immediately available for comment. The company is based in Noble, Oklahoma, according to public records.
The website includes a “terms of use” page on which users must promise they are age 18 or older and will not use the site for illegal purposes.
The Brady Center said that the case does not infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, noting that 74 percent of National Rifle Association members believe that no guns should be sold without a criminal background check.
A representative for the NRA was not immediately available for comment.
Radcliffe Haughton, who killed his estranged wife and two other women and wounded four others before killing himself in a shooting in a Milwaukee suburb on October 21, also got his weapon through armslist.com, according to Wisconsin officials.
Haughton, who was under a restraining order for domestic violence, avoided a background check through a “lethal loophole” by buying a gun through the website, according to a letter to Armslist sent by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Wisconsin U.S. Representative Gwen Moore on October 26.
Sales conducted over the Internet also have been linked to mass killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. In 1999 eBay announced it was prohibiting online gun sales, according to the Brady Center lawsuit.
Craigslist did the same in 2007. Amazon.com and Google AdWords also prohibits the listing of firearms for sale, the suit says.
An undercover investigation of online gun sales by New York City last year found that 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a firearm to a buyer who said he probably could not pass a background check.
(Reporting By Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Greg McCune and Xavier Briand)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
As morning turned to afternoon on Friday, further details continued to emerge from Newtown, CT, a tight-knit community shaken by a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of innocent students and teachers, in addition to the gunman, reportedly identified as Adam Lanza.
RELATED: President Fights Tears as He Addresses Nation
As President Barack Obama touched on in his tear-jerking press conference, this is not the first time the nation has witnessed a tragedy of this kind. The recent mass shooting at an Aurora, CO movie theater is just one instance of such violence. Columbine High School and Virginia Tech also resonate as prime examples.
Hollywood's biggest stars were quick to react to the news on Twitter and made an outcry for stricter gun control regulations.
Watch the video for ET's complete coverage of today's biggest headline.
RELATED: Celebs Tweet Reactions to CT School Shooting
The Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,” which comes out Wednesday, has already received several Best Picture awards from film critics’ groups, including the one in New York. But that’s no reason not to see it.
Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s follow-up to their Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker” is far superior to the earlier film — a gripping work but also a painstakingly detailed one that is more intellectually and morally serious about the War on Terror than any other Hollywood film yet made.
It lays out how a female CIA agent, named “Maya” and played by Jessica Chastain, pieced together information from a variety of sources, including al Qaeda prisoners who had been waterboarded, to learn of the existence of the bin Laden courier who ultimately led to his boss’s death.
Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
This scene from “Zero Dark Thirty” was made possible by the waterboarding of terrorists.
AP
“Zero Dark Thirty” is so drenched in procedural detail that its message may appear ambiguous at first glance, and the hacks are already calling it a “Rorschach test” that will confirm whatever view of torture you held going into the theater.
It isn’t. Not if you’re paying attention.
After seeing it, I can report that it is a clear vindication for the Bush administration’s view of the War on Terror. Moreover, “ZD30” subtly presents President Obama and by extension the entire Democratic establishment and its supporters in the media as hindering the effort to find bin Laden by politicizing harsh interrogation techniques and striking a pose against them that was naive at best.
Since the film is based on unpublished interviews with primary sources, it is unusually difficult to fact-check. But as information about the reality behind the story emerges, so far “ZD30” is standing up factually and is consistent with relevant statements by former CIA Director Leon Panetta and lawmakers with access to classified information about the raid.
The left is alarmed. Glenn Greenwald, without even having seen the film, wrote a piece headlined, “Zero Dark Thirty: New Torture-Glorifying Film Wins Raves,” then finished up by comparing Bigelow to (of course) Hitler’s favorite director Leni Riefenstahl.
Does “ZD30” glorify torture? No, because no one is tortured in it. The worst procedure shown is waterboarding, and while this is an extremely unpleasant process (it’s not even easy to watch a movie simulation of it), it isn’t torture.
Any reasonable definition of torture must exclude procedures that sane people would undergo on a lark. Journalists such as Kaj Larsen and Christopher Hitchens have volunteered to be waterboarded in exchange for nothing more than a cocktail-party anecdote and some copy. (Indeed, Larsen paid $800 for the privilege.) A mixed-martial-arts trainer named Ed Clay volunteered to be waterboarded because he was upset about the general tenor of discussion during a Republican presidential debate and wanted to prove something or other.
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Entrepreneurs from around the world took the stage during this packed week of entrepreneurship events in Miami: Florida International University’s Americas Venture Capital Conference (known as AVCC), HackDay, Wayra’s Global DemoDay and Endeavor’s International Selection Panel.
The events, all part of the first Innovate MIA week, also put the spotlight on Miami as it continues to try to develop into a technology hub for the Americas.
“While I like art, I absolutely love what is happening today... The time has come to become a tech hub in Miami,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez, who kicked off the venture capital conference on Thursday. He told the audience of 450 investors and entrepreneurs about the county’s $1 million investment in the Launch Pad Tech Accelerator in downtown Miami.
“I have no doubt that this gathering today will produce new ideas and new business ventures that will put our community on a fast track to becoming a center for innovative, tech-driven entrepreneurship,” Gimenez said.
Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and a founder of TechStars, cautioned that won’t happen overnight. Building a startup community can take five, 10, even 15 years, and those leading the effort, who should be entrepreneurs themselves, need to take the long-term view, he told the audience via video. “You can create very powerful entrepreneurial ecosystems in any city... I’ve spent some time in Miami, I think you are off to a great start.”
Throughout the two-day AVCC at the JW Brickell Marriott, as well as the Endeavor and Wayra events, entrepreneurs from around the world pitched their companies, hoping to persuade investors to part with some of their green.
And in some cases, the entrepreneurs could win money, too. During the venture capital conference, 29 companies —including eight from South Florida such as itMD, which connects doctors, patients and imaging facilities to facilitate easy access of records — competed for more than $50,000 in cash and prizes through short “elevator’’ pitches. Each took questions from the judges, then demoed their products or services in the conference “Hot Zone,” a room adjoining the ballroom. Some companies like oLyfe, a platform to organize what people share online, are hoping to raise funds for expansion into Latin America. Others like Ideame, a trilingual crowdfunding platform, were laser focused on pan-Latin American opportunities.
Winning the grand prize of $15,000 in cash and art was Trapezoid Digital Security of Miami, which provides hardware-based security solutions for enterprise and cloud environments. Fotopigeon of Tampa, a photo-sharing and printing service targeting the military and prison niches, scored two prizes.
The conference offered opportunities to hear formal presentations on current trends — among them the surge of start-ups in Brazil; the importance of mobile apps and overheated company valuations — and informal opportunities to connect with fellow entrepreneurs.
Speakers included Gaston Legorburu of SapientNitro, Albert Santalo of CareCloud and Juan Diego Calle of .Co Internet, all South Florida entrepreneurs. Jerry Haar, executive director of FIU’s Pino Global Entrepreneurship Center, which produced the conference with a host of sponsors, said the organizers worked hard to make the conference relevant to both the local and Latin American audience, with panels on funding and recruiting for startups, for instance.
A Miami-area photographer who secretly videotaped children while they changed clothes in his home studio was sentenced in federal court Friday to 10 years in prison.
Diego Tobias Matrajt, 37, pleaded guilty in September to distribution and possession of child pornography.
Last February, Matrajt distributed 10 images of child pornography to an undercover agent by using a peer-to-peer file sharing program, according to court records.
In April, FBI agents did a search of his home and computers, uncovering 26 video images of boys and girls changing clothes alone in a guest bedroom with their genitalia exposed, records show.
Matrajt admitted surreptitiously video recording children under the age of 12 as they changed clothes in the guest bedroom during photo shoots.
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