Cesar Millan Calls Suicide Attempt a 'Dark Moment'















11/17/2012 at 10:30 AM EST







Cesar Millan with dog Daddy


Meredith Jenks


After making a bombshell revelation about his attempted suicide in 2010, Cesar Millan is once again speaking out.

Millan, 43, who hosted National Geographic's Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan until the series ended in September, opened up about his battle with depression – and the overdose that nearly took his life – for Cesar Millan: The Real Story, a documentary airing on Nat Geo Wild on Nov. 25.

"I have always been honest with my fans, which means being open about any struggles I have had along the way," he says in a statement. "It was important for me to explain all the aspects that have led to my new chapter. Although it was a dark moment for me, it showed me that I still needed to be here and I have a lot more to do."

Millan worked through his depression after the death of his dog, Daddy, and split from his wife, with the help of work and exercise. Now, two years later, he hopes that his story will help others in similar situations.

"It made me become aware of the pain I needed to deal with and to start the healing process," he says. "I am sharing this in my bio to help others who might feel like I did at that point."

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EU drug regulator OKs Novartis' meningitis B shot

LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.

There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.

Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.

In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.

Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.

Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.

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Wall Street Week Ahead: Going off "cliff" with a bungee cord

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The 1987 crash. The Y2K bug. The debt ceiling debacle of 2011.


All these events, in the end, turned out to be buying opportunities for stocks. So will the "fiscal cliff," some investors say as they watch favorite stocks tumble during the political give-and-take happening in Washington.


The first round of talks aimed at avoiding the "fiscal cliff" caused a temporary rise in equities on Friday, signaling Wall Street's recent declines could be a buying opportunity. The gains were small and sentiment remains weak, but it suggests hope for market bulls.


Though shares ended moderately higher on Friday, it was not enough to offset losses for the week. The S&P was down 1.5 percent, while both the Dow and the Nasdaq fell 1.8 percent.


The S&P 500 is down more than 5 percent in the seven sessions that followed President Barack Obama's re-election. Uncertainty arose as attention turned to Washington's task of dealing with mandated tax hikes and spending cuts that could take the U.S. economy back into recession.


Some see the market's move as an overreaction to hyperbolic headlines about policy gridlock in Washington, believing stocks may start to rebound in what should be a quiet few days ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next Thursday.


"It just doesn't seem to make any sense that you suddenly wake up the day after the election and realize we've got a fiscal cliff," said Krishna Kumar, partner at New York hedge fund Goose Hollow Alpha Advisors.


Not long ago the S&P was on target for its second-best year in the last 10, riding a 17 percent advance in 2012. That's been halved to about 8 percent, which isn't bad but disappointing compared with just a month ago.


Investors have been selling the year's winners. Apple is down 25 percent from its peak above $700. General Electric is down 14 percent; Google has lost 16 percent. Overall, the stocks that make up the top 10 percent of performers in the month prior to Election Day have been the worst performers since, according to Bespoke Investment Group of Harrison, New York.


"I think it's a good opportunity to be long stocks at these levels," said Kumar.


Hikes on capital gains and dividend taxes are on the line, and Obama has dug in his heels on what he sees as a mandate to make the tax code more progressive.


He seems to have the upper hand in dealings with Congress because Republican lawmakers don't want to see tax rates increase, which is what will happen if no solution is found by the beginning of 2013. Republicans don't want to take the blame for driving the economy over the cliff.


The current crisis is similar to last year's fight to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, which led to the downgrade of the United States' top credit rating in early August 2011.


During the dealings, the S&P 500 lost 18.8 percent between its peak in July 2011 and its bottom in August. As the market slid, the political standoff badly hurt investors' confidence in Washington, setting off a spike in volatility.


In the end a deal was announced that raised the ceiling and put off longer-term fiscal decisions until January 1, 2013, setting the stage for today's "fiscal cliff" crisis.


After staying flat through September 2011, the S&P 500 jumped 31 percent between its October low and the end of March.


BUY THE DIP?


Gridlock in Washington and all that could possibly go wrong with the economy if a deal is not reached have grabbed the headlines, but the negotiations leave room for stock market gains. Congressional leaders said Friday they will work through the Thanksgiving holiday recess to find a solution.


"The debate over how to solve (the fiscal cliff) may be more productive than is commonly recognized," said Brad Lipsig, senior portfolio manager at UBS Financial Services in New York.


"The U.S. is facing a major debt overhang, and serious steps toward addressing it might ultimately be viewed as a positive for future growth," he said. "The market may recognize this and, after a time of hand wringing, recover from the concerns with a renewed sense of optimism."


The recent selling took the S&P 500's relative strength index - a technical measure of internal strength - below 30 this week, indicating the benchmark is oversold and due for a rebound.


The RSI in four of the 10 S&P sectors - utilities, telecoms, consumer staples and technology - is below 30 and the highest RSI reading, for the consumer discretionary sector, is below 40, suggesting a bounce is in store.


"What I want to do is what we did during the decline following the budget negotiations in the summer of 2011: The lower the stock market goes, the more I want to own stock," said Brian Reynolds, chief market strategist at New York-based Rosenblatt Securities.


"If we go off the cliff it will be with a bungee cord attached," he said.


KEEP CALM AND HEDGE


Volatility is expected to rise through the end of November and to spike in late December if no agreement on the fiscal cliff is reached in Congress. Alongside comes opportunity for those with high risk tolerance.


"Recently, volatility has increased in the market overall. You can't really pick it up in the VIX yet, but I think as we get through November, I think you're likely to see the VIX be at a relatively higher level," said Bruce Zaro, chief technical strategist at Delta Global Asset Management in Boston.


In 2011, the VIX averaged 19.2 in July and 35 in August. So far this month the average is 17.8 and it is expected to spike if negotiations on the cliff drag into late next month.


"Looking at the range of possibilities, I would say any of them would be better than sitting here waiting. I would even put going off the fiscal cliff in that category," said Jill Cuniff, president of Seattle-based Edge Asset Management Inc, which manages about $20 billion.


"But we don't believe Congress will let that happen; there's going to be some middle ground here."


(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Jonathan Spincer, additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)


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Israel Sticks to Tough Approach in Conflict With Hamas





TEL AVIV — With rockets landing on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Friday and the Egyptian prime minister making a solidarity visit to Gaza, the accelerating conflict between Israel and Hamas — reminiscent in many ways of so many previous battles — has the makings of a new kind of Israeli-Palestinian face-off.




The combination of longer-range and far deadlier rockets in the hands of more radicalized Palestinians, the arrival in Gaza and Sinai from North Africa of other militants pressuring Hamas to fight more, and the growing tide of anti-Israel fury in a region where authoritarian rulers have been replaced by Islamists means that Israel is engaging in this conflict with a different set of challenges.


The Middle East of 2012 is not what it was in late 2008, the last time Israel mounted a military invasion to reduce the rocket threat from Gaza. Many analysts and diplomats outside Israel say the country today needs a different approach to Hamas and the Palestinians based more on acknowledging historic grievances and shifting alliances.


“As long as the crime of dispossession and refugeehood that was committed against the Palestinian people in 1947-48 is not redressed through a peaceful and just negotiation that satisfies the legitimate rights of both sides, we will continue to see enhancements in both the determination and the capabilities of Palestinian fighters — as has been the case since the 1930s, in fact,” Rami G. Khouri, a professor at the American University of Beirut, wrote in an online column. “Only stupid or ideologically maniacal Zionists fail to come to terms with this fact.”


But the government in Israel and the vast majority of its people have drawn a very different conclusion. Their dangerous neighborhood is growing still more dangerous, they agree. That means not concessions, but being tougher in pursuit of deterrence, and abandoning illusions that a Jewish state will ever be broadly accepted here.


“There is a theory, which I believe, that Hamas doesn’t want a peaceful solution and only wants to keep the conflict going forever until somehow in their dream they will have all of Israel,” Eitan Ben Eliyahu, a former leader of the Israeli Air Force, said in a telephone briefing. “There is a good chance we will go into Gaza on the ground again.”


What is striking in listening to the Israelis discuss their predicament is how similar the debate sounds to so many previous ones, despite the changed geopolitical circumstances. In most minds here, the changes do not demand a new strategy, simply a redoubled old one.


The operative metaphor is often described as “cutting the grass,” meaning a task that must be performed regularly and has no end. There is no solution to security challenges, officials here say, only delays and deterrence. That is why the idea of one day attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, even though such an attack would set the nuclear program back only two years, is widely discussed as a reasonable option. That is why frequent raids in the West Bank and surveillance flights over Lebanon never stop.


And that is why this week’s operation in Gaza is widely viewed as having been inevitable, another painful but necessary maintenance operation that, officials here say, will doubtless not be the last.


There are also those who believe that the regional upheavals are improving Israel’s ability to carry out deterrence. One retired general who remains close to the military and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that with Syria torn apart by civil war, Hezbollah in Lebanon discredited because of its support for the Syrian government, and Egypt so weakened economically, Israel should not worry about anything but protecting its civilians.


“Should we let our civilians be bombed because the Arab world is in trouble?” he asked.


So much was happening elsewhere in the region — the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, the Syrian civil war, dramatic changes in Yemen and elections in Tunisia — that a few rockets a day that sent tens of thousands of Israeli civilians into bomb shelters drew little attention. But in the Israeli view, the necessity of a Gaza operation has been growing steadily throughout the Arab Spring turmoil.


In 2009, after the Israeli invasion pushed Hamas back and killed about 1,400 people in Gaza, 200 rockets hit Israel. The same was true in 2010. But last year the number rose to 600, and before this week the number this year was 700, according to the Israeli military. The problem went beyond rockets to mines planted near the border aimed at Israeli military jeeps and the digging of explosive-filled tunnels.


“In 2008 we managed to minimize rocket fire from Gaza significantly,” said Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman. “We started that year with 100 rockets a week and ended it with two a week. We were able to give people in our south two to three years. But the grass has grown, and other things have as well. Different jihadist ideologies have found their way into Gaza, including quite a few terrorist organizations. More weapons have come in, including the Fajr-5, which is Iranian made and can hit Tel Aviv. That puts nearly our entire population in range. So we reached a point where we cannot act with restraint any longer.”


Gazans see events in a very different light. The problem, they say, comes from Israel: Israeli drones fill the Gazan skies, Israeli gunboats strafe their waters, Palestinian militants are shot at from the air, and the Gaza border areas are declared off limits by Israel with the risk of death from Israeli gunfire.


But there is little dissent in Israel about the Gaza policy. This week leaders of the leftist opposition praised the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari, the Hamas military commander, on Wednesday. He is viewed here as the equivalent of Osama bin Laden. The operation could go on for many days before there is any real dissent.


The question here, nonetheless, is whether the changed regional circumstances will make it harder to “cut the grass” in Gaza this time and get out. A former top official who was actively involved in the last Gaza war and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it looked to him as if Hamas would not back down as easily this time.


“They will not stop until enough Israelis are killed or injured to create a sense of equality or balance,” he said. “If a rocket falls in the middle of Tel Aviv, that will be a major success. But this government will go back at them hard. I don’t see this ending in the next day or two.”


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Honey Boo Boo Gets Trashy and Some Really Cute Dumb Ways to Die
















We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:


RELATED: Catching Kangaroos Seems Pretty Easy; ‘The Dark Knight’ Goes Pee-wee













So, we’re not quite sure what kind of spirit moved artist Jason Mecier to create a Honey Boo Boo portrait from 25 pounds of trash. But it did. And we’re thankful (sort of?): 


RELATED: Dating Is Just So Depressing


RELATED: A Dubstep Birthday for Michael Jackson and One Soggy Koala


And thank god for YouTube. Besides going to America’s shopping malls, how else would we find terrible parents and gullible children? And how else would we know that we were entertained by these fascinating creatures? 


RELATED: Ai Weiwei’s ‘Gangnam Style’ Isn’t Bad


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Now that the Dark Knight trilogy is over, aren’t you in the mood for something lighter? Another prequel? How about a fan-made video (which we’re guessing took hours and hours and footage from the 90s and beyond) which imagines all Dark Knight‘s characters in high school?


OMGosh Melbourne Metro this is like the cutest video on earth! You guys are adorable, like we’re talking totes adorable squeeeee—Oh wait. We take that back. We take all of it back. 


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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American Idol Judges Are All Smiles in New Image






Only on People.com








11/16/2012 at 12:30 PM EST







From left: Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Ryan Seacrest, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban


FOX


It's a wrap! American Idol's new judging panel just finished auditions for Season 12, and viewers will see which contestants earned golden tickets when the show debuts in exactly two months.

A Fox rep confirms that judges Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban, along with returning judge Randy Jackson and host Ryan Seacrest, completed the last round of auditions on Wednesday and Thursday aboard the Queen Mary, which is docked in Long Beach, Calif.

Next up for the judges – who are all smiles alongside Seacrest in an exclusive new Idol photo – is Hollywood Week, when they will whittle down the contestant pool to determine which singers will move on to the live shows.

Despite an on-set spat between Carey and Minaj during auditions in Charlotte, N.C., in early October, the judges have been getting along well during this latest round.

"Mariah and Nicki sat next to each other yesterday," an Idol source said Thursday. "There really is some great chemistry among all the judges."

The new panel has been working long hours, adds the source, but "they've found what they think is some seriously superstar talent out there."

The Long Beach set had its fill of special, expressive moments too, such as when an 8-year-old girl showed up dressed like Minaj – complete with a pink and blue wig – to support her auditioning aunt.

"Nicki told her she loved her color palette and talked to her about how important it is stay in school," says the source. "The little girl sang 'Starships' for Nicki, who let the girl and her brother sit on her lap for the audition. It was really cute."

The new season of Idol makes its debut over two nights, on Jan. 16 and 17.

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EU drug regulator OKs Novartis' meningitis B shot

LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.

There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.

Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.

In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.

Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.

Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.

Read More..

Wall Street rises as Republicans call talks constructive

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Friday after Republicans said their meeting with Democratic President Barack Obama about the "fiscal cliff" was constructive and that they were prepared to put higher revenue on the table if there were also significant spending cuts.


All three major U.S. stock indexes erased losses to turn higher following comments by Republican House Speaker John Boehner and others who discussed with Obama ways to avert sharp tax increases and spending cuts that would take effect next year. Analysts have said the fiscal cliff could tip the economy into recession.


"To show our seriousness, we've put revenue on the table as long as it's accompanied by significant spending cuts," Boehner told reporters at the White House.


Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also offered conditional backing for new revenue but said reforms to social safety net programs are also necessary.


"I would call this a PR stunt, but just the fact that people are reacting to it this positively shows that the market is oversold and is seeking a reason to rally," said James Dailey, portfolio manager at TEAM Asset Strategy Fund in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.


"If we fail to hold onto (gains) and hit new lows later today, then that will definitely be very alarming."


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 40.13 points, or 0.32 percent, at 12,582.51. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 4.76 points, or 0.35 percent, at 1,358.09. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 10.09 points, or 0.36 percent, at 2,847.02.


The S&P is down 4.3 percent over the past two weeks, with such sectors as financials <.gspf> and materials <.gspm> among the hardest hit. The S&P and the Dow are currently down about 1.5 percent for the week while the Nasdaq is down about 2.2 percent.


Dell Inc's stock slumped 7.8 percent to $8.81 and was the biggest percentage decliner on the S&P 500 a day after reporting a steep drop in its quarterly profit.


Shares of Penn National Gaming Inc jumped 30 percent to $48.65 after the owner of gaming and pari-mutuel properties said late Thursday it will split its business into two separate publicly traded companies - a gaming focused real estate investment trust and a gaming operator.


Sears Holdings Corp late Thursday reported a quarterly loss that was narrower than expected, but same-store sales fell on weak demand for electronics, sending shares down 16.7 percent to $48.72.


J.M. Smucker Co reported a rise in second-quarter earnings, helped by a drop in commodity costs, but the stock fell 2.9 percent to $82.94.


(Editing by Kenneth Barry)


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John Duffy of 3C Interactive says he asks job candidates to describe what their first months on the job would be like, partly to “learn what their expectations are, and where they think we’re at.”



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How Obama’s Tech Team Helped Win the Election
















The Obama campaign‘s technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.


Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they’d lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.













They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, StallionDB, was fixing databases but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn’t have time.


They had been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy’s Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.


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And that was the point. “Game day” was Oct. 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign’s chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. “We worked through every possible disaster situation,” Reed said. “We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built.”


Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple of game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. “You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you’re doing,” he said, “but you’re calm because you know you can handle your sh–.”


The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent–by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s–from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago’s own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe especially these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. “I think the Republicans f—– up in the hubris department,” Reed told me. “I know we had the best technology team I’ve ever worked with, but we didn’t know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened.”


In fact, the day after the Oct. 21 game day, Amazon services–on which the whole campaign’s tech presence was built–went down. “We didn’t have any downtime because we had done that scenario already,” Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, Oct. 29, threatening the campaign’s whole East Coast infrastructure. “We created a hot backup of all our applications to U.S.-west in preparation for U.S.-east to go down hard,” Reed said.


“We knew what to do,” Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. “We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca.”


The New Chicago Machine vs. the Grand Old Party


Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama’s perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats’ vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp’s database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR, because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal.


The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn’t an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company’s sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp’s software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it’s not, like, a game changer. It’s just a nice thing to have.


So, it was with more than a hint of schadenfreude that Reed’s team hears that Orca crashed early on Election Day. Later reports posted by rank-and-file volunteers describe chaos descending on the polling locations as only a fraction of the tens of thousands of volunteers organized for the effort were able to use it properly to turn out the vote.


Of course, they couldn’t snicker too loudly. Obama’s campaign had created a similar app in 2008 called Houdini. As detailed in Sacha Issenberg’s groundbreaking book, Victory Lab, Houdini’s rollout went great until about 9:30 a.m. on the day of the election. Then it crashed in much the same way that Orca did.


In 2012, Democrats had a new version, built by the vendor NGP VAN. It was called Gordon, after the man who killed Houdini. But the 2008 failure, among other needs, drove the 2012 Obama team to bring technologists in-house.


With Election Day bearing down on them, they knew they could not go down. And yet they had to accommodate much more strain on the systems as interest in the election picked up toward the end, as it always does. Mark Trammell, who worked for Twitter during its period of exponential growth, thought it would have been easy for the Obama team to fall into many of the pitfalls that the social network did back then. But while the problems of scaling both technology and culture quickly might have been similar, the stakes were much higher. A fail whale (cough) in the days leading up to or on Nov. 6 would have been neither charming nor funny. In a race that at least some people thought might be very close, it could have cost the president the election.


And, of course, the team’s only real goal was to elect the president. “We have to elect the president. We don’t need to sell our software to Oracle,” Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed’s team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are.


We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, “YOLO,” short for “You Only Live Once,” with the Obama Os. 


When Obama campaign chief Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, “Welcome to the team. Don’t f— it up.” As Election Day ended and the dust settled, it was clear: Reed had not f—– it up.


The campaign had turned out more volunteers and gotten more donors than in 2008. Sure, the field organization was more entrenched and experienced, but the difference stemmed in large part from better technology. The tech team’s key products–Dashboard, the Call Tool, the Facebook Blaster, the PeopleMatcher, and Narwhal–made it simpler and easier for anyone to engage with the president’s reelection effort.


But it wasn’t easy. Reed’s team came in as outsiders to the campaign and, by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment.


By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama’s team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I’d even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure, and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections.


YOLO: Meet the Obama Campaign’s Chief Technology Officer


If you’re a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He’s brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren’t cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he’d be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age 7, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out. 


TV news segments about cybersecurity might look lifted straight from his memories, but the b-roll they shot of darkened rooms and typing hands could not convey the sense of exhilaration he felt when he built something that works. Harper Reed got the city of Chicago to create an open and real-time feed of its transit data by reverse engineering how they served bus location information. Why? Because it made his wife Hiromi’s commute a little easier. Because it was fun to extract the data from the bureaucracy and make it available to anyone who wanted it. Because he is a nerd.


Yet Reed has friends, such as the manager of the hip-hop club Empire who, when we walk into the place early on the Friday after the election, says, “Let me grab you a shot.” Surprisingly, Harper Reed is a chilled vodka kind of guy. Unsurprisingly, Harper Reed read Steven Levy’s Hackers as a kid. Surprisingly, the manager, who is tall and handsome with rock ‘n’-roll hair flowing from beneath a red beanie, returns to show Harper photographs of his kids. They’ve known each other for a long while. They are really growing up.


As the night rolls on, and the club starts to fill up, another friend approached us: DJ Hiroki, who was spinning that night. Harper Reed knows the DJ. Of course. And Hiroki grabs us another shot. (At this point I’m thinking, “By the end of the night, either I pass out or Reed tells me something good.”) Hiroki’s been DJing at Empire for years, since Harper Reed was the crazy guy you can see on his public Facebook photos. In one shot from 2006, a skinny Reed sits in a bathtub with a beer in his hand, two thick band tattoos running across his chest and shoulders. He is not wearing any clothes. The caption reads, “Stop staring, it’s not there i swear!” What makes Harper Reed different isn’t just that the photo exists, but that he kept it public during the election.


Yet if you’ve spent a lot of time around tech people, around Burning Man devotees, around startups, around San Francisco, around BBSs, around Reddit, Harper Reed probably makes sense to you. He’s a cool hacker. He gets profiled by Mother Jones even though he couldn’t talk with Tim Murphy, their reporter. He supports open source. He likes Japan. He says fuck a lot.  He goes to hipster bars that serve vegan Mexican food, and where a quarter of the staff and clientele have mustaches.


He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you. He’s what a king of the nerds really looks like. Sure, he might grow a beard and put on a little potbelly, but he wouldn’t tuck in his T-shirt. He is not that kind of nerd. Instead, he’s got plugs in his ears and a shock of gloriously product-mussed hair and hipster glasses and he doesn’t own a long-sleeve dress shirt, in case you were wondering.


“Harper is an easy guy to underestimate because he looks funny. That might be part of his brand,” said Chris Sacca, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major Obama bundler who brought a team of more than a dozen technologists out for an Obama campaign hack day.


Reed, for his part, has the kind of self-awareness that faces outward. His self-announced flaws bristle like quills. “I always look like a f—— idiot,” Reed told me. “And if you look like an a——, you have to be really good.”


It was a lesson he learned early out in Greeley, Colo., where he grew up. “I had this experience where my dad hired someone to help him out because his network was messed up and he wanted me to watch. And this was at a very unfortunate time in my life where I was wearing very baggy pants and I had a Marilyn Manson shirt on and I looked like an a——. And my father took me aside and was like, ‘Why do you look like an a——?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.’ But I realized I was just as good as the guys fixing it,” Reed recalled. “And they didn’t look like me and I didn’t look like them. And if I’m going to do this, and look like an idiot, I have to step up. Like if we’re all at zero, I have to be at 10 because I have this stupid mustache.”


And, in fact, he may actually be at 10. Sacca said that with technical people, it’s one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers. “And it was amazing how many incredibly well regarded hackers that I follow on Twitter rejoiced and celebrated [when Reed was hired],” Sacca said. “Lots of guys who know how to spit out code, they really bought that.”


By the time Sacca brought his Silicon Valley contingent out to Chicago, he called the technical team “top notch.” After all, we’re talking about a group of people who had Eric Schmidt sitting in with them on Election Day. You had to be good. The tech world was watching.


Terry Howerton, the head of the Illinois Technology Association and a frank observer of Chicago’s tech scene, had only glowing things to say about Reed. “Harper Reed? I think he’s wicked smart,” Howerton said. “He knows how to pull people together. I think that was probably what attracted the rest of the people there. Harper is responsible for a huge percentage of the people who went over there.”


Reed’s own team found their coworkers particularly impressive. One testament to that is several startups might spin out of the connections people made at the OFA headquarters, such as Optimizely, a tool for website A/B testing, which spun out of Obama’s 2008 bid. (Sacca’s actually an investor in that one, too.)


“A CTO role is a weird thing,” said Carol Davidsen, who left Microsoft to become the product manager for Narwhal. “The primary responsibility is getting good engineers. And there really was no one else like him that could have assembled these people that quickly and get them to take a pay cut and move to Chicago.”


And yet, the very things that make Reed an interesting and beloved person are the same things that make him an unlikely pick to become the chief technology officer of the reelection campaign of the president of the United States. Political people wear khakis. They only own long-sleeve dress shirts. Their old photos on Facebook show them canvassing for local politicians and winning cross-country meets.


I asked Michael Slaby, Obama’s 2008 chief technology officer and the guy who hired Harper Reed this time around, if it wasn’t risky to hire this wild guy into a presidential campaign. “It’s funny to hear you call it risky, it seems obvious to me,” Slaby said. “It seems crazy to hire someone like me as CTO when you could have someone like Harper as CTO.”


The Nerds Are Inside the Building


The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche start-up and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can’t afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive “customer” base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing. The websites might have looked like solid consumer Web applications, but they were not under the hood.


For all the hoopla surrounding the digital savvy of President Obama‘s 2008 campaign, and as much as everyone I spoke with loved it, it was not as heavily digital or technological as it is now remembered. “Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn’t a core or even peripheral part of our strategy,” said Teddy Goff, digital director of Obama for America and a veteran of both campaigns. Think about the killer tool of that campaign, my.barackobama.com; It borrowed the “my” from MySpace


Sure, the ’08 campaign had Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, but Hughes was the spokesman for the company, not its technical guy. The ’08 campaigners, Slaby told me, had been “opportunistic users of technology” who “brute forced and bailing wired” different pieces of software together. Things worked (most of the time), but everyone, Slaby especially, knew that they needed a more stable platform for 2012.


Campaigns, however, even Howard Dean’s famous 2004 Internet-enabled run at the Democratic nomination, did not hire a bunch of technologists. Though they hired a couple, like Clay Johnson, they bought technology from outside consultants. For 2012, Slaby wanted to change all that. He wanted dozens of engineers in-house, and he got them.


“The real innovation in 2012 is that we had world-class technologists inside a campaign,” Slaby told me. “The traditional technology stuff inside campaigns had not been at the same level.” And yet the technologists, no matter how good they were, brought a different worldview, set of personalities, and expectations.


Campaigns are not just another Fortune 500 company or top 50 website. They have their own culture and demands, strange rigors and schedules. The deadlines are hard and the pressure would be enough to press the T-shirt of even the most battle-tested start-up veteran.


To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed‘s domain. “Digital” was Joe Rospars’s kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those e-mails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns’ most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-the-ground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama’s secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the president. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn’t be Billy Beane, he’d be “Google Boy.”


There’s one other interesting component to the campaign’s structure. And that’s the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams–Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson cofounded, Blue State Digital. They’re the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk–maybe 30 percent–of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD’s biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company’s principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren’t other Democratic politicians. 


One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: “He’s the Karl Rove of the Internet,” someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail–the undisputed king of the medium–Rospars is to e-mail. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama’s unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again.


The complex relationship between BSD and the Obama campaign adds another dimension to the introduction of an inside team of technologists. If all campaigns started bringing their technology in house, perhaps BSD’s tech business would begin to seem less attractive, particularly if many of the tools that such an inside team created were developed as open source products.


So, perhaps the tech team was bound to butt heads with Rospars’s digital squad. Slaby would note, too, that the organizational styles of the two operations were very different. “Campaigns aren’t traditionally that collaborative,” he said. “Departments tend to be freestanding. They are organized kind of like disaster response–siloed and super hierarchical so that things can move very quickly.”


Looking at it all from the outside, both the digital and tech teams had really good, mission-oriented reasons for wanting their way to carry the day. The tech team could say, “Hey, we’ve done this kind of tech before at larger scale and with more stability than you’ve ever had. Let us do this.” And the digital team could say, “Yeah, well, we elected the president and we know how to win, regardless of the technology stack. Just make what we ask for.”


The way that the conflict played out was over things like the user experience on the website. Jason Kunesh was the director of UX for the tech team. He had many years of consulting under his belt for big and small companies like Microsoft and LeapFrog. He, too, from an industry perspective knew what he was doing. So, he ran some user interrupt tests on the website to determine how people were experiencing www.barackobama.com. What he found was that the website wasn’t even trying to make a go at persuading voters. Rather, everyone got funneled into the fundraising “trap.” When he raised that issue with Goff and Rospars, he got a response that I imagine was something like, “Duh. Now STFU,” but perhaps in more words. And from the Goff/Rospars perspective, think about it: the system they’d developed could raise $ 3 million *from a single email.* The sorts of moves they had learned how to make had made a difference of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why was this Kunesh guy coming around trying to tell them how to run a campaign?


From Kunesh’s perspective, though, there was no reason to think that you had to run this campaign the same as you did the last one. The outsider status that the team both adopted and had applied to them gave them the right to question previous practices.


Tech sometimes had difficulty building what the Field team, a hallowed group within the campaign’s world, wanted. Most of that related to the way that they launched Dashboard, the online outreach tool. If you look at Dashboard at the end of the campaign, you see a beautifully polished product that let you volunteer any way you wanted. It’s secure and intuitive and had tremendously good uptime as the campaign drew to a close.


But that wasn’t how the first version of Dashboard looked.


The tech team’s plan was to roll out version 1 with a limited feature set, iterate, roll out version 2, iterate, and so on and so forth until the software was complete and bulletproof. Per Kunesh’s telling, the Field people were used to software that looked complete but that was unreliable under the hood. It looked as if you could the things you needed to do, but the software would keep falling down and getting patched, falling down and getting patched, all the way through a campaign. The tech team did not want that. They might be slower, but they were going to build solid products.


Reed’s team began to trickle into Chicago beginning in May 2011. They promised, over-optimistically, that they would release a version of Dashboard just a few months after the team arrived. The first version was not impressive. “Aug. 29, 2011, my birthday, we were supposed to have a prototype out of Dashboard, that was going to be the public launch,” Kunesh told me. “It was freaking horrible, you couldn’t show it to anyone. But I’d only been there 13 weeks and most of the team had been there half that time.”


As the tech team struggled to translate what people wanted into usable software, trust in the tech team–already shaky–kept eroding. By Februrary 2012, Kunesh started to get word that people on both the digital and field teams had agitated to pull the plug on Dashboard and replace the tech team with somebody, anybody, else.


“A lot of the software is kind of late. It’s looking ugly and I go out on this field call,” Kunesh remembered. “And people are like, ‘Man, we should fire your bosses man…. We gotta get the guys from the DNC. They don’t know what the hell you’re doing.’ I’m sitting there going, ‘I’m gonna get another margarita.’ “


While the responsibility for their early struggles certainly falls to the tech team, there were mitigating factors. For one, no one had ever done what they were attempting to do. Narwhal had to connect to a bunch of different vendors’ software, some of which turned out to be surprisingly arcane and difficult. Not only that, but there were differences in the way field offices in some states did things and how campaign HQ thought they did things. Tech wasted time building things that it turned out people didn’t need or want.


“In the movie version of the campaign, there’s probably a meeting where I’m about to get fired and I throw myself on the table,” Slaby told me. But in reality, what actually happened was Obama campaign chief Jim Messina would come by Slaby’s desk and tell him, “Dude, this has to work.” And Slaby would respond, “I know. It will,” and then go back to work.


In fact, some shake-ups were necessary. Reed and Slaby sent some product managers packing and brought in more traditional ones like former Microsoft PM Carol Davidsen. “You very much have to understand the campaign’s hiring strategy: ‘We’ll hire these product managers who have campaign experience, then hire engineers who have technical experience–and these two worlds will magically come together.’ That failed,” Davidsen said. “Those two groups of people couldn’t talk to each other.”


Then, in the late spring, all the products that the tech team had been promising started to show up. Dashboard got solid. You didn’t have to log in a bunch of times if you wanted to do different things on the website. Other smaller products rolled out. “The stuff we told you about for a year is actually happening,” Kunesh recalled telling the field team. “You’re going to have one log-in and have all these tools, and it’s all just gonna work.”


Perhaps most important, Narwhal really got on track, thanks no doubt to Davidsen’s efforts as well as Josh Thayer’s, the lead engineer who arrived in April. What Narwhal fixed was a problem that’s long plagued campaigns. You have all this data coming in from all these places — the voter file, various field offices, the analytics people, the website, mobile stuff. In 2008, and all previous races, the numbers changed once a day. It wasn’t real-time. And the people looking to hit their numbers in various ways out in the field offices–number of volunteers and dollars raised and voters persuaded–were used to seeing that update happen like that.


But from an infrastructure level, how much better would it be if you could sync that data in real time across the entire campaign? That’s what Narwhal was supposed to do. Davidsen, in true product-manager form, broke down precisely how it all worked. First, she said, Narwhal wasn’t really one thing, but several. Narwhal was just an initially helpful brand for the bundle of software.


In reality, it had three components. “One is vendor integration: BSD, NGP, VAN [the latter two companies merged in 2010]. Just getting all of that data into the system and getting it in real time as soon as it goes in one system to another,” she said. “The second part is an API portion. You don’t want a million consumers getting data via SQL.” The API allowed people to access parts of the data without letting them get at the SQL database on the backend. It provided a safe way for Dashboard, the Call Tool (which helped people make calls), and the Twitter Blaster to pull data. And the last part was the presentation of the data that was in the system. While the dream had been for all applications to run through Narwhal in real time, it turned out that couldn’t work. So, they split things into real-time applications like the Call Tool or things on the web. And then they provided a separate way for the Analytics people, who had very specific needs, to get the data in a different form. Then, whatever they came up with was fed back into Narwhal.


By the end, Davidsen thought all the teams’ relationships had improved, even before Obama’s big win. She credited a weekly Wednesday drinking and hanging-out session that brought together all the various people working on the campaign’s technology. By the very end, some front-end designers who were technically on the digital team had embedded with the tech squad to get work done faster. Tech might not have been fully integrated, but it was fully operational. High fives were in the air.


Slaby, with typical pragmatism, put it like this. “Our supporters don’t give a shit about our org chart. They just want to have a meaningful experience. We promise them they can play a meaningful role in politics and they don’t care about the departments in the campaign. So we have to do the work on our side to look integrated and have our shit together,” he said. “That took some time. You have to develop new trust with people. It’s just change management. It’s not complicated; it’s just hard.”


What They Actually Built


Of course, the tech didn’t exist for its own sake. It was meant to be used by the organizers in the field and the analysts in the lab. Let’s just run through some of the things that actually got accomplished by the tech, digital, and analytics teams beyond of Narwhal and Dashboard.


They created the most sophisticated e-mail fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an e-mail from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing e-mails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $ 2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $ 500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.


Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after president dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see.


With Davidsen’s help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen’s old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign’s own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the last cost. They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. 


According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama’s campaign’s cost per ad was lower ($ 594) than the Romney campaign ($ 666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550,000 ads. And it wasn’t just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people.


The digital and tech teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters, a project that had the code name Täärgus for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.” Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, “Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn’t voted yet. Go tell him to vote.” Goff described the Facebook tool as “the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that’s come around in years, since the phone call.”


Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,” Goff said. “In terms of fundraising, that’s as innovative as we needed to be.” Storing people’s payment information also let the campaign receive donations via text messages long before the Federal Elections Commission approved an official way of doing so. They could simply text people who’d opted in a simple message like, “Text back with how much money you’d like to donate.” Sometimes people texted much larger dollar amounts back than the $ 10 increments that mobile carriers allow.


It’s an impressive array of accomplishments. What you can do with data and code just keeps advancing. “After the last campaign, I got introduced as the CTO of the most technically advanced campaign ever,” Slaby said. “But that’s true of every CTO of every campaign every time.” Or, rather, it’s true of one campaign CTO every time.


Exit Music


That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park’s Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He had told me earlier in the day that he’d never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him.


He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing, and DJs. “It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment,” Reed said. “And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet.”


“I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, ” Reed said, “and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which.”


We left Handlebar and made a quick pit stop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it’s like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America’s CTO and return to being “Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever,” as his personal Web page is titled.


But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have–and work with people who had– a higher purpose than building cool stuff. “Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the president. I would be like, ‘Yeah, that guy’s cool,’ ” Reed said. “It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing.”


Part of that process was Reed, a technologist’s technolgoist, learning the limits of his own power. “I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands,” he told me. “I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn’t adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose.”


And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court justices while they coded.


“There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it,” Reed said. “In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone.”


We finished our drinks, ready for what was almost certainly going to be a long night, and headed to our first club. The last thing my recorder picked up over the bass was me saying to Harper, “I just saw someone buy Hennessy. I’ve never seen someone buy Hennessy.” Then, all I can hear is that music.


Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Michael Strahan Strips Down for PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive Issue



If this whole TV thing doesn't pan out, Michael Strahan may have a future on stage – the strip-club stage, that is!

The former NFL star and Kelly Ripa's new co-host on Live! makes his most exciting career move yet in this behind-the-scenes video from his photo shoot for PEOPLE's 2012 Sexiest Man Alive issue.

"I'm a construction worker – a plumber – whatever you want to call me, I'll fix your pipes. That's what I'm here for," Strahan, 40, says of the Magic Mike-themed shoot. "To be included in the Sexiest Man [Alive] issue is incredible. ... I look at it as an honor."

And he's got the moves! "I'm an excellent dancer," he says. "I keep up with whatever's hot. I've been break-dancing and pop-locking since back in the day. [I do] the robot ... you can do the Dougie and all the new stuff. I try to keep up with everybody and what's going on. I don't have any special moves, I just try to keep up with the times."

Strahan isn't the only Mike showing off his magical powers of sex appeal in PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive issue, which stars cover guy Channing Tatum. Michael Bublé (cowboy), Michael Weatherly (naval officer), Michael Ealy (firefighter) and Michael Bolton (army soldier) also show off their best stripper moves.

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Diabetes rates rocket in Oklahoma, South

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation's diabetes problem is getting worse, and health officials say the biggest changes have been in Oklahoma and a number of Southern states.

The diabetes rate in Oklahoma more than tripled over 15 years, and also boomed in Southern states like Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama.

Most cases are the kind of diabetes linked to obesity. Health officials believe extra weight explains the increases in the South and Southwest. They also say the rates overall are up because people with diabetes are living longer.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the state report Thursday.

The diabetes rate more than doubled in several Northern states, too, including Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Maine.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr

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BP agrees to pay $4.5 billion in penalties for U.S. oil spill

HOUSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - BP Plc will pay $4.5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to felony misconduct in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.


The settlement includes a $1.256 billion criminal fine, the largest such levy in U.S. history, the company said on Thursday. Analysts said the deal let BP put its focus back on oil production, though at least one member of Congress questioned whether it would hurt states' chances for civil penalties.


The April 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers. The mile-deep Macondo oil well then spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf over 87 days, fouling shorelines from Texas to Florida and eclipsing in severity the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.


The oil company said it would plead guilty to 11 felony counts related to the workers' deaths, a felony related to obstruction of Congress and two misdemeanors.


BP, which replaced its chief executive after the spill as its market value plummeted, still faces economic and environmental damage claims sought by four Gulf Coast states and other private plaintiffs.


Its U.S. shares gained about 0.3 percent on Thursday while its London-traded shares were flat.


Wall Street analysts were encouraged that the plea deal could resolve a significant share of the liability BP faces. But it is not a "global" deal to resolve all outstanding liability.


"It certainly is an encouraging step," said Pavel Molchanov, oil company analyst with Raymond James. "By eliminating the overhang of the criminal litigation, it is another step in clearing up BP's legal framework as it relates to Macondo."


Other analysts said the settlement had been a communications challenge for the company, and they hoped to receive more detail at a presentation next month.


"Of course you never like to see value moving out of the company, but it's good news if this will allow them to be an oil company again," said Jason Gammel, energy analyst at Macquarie in London.


The disaster has dragged BP from second to a distant fourth in the ranking of top Western oil companies by value.


PROBATION AND MONITORS


A week after the U.S. presidential election, the settlement could also prompt a debate in Congress about how funds would be shared with the Gulf Coast states.


Congress passed a law last year that would earmark 80 percent of BP penalties paid under the Clean Water Act to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Texas.


"With these unprecedented criminal penalties assessed, I urge the Obama administration to be equally aggressive in securing civil monies that can help save our Louisiana coast" through other avenues, Louisiana Senator David Vitter said in a statement. "I certainly hope they didn't trade any of those monies away just to nail this criminal scalp to the wall."


The company said the payments would be spread out over six years in total, adding it expected to be able to handle the payments "within BP's current financial framework".


BP has sold $35 billion worth of assets to fund the costs of the spill. Matching that, it has paid $23 billion already in clean-up costs and claims, and has a further $12 billion earmarked for payment in its spill trust fund.


The deal also includes a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, plus payments to the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.


In addition to the penalties, BP agreed to go on five years' probation and to the appointment of two monitors, one for process safety and one for ethics. They have four-year terms.


The oil company said it has not been advised of any government authority that intends to debar BP from federal contracting activities as a result of the deal.


'RECKLESS MANAGEMENT'


In an August filing, the Justice Department said "reckless management" of the Macondo well "constituted gross negligence and willful misconduct" which it intended to prove at a civil trial set to begin in New Orleans in February 2013.


Negligence is a central issue to BP's potential liability. A gross negligence finding could nearly quadruple the civil damages owed by BP under the Clean Water Act to $21 billion in a straight-line calculation.


Still unresolved is potential liability faced by Swiss-based Transocean Ltd, owner of the Deepwater Horizon vessel, and Halliburton Co, which provided cementing work on the well that U.S. investigators say was flawed. Both companies were not immediately available for comment.


According to the Justice Department, errors made by BP and Transocean in deciphering a pressure test of the Macondo well are a clear indication of gross negligence.


"That such a simple, yet fundamental and safety-critical test could have been so stunningly, blindingly botched in so many ways, by so many people, demonstrates gross negligence," the government said in its August filing.


Transocean disclosed in September that it is in discussions with the Justice Department to pay $1.5 billion to resolve civil and criminal claims.


BP has already announced an uncapped class-action settlement with private plaintiffs that the company estimates will cost $7.8 billion to resolve litigation brought by over 100,000 individuals and businesses claiming economic and medical damages from the spill.


(Additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston, Braden Reddall in San Francisco and Andrew Callus in London; Writing by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by David Gregorio and Dale Hudson)


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Attacks Resume After Israeli Assault Kills Hamas Leader





KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — Israel and Hamas widened their increasingly deadly conflict over Gaza on Thursday, as a militant rocket killed three civilians in an apartment block in this small southern town. The deaths were likely to lead Israel to intensify its military offensive on Gaza, now in its second day of airstrikes.




In Gaza, the Palestinian death toll rose to 11 as Israel struck what the military described as medium- and long-range rocket and infrastructure sites and rocket-launching squads. The military said it had dispersed leaflets over Gaza warning residents to stay away from Hamas operatives and facilities, suggesting that more was to come.


The regional perils of the situation sharpened, meanwhile, as President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt warned on Thursday that his country stood by the Palestinians against what he termed Israeli aggression, echoing similar condemnation on Wednesday.


“The Egyptian people, the Egyptian leadership, the Egyptian government, and all of Egypt is standing with all its resources to stop this assault, to prevent the killing and the bloodshed of Palestinians,” Mr. Morsi said in nationally televised remarks before a crisis meeting of senior ministers. He also instructed his prime minister to lead a delegation to Gaza on Friday and said he had contacted President Obama to discuss strategies to “stop these acts and doings and the bloodshed and aggression.”


In language that reflected the upheaval in the political dynamics of the Middle East since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year, Mr. Morsi said: “Israelis must realize that we don’t accept this aggression and it could only lead to instability in the region and has a major negative impact on stability and security in the region.”


The thrust of Mr. Morsi’s words seemed confined to diplomatic maneuvers, including calls to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the head of the Arab League and President Obama.


The 120-nation Nonalignmed Movement, the biggest bloc at the United Nations, added its condemnation of the Gaza airstrikes in a statement released by Iran, the group’s rotating president and one of Israel’s most ardent foes. “Israel, the occupying power, is, once more, escalating its military campaign against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip,” the group’s coordinating bureau said in the statement. The group made no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire but condemned what it called “this act of aggression by the Israelis and their resort to force against the defenseless people” and demanded “decisive action by the U.N. Security Council.”


In his conversation with Mr. Obama, Mr. Morsi said, he “clarified Egypt’s role and Egypt’s position; our care for the relations with the United States of America and the world; and at the same time our complete rejection of this assault and our rejection of these actions, of the bloodshed, and of the siege on Palestinians and their suffering.”


Mr. Obama had agreed to speak with Israeli leaders, Mr. Morsi said.


The Thursday’ deaths in Kiryat Malachi were the first casualties on the Israeli side since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the most ferocious in four years, in response to persistent Palestinian rocket fire.


Southern Israel has been struck by more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza this year that have hit homes and caused injuries. On Thursday, a rocket smashed into the top floor of an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, about 15 miles north of Gaza. Two men and one woman were killed, according to witnesses at the scene. A baby was among the injured and several Israelis were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after rockets hit other southern cities and towns, they said.The apartment house was close to a field in a blue-collar neighborhood and the rocket tore open top-floor apartments, leaving twisted metal window frames and bloodstains.


Nava Chayoun, 40, who lives on the second floor, said her husband, Yitzhak, ran up the stairs immediately after the rocket struck and saw the body of a woman on the floor. He rescued two children from the same apartment and afterward, she said, she and her family “read psalms.”


Isabel Kershner reported from Kiryat Malachi, Israel, and Fares Akram from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Rina Castelnuovo from Kiryat Malachi; Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo; Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Alan Cowell from Paris.



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‘Angry Birds Star Wars’ Is More Addictive Fun Fans Want [REVIEW]
















Last month, Rovio announced a major partnership with Lucasfilm to create Angry Birds Star Wars. The game, out this week, represents a hybrid of the two powerful brands, and provides enjoyable gameplay for fans of both franchises.


[More from Mashable: Viral Video Recap: Memes of the Week]













For those unsure about the union, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Rovio has shown in Angry Birds Star Wars that it can create a fun, challenging game that doesn’t besmirch our favorite characters. Instead, laugh at images of Stormtroopers as pigs and Chewbacca as a giant, furry bird.


Angry Birds Star Wars doesn’t deviate from the main concept behind the series. The slingshot is back, and you’ve got to propel birds towards their swine foe to knock them over and destroy their fortresses. This is Rovio’s bread and butter, but it seems like each iteration of the game has been more creative, and asks more from players; Angry Birds Space added depth to the gameplay by including physics challenges, such as zero-gravity and planetary orbit.


[More from Mashable: iPad 4: A Turbocharged Tablet With Nothing to Do [REVIEW]]


Likewise, Angry Birds Star Wars creates new challenges by adding Star Wars-inspired powers to all of the birds, based on which character they portray. Red Bird, a.ka. Luke Skywalker, can swing a lightsaber to destroy objects he’s about smash into, or to take out an enemy. The bird version of Obi-Wan Kenobi can use The Force to push over obstacles while flying. Unsurprisingly, both of these powers are extremely fun to use (a lightsaber will always add entertainment value to whatever you’re doing).


The entire main cast of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is represented in bird form; each has their own power to master. Similarly, many of the films’ settings are portrayed in the game by beautifully drawn backgrounds. The levels that take place on Tantooine feature the planet’s two suns setting on the horizon.


Angry Birds also reenact classic Star Wars movie moments in cutscenes that appear between every few levels. While they may be corny, the scenes will bring a smile to any player’s face, especially when encountering the Jawas or bounty hunter Greedo rendered as birds or pigs.


There are many other touches to Angry Birds Star Wars that clearly demonstrate the game’s developers are passionate Star Wars superfans. For example, there are classic sounds that make nerd hearts flutter, such as the blaster noise that goes off whenever players hit a level’s high score. The sound editing also incorporates the film’s score with some cartoony remixes.


While Angry Birds Star Wars is playable on mobile, tablet and PC, it’s a better fit for larger screens. Players won’t be able to enjoy the tiny details of the world, not to mention the art and cinematics, as much when screen size is smaller. Targeting Angry Birds’ powers to small, specific spots also proves more difficult.


This is a must-download for fans of either franchise, and Rovio has made it available on virtually every platform at launch. Angry Birds Star Wars is out now for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Windows Phone, Mac, PC and Windows 8, for either $ 0.99 or $ 2.99.


Title Screen


The Angry Birds Star Wars title screen. The HD version is available for tablets, Mac, PC and Windows 8.


Click here to view this gallery.


This story originally published on Mashable here.


Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Jon Bon Jovi's Teen Daughter, Stephanie Bongiovi, Arrested After Possible Heroin Overdose















11/14/2012 at 12:30 PM EST







Jon Bon Jovi and daughter Stephanie


Dave M. Benett/Getty


The 19-year-old daughter of rocker Jon Bon Jovi was arrested on drug possession charges after she may have overdosed on heroin in her college dorm room in Upstate New York, according to a report.

Stephanie Rose Bongiovi, a student a Hamilton College in Kirkland, N.Y., was expected to be released from the hospital Wednesday, according to police.

Officers and a volunteer ambulance squad were called to the dorm at about 1:51 a.m. Wednesday to assist a woman who had possibly overdosed on heroin and was not responsive, police say.

After finding a small amount of heroin, police arrested a student, Ian S. Grant, 21, who, like Bongiovi, is from Red Bank, N.J. A later search of the dorm also turned up additional heroin, marijuana and drug paraphernalia, say police.

Bongiovi was then also arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana. She was released and ordered to return to court. All of the charges are misdemeanors.

"In addition to violating state law, the actions alleged to have been committed by the students violate Hamilton College policy," the college says in a statement to WKTV. "The college is cooperating with the police investigation. Our first concern is always for the safety of our students. Out of respect for the privacy of our students and in accordance with federal regulations we do not discuss individual health or disciplinary matters."

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Ireland probes death of ill abortion-seeker

DUBLIN (AP) — The debate over legalizing abortion in Ireland flared Wednesday after the government confirmed that a miscarrying woman suffering from blood poisoning was refused a quick termination of her pregnancy and died in an Irish hospital.

Prime Minister Enda Kenny said he was awaiting findings from three investigations into the death of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian who was 17 weeks pregnant. Her case highlights the bizarre legal limbo in which pregnant women facing severe health problems can find themselves in predominantly Catholic Ireland.

Ireland's constitution officially bans abortion, but a 1992 Supreme Court ruling found the procedure should be legalized for situations when the woman's life is at risk from continued pregnancy. Five governments since have refused to pass a law resolving the confusion, leaving Irish hospitals reluctant to terminate pregnancies except in the most obviously life-threatening circumstances.

In practice the vast bulk of Irish women wanting abortions, an estimated 4,000 per year, simply travel next door to England, where abortion has been legal on demand since 1967. But that option is difficult, if not impossible, for women in failing health.

University Hospital Galway in western Ireland declined to say whether doctors believed Halappanavar's blood poisoning could have been reversed had she received an abortion rather than wait for the fetus to die on its own. In a statement, it described its own investigation into the death, and a parallel probe by the national government's Health Service Executive, as "standard practice" whenever a pregnant woman dies in a hospital. The Galway coroner also planned a public inquest.

Savita Halappanavar's husband, Praveen, said doctors determined she was miscarrying within hours of her hospitalization for severe pain on Sunday, Oct. 21. He said that over the next three days doctors refused their requests for an abortion to combat her surging pain and fading health.

"Savita was really in agony. She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby," he told The Irish Times in a telephone interview from Belgaum, southwest India. "When the consultant came on the ward rounds on Monday morning, Savita asked if they could not save the baby, could they induce to end the pregnancy? The consultant said: 'As long as there is a fetal heartbeat, we can't do anything.'

"Again on Tuesday morning ... the consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita said: 'I am neither Irish nor Catholic,' but they said there was nothing they could do," Praveen Halappanavar said.

He said his wife vomited repeatedly and collapsed in a restroom that night, but doctors wouldn't terminate the fetus because its heart was still beating.

The fetus died the following day and its remains were surgically removed. Within hours, Praveen Halappanavar said, his wife was placed under sedation in intensive care with blood poisoning and he was never able to speak with her again. By Saturday her heart, kidneys and liver had stopped working and she was pronounced dead early Sunday, Oct. 28.

The couple had settled in 2008 in Galway, where Praveen Halappanavar works as an engineer at the medical devices manufacturer Boston Scientific. His wife qualified as a dentist but had taken time off for her pregnancy. Her parents in India had just visited them in Galway and left the day before her hospitalization.

Praveen Halappanavar said he took his wife's remains back to India for a Hindu funeral and cremation Nov. 3. News of the circumstances that led to her death emerged Tuesday in Galway after the Indian community canceled the city's annual Diwali festival. Savita Halappanavar had been one of the festival's main organizers.

Opposition politicians appealed Wednesday for Kenny's government to introduce legislation immediately to make the 1992 Supreme Court judgment part of statutory law. Barring any such bill, the only legislation defining the illegality of abortion in Ireland dates to 1861 when the entire island was part of the United Kingdom. That British law, still valid here due to Irish inaction on the matter, states it is a crime punishable by life imprisonment to "procure a miscarriage."

In the 1992 case, a 14-year-old girl identified in court only as "X'' successfully sued the government for the right to have an abortion in England. She had been raped by a neighbor. When her parents reported the crime to police, the attorney general ordered her not to travel abroad for an abortion, arguing this would violate Ireland's constitution.

The Supreme Court ruled she should be permitted an abortion in Ireland, never mind England, because she was making credible threats to commit suicide if refused one. During the case, the girl reportedly suffered a miscarriage.

Since then, Irish governments twice have sought public approval to legalize abortion in life-threatening circumstances — but excluding a suicide threat as acceptable grounds. Both times voters rejected the proposed amendments.

Legal and political analysts broadly agree that no Irish government since 1992 has required public approval to pass a law that backs the Supreme Court ruling. They say governments have been reluctant to be seen legalizing even limited access to abortion in a country that is more than 80 percent Catholic.

Coincidentally, the government said it received a long-awaited expert report Tuesday night proposing possible changes to Irish abortion law shortly before news of Savita Halappanavar's death broke. The government commissioned the report two years ago after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland's inadequate access to abortions for life-threatening pregnancies violated European Union law.

An abortions right group, Choice Ireland, said Halappanavar might not have died had any previous government legislated in line with the X judgment. Earlier this year, the government rejected an opposition bill to do this.

"Today, some 20 years after the X case, we find ourselves asking the same question: If a woman is pregnant, her life in jeopardy, can she even establish whether she has a right to a termination here in Ireland?" said Choice Ireland spokeswoman Stephanie Lord.

Yet the World Health Organization identifies Ireland as an unusually safe place to be pregnant. Its most recent report on global maternal death rates found that only three out of every 100,000 women die in childbirth in Ireland, compared with an average of 14 in Europe and North America, 190 in Asia and 590 in Africa.

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