Sears, Penney sever ties with Paula Deen

FILE - In this Dec. 30, 2010 file photo, Paula Deen speaks in Pasadena, Calif. Sears Holdings Corp. announced Friday, June 28, 2013, that it is cutting ties with Southern celebrity chef Deen, adding to the list of companies severing their relationship following revelations that Deen used racial slurs in the past. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 30, 2010 file photo, Paula Deen speaks in Pasadena, Calif. Sears Holdings Corp. announced Friday, June 28, 2013, that it is cutting ties with Southern celebrity chef Deen, adding to the list of companies severing their relationship following revelations that Deen used racial slurs in the past. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Paula Deen's media and merchandising empire is collapsing.

Sears, J.C. Penney and Walgreen said Friday that they're cutting ties with Paula Deen, adding to the growing list of companies severing their relationship following revelations that the Southern celebrity chef used racial slurs in the past.

Meanwhile, Paula Deen's publisher has canceled a deal with her for multiple books, including an upcoming cookbook that was the No. 1 seller on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Ballantine Books announced Friday it would not release "Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up," which was scheduled for October and was the first of a five-book deal announced early last year. Interest in it had surged as Deen, who grew up in Albany, Ga., and specializes in Southern comfort food, came under increasing attack for acknowledging she had used the N-word.

Ballantine, an imprint of Random House Inc., said it had decided to cancel the book's publication after "careful consideration." It had no comment beyond what was in its brief statement, spokesman Stuart Applebaum said.

Sears Holdings Corp. said it will phase out all products tied to the brand after "careful consideration of all available information."

"We will continue to evaluate the situation," said the parent company of Sears and Kmart stores.

Both Sears and Kmart sold Paula Deen products.

In an email statement to The Associated Press, J.C. Penney Co. Inc. said it decided to discontinue selling Deen-branded products.

Walgreen Co. said it was phasing out Paula Deen-branded products, which included tortilla chips and a selection of soups.

QVC took a more gentle approach on Friday and said that it has decided to "take a pause" from Deen. The home shopping network said that Deen won't be appearing on any upcoming broadcasts, and it will phase out her product assortment on its online sales channels over the next few months.

"We all think it's important, at this moment, for Paula, to concentrate on responding to the allegations against her and on her path forward," said Mike George, QVC's president and CEO in a letter posted on the company's website.

But QVC left the door open for Deen to return. "Some of you wonder whether this is a 'forever' decision ? whether we are simply ending our association with Paula," continued George. "We don't think that's how relationships work. People deserve second chances."

Deen issued her own statement that was posted on QVC's webpage. "As you know, I have some important things to work on right now, both personally and professionally. And so we've agreed that it's best for me to step back from QVC and focus on setting things right

The developments are the latest blows dealt to Deen since comments she made in a court deposition became public.

Earlier this week, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Home Depot all announced that they plan to stop selling cookware and other items with Deen's brand.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Novo Nordisk said it and Deen have "mutually agreed to suspend our patient education activities for now." Deen, who specializes in Southern comfort food, had been promoting the company's drug Victoza since last year, when she announced she had Type 2 diabetes

On Monday, pork producer Smithfield Foods dropped her as a spokeswoman.

Caesars Entertainment also announced that Paula Deen's name is being stripped from four buffet restaurants owned by the company. Caesars said that its decision to rebrand its restaurants in Joliet, Ill.; Tunica, Miss.; Cherokee, N.C.; and Elizabeth, Ind., was a mutual one with Deen.

Last week, the Food Network said that it would not renew her contract.

The stakes are high for Deen, who Forbes magazine ranked as the fourth highest-earning celebrity chef last year, bringing in $17 million. She's behind Gordon Ramsay, Rachael Ray and Wolfgang Puck, according to Forbes.

Paula Deen Enterprises, which spans from TV shows to cookware and furniture, generates total annual revenue of nearly $100 million, estimates Burt Flickinger III, president of retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group.

But Flickinger estimates she could lose up to 80 percent of her business by next year as suppliers extricate themselves from their agreements.

Not every company Deen does business with has severed ties with the celebrity chef. Among other stores that sell her products, Kohl's Corp. declined to comment, while Macy's Inc. said Thursday that it continues to "monitor the situation."

Hoffman Media LLC, the publisher of "Cooking with Paula Deen" magazine, announced Friday that it was continuing to publish her bi-monthly publication.

"Hoffman Media has worked closely with Ms. Deen since 2005," said Eric Hoffman, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Hoffman Media in a statement. "The recent images portrayed by the media do not reflect the person we know on a personal or a professional level."

___

AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report

Follow Anne D'Innocenzio on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-06-28-Paula%20Deen/id-7e4f3ca5d3b64f6b82071bfe5c52b9da

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NASA telescope to probe long-standing solar mystery

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A small NASA telescope was poised for launch on Thursday on a mission to determine how the sun heats its atmosphere to millions of degrees, sending off rivers of particles that define the boundaries of the solar system.

The study is far from academic. Solar activity directly impacts Earth's climate and the space environment beyond the planet's atmosphere. Solar storms can knock out power grids, disrupt radio signals and interfere with communications, navigation and other satellites in orbit.

"We live in a very complex society and the sun has a role to play in it," said physicist Alan Title, with Lockheed Martin Space Systems Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, which designed and built the telescope.

Scientists have been trying to unravel the mechanisms that drive the sun for decades but one fundamental mystery endures: How it manages to release energy from its relatively cool, 10,000 degree Fahrenheit (5,500 degree Celsius) surface into an atmosphere that can reach up to 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 million Celsius).

At its core, the sun is essentially a giant fusion engine that melds hydrogen atoms into helium. As expected, temperatures cool as energy travels outward through the layers. But then in the lower atmosphere, known as the chromosphere, temperatures heat up again.

Pictures and data relayed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, telescope may finally provide some answers about how that happens.

The 4-foot (1.2-meter) long, 450-pound (204-kg) observatory will be observing the sun from a vantage point about 400 miles above Earth. It is designed to capture detailed images of light moving from the sun's surface, known as the photosphere, into the chromosphere. Temperatures peak in the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona.

All that energy fuels a continuous release of charged particles from the sun into what is known as the solar wind, a pressure bubble that fills and defines the boundaries of the solar system.

"Every time we look at the sun in more detail, it opens up a new window for us," said Jeffrey Newmark, IRIS program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The telescope is scheduled to be launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp Pegasus rocket on Friday at 10:27 p.m. EDT. Pegasus is an air-launched system that is carried aloft by a modified L-1011 aircraft that will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California about 55 minutes before the scheduled launch.

The rocket is released from the belly of the plane at an altitude of about 39,000 feet so it can ignite and carry the telescope into orbit.

IRIS, which cost about $145 million including the launch service, is designed to last for two years.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-telescope-probe-long-standing-solar-mystery-172112310.html

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The Great American Nerdvel: Progress Report (Unqualified Offerings)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314965411?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Egypt court: Brotherhood members planned jailbreak

CAIRO (AP) ? An Egyptian court on Sunday said Muslim Brotherhood members conspired with Hamas, Hezbollah and local militants to storm a prison in 2011 and free 34 Brotherhood leaders, including the future President Mohammed Morsi.

The court statement read by judge Khaled Mahgoub named two members of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood ? Ibrahim Haggag and Sayed Ayad ? to be among the alleged conspirators in the attack on Wadi el-Natroun prison on Jan. 29, 2011.

It is the first statement by a court that holds members of the three Islamist groups ? the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Hamas, and Lebanon's Hezbollah ? responsible for a series of jailbreaks during the chaos of Egypt's 2011 uprising. Two other prisons in which Hamas and Hezbollah members were held were also attacked.

Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders have maintained that they were freed by local residents. Hamas, the Palestinian chapter of the Brotherhood, has denied involvement in the attacks on prisons.

The court statement is likely to further fuel opposition to Morsi's rule just a week before his opponents are scheduled to stage massive protests to force him out of office. The planned June 30 demonstrations mark his first anniversary in office as Egypt's first freely elected leader.

The past year has seen growing polarization as Egypt struggles with a host of problems that many accuse Morsi of failing to effectively tackle. They include surging crime, rising prices, power cuts, fuel shortages and unemployment.

Morsi has not spoken publicly about his escape from Wadi el-Natroun since he gave an account of what happened in a frantic phone call he made to Al-Jazeera Mubasher TV moments after being freed.

"From the noises we heard ... It seemed to us there were (prisoners) attempting to get out of their cells and break out into the prison yard and the prison authorities were trying to regain control and fired tear gas," Morsi said in the call.

By the time they got out, the prison was empty, and there was no sign of a major battle, he said.

The prison breaks took place during the 18-day popular uprising that toppled the 29-year regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The breaks led to a flood of some 23,000 criminals onto the streets, fueling a crime wave that continues to this day. Among those who escaped were around 40 members of Hamas and Hezbollah as well as the 34 Brotherhood leaders.

A total of 26 top police, prison and intelligence officials have testified before the court, which held its hearings in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. Some gave their testimony in closed session.

The case began in January when a former inmate appealed a three-month sentence passed by a lower court that convicted him of escaping Wadi el-Natroun. The defendant was acquitted by judge Mahgoub, who on Sunday referred to prosecutors the testimonies and evidence gathered during the trial on the jailbreak at Wadi el-Natroun in order "to reveal the truth and honor the state's right to mete out justice."

There was no immediate word from the office of the country's top prosecutor on whether his office planned to take up the case.

In Egypt's polarized political climate, Morsi's opponents have been using his escape from Wadi el-Natroun against him, saying friends of the Brotherhood violated the country's security and fed its instability. The eagerness of some in the intelligence and security agencies to blame Hamas could in part reflect resentment of the Brotherhood's ties with the militant group, which they have long seen as a threat.

The Wadi el-Natroun prison in which Morsi and his Brotherhood comrades were held is part of a four-jail complex northwest of Cairo. A total of 11,171 inmates were released from the complex. Thirteen inmates were also killed, according to Mahgoub, who said the attackers used machine-guns mounted on pickup trucks and SUVs as well as huge earth-moving vehicles that demolished parts of the walls and gates.

The last two hearings of the trial witnessed scuffles between supporters and opponents of Morsi. Sunday's hearing was held amid tight security with stringent control over who gets to enter the tiny courtroom.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-court-brotherhood-members-planned-jailbreak-093513553.html

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How Messy Is Your Computer's Desktop?

We all aspire to a certain amount of digital desktop cleanliness, but I think rather few of us actually keep up on it. As the days go by, the clutter builds bit by bit, and it's just irritating enough to be unpleasant, but not a big enough deal to actually clean up.

So where are you in the cycle right now? How messy is your desktop? Show it off, and no quick cleaning sprees. Not until after you share, anyway.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-messy-is-your-computers-desktop-542920795

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Sharp PG-LX3500

The Sharp PG-LX3500 ($990 street) stands out for a spare, utilitarian design. It's a little weak on convenience features, like providing every connector you could possibly want, but it's strong on the basics, like image quality and brightness. Built around a DLP chip with XGA (1024 by 768) resolution, it weighs a little less than six pounds and is rated at 3,500 lumens, putting it at the high end of the brightness range for its weight class. If you need an XGA projector that can throw a high-quality, bright image, that should be enough to pique your interest.

The PG-LX3500 is comparable in most ways to the LCD-based Editors' Choice Epson PowerLite 93+ and the DLP-based Dell 1430X. All three offer a 1.2x zoom lens, they all weigh about the same, and they're all appropriate for a small to mid-size conference room or classroom. The PG-LX3500 offers the brightest rating of three, but I'll come back to the issue of brightness shortly.

Basics and Setup
The PG-LX3500 weighs 5 pounds 11 ounces, and it measures 3.7 by 12.1 by 9.7 inches (HWD). That puts it in a size and weight class that makes it potentially portable, but more likely to wind up permanently installed or on a cart. Unlike some other models in this weight class, however, it doesn't come with a carrying case, so you'll need to buy one separately if you want to carry it with you.

Setup is standard fare. Plug in the appropriate cables, adjust the 1.2x zoom, and adjust the focus. The choice of connectors is a little lean, with image inputs limited to HDMI, VGA with both computer and component video support, and composite video. Notable for its absence is any kind of USB port, which not only means you can't read files from a USB key, but there's no way to connect to your computer for images using Direct USB or even for using your projector's remote for controlling the mouse cursor.

Brightness
Although the 3,500-lumen rating is obviously a plus for the PG-LX3500, it's important to keep that number in perspective when you compare it with the 1430X at 3,200 lumens or the Epson 93+ at 2,600 lumens. Keep in mind that perception of brightness is logarithmic, so even though 3,500 is about a third more lumens than 2,600, that much brighter an image won't look anywhere near a third brighter to the human eye.

Also keep in mind that brightness comparisons are complicated by the relationship between white brightness, which the rating is based on, and color brightness. If there is any difference between the two measurements, as there usually is with DLP projectors, the difference can affect both color quality and the brightness of color images. (For more on color brightness, see Color Brightness: What It Is, and Why You Should Care.)

That said, the PG-LX3500 was easily bright enough for the 98-inch diagonal image I used in my tests to stand up to the ambient light in a well-lit room. For lower ambient light levels or smaller image sizes, you can switch to Eco mode, to any of several preset modes with lower brightness levels, or both.

Image Quality and Other Issues
Even more important than brightness is that the PG-LX3500 delivers excellent data image quality, sailing through our standard suite DisplayMate tests. Yellow was a little dark in all modes, but colors were otherwise well saturated and suitably eye catching. Color balance was excellent in all modes, with neutral grays at all levels from white to black.

More important for data images is that the projector held detail well, with text characters highly readable at sizes as small as 6.8 points, although white text on black was a little easier to read than black on white, because the strokes of the characters were just a bit thicker. Also demanding mention is that the image was as rock solid with an analog connection as with a digital connection, even on screens that are designed to bring out pixel jitter.

Video quality for the PG-LX3500 is limited by the native 1,024-by-768 resolution, but is best described as watchable, which is better than many data projectors can manage.

It also helps that the PG-LX3500 doesn't show many rainbow artifacts, which is always a potential issue for single-chip DLP projectors. I see these artifacts easily, but with data screens I saw them only in one test image that's designed to bring them out. With video, I saw them a little more frequently, as is typical, but still far less often than with most DLP projectors. It's unlikely that many people, if any, will find the rainbow artifacts annoying.

One last plus for the PG-LX3500 is the surprisingly capable 2-watt speaker. Despite the low wattage, the speaker delivers enough volume to fill a small conference room. The audio quality isn't terrific, but it's a lot better than many projectors offer.

The Sharp PG-LX3500 comes up a little short on connection options and on convenience features like a large zoom or the ability to read files from a USB key. If you need those features, you'll obviously have to look elsewhere. However, it earns most of its points on data image quality and brightness, which are precisely the most important features for any data projector. And unlike many DLP projectors, it resists showing rainbows well enough to make video watchable. If you need a 1,024-by-768 projector that does the basics well, it can easily be the right choice for your needs.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Gd_o2-n7_Do/0,2817,2420806,00.asp

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