Congrats are in order for Jensen Ackles!
Pics: Hot Moms! Hollywood's Most Glam Baby Bumps!
The Supernatural star is expecting his first child with wife Danneel, confirms People magazine.
Jensen, 34, and Danneel, 33, will meet their bundle of joy later this year. The happy couple married in 2010.
Cops are hunting a man wanted for sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl inside the child’s apartment building, authorities said.
The victim was walking home from the store Saturday afternoon when the man followed the girl into her apartment building near Broadway and Pettit Avenue in Elmhurst, according to cops.
The man tried to engage the girl in conversation before touching her groin over her pants, cops said. He then exposed himself to her before the girl fled into her apartment uninjured.
Police described the perp as a white male with a beard and glasses, approximately 30 years old between five-feet-ten and six-feet-tall. He is believed to be between 170 and 190 pounds.
Cops said he was last scene wearing a black sweatsuit, a black knit cap and pushing a black mountain bike.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477).
More than 4,000 miles from its home base in Doral, Energy International is helping keep the lights on and the power grid humming in Gibraltar, the British territory on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.
Energy International, a global provider of power plants and energy solutions, sent a temporary plant that will provide power for at least the next two years while a more permanent fix is sought for the territory’s erratic and aging electrical system.
The Doral company was founded 14 years ago as MCA Power Systems and its initial goal was to pursue energy contracts in Latin America. It began 2000 with a name change and in recent years its focus has become global.
“The world needs energy,’’ said Brett Hall, EI’s vice president of finance.
While the 2007-2008 recession curtailed the growth of worldwide energy demand, the U.S. Energy Information Agency has projected that global demand for electricity will increase by 2.3 percent annually from 2008 to 2035.
The potential is especially strong in developing nations. The International Energy Agency estimated that in 2009, 21 percent of the world’s population — 1.4 billion people — didn’t have access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, the percentage of people without power rises to 69 percent.
Energy International has expanded sales from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, Africa and the Middle East, boosting revenue from $100 million annually in 2009 to more than $300 million today, Hall said. This year, EI is anticipating revenue of $350 million to $375 million.
In the next seven years the company, which is privately owned by American shareholders and affiliated with Gecolsa — the Caterpillar dealership in Colombia — hopes revenue will top $1 billion, he said.
Even though Energy International is based in the United States, it does little work domestically. Its sweet spot is emerging economies and contracts of $100 million or less.
“Our focus is to do whatever makes the most economic sense for a particular market,’’ said Hall.
“We’re not going to be building a nuclear power plant,’’ he said. But EI will accommodate its solutions to local fuel supplies whether it’s biofuel, natural gas or heavy fuels that are more prevalent.
When it comes to the type of temporary power solution needed by Gibraltar, which had been plagued by a string of power outages at its archaic electrical facilities, EI can have a temporary plant up and running in 30 to 40 days, supplying the engineering, rental turbines and other equipment and doing the installation.
“We were able to support Gibraltar’s power needs on short notice,’’ said Andres Molano, EI’s vice president of sales. “Some of their equipment required major maintenance and they needed to stop their plants.’’
EI, one of the world’s largest suppliers of interim energy solutions, signed a $12 million contract with the government of Gibraltar in November and the plant was operational by Dec. 21. The agreement includes an option for a three-year extension.
The equipment now in use in Gibraltar is considered part of EI’s fleet and will move on to other energy emergencies when its service in the territory famed for the Rock of Gibraltar is complete.
But when it comes to its permanent power plants, EI will build a facility for a client looking to generate its own power or construct a plant, run it and sell power directly to the final user.
“We can do all the work ourselves. We have all the skills in house — finance, design, operations, maintenance, building and the equipment,’’ said Hall.
Energy International has moved into the Middle East, completing projects in Oman and Yemen and establishing a subsidiary in Dubai in 2012 to pursue business in Africa and the Middle East, said Molano.
“Africa is new to us, but we believe there are opportunities there,’’ he said.
The company also is looking for continued growth in Latin America, especially in Colombia, which is now attracting foreign investors who previously had been spooked by violence.
Remote areas of the Amazon where temporary power solutions are needed also represent opportunity for the company.
“EI is very fortunate to be in a position in which we have more excellent opportunities than capital.’’ said Hall, so this year it will be concentrating on raising equity to finance growth.
“One of our biggest challenges in 2013,’’ Hall said, “will be to find investors or joint venture partners to provide capital that will enable EI to perform these projects so our aggressive revenue growth targets can be achieved.’’
In an effort to ensure fans purchase authentic BCS National Championship gear in Miami-Dade, a sweep for counterfeit material will be conducted at Sun Life Stadium on Monday, Miami-Dade police announced Sunday.
Hours before kick-off for the national game between Alabama and Notre Dame, officials from the Collegiate Licensing Company, the bowl, both universities, along with Miami-Dade police, will scrutinize vendors in search of unlicensed merchandise, police said.
All counterfeit merchandise is subject to seizure.
The trademark sweep will take place following a security sweep of the stadium at 9 a.m. Monday.
SINGAPORE/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Call it phablet, phonelet, tweener or super smartphone, but the clunky mobile phone – closer in size to a tablet than the smartphone of a couple of years back – is here to stay.
A surprise hit of 2012, it is drawing in more users, more handset makers and is shaping the way we consume content.
“We expect 2013 to be the year of the phablet,” said Neil Mawston, UK-based executive director of Strategy Analytics‘ global wireless practice.
While Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has blazed a trail with its once-mocked Galaxy Note devices, now other manufacturers are scurrying to catch up.
At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Chinese telecommunications giants ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will launch their own.
ZTE, which collaborated with Italy’s designer Stefano Giovannoni for the Nubia phablet, is scheduled to launch its 5-inch Grand S, while Huawei brings out the Ascend Mate, sporting a whopping 6.1-inch screen, making it only slightly smaller than Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet.
“Users have realized that a nearly 5-inch screen smartphone isn’t such a cumbersome device,” said Joshua Flood, senior analyst at ABI Research in Britain.
Driving the phablet’s shift to the mainstream is a confluence of trends. Users prefer larger screens because they are consuming more visual content on mobile devices than before, and using them less for voice calls – the phablet’s weak spot.
And as WiFi-only tablets become more popular, so has interest among commuters in devices that combine the best of both, while on the move.
According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, the monthly data traffic for every smartphone will rise fourfold between now and 2018 to 1,900 megabytes.
The upshot is a market for phablets that will quadruple in value to $ 135 billion in three years, according to Barclays. Shipments of gadgets that are 5 inches or bigger in screen size will surge by nearly nine-fold to 228 million during the same period, though estimates vary because no one can agree on where smartphones stop and phablets start.
But that’s the point, some say.
“I think phone size was a preconceived notion based on voice usage,” said John Berns, a Singapore-based executive who works in the information technology industry. He recently upgraded his Note for the newer Note 2 and bought another for his girlfriend for Christmas. “Smaller was better until phones got smart, became visual.”
Samsung has been both the engine and beneficiary. While other players shipped devices with larger screens earlier – Dell Inc launched its Streak in 2010 – it was only when the Korean behemoth launched the Galaxy Note in late 2011, with its 5.3-inch screen, that users took an interest.
“The Streak was launched at a time when 3-inch smartphones were standard and the leap to a 5-inch Streak was a jump too far for consumers,” says Strategy Analytics’ Mawston.
“The Galaxy Note was launched when 4-inch smartphones had become commonplace, and the leap to 5-inch was no longer such a chasm.”
THE BIGGER, THE BETTER
Since then Samsung has bet big on bigger: its updated Note has a 5.5-inch screen and its flagship Galaxy S3 – the best-selling smartphone in the third quarter of 2012 – has a screen that puts it in the phablet category for some analysts.
Samsung accounted for around three quarters of all phablets shipped last year, according to Barclays’ Taipei-based analyst Dale Gai.
Samsung’s marketing heft has paved the way for others. LG Electronics Inc accounted for 14 percent of shipments in the third quarter of last year, according to Strategy Analytics.
HTC Corp’s 5-inch Butterfly – called the Droid DNA in the United States – has been selling well in places where Samsung is less dominant, according to Taipei-based Yuanta Securities analyst Dennis Chan. The first batch sold out soon after its December launch in Taiwan.
“I don’t think we can say that Samsung invented phablets,” said Lv Qianhao, head of handset strategy at ZTE. “But it did do a lot to promote this product category, which helped create tremendous demand.”
Phablets are also proving popular in emerging markets.
A poll of nearly 5,000 readers of Yahoo’s Indonesian website chose Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 as their favorite mobile phone of 2012, ahead of the iPhone 5.
Kristian Tjahjono, a technology journalist who posted the poll, said phablets were a natural fit for Indonesians who liked tablets but also liked making phone calls.
But while those in such markets who can afford them are going for the high-end devices, the door is opening for cheaper models. Tjahjono pointed to Lenovo’s 5-inch S880, which has a lower resolution screen and sells for about $ 250, which is around a third of the price of Galaxy Note 2.
SWEET SPOT
Falling component prices will add to demand. The total cost of an upper-end phablet, its bill of materials, will likely fall to 2,000 yuan ($ 323) this year, says Gai from Barclays, and will halve within two years.
“One thousand yuan is a very sweet spot for China,” he said.
India is also a fan.
Vivek Deshpande, who manages global strategy for Shenzhen-based mobile phone maker Zopo, says that while the Indian and Chinese markets are different, they both share a common appetite for aspirational devices: phones big enough for their owners to show off. This is changing the direction of lower end players.
“Zopo’s primary focus is now on phablets,” said Deshpande.
Even Samsung is pushing its own creation downmarket: In Las Vegas it will unveil the Galaxy Grand, a 5-inch device that lacks some of the resolution and muscle of its bigger brethren but will be aimed at markets like India. There is a version offering a dual SIM slot, a popular feature for those wanting to arbitrage cheaper call and data plans.
As phablets slide into the mainstream, handset makers are trying to find ways of differentiating.
As well as hiring Italian designer Giovannoni better known for his minimalist, sleek bathrooms, ZTE also came up with an onscreen keypad that inclines to one side of the screen, depending on whether the user is left- or right-handed.
Samsung, however, not only has first mover advantage, it can also build on its expertise in display.
Barclay’s Gai says Samsung is expected to introduce a thinner, unbreakable AMOLED screen which will leave room for bigger batteries.
“That will put Samsung in good stead to still dominate the market,” he said. Despite pressure in China, Gai estimates Samsung’s share of smartphones with 5-inch or larger screens to fall only from 73 percent in 2012 to 58 percent in 2016, which is still the lion’s share.
By then consumers will see the phablet for what it is, says Horace Dediu, a Finnish analyst who runs a technology blog asymco.com. Its rise is part of a wider march of computing power into wherever we reside – the living room, the train, bed or work.
“It makes sense that we’re moving towards a time where we are served not by a computer or a netbook or a phone, but rather that we have these screens scattered around and available for us to play with,” he said. “In a way the phablet is not a bulky phone but a very delicate computer.”
(Editing by Emily Kaiser)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Texas Chainsaw 3D ripped through theaters in its weekend debut, scoring $23 million and the top spot at the box office.
The Christmas Day champion, Les Miserables dropped to fourth place over the weekend, behind Django Unchained ($20.1 million) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ($17.5 million). The popular musical pulled in $16.1 million.
WATCH: The Best Moment from Les Miserables
Quentin Tarantino's Spaghetti "Southern," starring Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio, is on pace to pass Inglourious Basterds as his top-grossing film in North America, as its current cumulative gross has just hit $106.4 million. Comparatively, Basterds took in a cumulative $120 million at the box office.
The New York City schools chancellor on Sunday accused the union representing school bus drivers of “jerking our kids around” by threatening a strike that would force 152,000 students to find alternative ways to get to class.
“A strike would affect our most vulnerable students,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott told a news conference at the Manhattan headquarters of the Department of Education.
The children who use the yellow school buses include 54,000 with disabilities, the chancellor said, and the “union should stop playing games, issuing threats of striking” — but not saying which day it might happen.
“The union has said, ‘Well, maybe on Monday, well maybe Wednesday, maybe we’ll do it, maybe we won’t do it.’ They’re jerking our kids around,” Walcott said. “We can’t allow that to happen.”
Officials of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union say they’re trying to avert a strike. But as Walcott spoke inside, thousands of drivers and their supporters packed City Hall Park for a boisterous rally with talk of walking out. cm-bd
The city is looking to cut transportation costs and has put contracts with private bus companies up for bid. The union is decrying the lack of employee protections, saying many current drivers could suddenly lose their jobs once their contracts are up in June.
A decision on the new bids is to be made in May, city officials said.
“They’re trying to replace us with inexperienced drivers working for new companies for minimum wage,” said Samuel Rivera, 38, who’s been driving for almost a dozen years.
Driver Rick Meli scanned the spirited throng in the park, standing shoulder to shoulder, and said, “This is going to get ugly.”
“I’ve been working 35 years driving kids to school in the Bronx, and now you’re going to tell me, ‘You don’t have a job no more’?” said the 67-year-old union member. “How do you tell this many people they could lose their jobs?”
In case of a strike, students will be given MetroCards to get to school. If they’re younger, a parent or guardian also would get a MetroCard to escort a child. And in the case of special needs children, families would get reimbursed for non-public transportation.
The union argues that child safety is at stake if less experienced drivers are hired for lower wages.
Walcott countered that bids include stringent safety requirements for the drivers — as well as savings that could be used for educational purposes. He said New York has not used significant competitive bidding for new yellow bus contracts since 1979, resulting in a $6,900 annual busing cost per child — compared with $3,124 in Los Angeles.
A strike would impact all students who use the buses, including parochial and private schools.
New York City has 1.1 million students in its school district.
For that blind first date, a half-century ago, the young doctor, Phillip Frost, showed up at Patricia Orr’s family house in suburban New York, with an unusual gift: a miniature mushroom garden.
In the 50 years since, Frost, the son of a shoe store owner, has gone on to amass a fortune of $2.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine, becoming the 188th wealthiest man in the United States by developing and selling pharmaceutical companies. Along the way, he and Patricia have become major philanthropists in Miami-Dade County and they’ve signed a pledge to give away at least $1 billion more.
“He’s a relentless guy,” says Miami banker Bill Allen, who’s know him for more than 40 years. “He’s not afraid to take risks. ... He knows the intimate details of the chemistry of products, and he’s the kind of guy who can examine 50 deals while eating a sandwich.”
CNBC’s Jim Cramer recently praised Frost’s “incredible track record” for developing companies, calling Frost’s latest endeavor, OPKO Health, a “very risky” investment while noting it could offer huge gains under Obamacare.
But back in 1962, Patricia’s first impression was that Phil Frost was a bit of a nerd, finishing his medical internship with a strong interest in research — including mushrooms. She figured an academic career loomed.
“My mother was very impressed,” recalls Patricia, not so much by the M.D. behind Frost’s name but by the gift, something more serious than the usual flowers or candy. Serious was fine with Patricia, who was living at home while working toward a master’s degree in education at Columbia University. For their first date, they listened to a classical music concert.
Frost’s rise to riches may seem highly distinctive, but in an odd coincidence he has much in common with another prominent Miamian. Frost, 76, and car dealer Norman Braman, 80, both frequently appear on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. Both grew up in Philadelphia — Frost the son of a man who sold shoes, Braman son of a barber. Both are Jewish, well-known art collectors and philanthropists.
“He’s an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur,” says Braman. “We have a lot in common, coming from very poor families. But he went to Central High (a public school for exceptional students) and I was not qualified to go there.”
There are other differences. While Braman is voluble and highly visible in the causes he supports, Frost tends to be a reticent, almost shy speaker, given to careful pauses.
‘Lucky chances’
Told that a former colleague had called Frost “lucky,” Frost thought for a long moment. He could have cited many national business stories about his business acumen. Instead, he responded crisply: “I’ll be satisfied with lucky. I benefited from chance meetings.”
Frost spent his first years living above the shoe shop within an Italian market in South Philly. His two brothers were 15 and 16 years older. “I was an afterthought.”
The family was religiously observant, and Frost recalls his father singing him songs in Yiddish when he was small. He lived at home while attending the University of Pennsylvania, except for a year abroad in France. He took many science courses, but his major was French literature.
Several residents in a neighborhood near Fort Lauderdale were allowed back into their homes Saturday afternoon being after evacuated earlier in the day due a Hazmat incident, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
At about 10 a.m. the sheriff’s office received a call from a resident in the 250 block of Northwest 31 Avenue, who noticed chlorine inside a steel tank he had purchased.
There was minor leakage from the tank and some homes in the area were evacuated as a precaution due to the strong smell.
Traffic was diverted from the area.
By about 1:30 p.m. the Broward Sheriff’s Fire Rescue’s hazardous materials team had secured the scene with assistance from Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue, according to sheriff’s office officials.
No injuries have been reported as a result of this incident.
TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – Honduras has removed its ambassador to Colombia amid reports his personal aide was involved in a wild party held at the embassy of Honduras in Bogota which, according to media, was attended by prostitutes and where cell phones and computers were stolen.
Ambassador Carlos Rodriguez quit his post on Saturday, Honduras’ foreign ministry said in a release, after the government requested his withdrawal.
Rodriguez’s personal aide went out with friends on December 20, picking up some prostitutes in Bogota’s red district before going to the embassy, where they consumed alcohol and trashed the facilities, El Heraldo daily reported.
It was not clear if Rodriguez was present, but the ministry said an investigation was under way.
Last year, about a dozen U.S. Secret Service employees were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms ahead of a visit to Colombia by President Barack Obama, in the biggest scandal to hit the agency.
(Reporting By Gustavo Palencia; Editing by Vicki Allen)
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