Google offers New York City neighborhood free WiFi






(Reuters) – Google Inc and a New York redevelopment organization are providing a Manhattan neighborhood with free public WiFi Internet access, making it the largest area of coverage in New York City.


The search giant and the non-profit Chelsea Improvement Co are making Internet access available outdoors in Chelsea, which is home to Google’s New York offices and several technology start-ups.






The neighborhood is also home to many students, as well as residents of one of the city’s public housing developments.


Google does not plan to extend the program, a company spokesman said on Tuesday.


The company also provides free Internet access to the city of Mountain View, California, where its main campus is located.


New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer helped unveil the initiative.


(Reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Man Wins $1 Million Lotto - Then Dies of Cyanide Poisoning: Police















01/08/2013 at 04:45 PM EST







Urooj Khan


Illinois Lottery/EPA/Landov


Urooj Khan won a million dollar lottery, but he lost his life the day after collecting his winnings. Now, the authorities suspect that the Chicago man was the victim of foul play.

Pathologists initially believed Khan died of natural causes, but have since changed their minds after a relative asked them to re-examine his death and they detected lethal amounts of cyanide in his blood.

"We are investigating the incident as a murder and are working closely with the medical examiner," Chicago Police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton tells PEOPLE.

Khan, a 46-year-old hardworking entrepreneur from India, bought the two lottery scratch-off tickets at a convenience store near his home last June.

Moments after scratching off the second ticket, he reportedly jumped into the air and screamed, "I hit a million!" then handed the clerk a hundred-dollar bill out of gratitude.

On July 19, Khan cashed in his ticket and received a check (minus taxes) for $425,000, some of which he planned on donating to a local children's hospital.

The next day he was back at work at his string of dry cleaning businesses. But that evening, shortly after going to bed, he awoke shrieking in agony.

Shabana Ansari, 32, his wife of 12 years, telephoned paramedics and he was rushed to nearby St. Francis Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead several hours later.

Khan's blood sample showed no signs of carbon monoxide, opiates or alcohol. And because there were no visible signs of trauma to his body and no evidence of foul play, pathologists didn't believe an autopsy needed to be performed.

His death was attributed to hardening of the arteries and Khan was eventually buried at a local cemetery.

But before a week had passed, an unidentified relative telephoned the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, saying that he suspected foul play. A morgue worker took another look at Khan's blood sample and this time discovered lethal levels of cyanide.

"If a family member has a concern that seems valid, we take those seriously," Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina tells the Chicago Tribune. "We can't [ordinarily] look for every toxin under the sun like a CSI episode."

Homicide detectives are currently piecing together Khan's final days and deciding whether or not to exhume his body.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down


WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.


Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.


"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.


But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.


Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.


The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.


Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.


Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.


But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.


Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.


Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.


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Wall Street slips as earnings season gets under way

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Tuesday, retreating from last week's rally on the "fiscal cliff" deal in Washington, as companies started to report results for the fourth quarter.


After a 4.3 percent jump in the two sessions around the close of the fiscal cliff negotiations, the S&P has declined a bit, with investors finding few catalysts to extend the rally that took the benchmark to five-year highs.


"We had a brief respite, courtesy of what happened on the fiscal cliff deal and the flip of the calendar with new money coming into the market," said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama.


Shares of AT&T Inc dropped 1.7 percent to $34.35, making it one of the biggest drags on the S&P 500, after the company said it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the quarter.


This figure beat the same quarter in 2011, but also means increased costs for the wireless service provider. Providers like AT&T pay hefty subsidies to handset makers so that they can offer discounts to customers who commit to two-year contracts.


Fourth-quarter profits are expected to beat the previous quarter's lackluster results, but analyst estimates are down sharply from October. Quarterly earnings are expected to grow by 2.7 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Dow component Alcoa, the largest U.S. aluminum producer, reported results after the closing bell.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 55.44 points, or 0.41 percent, to 13,328.85. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 4.74 points, or 0.32 percent, to 1,457.15. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> lost 7.01 points, or 0.23 percent, to 3,091.81.


"The stark reality of uncertainty with regard to earnings, plus the negotiations on the debt ceiling, are there and that doesn't give investors a lot of reason to take bets on the long side," Hellwig said.


With AT&T's fall, the S&P telecom services index <.gspl> was the worst performer of the 10 major S&P sectors, down 2.7 percent.


Sears Holdings shares dropped 6.4 percent to $40.16 a day after the company said Chairman Edward Lampert would take over as CEO from Louis D'Ambrosio, who is stepping down due to a family member's health issue. The U.S. retailer also reported a 1.8 percent decline in quarter-to-date sales at stores open at least a year.


Markets went lower as some of the first reported earnings were weak.


"It doesn't seem to be bouncing back, it might stay here or sell off a little further," said Stephen Carl, head of U.S. equity trading at The Williams Capital Group in New York.


Shares of restaurant-chain operator Yum Brands Inc fell 4.2 percent to $65.04 a day after the KFC parent warned sales in China, its largest market, shrank more than expected in the fourth quarter.


GameStop was one of the worst performers on the S&P 500 as shares slumped 6.3 percent to $23.19 after the video game retailer reported low customer traffic for the holiday season and cut its guidance.


Shares of Monsanto Co gained 2.5 percent to $98.42 after reaching a more than four-year high at $99.99. The world's largest seed company raised its earnings outlook for fiscal year 2013 and posted strong first-quarter results.


Volume was below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion shares traded per day, as 6.19 billion were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq.


Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,495 to 1,458, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,305 to 1,158.


(Reporting by Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)



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American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip


David Guttenfelder/Associated Press


Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.







SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.








Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press

Bill Richardson with journalists on Monday after arriving in Pyongyang, North Korea. Mr. Richardson, who has visited the North several times, called his trip a private humanitarian mission.






Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korean-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.


“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”


In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”


Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders, and to visit universities.


Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.


Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.


Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.


Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.


But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.


North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.


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Mark Zuckerberg faces fine in Germany over Facebook privacy violations









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Aurora Shooting: Officer Emotionally Recalls Slipping on Bloody Floor















01/07/2013 at 04:10 PM EST







James Holmes


University of CO/Splash News Online


As a body armor-clad James Holmes calmly told police about the explosives in his apartment, other officers raced to save victims of the movie-theater massacre, the first witnesses testified Monday in Holmes's preliminary hearing.

Officer Justin Grizzle choked up on the stand recalling slipping on the bloody floor as he encountered "several bodies throughout the theater laying motionless." He testified that, as he drove six victims to the hospital, "there was so much blood I could hear it sloshing around in the back of my car."

Among the victims of the Aurora, Colo., shooting he transported was Caleb Medley, a stand-up comedian who was shot in the head and is the last victim still hospitalized. Grizzle said Medley made a "god-awful" gurgling sound as he tried to breathe.

"I shouted, 'Don’t f–––ing die on me,'" Grizzle testified.

The first witness, Officer Jason Oviatt, testified that Holmes, a 25-year-old former neuroscience student, told them explosives in his apartment would go off if they were tripped.

"He was very relaxed," Oviatt testified. "It was like there weren't normal emotional responses."

The hearing, in Centennial, Colo., is to determine if there is sufficient evidence against Holmes on the 166 criminal charges in the July 20 attack, which killed 12 people and injured at least 70.

Some of the survivors are expected to testify during the week-long proceeding. Before this week, authorities had avoided discussing details and evidence about the highly publicized attack.

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Organ donations fall in Germany after scandal


BERLIN (AP) — Organ donations have dropped sharply in Germany following a scandal over alleged corruption at several transplant clinics.


The German Foundation for Organ Transplantation says the number of organs donated fell almost 13 percent to 3,917 last year, the lowest figure in a decade.


Several German clinics are being investigated over allegations that doctors manipulated waiting lists to help some patients appear sicker than they were and so receive transplants sooner.


The foundation said Monday that the scandal had "massively shaken" the public's faith in the transplant system.


Some 12,000 people in Germany require organ transplants each year.


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Wall Street edges off five-year high, awaits earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks lost ground on Monday, as investors drew back from recent gains that lifted the S&P 500 to a five-year high, in anticipation of sluggish growth in corporate profits.


Shares of financial companies dipped after a group of major U.S. banks agreed to pay a total of $8.5 billion to end a government inquiry into faulty mortgage foreclosures. The KBW bank index <.bkx>, a gauge of U.S. bank stocks, was down 0.3 percent.


Other sectors were hit as well, most notably energy and utilities. The S&P 500 energy sector index <.gspe> fell 0.8 percent and the utilities sector <.gspu> was off 1.1 percent.


The day's decline came a session after the S&P 500 finished at a five-year high, boosted by a budget deal and strong economic data. The S&P 500 rose 4.6 percent last week, the best weekly gain in more than a year.


"It's a little bit of taking some risk off the table ahead of profit season, you're not going to see anything all that great" on earnings, said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.


Earnings are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results, and analysts' current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Fourth-quarter earnings growth is expected to come in at 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Aluminum company Alcoa Inc begins the reporting season by announcing its results after Tuesday's market close. Alcoa shares fell 1.7 percent at $9.10.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 50.92 points, or 0.38 percent, to 13,384.29. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 4.58 points, or 0.31 percent, to 1,461.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> lost 2.84 points, or 0.09 percent, to 3,098.81.


Ten mortgage servicers - including Bank of America , Citigroup , JPMorgan , and Wells Fargo - agreed on Monday to pay $8.5 billion to end a case-by-case review of foreclosures required by U.S. regulators.


In a separate case, Bank of America also announced roughly $11.6 billion of settlements with mortgage finance company Fannie Mae and a $1.8 billion sale of collection rights on home loans.


The bank also entered into agreements with Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and Walter Investment Management to sell about $306 billion of residential mortgage servicing rights.


Bank of America shares lost 0.2 percent at $12.09 while Nationstar Mortgage Holdings jumped 16.8 percent to $38.83.


Citigroup shares were up 0.09 percent to $42.47, and Wells Fargo shares fell 0.5 percent to $34.77.


"The financials probably have the wind behind them now with a lot of the regulations coming out ... the market has to absorb a lot of the gains, and for that reason there's a pullback from this level," said Warren West, principal at Greentree Brokerage Services in Philadelphia.


Shares of U.S. jet maker Boeing Co dropped 2 percent after a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston's Logan International Airport on Monday morning.


Amazon.com shares hit their highest price ever at $269.22 after Morgan Stanley raised is rating on the stock. Shares were up 3.6 percent at $268.46.


Video-streaming service Netflix Inc shares gained 3.4 percent to $99.20 after it said it will carry previous seasons of some popular shows produced by Time Warner's Warner Bros Television.


Walt Disney Co stock fell 2.3 percent to $50.97. The company started an internal cost-cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.


Volume was lower than average, as 4.78 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq. This is well below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion per session.


Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,629 to 1,363, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,438 to 1,066.


(Reporting By Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)



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Klemens von Klemperer Dies at 96; Wrote of Nazi Era





Klemens von Klemperer, a refugee from Nazi Germany who wrote what is widely considered the seminal history of the movement among the country’s conservative elite to overthrow Hitler, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Easthampton, Mass. He was 96.




His death was confirmed by his son, James.


Dr. von Klemperer, an emeritus professor of history at Smith College, was one of a generation of refugee historians who helped lay the groundwork for modern German and European studies in the United States, a group that also included Hajo Holborn, Fritz Stern and Peter Gay.


A privileged child who came from a family of German bankers and industrialists, he had taken a leading role in demonstrations against Hitler as a student in Vienna before fleeing to the United States in 1938.


Dr. von Klemperer, the author of seven books, was best known for his 1992 work, “German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938-1945.”


On July 20, 1944, in the signature moment for the movement, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German Army colonel, placed a briefcase containing a bomb under the map table at Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s headquarters in a bunker in East Prussia. Hitler survived the ensuing blast, proclaiming divine providence, and set off a wave of executions of conspirators.


Dr. von Klemperer’s book explored the broader aims of the resistance movement and how its leaders — among them the aristocrat Helmuth James von Moltke and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as diplomats and high-ranking military men — had made many contacts seeking support from the Western Allies.


“He really charted the foreign contacts of that group; that’s the importance of von Klemperer’s work,” Catherine Epstein, chairwoman of the history department at Amherst College and an expert on German history, said in an interview. “These were very nationalistic resisters. They wanted to have an independent Germany, did not want to be occupied by the Allies.”


Their outreach was thwarted by the Allies’ goal of unconditional German surrender and by a lack of trust in the resistance movement. Yet, for Dr. von Klemperer, their efforts achieved a higher goal.


“He attempted to show that there were indeed good Germans, and that they were deeply, morally offended by the Nazis,” said Allan Mitchell, who profiled Dr. von Klemperer in his 2011 book “Fleeing Nazi Germany: Five Historians Migrate to America.” “That’s what was most important to him.”


In “German Resistance Against Hitler,” Dr. von Klemperer wrote, “The determination of the German Resistance to reach the ‘greater world’ stands as an example for the many dissidents and freedom movements who in our day, still plagued by oppression, are appealing to the conscience of the world.”


Klemens Wilhelm von Klemperer was born in Berlin on Nov. 2, 1916, into what had been a Jewish family until his grandfather, Gustav, the director of one of Germany’s largest banks, converted to Protestantism.


Klemens’s father, Herbert, was the president of a company that manufactured locomotives, submarines and torpedoes for the German military.


That status and the family’s conversion mattered less and less after anti-Jewish laws were passed in 1933. In 1935, young Klemens joined his mother’s family in Vienna.


He studied history at the University of Vienna and, after Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, took part in student street protests. But by November, with his family’s property seized, he had fled to the United States. Eventually, members of his family were killed at Auschwitz.


He enrolled at Harvard under a program for refugee scholars, but his studies were interrupted by his service as an intelligence officer in the United States Army. After returning to Harvard, he received his doctorate in history in 1949 and soon joined the faculty at Smith, where he taught for 37 years.


Among Dr. von Klemperer’s other books are “A Noble Combat: The Letters of Shiela Grant Duff and Adam von Trott zu Solz, 1932-1938” (1988), about the romantic relationship of a British woman and a German diplomat as they struggled with their concerns about the Nazi regime, and “Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a Time of Crisis” (1972), a biography of an Austrian priest who became chancellor in the 1920s.


Besides his son, Dr. von Klemperer is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Elizabeth Gallaher; a daughter, Catharine Utzschneider; and four grandchildren.


Three years ago, Dr. von Klemperer’s memoir, “Voyage Through the 20th Century,” was published.


“I was not an extraordinary person, but I did live in extraordinary times,” he wrote, “and my small mission was somehow to make sense of it all.”


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