Country singer Kristofferson looks to end of road

GENEVA (Reuters) – Kris Kristofferson — Oxford scholar, athlete, U.S. Army helicopter pilot, country music composer, one-time roustabout, film actor, singer, lover of women, three times a husband and father of eight — seems ready to meet his maker.

At least, that was the clear impression he left with an audience of middle-aged-and-upwards fans at a concert in Geneva this week, a message underscored by his 28th and latest album, “Feeling Mortal” and its coffin-dark cover.

At a frail-looking 76, his ample beard more straggly than ever and his always gravel-laden voice gasping out the familiar lyrics of his great classics from “Bobby McGee” to “Rainbow Again”, the hereafter appears at the front of his mind.

“I’ve begun to soon descend, like the sun into the sea,” runs the title song of the new CD.

On the stage without backing group in Geneva, the first leg of a solo European tour to promote the disc from his own record company, “God” trips off his lips like a punctuation mark.

Even the old songs that made him — as well as other country artists like Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash, and his one-time girl-friend Janis Joplin — internationally famous, sound shaped by the fading voice to underscore a spiritual dimension.

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” emerges less as an ode to elderly loners facing old age without family and children and more as a call to prepare for the next life.

Religiosity was never that far from Kristofferson, son of a major-general in the U.S. Air Force, grandson of a Swedish army officer and in the 1ate 1950s a Rhodes Scholar in English Literature at England’s Oxford University.

CRUCIFIXION

In the 1971 “Jesus was a Capricorn” he predicts the Christian savior would be crucified again if he came back preaching peace and love among all races and creeds.

In the new album, “Ramblin’ Jack” is semi-autobiographical — a song about a wandering singer “with a face like a tumbled-down shack” of “wild and righteous, wicked ways” who “ain’t afraid of where he’s goin’.”

Kristofferson is adored by many believers, probably the vast majority of U.S. country fans and performers. But his fans among the unreligious and the atheists were also happy just to relish the poetry of his lyrics and the idiosyncrasy of his voice.

In Geneva, despite its Calvinist past as secular today as any major European city, the ageing 1,000-odd audience in a theatre seating twice that number, were certainly ready to enjoy anything he gave them.

They cheered and applauded his political declaration, an aside injected after a song line: “nobody wins.” “But somebody has just won. Obama won, so the whole world has won!” he rasped, waving his electric guitar in the air.

SELF-MOCKERY

They loved his self-mockery when, overcome briefly by a sniffle and pulling a blue bandana — cousin of the red one in “Bobby McGee”? — from his jeans pocket, he asked them if they minded having paid $ 100 “to watch an old fart blow his nose.”

And they laughed with him when — in the full flood of lyrics on the pleasure of being around “a lot of lovely girls in the best of all possible worlds — he confided: “I wrote this song a LONG time ago.”

His 22-year-old angel-faced daughter Kelly, a banjoist and vocalist, joined him on stage for a handful of numbers, while in the hall outside son Jesse manned a stall selling the new CD and the black “Feeling Mortal Tour” t-shirts.

Children — their dreams and the dreams of their parents for them — have also long been a central theme of his music.

“I wrote this for my little girl,” he says of a father’s song pledging he will be “forever there” for a daughter through life, and after. “Spread your wings,” he tells her.

More prosaically, he recalls a rebuke from Jesse at age five over his 1970s hit: “The Silver-Tongued Devil”: “That’s a bad song. You’re blaming all your troubles on someone else.”

After the concert, the Kristofferson family left for Zurich and Vienna to continue the tour. “This may be our last goodbye,” he sang in a final song. “We may not pass this way again.”

“We’ll miss you,” called a voice from the audience.

(Reported by Robert Evans)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Lining up even earlier for Black Friday becomes a shop priority

In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.

Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters. 

Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.

"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items. 

PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals

At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.

"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."

Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."

After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.

A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.

About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.

"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.

Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.

But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.

Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.

Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.

For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.

The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.

JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.

"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.

To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.

Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

joseph.serna@latimes.com

Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.

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Recipes for Health: Pear Clafoutis — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT:

If you don’t want to make a crust but want something tartlike for your Thanksgiving dessert, a clafoutis, which is something like a cross between a flan and a pancake, is a great choice. It’s a very easy dessert, yet it’s always impressive.

2 tablespoons pear eau-de-vie or liqueur (optional)

2 tablespoons mild-flavored honey, like clover

2 pounds ripe but firm pears, like Bartlett or Comice

3 large eggs

1 vanilla bean, scraped

1/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup sifted unbleached white flour

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1/2 cup milk

pinch of salt

1. Combine the pear eau-de-vie and the honey in a bowl. Peel, core and slice the pears and toss with the mixture. Let sit for 30 minutes.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10-inch ceramic tart pan or baking dish.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer or with a whisk, beat together the eggs, the seeds from the vanilla bean and the sugar. Pour off the marinade from the pears and add to the egg mixture. Gradually beat in the flour, then beat in the yogurt, milk and salt.

4. Arrange the pears in the baking dish. Pour on the batter. Place in the oven and bake 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is beginning to brown. Serve hot or warm.

Yield: 8 servings.

Advance preparation: Although this is best served warm, you can allow it to cool completely and serve it at room temperature. It will hold for several hours out of the refrigerator. Leftovers make a nice breakfast treat.

Nutritional information per serving: 195 calories; 2 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 1 gram monounsaturated fat; 71 milligrams cholesterol; 40 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 47 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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News Analysis: Case Casts a Shadow on a Hedge Fund Mogul

In 2010, the billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen gave a rare interview to Vanity Fair. He said that he wanted to combat persistent rumors that his firm, SAC Capital Advisors, routinely violated securities laws by trading on confidential information.

“In some respects I feel like Don Quixote fighting windmills,” Mr. Cohen said at the time. “There’s a perception, and I’m trying to fight that perception.”

Federal prosecutors only heightened that perception on Tuesday, bringing a criminal case against a former SAC employee in what Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, who brought the charges in Federal District Court in Manhattan, called the most lucrative insider trading scheme ever charged.

And for the first time, the evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen participated in trades that the government says illegally used insider information — though prosecutors have not said that Mr. Cohen himself knew the information was confidential, and he has not been charged.

Any prosecution of Mr. Cohen would most likely hinge on the cooperation of Mathew Martoma, the former SAC employee charged in the case. Mr. Bharara said in the charges that Mr. Martoma obtained secret data from a doctor about clinical trials for an Alzheimer’s drug being developed by the companies Elan and Wyeth. The information enabled SAC to avoid losses of almost $194 million on the stocks, which it sold and then bet against, reaping $83 million in profit — a total benefit to the firm of more than $276 million. SAC executed the trades shortly after Mr. Martoma e-mailed Mr. Cohen and said he needed to discuss something important.

As to Mr. Cohen’s potential culpability in the case, the crucial issue is what Mr. Martoma told Mr. Cohen that led SAC to quickly dump $700 million worth of stock. Did he provide his boss details on why he had turned sour on Wyeth and Elan? Specifically, did he share the leak about the drug trial’s negative results and identify the source of the secret information? Through a spokesman, he said he was confident he had acted appropriately.

It appears, for now, that Mr. Martoma will fight the charges. But the crucial question, as it relates to Mr. Cohen, is whether at some point Mr. Martoma will reverse course, admit to insider trading and agree to help the government build a case against his former boss. Without Mr. Martoma’s cooperation, it is unlikely that the prosecutors have enough evidence to charge Mr. Cohen.

“This has all the markings of a case where the government goes after the smaller fish and then pressures them to flip so they can get the whale,” said Bradley D. Simon, a criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor in New York.

The government has several weapons for its effort to persuade Mr. Martoma to agree to a plea, including the stiff sentences for insider trading. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, Mr. Martoma could receive more than 15 years in prison, a term that could be reduced — or avoided altogether — if he agreed to testify against Mr. Cohen.

F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Martoma, 38, early Tuesday morning at his home in Boca Raton, Fla., a nearly 8,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style mansion on the grounds of the elite Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club. He lives there with his wife, a pediatrician, and three children. A graduate of Duke University and Stanford University’s business school, Mr. Martoma is expected to make an appearance in Federal District Court in Manhattan Monday morning.

Described by a former colleague as low-key and cerebral, Mr. Martoma is one of scores of traders who have earned millions of dollars working under Mr. Cohen and feeding him their best investment ideas. He joined SAC in 2006. In 2008, the year he participated in the alleged illegal trade, the firm paid Mr. Martoma a $9.3 million bonus. But SAC fired him in 2010 after two years of subpar performance.

Charles A. Stillman, a lawyer for Mr. Martoma, said on the day of his arrest, “What happened today is only the beginning of a process that we are confident will lead to Mr. Martoma’s full exoneration.”

It is no secret that the government has been circling Mr. Cohen since the middle of last decade, when it began its crackdown on insider trading, an investigation that has resulted in more than 70 criminal charges. Prosecutors have already linked five former SAC employees to insider trading while at the fund — securing three convictions — though none of those cases connected Mr. Cohen to any illicit activity. But the complaint filed on Tuesday puts Mr. Cohen at the center of the supposed improper conduct.

Mr. Cohen, 56, is a legend on Wall Street, having amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune by posting phenomenal investment returns averaging about 30 percent over the last two decades. Starting with a $25 million grubstake, SAC now manages about $13 billion and has 900 employees across the globe. Mr. Cohen has also emerged as a major force in the art world, owning an eclectic collection that includes works by Picasso, Warhol and Cézanne.

Prosecutors have constructed their case against Mr. Martoma, and increased the pressure on him, by securing the cooperation of Dr. Sidney Gilman, the doctor who supposedly leaked to him the Alzheimer’s drug’s trial data. The case against Mr. Martoma will depend largely on Dr. Gilman’s credibility as a witness.

Dr. Gilman, 80, a neurologist at the University of Michigan medical school, was hired by Elan and Wyeth to monitor the trial’s safety, which gave him access to secret information about the results. SAC retained Dr. Gilman as a consultant and paid him about $108,000.

At first, Dr. Gilman’s reports on the trial’s progress were positive, and SAC built a position in the two drug makers worth approximately $700 million, according to prosecutors. But then, on July 17, 2008, Dr. Gilman told Mr. Martoma that there were problems with the drug, the government said.

A few days later, Mr. Martoma e-mailed Mr. Cohen that he needed to discuss something “important,” and the two then spoke for 20 minutes, according to court filings. Over the next four days, at Mr. Cohen’s direction, SAC Capital jettisoned its entire position in the two stocks and then placed a big negative bet on the drug makers, the government said.

On July 30, after disclosure of the poor trial results, shares of Elan and Wyeth sank. According to the prosecutors’ calculations, SAC would have lost about $194 million had it kept the stock; taking a short position instead generated profits of about $83 million.

Dr. Gilman and the Justice Department have entered into a nonprosecution agreement under which he will cooperate in exchange for not being criminally charged.

Thus far, any potential evidence against Mr. Cohen is entirely circumstantial. The government’s complaint includes e-mails about secretly selling the Elan and Wyeth shares through esoteric methods like algorithms and dark pools. But that is common practice among large, sophisticated funds that do not want to alert competitors or move the stock too much. Moreover, while SAC dumped its large positions in the two stocks quickly — raising the question of what prompted it to do so — Mr. Cohen is known for a rapid-fire trading style. He frequently moves aggressively in and out of stocks while processing gobs of information fed to him by his underlings.

It would be difficult for a jury to infer anything incriminating just from the way these trades were executed.

The government in this case also lacks the powerful wiretap evidence that it has used to convict dozens others, including Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group. Federal agents did wiretap Mr. Cohen’s home telephone for a short period in 2008, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. But it is unclear whether the eavesdropping, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, yielded any fruit.

Even without incriminating wiretap evidence, the government has brought cases that rely almost entirely on witnesses testifying against their bosses.

One of those cases is now under way in federal court in Manhattan. Prosecutors are currently trying the former hedge fund portfolio managers Anthony Chiasson of Level Global Investors and Todd Newman of Diamondback Capital Management. Prosecutors say that the two were part of a conspiracy that made about $68 million illegally trading technology stocks.

The outcome of that trial is expected to depend largely on whether the jury believes the testimony of two cooperating witnesses who admitted to the conspiracy — Spyridon Adondakis and Jesse Tortora, former junior analysts at Level Global and Diamondback. The two say they shared secret information with the defendants. Defense lawyers have attacked the witnesses’ credibility, accusing them of lying to avoid prison.

That case, too, has strong ties to SAC. Mr. Chiasson and his co-founder were star traders under Mr. Cohen before starting the now-defunct Level Global. And the owners of Diamondback are both former SAC employees; one is Mr. Cohen’s brother-in-law, Richard Schimel. Diamondback, which continues to operate, has not been accused of wrongdoing.

“SAC’s extraordinary profits have always been something of a market mystery,” said Sebastian Mallaby, the author of “More Money Than God,” a book on the history of hedge funds. “As more and more lawsuits implicate former SAC traders, we may at last understand where SAC’s profits came from.”

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Growing up with grandma

NEW YORK — Each day at 5 a.m., Denise Peace rises and begins the task of waking and feeding five grandchildren, ages 2 to 17, and shepherding them out the door of her cramped but miraculously neat apartment in Brooklyn.

The 5-year-old needs to be on his school bus by 6:26. The eldest has to catch a 7 a.m. train. The 4-year-old must be walked to school in time for the 8:10 bell. The 2-year-old plays while Peace prepares the 3-year-old for day care. In the early afternoon, she reverses the drill, fetching children from bus stops and schools and getting them home for dinner, baths and bed. Peace collapses about 9 p.m.

"Then I just start all over again," the 56-year-old said of the moment when her alarm sounds the next morning.

It's a routine that changes once a month, when Peace travels to a Brooklyn church and meets with dozens of other grandmothers — and some great-grandmothers — in similar situations. All have been catapulted back into full-time parenting by the sudden losses of their own children. All have been brought together by the New York Police Department and local clergy for a chance to swap stories, compare legal and parenting advice, cry on a friendly shoulder, pray and simply let off steam.

"It comforts you. It lets you know you're not alone in this," said Peace, who learned of the close-knit group called Grandmothers LOV — for Love Over Violence — as she searched for programs last year to help women like herself. "They have your back. It's like another family."

It's a family that is growing. According to the 2010 census, the number of grandparents who are primary caregivers to grandchildren has risen 12.8% since 2000, from about 2.4 million to more than 2.7 million. Between 1990 and 2000, census figures indicate that the number of U.S. children being raised by grandparents rose 30%. And the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which studies children's issues, says that in 1970, 3.2% of U.S. children lived in grandparent-run households; by 1997, it was 5.5%.

With today's grandparents — particularly grandmothers — living longer and often staying healthier, they are more likely to be able to step in if parents die or are unable to raise their children because of illness, incarceration, drug abuse or other problems. The recession is believed to have played a role in the increase, with grandparents more apt than many parents to have the financial stability needed to raise children, said Robert Geen, the Annie E. Casey Foundation's family services policy director.

"I think there is a concern that the tough economic environment is putting pressure on parents — that it is simply overwhelming them," Geen said. "The big concern is that our social services system is completely oriented toward a nuclear family, so support available to grandparents is fairly lacking."

Joanne Jaffe, the housing chief for the New York Police Department, had noticed how many grandmothers were becoming the anchor for disjointed families. LOV, which first met in September 2010, evolved from her observations, and from Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's work with Brooklyn clergy to combat youth violence.

Jaffe focused on grandmothers — not grandfathers — for several reasons. Among them: far more grandmothers than grandfathers are thrust into parenting roles because they often have more time, experience and willingness than men of their generation to rear their children's children. Jaffe wanted to empower those women to become leaders in combating violence and other problems in their communities.

"It's a giant family therapy group," Jaffe said recently as LOV members trickled into the Mt. Sion Baptist Church, on a busy corner near a loud highway overpass. There were women leaning on walkers and on canes, and at least one in a wheelchair. Another came with a squirming toddler in her arms.

There were squeals of joy and cries of "Welcome back!" as the women who had not seen each other in eight weeks — the group had taken a summer hiatus — huddled like giddy teenagers. For the next 21/2 hours, with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in day care, at school, or being cared for by baby-sitters or other family members, they could focus on themselves and one another.

Inez Rodriguez said she had canceled hip and knee replacement surgery to come to the gathering. Daphne Georgalas lamented the challenge of resting babies on her tired shoulders. "I thought I was done — and lo and behold I have little Princess Emily now," she said of her infant granddaughter.

Jaffe, whose NYPD uniform was in sharp contrast to the colorful dresses and hats worn by many of the grandmothers, made a point not to sound too cheery as she greeted the crowd. Instead, she alluded to the city's bloody summer, when shootings left several children and teenagers dead and wounded in the very neighborhoods that many of the grandmothers call home, and hope to change by keeping their own grandkids out of trouble.

"I'm not going to say it was a wonderful summer. I'm not coming here saying it's been a wonderful year," Jaffe said as cries of "Amen" and knowing "Uh-huhs" filled the room.

As police officers in uniform dished out a hot buffet breakfast, the women began catching up with one another. One of them was Carolyn Faulkner, a slender 74-year-old, who raised two grandchildren, now 21 and 19, and is now raising a third — a 10-year-old girl.

"Between running to school and going to PTA meetings, it's a lot of work, but you know what they say to me?" she said of her grandchildren. "'Thanks, Grandma.' That's more than money can buy."

Faulkner says she stepped in to care for her eldest daughter's three children when it became clear their mother was not up to the task.

"She didn't do drugs or anything. She just didn't grow up," said Faulkner, who with her husband of 50 years has run a wedding planning business among other enterprises, and who sits on her neighborhood's community board.

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Facebook to share data with Instagram, loosen email rules

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc is proposing to combine user data with that of recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram, and will loosen restrictions on emails between members of the social network.

Facebook also said on Wednesday it is proposing to scrap a 4-year old process that can allow the social network’s roughly 1 billion users to vote on changes to its policies and terms of services.

Facebook said it may share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates that Facebook owns to “help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services.”

One of Facebook’s most significant affiliate businesses is Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that Facebook acquired in October for roughly $ 715 million.

The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc. In January, Google said it would combine users’ personal information from its various Web services – such as search, email and the Google+ social network – to provide a more customized experience.

Google’s unified data policy raised concerns among some privacy advocates and regulators, who said it was an invasion of people’s privacy. A group of 36 U.S. state attorney generals also warned in a letter to Google that consolidating so much personal information in one place could put people at greater risk from hackers and identity thieves.

Facebook also wants to loosen the restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system.

Facebook said it wanted to eliminate a setting for users to control who can contact them. The company said it planned to replace the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.

Asked whether such a change could leave Facebook users exposed to a flood of unwanted, spam-like messages, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said that the company carefully monitors user interaction and feedback to find ways to enhance the user experience.

“We are working on updates to Facebook Messages and have made this change in our Data Use Policy in order to allow for improvements to the product,” Noyes said.

Facebook’s changes come as the world’s largest social networking company with roughly 1 billion users has experienced a sharp slowdown in revenue growth. The company generates the bulk of its revenue from advertising on its website.

The changes are open to public comment for the next seven days. If the proposed changes generate more than 7,000 public comments, Facebook’s current terms of service automatically trigger a vote by users to approve the changes. But the vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.

Facebook has said in that past that it was rethinking the voting system and on Wednesday Facebook moved to eliminate the vote entirely, noting that it hasn’t functioned as intended and is no longer suited to its current situation as a large publicly traded company subject to oversight by various regulatory agencies.

“We found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Instead of the vote, Facebook will look for other forms of user feedback on changes, such as an “Ask the Chief Privacy Officer” question-and-answer forum on its website as well as live webcasts about privacy, safety and security.

Facebook, Google and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.

In April, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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In “Middle of Nowhere,” Cast Found Black Characters Beyond the Stereotypes

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – When the black actors in “Middle of Nowhere” read the film’s script, they were shocked to find they could actually relate to the characters.

Director Ava DuVernay‘s depiction of a Compton woman struggling while her husband is incarcerated resonated with her cast of actors.

Before joining the cast, actor David Oyelowo had been shooting “Lincoln,” in which he plays Union Army soldier Ira Clark. He said “Middle of Nowhere” delves deeper into black people’s lives in a way that emphasizes normality.

He hinted that, while he was grateful to see black characters depicted in the Civil War-set Steven Spielberg film, the characters seemed to be an afterthought compared to the movie’s light-skinned titans, particularly when compared to “Middle of Nowhere.”

“You don’t see the people suffering under the weight of not having the 13th Amendment – there’s only so much you can do in two hours – and that’s the movie,” he said. “In ‘Lincoln,’ the roles you see: A butler, you see Sally Field’s handmaiden, so to speak, and you see me, myself, a soldier fighting for his country.”

“Middle of Nowhere” stars Emayatzy Corinealdi, a relative unknown in Hollywood, as Ruby. When her husband is jailed for gun smuggling, Ruby is forced to drop out of medical school to pay his legal fees. After he is denied parole, she finds herself on an existential journey trying to piece together a life for herself while maintaining her relationship with her incarcerated husband.

“We’re still a bit trapped in what the industry considers to be who we are and what our lives look like,” actress Lorraine Toussaint, who plays Ruby’s mother, told the audience at the Landmark Theatre Tuesday night at TheWrap’s Annual Screening Series. “Most stereotypical characters that I’ve played or see in film, I don’t know anyone in my life like those people.

“I don’t know gang-bangers, I don’t know people that run from the police,” she added. “I don’t know people that are in trouble all the time.”

DuVernay said she boiled months of research – interviewing the wives of felons, often at support groups or during visits to a penitentiary – into a screenplay and that she then raised $ 200,000 to turn it into a film.

“As I started to really examine what life is like in Compton where I grew up and really think about the texture of the lives of women who live there, incarceration kept coming up,” DuVernay told TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, who moderated a Q&A after the film’s screening.

“It’s radical to see black people being normal,” DuVernay said as she discussed what she sees as Hollywood‘s penchant for exaggerated black stereotypes.

Knowing that studio executives would likely challenge her choice of actors or try to market the movie as a “black” film, as opposed to just a film about black people, DuVernay fell back on more than a decade of experience in publicity and set up her own distribution company.

After snubbing Universal Pictures – Oyelowo accidentally let the studio’s name slip, for which DuVernay quickly apologized: “Sorry Universal! Does anyone have a camera on? Don’t tweet that” – she founded African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement.

“I started a distribution company because there wasn’t a distribution company interested in films about the interior lives of black women,” she said, drawing applause.

“Middle of Nowhere,” the winner of the Sundance Director’s Prize, opened on October 12. It has so far shown on 60 screens.

When, during the Q&A, one audience member asked whether DuVernay considered a more multi-ethnic cast – it’s largely black, save for what the director called the “token” Sharon Lawrence, the actress best known for “NYPD Blue,” who plays an attorney – or chose a black cast for marketing purposes, Oyelowo quickly jumped in.

“Can you imagine a studio saying, ‘hey, we should put a bunch of black people in it as a marketing tool?’” he said, laughing. “That’ll be the day. You should run a studio, my friend.”

Oyelowo exuded a particular excitement about the film. He was introduced to the script on a flight to Vancouver. The passenger seated beside him asked him for advice on investing in a movie. In the course of their conversation, Oyelowo invited the man, who ultimately helped finance “Middle of Nowhere,” to send him a copy of DuVernay‘s screenplay.

Reading the script on the way back to Los Angeles, he said he couldn’t resist visibly gesticulating with joy at how good, how real, the characters were. “Most black characters I read felt cartoonish to me,” he said. But this was something different.”

He phoned DuVernay, who said he had already been on her shortlist, and got the job.

And in a year when films like “Middle of Nowhere,” “Lincoln” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” – about a freed slave exacting revenge on the slavers that captured his wife – he’s proud of the direction Hollywood is going.

“I’m happy to see you all here,” Oyelowo said, surveying an audience dotted with people of many ethnicities. “It wasn’t always this way.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Tool Kit: Online Shopping Tips for the Holidays

Some people may be looking forward to leaving Thanksgiving dinner before the pie is served to join the Black Friday rush, which will begin during dinnertime Thursday, earlier than ever, at stores like Sears, Walmart and Lord & Taylor.

But for those who prefer to stay for the pie course, avoid the lines and freezing temperatures and shop from the comfort of their homes, there are just as many deals to be found online this year, especially for smart shoppers.

Last year, online shoppers spent $816 million on Black Friday, an increase of 26 percent from the year before, and an additional $2.3 billion over Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, according to comScore. It expects online spending to rise this year.

Online, there is no commute, no parking and no crowds — and shopping can be done in bed or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Still, you cannot try clothes on, you have to wait for your purchase to arrive and there is always the nagging feeling that a better price is just one more click away.

To find your way around those problems, here are some tips from online shopping pros, retailers and shopping bloggers.

BARGAINS START EARLY “Cyber Monday is passé,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer for ShopRunner.com, a network of e-commerce sites. “With online sales beginning as early as the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, consumers who hold out for the best deal may find that what they are looking for has already sold out.”

Amazon.com, for example, started its Black Friday deals on Monday, but they end Saturday. SHOP ON TUESDAYS One of the secrets of online shopping is that prices change by the second. To maximize your chances of getting the best price year-round, shop on Tuesday, a variety of e-commerce experts say. For whatever reason, Tuesday is when most e-commerce sites, including Shopbop, Etsy and RetailMeNot, post discounts and new items.

No matter the day, online retailers often start sales in the wee hours, so shop early.

As for the time of year, women’s clothes, shoes and accessories are discounted most in January, February, August and September, according to Shop It To Me, an online shopping search site. For consumer electronics like laptops, shop in midsummer and late September, before and after the back-to-school rush, according to Decide.com, a price comparison site.

NEVER PAY FULL PRICE Online holiday shoppers should use 40 percent off as a benchmark for a good deal, said Marjorie Cader, a Shop It To Me spokeswoman, based on discount data the site has collected. Expect discounts that are about 5 percent better from online-only retailers than from those that also operate brick and mortar stores, she said.

Comparison shopping sites like TheFind or ShopStyle can locate the best prices; Google or coupon sites like RetailMeNot can also help find a discount.

Google, Amazon and even flash sale sites like Gilt.com do not always have the lowest prices. You might check small shopping blogs dedicated to your favorite brands, like Grechen’s Closet for contemporary women’s clothes or J. Crew Aficionada.

“Spend 20 minutes and ensure you are getting the best deal out there,” said John Faith, senior vice president of mobile at WhaleShark Media, which operates coupon sites, including RetailMeNot.

BE A HAGGLER This is the year haggling at the cash register could become acceptable, as offline retailers try to keep shoppers offline. If you find a better price online — by using an application like RedLaser or searching Amazon — ask whether the cashier will match it. Big retailers like Target have already said they will.

WAIT TILL THE LAST MINUTE Procrastinators might benefit during the holidays. Electronics sold online are least expensive in the week before Christmas, according to Decide, especially TVs, laptops and cameras.

And while Dec. 17 is the last day that most online retailers will offer free shipping in time for Christmas, Walmart, the luxury clothing seller Net-a-Porter and others will deliver the same day. In San Francisco and New York, eBay now offers same-day delivery from hundreds of stores, including Macy’s, Target and Toys “R” Us.

NEVER PAY FOR SHIPPING... Nine of ten retailers will offer free shipping on certain purchases this holiday season, and a third will offer free shipping on all purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

Some, though, require that you enter a promotional code, so it’s wise to take a minute to look around the Web site or search a coupon site to find it.

Stores including Walmart, Toys “R” Us and Nordstrom allow you to shop online and pick up your order locally.

...OR FOR RETURNS Sites like Zappos.com and Piperlime send prepaid shipping labels, but beware.

“When it comes to returns, read the fine print,” said Brian Hoyt, a spokesman for WhaleShark Media. Some merchants include a prepaid return label but subtract the price from your refund, and others charge a restocking fee as high as 30 percent for consumer electronics.

Many companies, including Gap and J. Crew, also let you return an online purchase to a local store. And until Dec. 31, PayPal will cover the return shipping cost if the merchant does not, as long as you pay with PayPal and make the return within 30 days.

SEARCH WISELY Try searching synonyms, like “coat” instead of “jacket.” On sites like eBay, try leaving out words — if you are looking for an Yves Saint Laurent handbag on eBay, search for “Saint Laurent” or “Laurent bag.”

“If you search for ‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ you’ll be fighting over pieces with a bigger group of people,” said Sophia Amoruso, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce retailer Nasty Gal, who suggested purposefully misspelling brand names as well. “Think of what an uninformed person might list a really great designer piece as, and you can get an amazing gem for an incredible price.”

EBay Fashion also lets shoppers search by taking a cellphone picture of a fabric to find similar designs.

GET INSPIRED Search for “black sequin dress,” and you’ll get 128 results on Zappos.com, 2,618 on Amazon.com and a truly overwhelming 18 million on Google.

One solution: Trust online curators to suggest items. Etsy creates lists of recommended items. On Pinterest, you can peruse items culled by others. Other sites to search for inspiration: Polvyore, Fancy, Svpply, Lookbook.nu and We Heart It.

TRY IT ON, VIRTUALLY You can visit sites that show real people wearing the clothes you’re interested in buying, like Go Try It On, Fashism and Rent the Runway and sites that show video, including Asos, MyHabit and Joyus. Or, as long as a site offers free shipping and returns, order two sizes and return one.

SHOP INTERNATIONALLY “Don’t let international shopping scare you off,” said Caroline Nolan, the writer of Pregnant Fashionista, a maternity shopping blog.

Many international e-commerce sites, like Asos, ship free to the United States. And because the seasons are different, winter clothes in Australia, for instance, go on sale just as Americans are starting to shop for winter, she said. FarFetch has items from small boutiques worldwide and 1stDibs is good at finding rare items like an antique from Paris. On eBay, you might have luck finding items made by a European designer by switching to eBay’s site for a particular country.

MAKE SITES WORK FOR YOU On Shop It To Me, you can enter your favorite designers and sizes and the site will send you personalized e-mails with promotions and sales. Many sites allow shoppers to place a symbol like a heart on best-liked items or save them to a wish list. On a site like Pinterest, shoppers can build a list.

“You always think you’ll remember where you saw something or what brand it was, but really you never do,” said Noria Morales, style director at SugarInc, a network of fashion and lifestyle blogs.

Even better, sites like Shopbop and Polyvore send alerts when items you have saved go on sale or are running low. EBay sends alerts when new items are listed for a search you have saved.

BE DILIGENT No one has time to read 50 e-mails a day from retailers. But for your favorite e-commerce sites, it is worth signing up for e-mails, as well as tracking them on Facebook and Twitter, where they often post exclusive deals. Many online shoppers have more luck hunting for items than trusting services to send alerts, said Grechen Reiter, owner of Grechen Media, a network of shopping blogs.

“It is the thrill of the hunt that gets us going, after all,” she said.

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