Hours after Ben Affleck was snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which did not give him a Best Director nomination for his film Argo, he won in the same category at Thursday night's 18th Annual Critics Choice Movie Awards in Santa Monica.
"I'd like to thank the Academy," joked Affleck, 40, while on stage to collect his hardware. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding! This is the one that counts."
Affleck's victory was greeted by thunderous applause and a standing ovation from the crowd. His absence from the field of Best Director Oscar nominees was considered one of the biggest shocks when the nominations were announced Thursday morning. Meanwhile, Argo was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
"It actually is very, very cool for me," Affleck said while accepting his Critics Choice Award. "There was a time where the Ben Affleck Critics Award was a Saturday Night Live sketch, so this is a very, very cool and exciting thing."
Affleck, who attended the show without wife Jennifer Garner, went on to thank his family by saying, "My daughter wrote my name on my hand for luck. I don't know how that works, but I guess it worked," he said. "I want to thank my kids and I want to thank my wife, without whom I would not be anywhere, much less here."
When Affleck returned to his table, George Clooney – a producer on Argo – greeted him with a congratulatory hug and smile, while fellow nominee David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) offered his congrats by rubbing Affleck's back.
Argo also was named best picture at the Critics Choice Awards.
NEW YORK (AP) — Flu is more widespread across the nation, but the number of hard-hit states has declined, health officials said Friday.
Flu season started early this winter, and includes a strain that tends to make people sicker. Health officials have forecast a potentially bad flu season, following last year's unusually mild one.
The latest numbers, however, hint that the flu season may already have peaked in some spots.
Flu was widespread in 47 states last week, up from 41 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. Many cases may be mild. The only states without widespread flu are California, Mississippi and Hawaii
The hardest hit states dropped to 24 from 29. Those are states where large numbers of people have been treated for flu-like illness.
Those with less activity include Florida, Arkansas and South Carolina in South, the first region hit in the current flu season.
Nationally, 20 children have died from the flu. There is no running tally of adult deaths, but the CDC estimates that the flu kills about 24,000 people in an average year.
Flu vaccinations are recommended for everyone 6 months or older. Health officials are still recommending vaccinations, even in areas with widespread flu reports.
Nearly 130 million doses of flu vaccine were distributed this year, and at least 112 million have been used, according to CDC officials.
Vaccine is still available, but supplies may have run low in some locations, health officials say.
Also on Friday, CDC officials said a recent study of more than 1,100 people has concluded the current flu vaccine is 62 percent effective. That's in line with how effective the vaccine has been in other years.
The flu vaccine is reformulated each year, and officials say this year's version is a good match to the viruses going around.
Flu usually peaks in midwinter. Symptoms can include fever, cough, runny nose, head and body aches and fatigue. Some people also suffer vomiting and diarrhea, and some develop pneumonia or other severe complications.
Most people with flu have a mild illness. But people with severe symptoms should see a doctor. They may be given antiviral drugs or other medications to ease symptoms.
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Online:
CDC flu: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks edged lower on Friday after Wells Fargo & Co
Wells Fargo, the fourth-biggest U.S. bank and the nation's largest home lender, said its fourth-quarter net interest margin - a key measure of how much money banks make from loans - fell, even as profit jumped 24 percent. The bank also made fewer mortgage loans than in the third quarter.
"It (Wells Fargo results) is weighing on the sector. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this won't be a sector thing and more confined to Wells Fargo, but it's definitely playing a factor today," said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets LLC in Boston.
The bank's shares fell 1.4 percent to $34.92. The S&P 500 financial sector index <.gspf> fell 0.6 percent and the KBW Banks index <.bkx> fell 1 percent. Bank of America Corp
Overall earnings were expected to grow by 1.9 percent in this earnings season, according to Thomson Reuters data.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 6.12 points, or 0.05 percent, at 13,477.34. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 2.37 points, or 0.16 percent, at 1,469.75. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 2.19 points, or 0.07 percent, at 3,119.56.
Also keenly watched Friday were shares of Dow component Boeing
Best Buy
Basic materials shares were pressured after China's annual consumer inflation rate picked up to a seven-month high, narrowing the scope for the central bank to boost the economy by easing monetary policy. The S&P basic materials sector <.gspm> fell 0.6 percent.
Dendreon Corp
(Editing by Bernadette Baum, Nick Zieminski)
Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Members of the Kurdish community watched as the body of one of the three Kurdish women shot dead at the Kurdish Institute was carried away on Thursday in Paris. T
PARIS — Three Kurdish women, including a founding member of a leading militant group fighting for autonomy in Turkey, were shot to death at a Kurdish institute in central Paris, police officials said on Thursday, potentially jeopardizing efforts to negotiate a cease-fire in the decades-old conflict.
News reports identified the women as Sakine Cansiz, a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by the initials P.K.K.; Fidan Dogan, the head of the institute and a representative of the Kurdistan National Congress, an umbrella group of Kurdish organizations in Europe; and Leyla Soylemez, a young Kurdish activist.
The women’s bodies were discovered shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday, according to Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, who added that the antiterror department of the prosecutor’s office would oversee the investigation. She confirmed that Ms. Dogan, born in 1984, and Ms. Soylemez, born in 1988, were victims in the killings, but declined to confirm the identity of the third woman.
Asked about the motive, she said, “No hypothesis can be excluded at this stage.”
Visiting the crime scene on Thursday, Interior Minister Manuel Valls called the shootings “intolerable” and said they were “without doubt an execution.” The violence at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, in the city’s 10th Arrondissement near the Gare du Nord railroad station, seemed to open a new chapter in the often murky annals of Kurdish exile life.
In recent years, Turkey has sought to clamp down on the activities of Kurdish activists outside Turkey. Sizable exile communities in France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark have established civic and media organizations that Kurdish officials say are a refuge from Turkish censorship.
Turkey has accused some of the institutions of being fronts for separatist activities or terrorism.
Analysts in Turkey said it seemed to be no coincidence that the killings had come just days after reports of peace negotiations involving Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the P.K.K., who was incarcerated in 1999 in a fortresslike prison on the western Turkish island of Imrali.
While Kurdish militants blamed Turkey for the shootings in Paris, Turkish officials said the women could have been killed because of feuding within the P.K.K.
Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of the ruling party in Turkey, said the episode seemed to be part of an internal dispute but offered no evidence to support the claim.
“Whenever in Turkey we reach the stage of saying, ‘Friend, give up this business, let the weapons be silent,’ whenever a determination emerges on this, such incidents happen,” Mr. Celik told reporters in Ankara. “Is there one P.K.K.? I’m not sure of that.”
French police officials said a murder investigation had been opened. The bodies and three shell casings were found in a room at the institute. The women were all said to have held Turkish passports.
The P.K.K. has been fighting a bitter guerrilla war against the Turkish authorities for almost three decades to reinforce demands for greater autonomy. The conflict, which has claimed 40,000 lives, is fueled by competing notions of national identity rooted in the founding of modern Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey, the United States and the European Union have labeled the P.K.K. a terrorist organization, but sympathy for the group and its goals remains widespread in many towns in Turkey’s rugged southeast.
Restive Kurdish minorities span a broad region embracing areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union. Regional turmoil in recent years has emboldened Kurdish separatists inspired by the example of the Iraqi Kurds, who control an autonomous zone. Turkey also fears that the civil war in neighboring Syria could strengthen the separatist yearnings of Kurds there, feeding Kurdish activism in Turkey.
The killings, which apparently took place Wednesday, inspired hundreds of Kurdish exiles to gather outside the institute on Thursday, chanting, “We are all P.K.K.!” and accusing Turkey of assassinating the three women, abetted by the French president, François Hollande.
The bodies were discovered by Kurdish exiles who had become concerned about the whereabouts of the women.
The victims had been alone in the building on Wednesday and could not be reached by telephone in the late afternoon, according to Leon Edart, who manages the center. Mr. Edart, speaking to French reporters, suggested that the victims opened the door to their killer or killers.
An organization called the Federation of Kurdish Associations in France, representing many of the estimated 150,000 Kurdish exiles in the country, said in a statement that the women might have been killed on Wednesday afternoon with weapons equipped with silencers.
After hitting a rough patch that seemed to last for most of 2012, Research In Motion (RIMM) may finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. RIM plans to unveil the finished version of its next-generation BlackBerry 10 platform at a press conference on January 30th, and at least one new smartphone is expected to be revealed during the event. Generating interest in BlackBerry 10 within the crowded global smartphone market will be no easy task for the struggling vendor, but if demand at top Canadian Rogers is any indication, RIM is off to a promising start.
[More from BGR: ‘Apple is done’ and Surface tablet is cool, according to teens]
In mid-December, Rogers began taking reservations for RIM’s first BlackBerry 10-powered handset. The carrier offered almost no information about the BlackBerry smartphone, which has not yet been announced, but asked subscribers interested in purchasing the device to register on the company’s website.
[More from BGR: iPhone 5 now available with unlimited service, no contract on Walmart’s $ 45 Straight Talk plan]
BGR approached Rogers on Thursday to see how subscriber response has been thus far.
“While we can’t release the total number of reservations we have received for the BlackBerry 10 all-touch device, we can say that customer interest is definitely strong and reservations continue daily,” a RIM spokesperson told BGR via email.
The strong response from Rogers subscribers despite being provided only with the knowledge that the device will feature an all-touch form factor and will run the BlackBerry 10 OS is a good sign for RIM.
The vendor has a number of difficult challenges ahead, and convincing current BlackBerry users to upgrade en masse is near the top of the list. Strong early demand at Rogers for RIM’s first BlackBerry 10 handset is clearly a positive sign in this regard, as most early reservations likely came from current BlackBerry subscribers.
This article was originally published on BGR.com
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Monopoly is pitting dog and cat lovers against each other in a new contest to eliminate one of its iconic tokens and replace it with a new one.
Via Facebook, Hasbro, the toy and game company behind the nearly 78-year-old board game, is asking fans to part with one of the die-cast tokens used to represent players – the Scottie dog, top hat, wheelbarrow, clothes iron, battleship, race car, thimble or shoe.
Classic Monopoly pieces
Courtesy Hasbro
While the clothes iron, racer, thimble, shoe, top hat and battleship were part of the original game when it was released in 1935, the Scottie and wheelbarrow didn't join the lineup until the early 1950s. Once the votes are tallied, the new version of the board game will be available in "mid to late" 2013, the company predicts.
"The tokens are one of the most iconic parts of the Monopoly game, and we know that people are emotionally tied to their favorite one," Eric Nyman, Senior Vice President and Global Brand Leader for Hasbro Gaming, said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.
Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.
How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.
In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.
"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.
But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.
The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.
"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.
"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.
But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.
More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.
Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.
The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.
So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.
The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed on Thursday on optimism about global growth spurred by stronger-than-expected exports in China, the world's second-biggest economy, though gains in the S&P 500 were capped at a resistance level near a 5-year high.
Financial and energy stocks were the day's top gainers in afternoon trading. The financial sector index <.gspf> rose 0.8 percent and the energy sector <.gspe> was up 0.6 percent.
The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index hovered near a five-year closing peak of 1,466.47. On Friday, the index had closed at its highest since December 2007.
"The market is technically right at the level of resistance, near 1,465-1,467," said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab.
"A solid breakthrough above the level would be the start of a next leg higher, but it looks like it is going to be difficult to break above that level for now," Frederick said, citing concerns about the corporate earnings season and impending negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling.
By late morning, the S&P 500 had erased almost all its gains from earlier Thursday in minutes. Some traders said the dip was triggered by a trade in the options market that prompted a large amount of S&P futures to hit the market at the same time, sending the S&P 500 index down rapidly.
Data showed China's export growth rebounded sharply to a seven-month high in December, a strong finish to the year after seven straight quarters of slowdown.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 36.20 points, or 0.27 percent, at 13,426.71. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 5.11 points, or 0.35 percent, at 1,466.13. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 0.05 points, or 0.00 percent, at 3,105.86.
In company news, shares of upscale jeweler Tiffany
U.S.-traded Nokia shares
Herbalife Ltd
U.S. data showed claims for unemployment benefits rose last week, though seasonal volatility made it difficult to get a clear picture of the labor market's health.
Also, U.S. wholesale inventories rose more than expected in November and sales rose by the most in more than 1-1/2 years. The market's reaction to both reports was muted.
(Editing by Bernadette Baum)
SAN FRANCISCO — The attackers hit one American bank after the next. As in so many previous attacks, dozens of online banking sites slowed, hiccupped or ground to a halt before recovering several minutes later.
James A. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes that recent online attacks on American banks have been the work of Iran.
But there was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas.
The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.
“There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,” said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mr. Lewis said the amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was “multiple times” the amount that Russia directed at Estonia in a monthlong online assault in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation.
American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their claims, but computer security experts say the recent attacks showed a level of sophistication far beyond that of amateur hackers. Also, the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: another earmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said.
“The scale, the scope and the effectiveness of these attacks have been unprecedented,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks on behalf of banks and cloud service providers. “There have never been this many financial institutions under this much duress.”
Since September, intruders have caused major disruptions to the online banking sites of Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Capital One, Fifth Third Bank, BB&T and HSBC.
They employed DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, named because hackers deny customers service by directing large volumes of traffic to a site until it collapses. No bank accounts were breached and no customers’ money was taken.
By using data centers, the attackers are simply keeping up with the times. Companies and consumers are increasingly conducting their business over large-scale “clouds” of hundreds, even thousands, of networked computer servers.
These clouds are run by Amazon and Google, but also by many smaller players who commonly rent them to other companies. It appears the hackers remotely hijacked some of these clouds and used the computing power to take down American banking sites.
“There’s a sense now that attackers are crafting their own private clouds,” either by creating networks of individual machines or by stealing resources wholesale from poorly maintained corporate clouds, said John Kindervag, an analyst at Forrester Research.
How, exactly, attackers are hijacking data centers is still a mystery. Making matters more complex, they have simultaneously introduced another weapon: encrypted DDoS attacks.
Banks encrypt customers’ online transactions for security, but the encryption process consumes system resources. By flooding banking sites with encryption requests, attackers can further slow or cripple sites with fewer requests.
A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed in online posts that it was responsible for the attacks.
The group said it attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, and pledged to continue its campaign until the video was scrubbed from the Internet. It called the campaign Operation Ababil, a reference to a story in the Koran in which Allah sends swallows to defeat an army of elephants dispatched by the king of Yemen to attack Mecca in A.D. 571.
But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.
“It’s a bit of a grudge match,” said Mr. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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