'Argo' director Ben Affleck Wins DGA Award

Ben Affleck was named outstanding director for "Argo" at the 65th Annual Directors Guild of America Awards, which were held...

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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly...

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‘Girls,’ ‘Sugar Man’ earn Directors Guild honors

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Girls” star Lena Dunham has won the TV comedy directing prize from the Directors Guild of America, while the musical portrait “Searching for Sugar Man” earned the documentary award.Dunham won Saturday for directing the pilot of the show, which focuses on the lives of a group of girls in their 20s.“It is such an unbelievable honor to be in the company of the people in this room,...

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Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors. VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates. ...

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Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik. REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with...

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Marmot researchers raise a toast for Groundhog Day

For most Americans, Groundhog Day is a quaint oddity or a movie starring Bill Murray. For Punxsutawney Phil Sowerby, the Pennsylvania...

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Twitter Hacked; Company Says 250K Users May Have Been Affected

Following a string of revelations this week from several media companies who announced they had been recently hacked, Twitter announced on Friday that it had also been the target of a sophisticated attack.The company wrote in a blog post ironically titled “Keeping our users secure” that it detected unusual patterns this week that led it to identify attempts to access user data.“We discovered...

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Schwarzenegger: Simple Austrian upbringing made me green

VIENNA (Reuters) – Arnold Schwarzenegger credited his simple upbringing amid the lakes and hills of Austria for a recent conversion to fully fledged green activism, the latest stage in his varied career.The former body-builder, star of the “Terminator” action films and governor of California grew up in Thal, a small village in the Austrian province of Styria, and emigrated to the United States at...

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90. The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore...

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Media Decoder Blog: In Wake of Restructuring, NBC News President Quits

8:30 p.m. | Updated The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority.Pat Fili-Krushel, chairwoman of the NBCUniversal News Group, said in a brief telephone interview on Friday that she would “cast a wide net” while searching...

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Mahony stripped of public church duties

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez  on Thursday announced dramatic actions in response to the priest abuse scandal, saying that Cardinal Roger Mahony would no longer perform public duties in the church and that Santa Barbara Bishop Thomas J. Curry has stepped down.Gomez said in a statement that Mahony -- who led the L.A. archdiocese from 1985 to 2011 -- "will no longer have any administrative...

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How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing

Seen from across Walvis Bay, the windswept patch of Atlantic Ocean known as Speed Spot is barely more than a sparkle of whitecaps against a long, low sandbar. As we get closer to what is one of the world’s most perfect speed-sailing areas, I scan the shore. It’s featureless save for two small shelters. We motor our zodiac toward the remote beach until we have to kill the outboard and tilt...

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Whitney Houston anniversary to be marked with TV Grammy special

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Grammy organizers plan to mark the first anniversary of the sudden death of Whitney Houston with a behind-the-scenes TV show on how they scrambled to honor the singer just 24 hours after she died.The Recording Academy said on Thursday that the hour-long special entitled “The Grammys Will Go On: A Death in the Family” will air on February 9, the day before the 2013 Grammy Awards...

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Insurance Industry Report Faults High Fees for Out-of-Network Care

Michael Nagle for The New York TimesAngel Gonzalez, 36, faced huge bills after emergency gallbladder surgery, despite having good insurance coverage. “I was on the hook for more than I made in a year.” Just over a year ago, Angel Gonzalez, 36, awoke with searing chest pain at 2 a.m. A friend drove him to the closest emergency room. Though he was living on $18,000 a year as a graduate...

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DealBook: Doubt Is Cast on Firms Hired to Help Banks

Federal authorities are scrutinizing private consultants hired to clean up financial misdeeds like money laundering and foreclosure abuses, taking aim at an industry that is paid billions of dollars by the same banks it is expected to police.The consultants operate with scant supervision and produce mixed results, according to government documents and interviews with prosecutors and regulators. In...

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Bell city clerk testifies signatures on documents were forged

A key prosecution witness in the Bell corruption case testified Wednesday that signatures on city contracts, minutes for council...

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<em>New York Times</em> Hacked Again, This Time Allegedly by Chinese

In a dramatic announcement late Wednesday, the New York Times reported that hackers from China had been routing through the paper’s network for at least four months, stealing the passwords of reporters in an apparent attempt to identify sources and gather other intelligence about stories related to the family of China’s prime minister.The hackers breached the network sometime around Sept....

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Patty Andrews of Andrews Sisters dead at 94

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Patty Andrews, the last surviving member of the singing Andrews Sisters trio whose hits such as the rollicking “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” and the poignant “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” captured the home-front spirit of World War II, died Wednesday. She was 94.Andrews died of natural causes at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, said family spokesman Alan Eichler...

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