Injury forces Rousimar Palhares out of fight with Dean Lister at World Jiu-Jitsu Expo

Guilherme Cruz, MMA Fighting

Fans will have to wait a little longer to watch Rousimar Palhares back in competition.

Palhares' manager, Alex Davis, revealed to MMAFighting.com that the fighter was forced to cancel his submission match with fellow UFC veteran Dean Lister at next weekend’s World Jiu-Jitsu Expo 2013 in Long Beach, California, due to injury.

"He has a shoulder injury and is a little overweight, but the main reason why he decided to pull out of the fight is because of the injury," Davis told MMAFighting.com on Monday.

WJJE president Renzo Gracie decided to include Palhares in the event "after everybody started criticizing him" for holding the heel hook too long in his 31-second submission victory over Mike Pierce at UFC Fight Night 29 in Brazil, and expects to have him on the event next year.

"He has a shoulder injury," Gracie told Ariel Helwani on Monday's The MMA Hour. "They train very intensively there. It's different. It won’t be possible to have him on the event this year, but he said he'll come back next year."

Lister doesn’t have a new opponent yet, though.

"Right now, we’re trying to get him a fight," Gracie said. "It will be an unbelievable show."

Palhares was criticized by fans and media for his behavior during his UFN 29 win, but Renzo Gracie doesn’t think he deserves the harsh words.

"Palhares is like a 12 years old kid," he said. "He was raised in a farm in Brazil, and you can’t picture a farm in Iowa. He's so naive. The reality is, he has a completely different mindset. They're born like Indians, and it’s like getting an Indian from the jungle and expect them to live here."

Check below the complete lineup of World Jiu-Jitsu Expo:

Saturday, Nov. 9:
Caio Terra vs. Nam Pham
Rafael Lovato vs. TBA
Samuel Braga vs. João Miyao
Efrain Escudero vs. Philipe Nover

Sunday, Nov. 10:
Jake Shields vs. Leandro "Lo" Nascimento
Dean Lister vs. TBA
Paulo Miyao vs. Jon Fitch
Lucas Leite vs. Keenan Cornelius
Bruno Malfacine vs. Jeff Glover

Source: http://www.mmafighting.com/2013/11/4/5065964/injury-forces-rousimar-palhares-out-of-fight-with-dean-lister-at
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NM jury to decide if death penalty is an option

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — John McCluskey is not the vicious pit bull or three-time loser that prosecutors have made him out to be, according to his defense attorneys. Rather, they said Monday that the Arizona inmate convicted of killing an Oklahoma couple while on the run in New Mexico is a remorseful animal lover unable to properly reason because of his abusive childhood and brain defects.

"Like all of us in this room, he is a human being," attorney Teri Duncan said in closing arguments in the first phase of McCluskey's sentencing trial in federal court. "...with flaws, but a human being nonetheless."

Duncan also quoted one of her favorite childhood books, "Bless Me, Ultima," where one of the characters teaches that "when you understand, you see it is not evil."

She said jurors should spare McCluskey the death penalty not of out of sympathy, but out of understanding of how his brain works and his inability to control his impulses.

Prosecutor Michael Warbel, however, argued that John McCluskey was thinking clearly when he planned his August 2010 escape from prison and the resulting violent rampage that included the carjacking and murders of Gary and Linda Haas of Tecumseh, Okla., as they passed through New Mexico in August 2010 on an annual camping trip to Colorado.

"We are talking about what he intended when he pointed that gun at Gary Haas and shot him in the head. We are talking about he intended when he pointed that gun at Linda Haas and pulled the trigger twice," Warbel said.

Warbel reminded jurors that in the first phase of the sentencing trial they are simply deciding whether McCluskey is eligible for the death penalty, not whether to impose it. It's a fact-finding exercise, not an emotional one, the prosecutor said.

McCluskey, 48, was convicted by the same jury on Oct. 7 of 20 counts of aggravated murder, carjacking and other charges.

In an effort to spare McCluskey from the possibility of execution, the defense called several neurological experts over the last week in support of their argument that McCluskey is incapable of controlling his impulses and making reasoned decisions due to brain abnormalities, emotional and physical abuse, and a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.

Duncan said when McCluskey loves dogs and horses, and as a teen got a job at a horse track until his father made him quit because of "alcohol issues."

"You have to wonder had John been able to finish at the racetrack would we be sitting here today," she asked.

Prosecutors on Thursday called to the witness stand Johns Hopkins neurologist Barry Gordon, to dispute the defense's experts. He told jurors he had interviewed McCluskey, conducted an exam and reviewed the convict's brain imaging scans and health history and concluded McCluskey does have the capacity to control himself.

McCluskey was serving 15 years for attempted second-degree murder, aggravated assault and discharge of a firearm when he and two other prisoners escaped from a medium-security prison near Kingman, Ariz., in July 2010 with the help of his cousin and fiancee, Casslyn Welch.

One inmate was quickly captured after a shootout with authorities in Colorado, while McCluskey, Welch and inmate Tracy Province headed to New Mexico.

Testimony showed the trio, hot and cramped from three days in a small car without air conditioning, targeted the Haases at a rest stop near the New Mexico-Texas state line for their truck and travel trailer.

Province and Welch pleaded guilty last year to charges of carjacking resulting in death, conspiracy, the use of a firearm during a violent crime and other charges. They both said McCluskey was the triggerman.

• Crime & Justice
• Society & Culture
• John McCluskey

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nm-jury-decide-death-penalty-option-080801905.html
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System Malfunction

The failure of healthcare.gov gets to the heart of the difference between campaigning and governing.

Photo by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

For four years we've watched the public political spat over President Obama's Affordable Care Act, but the Washington Post has given us a view into what it looks like when a political fight gets into the twitch muscles of an administration.

In an in-depth investigation into the implementation of the president’s health care law, the paper's reporters describe the creation of a jalopy built by a deeply flawed system. The problems piled up over years, flowing from both Republican obstructionism and the hyper political sensitivity of the Obama administration. This mix led to decisions based on politics instead of efficiency, which created the complexity and delay that contributed to the problems the president is scrambling to fix today. 

Healthcare.gov’s collapse touches on the big issues of the Obama administration because the website represents a multiyear effort to implement the president's greatest vision. As the Washington Post outlines, three years before the site became an embarrassment, the seeds of its destruction were evident. The ingredients are familiar: partisan hurdles thrown up by the GOP, the jumpy political instincts of administration aides, administration insularity, spin that borders on deception, bureaucratic clots, and the bold and sprawling scope of the project. The question at the heart of this story—and, in a sense, of the entire Obama administration—is, what percentage of each element contributed to the ultimate outcome? 

The hero of the Post narrative is David Cutler of Harvard, an Obama adviser who wrote a four-page memo in 2010 outlining a number of structural flaws he saw in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Many of those structural flaws led to the public mess we're now witnessing. “I am concerned that the personnel and processes you have in place are not up to the task, and that health reform will be unsuccessful as a result,” he wrote to the president’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers. The memo would seem to refute those who suggest that the failure of healthcare.gov is simply the kind of rocky rollout that attends any product launch. 

The Obama administration needed someone to balance political considerations and operational ones. That position appears to have never existed.

The problems were deep and predictable. Cutler suggests one big flaw was that there was no central person leading the charge who had experience implementing anything of that size and complexity in the nongovernmental world. This critique gets to the heart of the question about the difference between campaigning and governing. The modern political campaign is seen as a proxy for governing. For most of American history, it was seen as the opposite, because the talents of one often have little to do with the other. Can the team that runs a successful campaign—whether it's for office or selling a piece of legislation—also run a successful product launch? If the team members can't, do they know enough to bring in a person who can? When healthcare.gov imploded, the president knew to call in the experts and put a seasoned troubleshooter at the head of the cleanup effort. Why wasn't that done before?

Apple and Google would never have allowed the problems that Cutler outlines in his memo to fester. But then again, Apple and Google would not have had to deal with an environment where their rivals were plotting to remove all the equipment from their product laboratories every night. The implementation of Obamacare didn't happen in a corporate environment. It happened in a toxic political arena where Republicans were working to undermine the law at every turn. That created hurdles real and imagined. A number of Republican governors did not open their own exchanges, adding to the federal burden. Republicans in Congress tried to defund the law any possible way they could, which meant administration officials had to house health care operations in parts of the government that would be protected from the defunding effort. The topsy-turvy organization decentralized responsibility for the law’s implementation throughout the bureaucracy.

Of course, that doesn’t mean having a team of proper eggheads leading the effort would have made everything work. They might have gotten the implementation to look pretty on the whiteboard while failing to see the partisan traps. That would have made the law more efficient but also more politically vulnerable. On the other hand, administration officials may have been jumping at shadows, contorting decisions at every turn to avoid imagined political perils. The Obama administration needed someone to balance political considerations and operational ones. That position appears to have never existed.

But the political problems facing the Affordable Care Act weren't just about avoiding specific attacks on the legislation to keep it alive. Obama aides wanted to keep the president's second-term prospects alive. That added complexity to the process as crucial regulations were delayed so that their publication didn’t cause public relations headaches. The president needed to get re-elected to make sure his signature program was implemented, but how much did getting him re-elected warp the ability to implement the signature legislation? 

President Obama and his team won the political fight to pass health care reform, but they are failing at the implementation. Figuring out what variables matter most could do more than just tell us why the rollout was botched; it could tell us how to improve the state of things in Washington, where even basic legislation can't pass and when it does it isn’t executed well. That's information we should take into the next election and pose to lawmakers making big promises about what they will get done. The president is right: The collapse of healthcare.gov is about much more than a website. 

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/11/healthcare_gov_doomed_by_partisanship_and_spin_obamacare_s_failed_launch.html
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Kerry Washington, Husband Nnamdi Asomugha Have Sweet Night Out After SNL Appearance

Late-night date night! Pregnant Kerry Washington and her top-secret husband Nnamdi Asomugha were spotted together in Manhattan over the weekend. 

The expectant Scandal star, hot off her successful stint as Saturday Night Live host on Nov. 2, was the guest of honor at the show's after party at Asellina Ristorante in NYC'S Gramercy nabe -- with her NFL player husband in tow. (On Monday, Nov. 4, Asomugha was waived by the San Francisco 49ers.)

PHOTOS: Super secret celebrity weddings

"She was adorable, as you can imagine" an observer tells Us Weekly of Washington, 36. "She was with her husband, parents and family and friends. When she arrived to the table, they gave her a standing [ovation]!"

A second source tells Us that the Emmy-nominated beauty, who stayed at the Ritz Carlton last week while rehearsing for SNL, also had her family in town to mark the big occasion. And it sounds like Washington and her spouse of four months spent Friday night in. 

*** SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE -- "Kerry Washington" Episode 1646 -- Pictured: (l-r) Taran Killam, Kerry Washington
Credit: Dana Edelson/NBC

PHOTOS: Kerry Washington's red carpet style

The actress, 36, who concealed her pregnant curves during her monologue on Saturday night, spent the evening beside her husband, 32, chatting up pals and colleagues, finally heading out around 3 a.m.

Us Weekly exclusively revealed Washington's pregnancy last week. "She's about four months along," an insider told Us of the pregnant star, who is expecting her first child with the San Francisco 49ers cornerback. The elusive couple, who married in a super secret ceremony on June 24 in Hailey, Idaho, is notorious for avoiding the public eye and keeping quietly to themselves. 

PHOTOS: Celebrity pregnancies

Despite her need for privacy, Washington told Glamour magazine in September that she's not trying to be misleading. "I'm walking around in the world with my ring," she said on her marriage to Asomugha. "And when people say congratulations, I say thank you."

Source: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/kerry-washington-husband-nnamdi-asomugha-have-sweet-night-out-after-snl-appearance-2013411
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Gov't easing the way for disabled air passengers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Disabled travelers should find it easier to access airline websites under a new set of rules the government issued on Monday.

Airline website pages which have core travel information and services must be accessible to the disabled within two years, the Department of Transportation said, and all pages on airline websites must within three years be readily available to people with disabilities.

The new regulations also require airline ticket agents to disclose — and offer — web-based discount fares to customers unable to use their sites due to a disability. Airlines already are required to provide equivalent service for consumers who are unable to use inaccessible websites

Airlines and airports will also have to make accessible to the disabled automated kiosks providing boarding passes and baggage, as they purchase new equipment. If no kiosks are installed, 25 percent of the kiosks currently at each airport location must be accessible within 10 years.

Another new rule gives airlines more flexibility in how they transport manual, folding wheelchairs onboard, making it possible for them to carry up to two wheelchairs in the cabin, the department said. In addition to being able to stow a wheelchair in a closet, airlines will also be allowed to strap a second chair across a row of seats.

Closets also must have signs saying wheelchairs have priority over other baggage.

At the same time, the department announced that it has fined US Airways $1.2 million for failing to provide adequate wheelchair access to passengers in Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C. It's one of the largest penalties of its kind ever assessed by the agency in a disability case.

Under the department's rules, airlines are required to provide free, prompt wheelchair assistance, upon request, to passengers with disabilities. The department said this includes helping passengers to move between gates and make connections to other flights.

The department said that US Airways' use of a combination of electric carts and wheelchairs to transport passengers between gates required frequent transfers and led to long delays. It said that some passengers missed connections because of the delays, or were left unattended for long periods of time.

The department examined some 300 complaints that passengers filed with the US Airways and the government relating to alleged hardship incidents in 2011 and 2012 at Philadelphia International Airport and at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. That was only a sample of the total number of complaints.

US Airways may allocate up to $500,000 of the fine for improvements that go beyond the DOT's requirements, the department said.

___

Follow Joan Lowy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Joan_Lowy

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-11-04-Airlines-Disabled%20Passengers/id-44067ce0322a4c40bfb8fad0094e9ba3
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Eric Schmidt Joins The Newly-Formed Advisory Board At Cloud Rendering Company OTOY

OTOY, a company building rendering technology for running games and other applications in the browser, is announcing a new board of advisors, including Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Six years ago, in an interview with the the New York Times, I predicted that 90 percent of computing would eventually reside in the web based cloud,” Schmidt said in an emailed statement. “OTOY has created a remarkable technology which moves that last 10 percent – high-end graphics processing – entirely to the cloud. This is a disruptive and important achievement. In my view, it marks the tipping point where the web replaces the PC as the dominant computing platform of the future.”

OTOY co-founder and President Alissa Grainger said the board is being formed now to “guide us as we grow OTOY and enter the commercial phase of our business.” Some of its members were already involved in OTOY as investors — namely famed Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel and writer/investor George Gilder. The advisory board also includes Schmidt, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (Mozilla has partnered with OTOY), and longtime IBM executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

As far as I can tell, TechCrunch first wrote about OTOY way back in 2008, so it’s been a long road to commercial deployment. But then, Otoy has a pretty big vision (as indicated by Schmidt’s comment) — using its Octane Render technology to make it possible to run almost any application on any device.

And just to be clear, this news doesn’t affect OTOY’s governance structure at all. Grainger said the board of directors (i.e., the board has formal decision-making power) still consists solely of co-founder and CEO Jules Urbach.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/FU1NK0cTe_0/
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How to add all your social, email, and photo sharing accounts to OS X Mavericks

The Mac has been getting more social and OS X Mavericks is no exception. Not only can you now add your Twitter, Facebook, and email accounts, but Google, Flickr, LinkedIn, and more. OS X Mavericks refers to them as Internet Accounts. Not sure how to set get them linked up? Here's how!

1. Click on the Apple in the upper left hand corner of your Mac's screen.
2. Now click on System Preferences.
3. From the System Preferences pane, click on Internet Accounts.
4. Click on the + sign in the lower left hand corner of the left side navigation in order to add a new account.
5. Choose your account type in the right hand navigation.
6. Enter your credentials when asked and then click Next.
7. Depending on what kind of account you added, you may now be able to customize how your Mac interacts with this account. Once you do that, you're done!

That's all there is to it. Your account is now linked to your OS X Mavericks user account. You can delete it or edit it by returning to Internet Accounts any time you'd like. Keep in mind you may get notifications now through Notification Center. If you want to edit those, just hop into System Preferences > Notification Center from the Apple menu. You can then edit what kind of notifications each of your accounts will send to Notification Center.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/ZJi7J_wpFRE/story01.htm
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