LeAnn Rimes Confronts Gossip, Rumors Head-On During 'Ellen' Appearance

There's been a lot of focus on country star LeAnn Rimes this week. Part of it, of course, has to do with the fact that she's just released her first studio album in four years. But, another big part of it is what people have come to expect when they hear Rimes's name--more tabloid gossip about her marriage to actor Eddie Cibrian and her skinny figure.

Well, it seems Rimes is determined to put a stop to the chatter once and for all. During an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday, she had some stern words for her critics--calling the accusations about her weight "bullying" and disrespectful.

Rimes firmly stated to DeGeneres that she is not anorexic or bulimic, saying such claims are "namecalling" on the part of the tabloids. "These are diseases," she said. "I feel a sense of responsibilty for the people who are actually going through the diseases. And I'm not one of them."

"I do feel that the press has been very irresponsible with calling a lot of people fat or anorexic," she added. "It seems like bullying now, instead of really taking these diseases seriously that a lot of people are going through."

Rimes also addressed her five-month-old marriage to Cibrian, whom she started dating when both were still married to their respective first spouses. "It's hard to see tons of lies written about a situation that people know nothing about," she told DeGeneres.

She explained that Cibrian's two young sons--whom she referred to as her "bonus boys"--are a big part of why she and Cibrian have not defended their relationship more vehemently. "Because there's kids involved, sometimes you have to take the high road, instead of screaming from the top of a mountain.

"Obviously we made decisions that were not the right ones," Rimes admitted. "But they brought us to a place where we are now. And we're happy and we're married."

Brady's 517 yards, 4 TDs lift Pats over Dolphins

MIAMI (AP) — Desperate to slow down Tom Brady, the Miami Dolphins tried playing 12 men on defense.

That didn't work. They drew a penalty. Using only 11 defenders was even worse.

Brady threw for a team-record 517 yards and four touchdowns, including a 99-yarder to Wes Welker, and the New England Patriots opened their season Monday night by beating Miami 38-24.

Brady and the reigning AFC East champions picked up where they left off last season, when he was a unanimous choice for NFL MVP, and his team led the league in scoring.

"He's a great quarterback," teammate Aaron Hernandez said, "and the world knows that."

New England totaled 622 yards, the most in franchise history and the most allowed by Miami. Brady's performance overshadowed Miami's Chad Henne, who threw for a career-high 416 yards.

The 906 net yards passing by both teams was an NFL record.

"They made some plays on us," Brady said. "We made a few more than them."

Even by Patriots standards — they're 1-0 for the eighth consecutive year — this was a fast start.

Defensive end Jared Odrick picked off a deflected pass to set up a Miami touchdown and end Brady's NFL-record streak of 358 passes without an interception. Otherwise Brady was close to flawless.

Brady went 32 for 48 and became the 11th quarterback to throw for at least 500 yards. Norm Van Brocklin set the record of 554 yards in 1951.

Brady thrived directing a no-huddle attack that kept the Dolphins on their heels.

"I enjoy scoring points," Brady said. "So whatever we need to do to score points, that's what I want to do."

The capper came with 5:44 left and the Patriots leading 31-17. After they stopped Miami on downs at the 1-foot line, Brady lined up in the shotgun on first down and threw from his end zone to Welker, who had slipped behind Benny Sapp near the 30-yard line.

"When I saw the coverage as we lined up, I knew there was a strong possibility I could be getting the ball," Welker said. "I just wanted to make the most of the opportunity."

He did, catching the pass in stride and sprinting untouched for the score to complete the longest play in Patriots history.

"Awesome," Brady said. "I only threw it 25 yards. Wes did all the work."

Brady also threw touchdown passes on consecutive plays. He hit Hernandez for a 31-yard score, and when a replay review determined the receiver was down at the 1, Brady threw to him again for a TD on the next play.

His other scoring passes covered 10 yards to Rob Gronkowski and 2 yards to Welker.

"Some of their scores ended up looking like it was kind of easy," Miami coach Tony Sparano said.

Said Brady: "I wouldn't say it was easy at all."

He was sacked only once, and good protection gave his receivers plenty of time to work their way open.

Newcomer Chad Ochocino was targeted three times and had only one catch for 14 yards. But Welker made eight receptions for 160 yards against his former team, and tight ends Hernandez and Gronkowski combined for 189 yards on 13 catches.

"It wasn't a one-man band out there," Patriots coach Bill Belichick said. "We had a lot of contributions."

The Dolphins' defense returned virtually intact from last season and was expected to be the team's strength, but Brady riddled them from the start. He completed his first eight passes for 127 yards on the Patriots' first two possessions, and both ended with TDs.

Brady's first interception since Oct. 17 came early in the third quarter, when he tried to hit Julian Edelman in the flat. Sapp deflected the ball to the 304-pound Odrick, who rumbled 40 yards to the 9. Two plays later, Henne hit Brian Hartline with a 10-yard touchdown pass to make the score 14-all.

Brady was so rattled it took him 10 plays to put the Pats ahead to stay.

Va. Tech lockdown recalls 2007 shooting spree

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Memories of the worst mass school shooting in U.S. history at Virginia Tech came flooding back when the campus locked down after reports of a man with a gun, although some who were told to stay indoors treated the warnings with a shrug.
The university on Thursday issued the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since the 2007 massacre. It came after three teenage girls attending a summer camp on campus reported to university police that they saw a man with a possible gun as they walked to the dining hall.

The school lifted the lockdown more than five hours later after a search for such a man was unsuccessful and police had no real leads.
Mohammed Al-Halali, a sophomore taking a summer architecture design lab, said the shootings that killed 33 people were "the first thing that came to mind" when he got the emergency alert and he received many texts from friends to make sure he was all right.
Still, he said he never felt unsafe and he thought the police would have things under control. He said the news media was hyping it.
University spokesman Larry Hincker said all voicemail, text-messaging, email and social-media alerting systems worked without a hitch, and that issuing such a warning was necessary. Still, some continued to stroll about the 2,600-acre campus, despite requests to stay indoors. Several thousand students and the school's 6,500 employees were on campus for summer classes.

"People have the right to do what they want to do," Hincker said. "People have their own free will."
Police searched some 150 buildings on the square-mile campus and issued a composite sketch of a baby-faced man who was said to be wearing shorts and sandals, but they found no sign of him. They continued to patrol the grounds as a precaution even after the lockdown was lifted.
"We're in a new era. Obviously this campus experienced something pretty terrible four years ago," Hincker said. He added: "Regardless of what your intuition and your experience as a public safety officer tells you, you are really forced to issue an alert."

It was the first time the entire campus was locked down since the shooting rampage by student Seung-Hui Cho, and the second major test of Virginia Tech's improved emergency-alert system, which was revamped to add the use of text messages and other means besides email of warning students.
The system was also used in 2008, when an exploding nail-gun cartridge was mistaken for gunfire. But only one dormitory was locked down then and it reopened two hours later.
Peggy Newsome was driving her 17-year-old daughter, Paige, and two of Paige's friends, Emily Oliver and Lauren Mackey, to Blacksburg for an afternoon admissions tour when the group started getting text messages from friends about the lockdown.

"We were just talking about (the massacre) on the way here, and I swear to you it wasn't five minutes and we heard about what was going on," said Newsome, of Hanover County in suburban Richmond.
When they reached the undergraduate visitors center they saw a sign on the door reading: "Please vacate immediately."
Because all tours Thursday were canceled, they drove around campus and got out to see the memorial to the 2007 victims in front of Burruss Hall. They felt safer after seeing police cars stationed at several spots. After the lockdown was lifted, they took their own walking tour and visited a dining hall and several other buildings.
"In all the classrooms they had emergency-information posters and some electronic tickers," Newsome noted.
The girls took the day's events in stride, and said it'd make a good story to tell their friends.
But in many minds, Virginia Tech and the 2007 mass slayings always will be linked, and criticism of the university's response to that event led to an overhaul of emergency-notification procedures. Authorities said they took abundant caution and opted to issue the lockdown because they had what they regarded as credible evidence of a threat.

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said police from several law-enforcement agencies would continue to patrol the grounds in marked and unmarked cars and search buildings.
Earlier this year, federal authorities fined Virginia Tech $55,000 for waiting too long to notify the campus after a gunman killed two students at a dorm during the 2007 rampage. An email alert went out more than two hours later, about the time student Cho was chaining the doors to a building where he killed 30 more people and himself.

Rod Blagojevich asks for third trial over Senate fraud charges

Rod Blagojevich asks for third trial over Senate fraud charges
Former Illinois governor charged with selling US president's Senate seat claims recent retrial was hampered by errors.

The former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, has asked a judge to grant him a third trial over charges he tried to sell or trade Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat after what he has alleged were errors and biases at his recent retrial.

In a 158-page motion, considered voluminous even by legal standards, Blagojevich's lawyers lambasted prosecutors and the presiding judge for a lack of evenhandedness. They argue that this led a jury to convict the former governor on 17 of 20 charges last month.
"It is a case of overwhelming bias against the defence in which the playing field was so unlevel that Blagojevich never stood a chance of a fair trial," read the motion.
Jurors found Blagojevich, 54, guilty of the majority of counts against him. These included fraud and attempted extortion for trying to sell or trade the Senate seat Obama relinquished on entering the White House in exchange for campaign donations or a high-paying job.
Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the US attorney's office, declined to comment on the motion. The US government could respond at a status hearing set for next week.

Post-trial motions by the defence are a common way to lay down arguments that legal teams can draw from when they appeal to a higher court. Blagojevich's lawyers had to ask for permission though, for the longer-than-usual filing.
The motion argues that the trial began going awry from the start as the judge, James Zagel, allowed jurors with heavy biases to stay in the jury pool. When there were objections during testimony Zagel almost invariably sided with prosecutors, according to the motion.

"There was a thumb on the scale of justice which resulted in the unconstitutional convictions in this case," the motion says. It also directly accuses Zagel, saying, "This court stacked the deck against Blagojevich."
No sentencing date for Blagojevich has been set. Most legal experts say Zagel is likely to sentence him to about ten years in prison for the recent convictions and his sole conviction at his first trial last year, for lying to the FBI. The initial trial ended in a deadlock, forcing the retrial.

Goodwin Liu withdraws 9th Circuit nomination

6-Year-Old Lucy Mangum Forgives Shark That Attacked Her Off North Carolina Island

 

Obama, Boehner at war over debt talk collapse

House Speaker John Boehner walked away from negotiations Friday, complaining that Mr. Obama would not agree to Republican demands that the deal not include any tax increases. Shortly after Boehner made his decision public, Mr. Obama, appearing frustrated, appeared before reporters to explain what had been on the table and hammer Boehner for walking away from an "extraordinarily fair deal."
The deal on the table, as Mr. Obama laid it out, included more than $1 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense discretionary spending, as well as $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He said he asked for approximately $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that he said would have come from eliminating loopholes and deductions and engaging in broad tax reform, not hiking tax rates.

President Barack Obama makes a statement in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, July 22, 2011 on the break down of debt ceiling talks.

(Credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The deal, he said, called for less in tax increases than the deal worked out by the bipartisan "Gang of Six" negotiators, while including as much in discretionary savings. He said if the deal was unbalanced, "it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue."
"It is hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal and frankly, if you look at the commentary out there, there are a lot of Republicans that are puzzled as to why it couldn't get done," Mr. Obama said. "In fact, there are a lot of Republican voters out there who are puzzled as to why it couldn't get done."
Appearing after Mr. Obama spoke, Boehner suggested the president "moved the goalposts" during discussions. He said there had been a closed-door agreement to increase revenues $800 billion through tax reform, but that Mr. Obama then insisted on an additional $400 billion in tax increases over 10 years.
Asked how the deal could break down over $40 billion per year over 10 years, Boehner said the tax increases would have been on "the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs" -- presumably high-earners. 
"I can tell that you [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor and I were very disappointed in this call for higher revenue," Boehner said. "Secondly, they refuse to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices that are facing our country on entitlement reform. That's the bottom line. I take the same oath of office as the president of the United States. I've got the same responsibilities as the president of the United States. And I think that's for both of us to do what's in the best interest of our country. And I can tell you that it's not in the best interest of our country to raise taxes during this difficult economy and it is not in the best interest of our country to ignore the serious spending challenges that we face."

 

 (Credit: CBS)

Mr. Obama at one point suggested he "couldn't get a phone call returned" from Boehner earlier in the day, and said that when it comes to a deal, "I've been left at the altar now a couple of times." (A senior White House official later said the deal Mr. Obama was still on the table.) He said he was unable to guarantee that Social Security checks and other obligations would go out after the August 2 deadline, and said the blame falls on House Republicans who have been unwilling to compromise to get a deal done.
Mr. Obama said he was calling Congressional leaders to the White House Saturday morning at 11 a.m. "to explain to me how we are going to avoid default," acknowledging that discussions were basically back to square one.
"What this came down to is there doesn't seem to be a capacity for them to say yes," Mr. Obama said.
"I think the challenge really has to do with the seeming inability, particularly in the House of Representatives, to arrive at any kind of position that compromises any of their ideological preferences," he said. "None. And you've heard it. I'm not making this up. I think there are a number of members of that caucus that have been very clear about that."
Asked what he would say to calm skittish markets, Mr. Obama said, "I remain confident that we will get an extension of the debt limit and we will not default," but he was less confident that the GOP will step up and deal with underlying debt and deficits "in a way that is fair." He said he would be willing to sign a debt limit increase that did not include deficit reduction measures if presented such a bill by Congress.
"I think it's very important that the leadership understands that Wall Street will be opening on Monday and we'd better have some answers during the course of the next several days," Mr. Obama said.
Boehner also said he was "convinced" there would be no default.  He said "absolutely not" when asked if he was pressured to walk away from the deal by his caucus.

"I gave the president's proposal serious consideration," he said. "Let's understand something. There was an agreement with the White House of $800 million in revenue. The president walked away from his agreement and demanded more money at the last minute."

CBSNews.com special report: America's debt battle
The president earlier acknowledged that the Democratic leadership in Congress had not signed off on the proposed deal. He said, however, that both he and the leadership "were willing to engage in serious negotiations despite a lot of heat from a lot of interest groups around the country in order to make sure that we actually dealt with this problem."

Rumors of proposed cuts to entitlements had angered many Democrats and interest groups, and in announcing that he had offered $650 million in cuts on that front over 10 years, Mr. Obama said, "We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way."
"I was willing to try to persuade Democratic leadership as well as Democratic members of Congress that even a deal that is not as balanced as I think it should be, is better than no deal at all," he said. "And I was willing to persuade Democrats that getting a handle on debt and deficit reduction is important to Democrats just as much as it's important to Republicans. And, frankly, a lot of Democrats were persuaded by that."
The president and House speaker have been seeking a "grand bargain" of around $4 trillion in deficit reduction, but have faced stiff resistance from lawmakers in both parties. House Republicans say they will not accept revenue increases in the deal, while Democrats say any deal must include revenue increases as well as spending cuts.
Despite rumors of a deal in recent days -- the alleged contours of which fueled anger from lawmakers -- Boehner said in a letter to colleagues before Mr. Obama spoke that  "a deal was never reached, and was never really close."

Toward the end of his remarks, Mr. Obama grew particularly animated when he suggested that lawmakers were putting what "some funder says or what some talk radio host says or what some columnist says or what pledge we signed back when we were trying to run" ahead of the concerns of the American people. He called that attitude "inexcusable."
"You know, at some point I think if you -- if you want to be a leader, then you've got to lead," he said before leaving the podium.

Bomb Tears Through Government HQ In Oslo

Bomb tears through government HQ in Oslo; 2 dead

OSLO, Norway—A powerful bomb tore into the heart of Norway on Friday, killing at least two people and injuring 15 as it ripped open buildings including the prime minister's office. It was the deadliest bombing since World War II in Oslo, normally associated with the Nobel Peace Prize that is awarded there.

Elsewhere, a gunman dressed in a police uniform opened fire at a Labor Party youth camp at Utoya, an island outside Oslo, on Friday, shooting several youths, party spokesman Per Gunnar Dahl told The Associated Press. He said unconfirmed reports said five people were hit as panicked youth tried to escape the island swimming.

It wasn't immediately clear if the two attacks were related.

In Oslo, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was working at home Friday and was unharmed by the bombing, according to senior adviser Oivind Ostang.

The square where the bomb exploded was covered in twisted metal and shattered glass, and carpeted in documents expelled from the surrounding buildings, which house government offices and the headquarters of some of Norway's leading newspapers. Most of the windows were shattered in the 20-floor high rise where the prime minister and his administration works.

Oslo police said the explosion was caused by "one or more" bombs, but declined to speculate on who was behind the attack. They later sealed off the nearby offices of broadcaster TV 2 after discovering a suspicious package.

"So far, police cannot say anything about the scope of the damage, aside from that there's been one or several explosions," a police statement read.

An AP reporter who was in the office of Norwegian news agency NTB said the building shook from the blast and all employees evacuated as the alarm went off. Down in the street, he saw one person with a bleeding leg being led away from the area.

 

 People are treated at the scene after an explosion in Oslo, Norway, Friday July 22, 2011. A loud explosion shattered windows Friday at the government headquarters in Oslo which includes the prime minister's office, injuring several people. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is safe, government spokeswoman Camilla Ryste told The Associated Press. (AP PHOTO / Holm Morten, Scanpix)


Public broadcaster NRK showed video of a blackened car lying on its side amid the debris.

Witness Ole Tommy Pedersen was standing at a bus stop 100 meters (yards) from the government high-rise at 3:30 p.m. (1330 GMT) when the explosion occurred.

"I saw three or four injured people being carried out of the building a few minutes later," Pedersen told AP.

The blast comes as Norway grapples with a homegrown terror plot linked to al-Qaida. Two suspects are in jail awaiting charges.

Last week, a Norwegian prosecutor filed terror charges against an Iraqi-born cleric for threatening Norwegian politicians with death if he is deported from the Scandinavian country. The indictment centered on statements that Mullah Krekar -- the founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam -- made to various news media, including American network NBC.

Terrorism has also been a concern in neighboring Denmark since an uproar over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad six years ago. Danish authorities say they have foiled several terror plots linked to the 2005 newspaper cartoons that triggered protests in Muslim countries. Last month, a Danish appeals court on Wednesday sentenced a Somali man to 10 years in prison for breaking into the home of the cartoonist.

Facebook, Microsoft Partnership Deepens with Skype Announcement

 

Facebook's new Skype integration is another marker in its long-deepening relationship with Microsoft, as both companies seek to battle Google.

When Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in May, it kicked off a good deal of analyst chatter about how Redmond would choose to integrate the communications company’s assets into its product lineup.
How exactly Skype will appear in products like Office 365 remains to be seen, but the acquisition could end up paying dividends for Microsoft in its competition against Google, by giving Facebook—in which Redmond owns a minority stake—another tool with which to battle for social-networking hearts and ad dollars.
Starting July 6, Facebook users can video-chat with one another using Skype. (The social network is also introducing a retooled people sidebar, supposedly to make initiating chats easier, as well as a way to initiate group instant-messaging.)
“We are now making it possible to video chat with your friends right from within Facebook,” read a note on Skype’s corporate blog. “The partnership with Facebook makes fantastic business sense for Skype and gives us an unprecedented opportunity to offer Skype’s voice and video calling products to more than 750 million active users on Facebook.”
 
During a July 6 presentation at Facebook headquarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed his company had been working with Skype on the project for the past six months, before Tony Bates assumed the CEO slot or Microsoft announced the acquisition.
“This is going to be something that’s rolled out to everyone that you can integrate immediately,” he told the audience. “It’s so minimal and it’s so easy to use.”
More to the point, it offers Facebook a counter to Google’s own video-chat service, and perhaps even Apple’s FaceTime conferencing feature. Although Facebook and Apple aren’t direct competitors, the two companies apparently had a disagreement over allowing Apple’s Ping, a social-networking service centered on music, to import Facebook contacts. Facebook is also rumored to be prepping an HTML5 mobile-app platform that would conceivably challenge Apple’s App Store.

Last week, Google offered a limited number of people the ability to start a profile on Google+, its nascent social-networking service. The search-engine giant likely sees Facebook as its major competitor for online ad revenue, and CEO Larry Page has reportedly tied in employee bonuses to success in social networking. Whether or not Google+ becomes an existential threat to Facebook, it certainly raises the specter of increased competition—and boosts the pressure on Facebook to create new features that will hold its 750-million-member base.

Microsoft and Facebook have been deepening their relationship in recent months. When Microsoft decided to evolve its Bing search engine by “infusing the emotional into it,” in the words of Bing director Stefan Weitz, the company chose to do so by integrating Facebook features such as the “Like” button.
When users query Bing for specific people, for example, the search engine can offer Facebook information on the results page. If they’re traveling to a new city, such as Paris, Bing will tell them which Facebook friends live there. Bing will also notify users of airfare deals for places they’ve liked on Facebook, and let users post Bing Shopping pages on their Facebook wall (“Should I buy this?”).
In a March interview with eWEEK, Weitz suggested that the Web’s social layer has come to mimic the same sort of behaviors that people exhibit in the real world. Even before the addition of new social features, Facebook and Microsoft had already collaborated on Facebook Profile Search, which leveraged a user’s Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results for people searches; they could also post messages to their Facebook walls via Bing’s pages.

During his July 6 talk, Zuckerberg also painted a portrait of a Web increasingly focused on the social—specifically, the ability to share loads of content. “We’ve seen this trend since [Facebook] began,” he said. In terms of how much data people share with those in their social circles, “it’ll be about twice as much a year from now, and twice as much a year after that.” That will affect everything from app development to the tools that people use to interact.
Skype is evidently a vital part—at least for the moment—of that Facebook evolution, and Microsoft owns Skype. More than ever, Facebook and Microsoft find themselves bound together in a growing battle for the Web.

 

Watching TV on Pc

There has been a big trend these days on watching TV on Pc. This is a convergence between computers, internet (broadband) and the television universe.

Most of the people are using PC-TV to watch their favorite: sports, movies and many other programs not always shown on the local TV channels. With the emergence of Broadband, the quality has improved enormously, bringing high-resolution and crystal clear sound. We are talking here about PC TV-via-the-Internet and not TV Tuner card.

IPTV - Internet Protocol Television - is around the corner: BT and Microsoft having recently announced a partnership to deliver a range of services covering sports, entertainment and news direct to your home via the internet.

But you do not need to wait for this IPTV or Venice Project (by Skype creators).

Today there are many sites, proclaiming to provide you the necessary software and know how for enabling you to watch shows that otherwise wouldn't be available.

We have checked several of them. The first question is that real? Yes it is. In addition the cost is very low.

There are many sites offering you such a service, not all of them are good, but few are worth your money.

The one we consider to be one of the best is called satliveonpc.com. They are offering you a subscription of one year at a very low price and they give you all the needed software and instructions.