Jessica Alba Launches The Honest Company

The actress and mom of two launches a new collection of eco-friendly cleaning products, diapers and wipes that are safe for the whole family.

Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/gxLhB8cRmSY/

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Oil Rises above $101 on Positive China Data, Iran

Oil advanced above $101 a barrel Wednesday, buoyed by positive economic data from China and continued concerns about diplomatic tensions with Iran and their potential effect on the flow of the region's oil exports.

By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark crude for February delivery was up 74 cents at $101.45 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract jumped $2.01 to finish at $100.71 on Tuesday.

In London, Brent crude was up 44 cents to $111.97 on the ICE Futures exchange.

China, the world's second largest economy, reported 8.9 percent growth in the fourth quarter, slower than the previous quarter but robust enough to indicate it would avoid an abrupt slowdown. Retail and factory production improved while oil demand was up 6.4 percent in 2011 from 2010, according to data cited by Barclays Capital.

Tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as a move by France to accelerate the EU's implementation of an embargo on Iranian oil export also supported prices, he said.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi has said Saudi Arabia wants to stabilize prices at $100 a barrel this year and was ready to pump more oil if needed. That came as Iran warned Gulf nations not to make up any shortfall and that it may shut the Strait of Hormuz which is used to transport about a fifth of the world's oil.

Iraq's oil minister, Abdul-Karim Elaibi, who is also the rotating president of OPEC, said he would travel to Iran on Thursday to convince Tehran to assure the world that the Islamic Republic will not close the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which about one-sixth of the world's oil flows.

A slower pace of oil demand growth forecast by the International Energy Agency helped cap gains.

The Paris-based IEA said global demand for crude would rise by 1.1 million barrels a day in 2012, while earlier it was expecting demand to increase by 1.3 million barrels a day.

The IEA also warned that the relatively narrow band in which oil prices have been moving lately was not necessarily a sign of market consistency.

"A sustained spell of oil price stability is often seen as a good thing," the IEA said in its monthly report on the oil market. "But if it derives from the 'rock' of potential economic slump on the one hand, and the 'hard place' of possible geopolitical turmoil on the other, that is scarcely a source of comfort."

Investors will also be monitoring fresh information on U.S. stockpiles of crude and refined products.

Data for the week ending Jan. 13 is expected to show builds of 2.6 million barrels in crude oil stocks and of 3 million barrels in gasoline stocks, according to a survey of analysts by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos.

The American Petroleum Institute will release its report on oil stocks later Wednesday, while the report from the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration ? the market benchmark ? will be out Thursday.

Both reports are being released a day later than usual because of Monday's Martin Luther King holiday.

In other energy trading, heating oil rose 0.16 cent to $3.0388 per gallon and gasoline futures rose 0.83 cent to $2.7796 per gallon. Natural gas advanced 2 cents to $2.508 per 1,000 cubic feet.

___

Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report.

? Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Oil-Prices/2012/01/18/id/424545

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Romney looking to clinch GOP nomination in Florida

FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2011 file photo, Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a town hall meeting in The Villages, Fla. Four years ago, Florida crushed Romney's presidential campaign. This time, the GOP front-runner is working to ensure the state seals his fate as his party's presumptive nominee _ regardless of what happens in South Carolina's primary on Saturday. His political machine has been grinding in Florida for months. And the former Massachusetts governor has been aggressively trying to win over tens of thousands of absentee voters, while blanketing the state's television airwaves and wooing local evangelical leaders. (AP Photo/Reinhold Matay, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2011 file photo, Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a town hall meeting in The Villages, Fla. Four years ago, Florida crushed Romney's presidential campaign. This time, the GOP front-runner is working to ensure the state seals his fate as his party's presumptive nominee _ regardless of what happens in South Carolina's primary on Saturday. His political machine has been grinding in Florida for months. And the former Massachusetts governor has been aggressively trying to win over tens of thousands of absentee voters, while blanketing the state's television airwaves and wooing local evangelical leaders. (AP Photo/Reinhold Matay, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 29, 2011 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, second from right, shares a laugh during a campaign stop in Medley, Fla. From left are, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., former Florida Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Romney and Reps. Ileana Ros Lehtinen, R-Fla. Four years ago, Florida crushed Romney's presidential campaign. This time, the GOP front-runner is working to ensure the state seals his fate as his party's presumptive nominee _ regardless of what happens in South Carolina's primary on Saturday. His political machine has been grinding in Florida for months. And the former Massachusetts governor has been aggressively trying to win over tens of thousands of absentee voters, while blanketing the state's television airwaves and wooing local evangelical leaders. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) ? Four years ago, Florida crushed Mitt Romney's presidential ambitions. This time, the GOP front-runner is working to ensure the state seals his nomination ? regardless of what happens in South Carolina's primary on Saturday.

The Romney political machine has been grinding here for months. The former Massachusetts governor has been aggressively courting absentee voters, blanketing the state's television airwaves and wooing local evangelical leaders.

"Romney has been here and established longer than any other presidential candidate that's running on the Republican ticket," said Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, who hasn't endorsed anyone in the race. "He has the money and the organization and that's always an advantage."

It's especially an advantage in Florida, which has its primary on Jan. 31.

Romney's big push here is partly out of necessity, given that there's lingering distrust among the state's conservative voters over his candidacy. But while shoe leather and town hall-style meetings may be the mark of successful campaigns in the first two voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the logistics of running for president in Florida ? a state roughly the size of six New Hampshires with double the combined populations of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina ? require the kind of organization and money that only Romney appears to possess.

His Florida team has been making phone calls and knocking on doors since last September. He and his allies have been running television ads here for almost a month. No other campaign is on the air.

To date, Romney's campaign has spent $2.3 million on Florida television advertising, including videos promoting his business credentials in English and Spanish. And the pro-Romney political action committee, Restore Our Future, has spent an additional $4 million so far on Florida television, most recently for an ad to attack rival Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who is a favorite among some of the state's evangelical voters.

Santorum has little ability to fight back here. He announced the hiring of a Florida staff just last week. And his campaign released the endorsement of a lone prominent social conservative on Tuesday.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is running second to Romney is most Florida polls. He has no television presence but does have a staff of 14 with a growing network of volunteers across the state. With absentee voting already well under way, it's hardly clear that that will be enough to compete with Romney, who holds a double-digit lead in recent surveys.

Roughly 460,000 Republican absentee ballots have already been mailed ? to military personnel, overseas residents and other Floridians ? and about 120,000 have been returned in a state that has 4 million registered Republican voters. Romney's campaign has implemented a program to contact each of the absentee voters, first by mail and then with follow up phone calls and personal visits from volunteers.

The other campaigns have barely opened offices.

Romney also has captured the endorsements of many of the state's leading Republicans, although Gov. Rick Scott ? who initially indicated he was leaning toward Texas Gov. Rick Perry ? has remained uncommitted. Some of the support remains from Romney's first run four years ago, when he finished 5 points behind Sen. John McCain in a Florida primary that would largely push him out of the race.

A noticeable confidence has emerged inside Romney's Tampa headquarters after back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire as well as a commanding standing in South Carolina.

"If you look at what the other guys are trying to do in Florida, I really think it's the difference between someone trying to play at the Super Bowl level versus someone trying to put together a sandlot football team on the fly," said Romney's top Florida strategist, Brett Doster.

Despite that posture, some conservatives here remain wary of a Romney candidacy.

"They don't believe him to be a true conservative," said Sherri Ortega, a committee woman for the Suwannee County Republican Party who counts herself a skeptic partly because of the health care overhaul Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. "It's just how I see it."

Recognizing weakness among the state's vocal evangelical voters, the Romney campaign months ago established a coalition of social conservatives who host weekly conference calls. It's a group that includes former leaders from the Christian Coalition, who help sell Romney's conservatives credentials to the voting bloc known as "values voters."

Romney's Mormon faith is still an issue for some local Christians, according to Robert Skura, a 49-year-old roofing contractor from Altamonte Springs.

"We're pretty conservative down here in Florida," said Skura, who's been a Romney supporter since meeting him at a campaign stop four years ago. "But you're not going to get Jesus Christ himself to run for president."

Conservatives here seem to have the same concerns of their counterparts in Iowa and New Hampshire. And Romney won those contests, largely because his opponents struggled to unite anti-Romney conservatives and prove they could assemble an organization capable of defeating President Barack Obama next fall. Indeed, electability has emerged as a top concern among Republican voters like Ortega and Skura.

"It's essential. Anybody but Obama," Ortega said.

Skura agreed while standing at a Romney rally at an Orlando pizza parlor this week. After eating free pizza and making sure the campaign had his name and contact information, Skura left holding a Romney lawn sign.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-01-17-Romney-Florida%20Push/id-be497631881841f5a367b4850e4531c1

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Wikipedia editors question site's planned blackout (AP)

NEW YORK ? Can the world live without Wikipedia for a day? The shutdown of one of the Internet's most-visited sites is not sitting well with some of its volunteer editors, who say the protest of anti-piracy legislation could threaten the credibility of their work.

"My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."

Wikipedia's English-language site shut down at midnight Eastern Standard Time Tuesday and the organization said it would stay down for 24 hours.

Instead of encyclopedia articles, visitors to the site saw a stark black-and-white page with the message: "Imagine a world without free knowledge." It carried a link to information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers.

It is the first time the English site has been blacked out. Wikipedia's Italian site came down once briefly in protest to an Internet censorship bill put forward by the Berlusconi government. The bill did not advance.

The shutdown adds to a growing body of critics who are speaking out against the legislation. But some editors are so uneasy with the move that they have blacked out their own user profile pages or resigned their administrative rights on the site to protest. Some likened the site's decision to fighting censorship with censorship.

One of the site's own "five pillars" of conduct says that Wikipedia "is written from a neutral point of view." The site strives to "avoid advocacy, and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that the site can maintain neutrality in content even as it takes public positions on issues.

"The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened," he tweeted.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers the site, announced the blackout late Monday, after polling its community of volunteer contributors and editors and getting responses from 1,800 of them. The protest is aimed at the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate.

"If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," the foundation said.

Both bills are designed to crack down on sales of pirated American products overseas, and they have the support of the film and music industry. Among the opponents are many Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL. They say the bills would hurt the industry and infringe on free-speech rights.

Social news website Reddit.com is shutting down for 12 hours on Wednesday, but most companies are staying up. Google Inc.'s home page linked to a petition urging Congress: "Don't censor the Web."

Dick Costollo, CEO of Twitter, said he opposes the legislation as well, but shutting down the service was out of the question.

"Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish," Costollo tweeted.

Since Wikimedia depends on a small army of volunteers who create and update articles, it's particularly concerned about a lack of exemptions in the bills for sites where users might contribute copyrighted content. Today, it has no obligation under U.S. law except removing that content if a copyright holder complains. But under the House version of the bill, it could be shut down unless it polices its own pages.

The plans for the protest were moving forward even though the bill's prospects appeared to be dimming. On Saturday, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the bill would not move to the House floor for a vote unless consensus is reached. However, Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said work on the bill would resume next month.

The White House raised concerns over the weekend, pledging to work with Congress to battle piracy and counterfeiting while defending free expression, privacy and innovation in the Internet. The administration signaled it might use its veto power, if necessary.

That the bill seems unlikely to pass is another reason Lawton opposes the blackout.

"I think there are far more important things for the organization to focus aside from legislation that isn't likely to pass anyway," he said. He's been contributing to Wikipedia for eight years.

Danny Chia, another contributor to the site, said he had mixed feelings about the blackout. The neutrality applies to the content, but a lot of people interpret it as being about the site as a whole, said the Los Altos, Calif., software engineer.

In an online discussion, others raised the same point about the blackout: Appearances matter, and if the audience sees Wikipedia taking a stand, it might not believe the articles are objective, either.

Wikipedia has seen a small decline in participation, from a peak of 100,000 active editors a year ago to about 90,000 now. Wikimedia Foundation blames this mainly on outdated editing tools, and believes it can get the number growing again with software upgrades.

___

AP Technology Writer Mike Liedtke contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_hi_te/us_wikipedia_credibility

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Madonna Almost Rips The Train Off Jessica Biel?s Dress At The Golden Globes

Last night at the Golden Globes, Madonna and Jessica Biel found themselves awkwardly giggling after the pop superstar stomped on the train of the “New Year’s Eve” actress’ long, lace dress and had to be asked to step off it. As Madonna followed Biel down the red carpet press line, Biel felt a tug on [...]

Source: http://www.celebritymound.com/madonna-almost-rips-the-train-off-jessica-biels-dress-at-the-golden-globes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=madonna-almost-rips-the-train-off-jessica-biels-dress-at-the-golden-globes

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Daily Tip: How to activate AssistiveTouch to overcome hardware button problems on iPhone, iPad

Curious how to enable iOS 5‘s Assistive Touch accessibility feature? Whether you have trouble using the physical controls on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, or the controls themselves

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/jdTxOI61fos/story01.htm

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Inhabitat's Week in Green: Detroit Auto Show, solar plants and hydrophobic nanocoating

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.

This week Inhabitat hit the streets of Detroit to bring you the hottest hybrid vehicles and electric cars from the 2012 North American International Auto Show! We saw automakers unveil scores of sexy supercars like the Lexus LF-LC coupe, the Chevy MiRay, and the NSX concept hybrid, and we also showcased more realistic street-ready vehicles like Ford's Fusion Energi plug-in hybrid, VW's brand new hybrid Jetta, and Via Motors' VTRUX extended-range EV pickup. We also peered into the future of sustainable transportation as we brought you the finalists in Michelin's city car design challenge, we learned that the world's largest driverless personal transit system is set to break ground in India, and we saw the UK green light the first phase of its new HS2 high-speed rail line.

It was also a bright week for alternative energy as MIT scientists discovered a way to make more efficient solar plants modeled after sunflowers and Sweden announced plans for a massive 700 megawatt wind farm in the Baltic Sea. Meanwhile, we learned that Rwanda's poo-powered prisons are able to produce 75% of their power from human waste, we showcased plans for an energy-generating rolling suitcase that charges your gadgets, and we saw the launch of several shining solar-powered devices - OLPC's XO3 tablet computer and the sun-powered Solarkindle e-reader cover.

In other news, this week we rounded up our favorite eco gadgets from CES 2012 - including a hydrophobic nanocoating that makes any gadget completely waterproof. We also saw 200 Chinese works construct a 30 story prefab building in just 15 days, and we watched superman fly across a cute animated LEGO TV. Finally, we brought you the latest and greatest developments in wearable technology - including a set of smart sunglasses that merge virtual information with the real world, a set of bone-conducting earphones, and a set of motorized skates that can be attached to any boring old pair of shoes.

Inhabitat's Week in Green: Detroit Auto Show, solar plants and hydrophobic nanocoating originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/15/detroit-auto-show-solar-plants-and-hydrophobic-nanocoating/

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