Los Angeles police offer gift cards to take guns off streets

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police traded gift cards for guns in Los Angeles on Wednesday, in a buyback program Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced as a crime-fighting response to the deadly shooting rampage in Newtown, Connecticut.

Police officers handed out $200 grocery store gift cards to people who turned in an automatic weapon, and $100 gift cards to those who provided a handgun, rifle or shotgun.

Los Angeles has held an annual gun buyback since 2009, and similar events have been organized in years past in several other cities, including Detroit and Boston. Police in San Diego had a buyback earlier this month.

Some experts say the buybacks have little effect in reducing gun violence, but Villaraigosa touted the buyback program as one step that can be taken in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14 that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.

The shooter, Adam Lanza, killed himself and also shot to death his mother at the home he shared with her, police said.

Los Angeles normally has its gun buyback in May, but Villaraigosa announced last week that the city would have this special buyback in response to the Newtown tragedy.

"There are a number of things we can do. This is just one of them," Villaraigosa said on CNN. "We've got to also address the culture of violence that we've got in this country."

At last count, the Los Angeles gun buyback had collected 1,366 firearms, including 477 handguns and 49 assault weapons, said Vicki Curry, a spokeswoman for the mayor.

The buyback ended at 4 p.m. local time, but a final tally of guns collected was not expected to be released before Thursday. In May, the city's annual gun buyback program collected 1,673 firearms at six locations, compared to two locations used for the program on Wednesday, Curry said.

At each of the locations where the buyback was held, a line of cars stretched around the block, Curry said. People dropping off their guns were asked to leave them in the trunks of their cars, where officers retrieved the weapons. Those surrendering their guns were allowed to remain anonymous.

While officials in Los Angeles and elsewhere have said the gun buybacks help keep streets safe, a 2004 report by the National Research Council of the National Academies questioned that conclusion.

Among the report's findings were that guns surrendered in buybacks tend to be old or inherited from previous owners, and not likely to be used in crime. Also, gun owners find it easy to replace their firearms, according to the report, which was titled "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review."

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; editing by Todd Eastham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/los-angeles-police-offer-gift-cards-guns-off-012126480.html

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DC hotels less busy for Obama's 2nd inauguration

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Visitors coming to the nation's capital for President Barack Obama's second inauguration can't stay in the one place President Ronald Reagan's family once called an eight-star hotel. That spot is the White House, and it's booked for the next four years. Still, inauguration-goers have a range of lodging options ? from crashing on a friend's couch to rooms that cost thousands of dollars a night.

With second inaugurations tending to draw fewer spectators, finding a place to stay in Washington won't be nearly as difficult as in 2009.

City officials are expecting 600,000 to 800,000 visitors for the Jan. 21 inauguration, far less than the 1.8 million people who flooded the National Mall four years ago to witness the inauguration of America's first black president. Back then, some hotels sold out months in advance and city residents rented out their homes for hundreds of dollars a night. This time, hotels say they're filling up more slowly, with rooms still available and prices at or slightly below where they were four years ago.

"Very few hotels are actually sold out at this point, so there's a lot of availability," said Elliott Ferguson, CEO of the tourism bureau Destination DC, who added that he expected demand to pick up after Christmas.

In 2009, hotel occupancy in the city for the night before the inauguration was 98 percent, and visitors paid an average daily rate of more than $600 that night, according to STR, a company that tracks hotel data. This time, some hotels still have half their rooms available. As a result, some establishments have relaxed minimum stays from four nights to three and could drop prices closer to the inauguration if demand does not increase.

Despite the muted enthusiasm, many of the city's posh hotels are still offering pricy packages. Visitors with an unlimited budget can check in to accommodations almost as grand and historic as the White House.

At The Willard hotel, about a block from the White House, rooms were still available starting at more than $1,100 a night with a four-night minimum. That means every guest will pay more than President Abraham Lincoln did when he checked out after his 1861 inauguration and paid $773.75 for a stay of more than a week.

At the Park Hyatt hotel in northwest Washington, where rooms start at $849 a night with a four-night minimum stay, the presidential suite is still available. For the 57th presidential inauguration next month, the hotel is charging $57,000 for a four-night package in the suite that includes butler service. And no one has yet booked $100,000 packages at the Fairmont hotel or the Ritz-Carlton.

A number of the city's luxury hotels plan special treats for guests, some of whom will be paying two to five times as much to stay during the inauguration compared with staying in the same room a week before. At the Ritz-Carlton, for example, where rooms start at about $1,100 per day, guests will get to bring home commemorative pillowcases embroidered with the official inauguration seal and their initials.

There are options for visitors looking to spend less, too, though some wallet-friendly choices have filled quickly.

Rooms at HI-DC, a hostel in downtown Washington, were sold out the day after the Nov. 6 election, with a bed in a dorm room going for $50 a night and private rooms for $150. With all the rooms sold, the hostel is finalizing plans for an election trivia night for guests.

Aunt Bea's Little White House, a six-room bed and breakfast in northeast Washington, still had two rooms available the week before Christmas, with rates starting at $225 a night. Innkeeper Gerald Duval said that included a bottle of champagne and a commemorative coin. There'll also be red-and-white bunting on the home's porch along with cutouts of the president and first lady.

Farther from downtown, the Best Western Plus hotel in Rockville, Md., was about 80 percent full with rooms at about $180 a night, down from a $209 starting rate. Director of Sales Ron Wallach said the hotel targeted some groups before the election, including students, journalists and the Secret Service, in order to fill its rooms.

Other travelers looking for budget-friendly prices may have success with websites like Craigslist or Airbnb, where homeowners offer their places for a price. More than 200 Craigslist housing posts in the area included the word "inauguration." Airbnb said it expected approximately 2,000 people to stay in Washington during the inauguration using its site.

Other travelers have told friends and family living in the area to plan on having guests. Lauren Hines and her husband had three people stay at their small Capitol Hill apartment during the 2009 inauguration, so many that one slept in a hallway. She and her husband now live in nearby Alexandria, Va., and planned to host her father-in-law, and maybe mother-in-law, from Ohio. Hines said they didn't even consider a hotel.

"They know that they've always got a place with us," she said.

___

Follow Jessica Gresko at http://twitter.com/jessicagresko

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dc-hotels-less-busy-obamas-2nd-inauguration-160239105--politics.html

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PFT: Sanchez to start for Jets this week

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Former Lions offensive tackle Lomas Brown, who boasted last week that he intentionally missed a block so teammate Scott Mitchell would get hurt, now says he regrets it. But Brown, who is now an ESPN commentator, didn?t quite come clean.

?That was 1994, and I was extremely frustrated with the situation that was going on. And, you know, I didn?t try to get the guy hurt, but that?s what ended up happening,? Brown said on ESPN First Take today.

Brown?s claim that ?I didn?t try to get the guy hurt? doesn?t make any sense. He explicitly stated in a radio appearance last week that he purposely missed a block because he wanted Mitchell to suffer an injury, that he told a teammate that?s what he was doing, and that he was glad when Mitchell did, in fact, leave the game with an injury. Brown then boasted about the fact that backup quarterback Dave Krieg came in and played much better than Mitchell had, as if Brown deserved credit for forcing the Lions to make the switch.

Brown?s claim also doesn?t make sense because in the next breath he expressed regret for what he did.

?Do I regret it happened? Yeah, I regret it happened. Did I regret it happened then? No, I didn?t regret it then,? Brown said, later adding that he estimates he played 18,000 plays in his football career and, ?It?s one play out of the 18,000 that I regret.?

So Brown does regret what he did, and is acknowledging that he did it, even after he said he wasn?t trying to get Mitchell hurt.

Mitchell said on Wednesday that he was stunned by Brown?s comments, noting that Brown had been a guest in his home and had always acted to his face like they were friends. Brown acknowledged being friendly with Mitchell.

?Yeah, Scott did have us over to the house and everything, and I felt that I was a good teammate to Scott,? Brown said. ?I expected Scott to react that way. That?s the way he should have reacted. I don?t blame him for reacting that way. But Scott knows a lot of things that went on, too, in Detroit. So I don?t know what I can say now. I?ve already said it, it?s out there. And like I said I expected him to react in that way. I probably, if the shoe had been on the other foot, I probably would have reacted that way too. No, not probably. I would have reacted that way ? probably a little worse than that. So I don?t blame Scott, and hopefully we?ll talk about it.?

Well, it?s good to know that Brown doesn?t blame Mitchell for Brown intentionally letting Mitchell get hurt.

Brown also said that he wishes he had expressed himself differently on his radio appearance last week and not come across like he was bragging about letting Mitchell get hurt.

?I should have been more tactful about how I said that,? Brown said. ?It came off boastful. And I shouldn?t have said it that way. I said it, I can?t take it back, but I shouldn?t have said it the way I said it.?

After those comments, First Take host Cari Champion closed the segment by telling Brown, ?Well done, big fella.? Brown?s ESPN co-workers might be willing to let him off easy, but the rest of us don?t have to. What Brown did to Mitchell was despicable, and Brown has permanently damaged his reputation.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/12/27/mark-sanchez-to-start-for-the-jets-this-week/related/

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NASA Launches Telescope-Toting Balloon from Antarctica on Christmas

A giant helium balloon is slowly drifting above Antarctica, about 22 miles (36 kilometers) up. Launched on Tuesday (Dec. 25) from the National Science Foundation's Long Duration Balloon (LDB) facility on Earth's southernmost continent, it carries a sensitive telescope that measures submillimeter light waves from stellar nurseries in our Milky Way.

"Christmas launch!" wrote?officials with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, which oversees the agency's balloon research program, in a Twitter post yesterday. "BLAST launched today from McMurdo Station, Antarctica."

This is the fifth and final mission for BLAST, short for the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, and mission designers hope it will reveal why so few stars are born in our galaxy.

On Dec. 12, BLAST was still in one of the two giant Payload Assembly Buildings at the LDB facility, a short distance from the U.S. research center McMurdo Station. Principal investigator Mark Devlin of the University of Pennsylvania and a group of graduate students were mounting a giant sunshade on the telescope, to ensure that the ultra-cold detectors won't heat up during the flight.

"The detectors are cooled to 0.3 degrees aboven absolute zero, using liquid helium," said Devlin. "If they were any warmer, they wouldn't be able to register the faint submillimeter radiation of cold interstellar dust clouds at just 30 degrees above absolute zero."

Star mystery

After test flights in 2003 in New Mexico and in 2005 in Sweden, BLAST's third flight, in 2006 from Antarctica, was a "mind-boggling" success, Devlin said. The instrument revealed beyond doubt that in most distant galaxies, new stars are born at a prolific rate. By measuring the star formation rate in galaxies more than 7 billion light-years away, the researchers determined that over half of the stars in the uuniverse were born within the first 5 billion years after the Big Bang.

"But there's an unsolved problem," added co-principal investifator Barth Netterfield of the University of Toronto, Canada, who was assisting the BLAST team with the launch preparations. "BLAST found lots of so-called dark cores in our own Milky Way ? dense clouds of cold dust that are supposed to be stars-in-the-making. Based on the number of dark cores, you would expect our galaxy to spawn dozens of new stars each year on average. Yet, the galactic star formation rate is only some four solar masses per year."

So why is the stellar birth rate in our Milky Way so low? Astronomers can think of two ways in which a dense cloud of dust is prevented from further contracting into a star: turbulence in the dust, or the collapse-impeding effects of magnetic fields. On its new mission, BLAST should find out which process is to blame. [Images: Life at Antarctica's Concordia Station]

The idea is straightforward: magnetic fields tend to align electrically charged, elongated dust particles. If dust particles have a preferred orientation, they will slightly polarize the submillimeter radiation from the cloud. Using polarimeters, BLAST can detect if the radiation is indeed polarized, and if it is, determine the direction of the magnetic field. "If there's no polarization present," said Netterfield, "turbulence must be the reason" why so few dark cores collapse into new stars.

Final mission?

In 2010, on its fourth mission, BLAST was already equipped with polarimeters. However, accdording to Devlin, "that flight did not do so well because of a melted filter. We have some data, but we know we can do better."

Luckily, repeating a balloon-borne experiment is much easier and much cheaper than re-launching a scientific satellite. After each flight, most of the payload is recovered and can be used again. In particular, the BLAST camera with its sensitive and expensive detectors has been recovered every single time.

?

BLAST's fifth flight will probably last between 12 and 14 days. While Devlin, Netterfield and their colleagues are celebrating Christmans and New Year's Eve, the 4,000-pound (1800 kilograms) stratospheric telescope will observe selected star-forming regions in the constellations Vela and Lupus.

?

And if senior graduate student Tristan Matthews of Northwestern University Illinois has his way, this may not be BLAST's final mission after all. Depending on the results and the recovery success of the current flight, Matthews hopes to fly BLAST in its present configuration for a sixth time, in the Arctic. "That would give us access to a well-studied and nearby star-forming region in Taurus," he said.

Meanwhile, Devlin has received a $5 million grant from NASA over a period of five years to develop a larger version of BLAST, with a 2.5-meter mirror, as compared to the current 1.8-meter aperture. That would vastly increase the number of stellar nurseries that could be studied. "We could fly SuperBLAST in 2016 or so," he said.

Dutch astronomy writer Govert Schilling visited McMurdo Station and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as a selected member of the U.S. National Science Foundation's 2012/2013 media visit program.?Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on?Facebook?and?Google+.

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-launches-telescope-toting-balloon-antarctica-christmas-164200686.html

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Source: http://www.dgstradinginc.com/methods-for-getting-trustworthy-pay-day-loan-businesses/

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Holiday Obstacles for Authors | Writing and Publishing News

Merry Christmas. I hope you?ve noticed that I haven?t been blogging daily this week. It is good to be missed?to have people disappointed when they get up and head to their computer for words of publishing wisdom, only to find nothing new posted. It?s not that I want to disappoint you. Rather, I hope that you find value in this blog effort of mine. I?ve been posting here for 7 years and one month. For most of that time, I have posted daily. This is my 1,693rd post. I will hit the 2,000 mark sometime in 2013. Who else do you know who has posted anywhere near that number?

Okay, so it is Christmas day. It has been busy in the family arena and I?ve been enjoying every minute of it. But I am eager to get back to my client work and putting the final touches on my second novel. It will also be nice to feel as though everyone else is back to work. Some of you know what I mean. During the holidays and sporadically throughout the summer, you find it difficult to communicate with editors, publishers, reviewers, your publicists, program directors and so forth. Why? Because they take time off?they leave out-of-office-replies to your earnest emails. You are ready to move forward with your project. You want to set up speaking gigs, submit an article or a book manuscript, get your book reviewed, move your marketing program forward, etc, and they are taking a ?much needed break.?

Well, you?ll probably have to wait a little while longer. On the heels of this holiday, of course, is the tradition of seeing in the New Year. Maybe you?ll connect with the person or people who can help you move ahead around January 2. Although, some of the key people may have been waiting for the holidays to be over before heading out to snowboard, ski or maybe vacation in a warmer climate. Sigh!!

If you are a freelance writer or author, you know about obstacles and challenges. If you?ve been earning your living for many years through writing like I have or even just enjoying the writing life for a long time, you?ve experienced many different roadblocks?or potential roadblocks. Here are some words of wisdom from earlier generations: ?This too will pass.? Yes, the obstacle may diminish at some point, but what about the opportunity? Often, timing is everything. But as writers who must rely on others, it is difficult to know or have control over the timing of events and activities related to our projects.

It is up to us to do the research in order to learn whether our book, story or article is timely. And when we think we?ve nailed the time element and we move forward with our gut, to have doors to what we believe are the opportunities we need, close is?well, rather disheartening, don?t you think?

But we will survive. As writers and authors, we are creative. We know how to do the research necessary to move our projects forward. We understand the importance of filling many baskets with eggs (possibilities, opportunities, potentialities?).

And here?s another clich? I?d like to remind you of today: ?When one door closes, another opens.? But be ever aware because the next door might be a window?a small, nearly invisible window.

If you are a bit out of sorts because you have business you want to conduct this season and you are finding many closed doors despite your attempts, stay calm. Stay focused. Either take a break of your own and enjoy an aspect of the season or move to plan B and see what transpires.

In the meantime, good luck with your current project. May it bring you great joy throughout the process and beyond.

If you are an author in any phase of writing, producing or marketing one or more books, be sure to check out my most current array of books for authors:

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Source: http://www.matilijapress.com/publishingblog/?p=2447

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