As hard as it may be to believe, Oscar nominees Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence were once fresh-faced actors itching for their big break in the biz.
Pics: Star Sightings!
Click the video to see the five stars (before they became famous) in their very first on-screen roles!
The manhunt for a former Los Angeles police officer suspected of going on a killing spree converged Tuesday on a mountain cabin where authorities believe he barricaded himself inside, engaged in a shootout that killed a deputy and then never emerged as the home went up in flames.
A single gunshot was heard from within. San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller said Tuesday night that a charred body was found inside the burned-out cabin.
Investigators will use forensic tests to determine if the body belongs to Christopher Dorner. If the results are positive, the search for the most wanted man in America over the last week will have ended the way he had expected — death, with the police pursuing him. He is believed to have killed at least four people.
KABC; Inset: Splash News
HELLFIRE: Flames consume the Big Bear Lake, Calif., cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was holed up yesterday during a police siege.
Thousands of officers had been on the hunt for the former Navy reservist since police said he launched a campaign to exact revenge against the Los Angeles Police Department for his firing. They say he threatened to bring "warfare" to officers and their families, spreading fear and setting off a search for him across the Southwest and Mexico.
"Enough is enough. It's time for you to turn yourself in. It's time to stop the bloodshed," LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said at a news conference held outside police headquarters in Los Angeles, a starkly different atmosphere than last week when Dorner was on the loose and officials briefed the news media under heavy security in an underground hallway.
A short time after Smith spoke Tuesday, smoke began to rise from the cabin in the snow-covered woods near Big Bear Lake, a resort town about 80 miles east of Los Angeles. Flames then engulfed the building — images that were broadcast on live television around the world. TV helicopters showed the fire burning freely with no apparent effort to extinguish it.
"We have reason to believe that it is him," said San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cynthia Bachman, adding that she didn't know how the fire started. She noted there was gunfire between the person in the cabin and officers around the home before the blaze began.
Earlier, there were conflicting reports about whether a body had been found inside shortly after the fire, with both the Los Angeles and San Bernardino authorities disputing the find in separate news conferences. But an official later told the AP a body had been seen in the rubble. The official requested anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
Until Tuesday, authorities didn't know whether Dorner was still near Big Bear Lake, where they found his burned-out pickup last week.
The lenses get longer, but the bodies get smaller. Pretty amazing. These four cameras offer wide-angle lenses with long zooms, giving you a lot of shooting flexibility, but without the bulk of larger dSLR-style megazooms.
Canon PowerShot SX260 HS
Rating: 4 stars out of 5 (Excellent)
The good: Shooting modes are for every type of photographer, casual to advanced. There is a useful long zoom lens with excellent image stabilization, and overall excellent photo and video quality for a compact megazoom.
The bad: Menus and controls can take getting used to, battery life is short and photos get noticeably softer-looking indoors or in low light.
The cost: $209 to $325.99
The bottom line: The wider, longer lens, a few much-needed design tweaks, and excellent photo quality add up to one pretty great compact megazoom.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS20
Rating: 4 stars out of 5 (Excellent)
The good: Excellent design and feature set, including an ultrawide-angle 20x zoom lens, GPS and semimanual and manual shooting modes, as well as fast shooting performance and improved low-light photo quality from previous versions.
The bad: Using all of the high-performance features, such as the near-pointless touch screen, can cut into battery life. Also, photos are noisy and soft when viewed at 100 percent.
The cost: $229.99 to $294
The bottom line: The zoom lens might be the main attraction, but the camera is all-around excellent.
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX30V
Rating: 4 stars out of 5 (Excellent)
The good: Excellent photo and video quality for its class, fast shooting performance and plenty of shooting options for everyone.
The bad: It’s expensive, especially when compared with competing models. It’s not the easiest to use and the feature set is so deep it might be overwhelming for some users.
The cost: $299.99 to $419.99
The bottom line: The feature-rich camera has a great mix of speed and photo quality.
Samsung WB850F
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 (Very good)
The good: A feature-packed compact megazoom with a versatile lens, very good picture quality and excellent Wi-Fi capabilities.
The bad: Shooting performance is a bit mixed, battery life is mediocre and interface, while very good, can take some time to learn.
The cost: $288 to $379.99
The bottom line: For snapshooters looking to enter the world of connected cameras, this is a good place to start.
A wounded suspect was in custody Tuesday morning after a pair of men opened fire on Miami-Dade police at a Florida City home and officers returned fire.
A search is on for the second suspect.
According to Miami-Dade police, officers on Monday night went to a residence at 326 NE Eighth Ave. after receiving a "gun bounty tip," police said Tuesday morning.
"As the officers approached the residence, two subjects immediately open fire at the officers. The officers returned fire and both subjects fled the area," police spokesman Alvaro Zabaleta said.
Police found one of the suspects, wounded by gunfire, in an area hospital. They did not release his name nor the names of the officers involved.
The second suspect remains at large.
Police recovered two guns outside of the Florida City house.
No officers were injured in the trade of gunfire that happened just before 9 p.m.
Late Monday night, a police helicopter and K-9 units circled the area with a giant spotlight apparently searching for suspects. A six-block radius around the shooting was closed off to traffic.
This article will be updated when more details become available.
Apparently there is one girl whose words have weight enough to sway The Bachelor from his affections for Tierra, and that's his sister Shay.
One week prior to the all-important hometown dates, Sean flies his sister to St. Croix to help him work out his feelings for the remaining six. Harking back to her sage, sisterly advice before he embarked on his Bachelor adventure, Shay tells Sean not to "end up with a girl no one likes." The words strike a painful chord with him seeing as Tierra's alienation from the other ladies is no longer a secret.
Pics: 'The Bachelor' Scorecard (Did the Relationships Sizzle or Fizzle?)
Inspired to test his sister's intuition, Sean decides to introduce Tierra to his sibling, but when he arrives to the ladies' hotel, the resident mean girl is found weeping after an all-out war of words with AshLee. At first dismayed by her pain, Sean comes to realize the humane thing to do would be to send Tierra home, fearing she won't be able to handle the more stressful weeks ahead.
"I can't believe they did this to me!" are Tierra's departing words as she is sent packing. "I hope the girls got what they wanted."
During the final rose ceremony in St. Croix, Lesley is cut loose from the remaining five. Despite their incredible connection and friendship, Sean worries that the relationship had gone stagnant.
Pics: Meet 'Bachelor' Sean Lowe's Lucky Ladies!
A confused, crying Catherine takes Lesley's elimination especially hard as she believed that Sean and Les, in her opinion, were better suited for eachother than she will ever be with Mr. Lowe.
Next Monday on ABC, Desiree, Lindsay, Catherine and AshLee will get to introduce their maybe-husband-to-be to the family, but it seems the hometown dates don't go over as well for Des in particular, whose protective brother appears unwilling to accept her "playboy" boyfriend.
REUTERS
A monitor at the Japan Meteorological Agency's earthquake and tsunami observations division shows ground motion data from the nuclear test in North Korea.
PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea conducted a nuclear test at an underground site in the remote northeast Tuesday, taking an important step toward its goal of building a bomb small enough to be fitted on a missile that could reach United States.
North Korea made clear that the explosion of its third atomic device — which it claimed was smaller than the ones in its previous two tests — was a warning to what it considers a hostile United States. Its actions drew immediate condemnation from Washington, the U.N. and others. Even its only major ally, China, voiced opposition.
"The test was conducted in a safe and perfect way on a high level, with the use of a smaller and light A-bomb, unlike the previous ones, yet with great explosive power," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said.
It was a defiant response to U.N. orders to shut down atomic activity or face more sanctions and international isolation, as well as a direct message from young leader Kim Jong Un to the United States, Pyongyang's No. 1 enemy since the 1950-53 Korean War.
KCNA said the test is aimed at coping with "the ferocious hostile act of the U.S." That's a reference to what Pyongyang said was Washington's attempts to block its right to launch satellites. North Korea was punished by U.N. sanctions after a December launch of a rocket that the U.N. and Washington called a cover for a banned missile test. Pyongyang said it was a peaceful satellite launch.
The timing was significant. The test in an underground tunnel came hours before President Barack Obama was scheduled to give his State of the Union speech, a major, nationally televised address.
Obama said in a statement Tuesday that the test is "a highly provocative act" and promised to "continue to take steps necessary to defend ourselves and our allies."
The test also comes only days before the Saturday birthday of Kim Jong Un's father, late leader Kim Jong Il, whose memory North Korean propaganda has repeatedly linked to the country's nuclear ambitions. This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War, and in late February South Korean President-elect Park Geun-hye will be inaugurated.
North Korea is estimated to have enough weaponized plutonium for four to eight bombs, according to American nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker.
If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.
New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.
The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.
“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”
Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.
Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.
Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.
In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.
This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.
With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.
The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”
Second of two parts
Every year for nearly a decade, private tutoring companies have made millions in Florida because the federal government required school districts to hire them.
That was in danger of changing last February, when the state won freedom from mandated private instruction for poor children in the state's worst schools.
But the tutoring industry wasn't letting go without a fight.
At the end of last year's legislative session, Florida became a key target as the tutoring lobby battled to retain funding.
The effort paid off in March, when state lawmakers quietly voted to keep the money flowing.
The moment marked a major victory for the tutoring industry, but, as the Tampa Bay Times reported on Sunday, it also ensured the survival of a program that is shot through with cheating, opportunism and fraud.
In tracing the new law from the agenda books of a special interest group to the pages of state statutes, the Times reviewed public records and interviewed legislators, lobbyists, education officials and advocates.
It found that the push to fund tutoring in Florida was part of a national campaign by the industry, an undertaking that failed in other places but succeeded in Tallahassee.
To save tutoring, the industry formed a nonprofit group that sold the effort as a civil rights struggle, spent $2.4 million on campaign contributions and lobbying fees and pushed legislation in states across the country.
In New York and Maryland, tutoring companies and their lobbyists battled fiercely for a law requiring funding and still made no headway.
In Florida, all it took was a phone call.
Rallying support
By the summer of 2010, midway through President Barack Obama's second year in office, tutoring companies that had thrived on government contracts knew they were in trouble.
Industry groups were expecting the administration to gut requirements for private tutoring, known as supplemental educational services, that made up a key part of President George W. Bush's education reform act, No Child Left Behind.
What the industry needed was a campaign to rally people who otherwise might not show support. The solution? Defend subsidized tutoring as a civil rights cause.
Steve Pines, head of the Education Industry Association, previewed the strategy in a PowerPoint presentation for tutoring companies in June 2010. His organization, a trade group for for-profit education businesses, would spend $1.5 million to help launch a nonprofit called Tutor Our Children.
The new organization would hire lobbyists, create a pro-tutoring website and encourage parents to flood public officials with support for mandated tutoring, all while positioning the campaign as a fight for civil rights.
It cultivated ties to the Urban League of Greater Miami and the United Farm Workers of America. In April 2011, it organized a panel discussion in Washington called "Waiving Away Education Civil Rights."
In October 2011, Tutor Our Children announced it had hired a spokeswoman, Stephanie Monroe, a Washington lobbyist who formerly served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the Bush administration.
About a week later, Monroe testified in a Senate hearing on the organization's behalf.
The same day, the group posted on its website a photo of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. It showed an inscription — a quote from King — that reads in part: "Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights."
The family of the late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno released the findings of their own investigation into the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation scandal yesterday — and it exonerated Paterno while blasting an earlier report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh as “fundamentally flawed.”
More than six months after Freeh’s July 2012 report accused Paterno and others of covering up Sandusky’s child abuse, the family’s report, conducted by former US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, concluded there was no conspiracy.
“Mr. Freeh irresponsibly blamed Joe Paterno in this scandal,” wrote Paterno family attorney Wick Sollers.
He accused Freeh of “offering a flawed, one-sided viewpoint” and ripped him for not interviewing Paterno.
Freeh retorted that he stood by his conclusions and specifically said Paterno refused to meet with him while still finding time to grant interviews to a newspaper reporter and his biographer before his death in January 2012 at age 85.
Freeh called the family’s report “self-serving.”
Critique of the Freeh Report by
U.S. Century Bank is expected to sign off on Monday on its letter of intent — the framework for a plan to recapitalize the bank.
Under the deal, a local group of investors, led by Jimmy Tate of Tate Capital and Sergio Rok of Rok Enterprises, will bring in fresh capital and wipe out the Doral bank’s bad loans, while allowing it to operate independently.
The investor group is expected to inject $50 million in capital into the bank, becoming majority owners. In addition, the group will pay about $90 million to buy certain loans, including all $98 million of U.S. Century’s non-performing loans, said U.S. Century President and Chief Executive Carlos J. Dávila. The deal would also provide for a negotiated amount to be paid to the federal government to repay U.S. Century’s $50.2 million in TARP funds.
A definitive agreement, based on the letter of intent, is expected next month. Pending shareholder and regulatory approval, the deal could be completed by mid-year, Dávila said.
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