If you?re of a mind to assist out a charity you don?t have to half with any of your cash in the event you don?t want to, you can go out and donate an automotive for those who like. I?ve heard about it, but I?ve by no means identified anybody who has performed it. It?s a fantastic thought although, and had somebody not stolen my last car, I might have performed it myself. My last automotive was not in bad form, however wasn?t something I needed to resell. It ran good but the body was one thing of a mess. I liked it though, and that?s why I had it for thus long. You have to love a car that can fly up the mountains around me at a gentle sixty miles per hour without lacking a beat.
There are many charities that encourage you to donate an automobile, although I?m unsure what they do with them after that. If an automobile is in dangerous enough form, is it higher to junk it or donate it. Perhaps the parents that accept the car promote the components or one thing, and the proceeds go to charity. What occurs to after you donate a car? It is indeed a mystery to me, although I have by no means really thought of it till now. What would anyone need with my junk car anyway?
Although I do not know what happens to the car after you donate an automotive, I do know that many places what you to do it, and it?s thought of a charitable donation. If you fill out your taxes that yr, you may deduct the worth of the automotive as a charity donation. Do not lie about how much it is worth although, as this may get you into large trouble. It is best to get a receipt from the place you takes your automobile, and this is what you need to present to your accountant or tax preparer.
If you want to donate an automotive, but don?t know who would need it, you may at all times search online. You can see many charities that may accept your car, and in case you go to their website they may let you know how to donate an automobile, and risk provide you with an area place you?ll be able to go to do so. If you cannot find the information on their internet page, you may go ahead and call them via e mail or cellphone and ask. For those who find that they do not want what it?s important to offer, someone else is sure to take it.
If you would like additional facts with regard to car donation, drop by David Proctilax's web page immediately.
LOS ANGELES?? The Screen Actors Guild on Sunday picked the actors in drama "The Help" as the top ensemble cast of 2011 and gave it two other awards for best lead actress and supporting actress, in a surprise over heavily favored silent movie romance "The Artist."
"The Help" earned three awards overall and "The Artist" only one for French actor Jean Dujardin as best actor in a drama for his role as a fading actor at the end of the talkies.
Dujardin seemed genuinely surprised as he held his statue, thanking the audience of A-list actors including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams.
He noted that as a kid he was always a dreamer and that his teachers called him "Jean of the moon."
"I was always dreaming," he said. "I realize now that I never stopped dreaming. Thank you very much. Thank you for this dream."
Viola Davis was named best actress in a movie for civil rights-era drama "The Help," and she too talked of dreaming big as a kid and encouraged others to do so.
"Dream big and dream fierce," she said.
Others winning SAG film honors included Christopher Plummer with the first film honor for supporting actor. Plummer, 82, who plays an elderly man who reveals his homosexuality, much to the chagrin of his family, thanked his fellow actors from the stage, calling them a wacky but wonderful bunch of artists.
"I just can't tell you what fun I've had being a member of the world's second oldest profession," Plummer joked on stage. "When they honor you, it's like being lit by the holy grail. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
Octavia Spencer won supporting actress in a movie with her role as a poor maid "The Help." It proved to be a surprise over Berenice Bejo of silent film romance, "The Artist."
SAG's film awards are closely watched for their impact on Oscars because actors make up the biggest voting group at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which picks winners. The Academy Awards take place in Los Angeles on February 26.
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But unlike academy voters focused on film, SAG members also pick winners in TV awards, and in that arena, "Boardwalk Empire" was named best drama series for the second straight year and "Modern Family was picked top comedy, also for the second year.
Alec Baldwin was named best actor in a TV comedy for the sixth year for his role as a TV executive on "30 Rock," and Betty White, who turned 90-year-old earlier this month, took the comedy actress trophy for a second time in "Hot in Cleveland."
An obviously surprised White acknowledged her co-stars Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick.
The win "belongs with four of us," she said, then looked at her statuette with a gleam in her eye and a joke on her mind. "I'm dealing them right-in with this. I'm not going to let them keep this, but I will let them see it."
In other TV awards, Kate Winslet was named best actress in a small-screen movie or miniseries for "Mildred Pierce," and Paul Giamatti won the trophy for actor in a movie or mini-series with "Too Big to Fail."
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Study may answer longstanding questions about Little Ice AgePublic release date: 30-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Hosansky, NCAR/UCAR Media Relations
hosansky@ucar.edu
303-497-8611
Jim Scott, CU-Boulder Media Relations
303-492-3114
jim.scott@colorado.edu
National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
For scientific contacts, see bottom of release.
BOULDER -- A new international study may answer contentious questions about the onset and persistence of Earth's Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that lasted for hundreds of years until the late 19th century.
The study, led by the University of Colorado Boulder with co-authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and other organizations, suggests that an unusual, 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions triggered the Little Ice Age between 1275 and 1300 A.D. The persistence of cold summers following the eruptions is best explained by a subsequent expansion of sea ice and a related weakening of Atlantic currents, according to computer simulations conducted for the study.
The study, which used analyses of patterns of dead vegetation, ice and sediment core data, and powerful computer climate models, provides new evidence in a longstanding scientific debate over the onset of the Little Ice Age. Scientists have theorized that the Little Ice Age was caused by decreased summer solar radiation, erupting volcanoes that cooled the planet by ejecting sulfates and other aerosol particles that reflected sunlight back into space, or a combination of the two.
"This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age," says lead author Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado Boulder. "We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short periodin this case, from volcanic eruptionsthere appears to be a cumulative cooling effect."
"Our simulations showed that the volcanic eruptions may have had a profound cooling effect," says NCAR scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, a co-author of the study. "The eruptions could have triggered a chain reaction, affecting sea ice and ocean currents in a way that lowered temperatures for centuries."
The study appears this week in Geophysical Research Letters. The research team includes co-authors from the University of Iceland, the University of California Irvine, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, and the Icelandic Science Foundation.
Far-flung regions of ice
Scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age range from the 13th century to the 16th century, but there is little consensus, Miller says. Although the cooling temperatures may have affected places as far away as South America and China, they were particularly evident in northern Europe. Advancing glaciers in mountain valleys destroyed towns, and paintings from the period depict people ice-skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, places that were ice-free before and after the Little Ice Age.
"The dominant way scientists have defined the Little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway," says Miller, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "But the time in which European glaciers advanced far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period."
Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact, collected from beneath receding margins of ice caps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. They found a large cluster of "kill dates" between 1275 and 1300 A.D., indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.
The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about 1450 A.D., indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.
To broaden the study, the researchers analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjkull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the coreswhich can be reliably dated by using tephra deposits from known historic volcanic eruptions on Iceland going back more than 1,000 yearssuddenly became thicker in the late 13th century and again in the 15th century due to increased erosion caused by the expansion of the ice cap as the climate cooled.
"That showed us the signal we got from Baffin Island was not just a local signal, it was a North Atlantic signal," Miller says. "This gave us a great deal more confidence that there was a major perturbation to the Northern Hemisphere climate near the end of the 13th century."
The team used the Community Climate System Model, which was developed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy with colleagues at other organizations, to test the effects of volcanic cooling on Arctic sea ice extent and mass. The model, which simulated various sea ice conditions from about 1150 to 1700 A.D., showed several large, closely spaced eruptions could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to trigger the expansion of Arctic sea ice.
The model showed that sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and created a self-sustaining feedback on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, according to the simulations.
The researchers set solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models. The simulations indicated that the Little Ice Age likely would have occurred without decreased summer solar radiation at the time, Miller says.
###
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Gifford Miller, CU Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research Fellow
303-492-6962
gmiller@colorado.edu
About the article
Title: Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks
Authors: Gifford Miller, Aslaug Geirsdottir, Yafang Zhong, Darren J. Larsen, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Marika M. Holland, David A. Bailey, Kurt A. Refsnider, Scott J. Lehman, John R. Southon, Chance Anderson, Helgi Bjornsson, Thorvaldur Thordarson,
Publication: Geophysical Research Letters
On the Web
For news releases, images, and more
www.ucar.edu/news
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Study may answer longstanding questions about Little Ice AgePublic release date: 30-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Hosansky, NCAR/UCAR Media Relations
hosansky@ucar.edu
303-497-8611
Jim Scott, CU-Boulder Media Relations
303-492-3114
jim.scott@colorado.edu
National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
For scientific contacts, see bottom of release.
BOULDER -- A new international study may answer contentious questions about the onset and persistence of Earth's Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that lasted for hundreds of years until the late 19th century.
The study, led by the University of Colorado Boulder with co-authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and other organizations, suggests that an unusual, 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions triggered the Little Ice Age between 1275 and 1300 A.D. The persistence of cold summers following the eruptions is best explained by a subsequent expansion of sea ice and a related weakening of Atlantic currents, according to computer simulations conducted for the study.
The study, which used analyses of patterns of dead vegetation, ice and sediment core data, and powerful computer climate models, provides new evidence in a longstanding scientific debate over the onset of the Little Ice Age. Scientists have theorized that the Little Ice Age was caused by decreased summer solar radiation, erupting volcanoes that cooled the planet by ejecting sulfates and other aerosol particles that reflected sunlight back into space, or a combination of the two.
"This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age," says lead author Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado Boulder. "We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short periodin this case, from volcanic eruptionsthere appears to be a cumulative cooling effect."
"Our simulations showed that the volcanic eruptions may have had a profound cooling effect," says NCAR scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, a co-author of the study. "The eruptions could have triggered a chain reaction, affecting sea ice and ocean currents in a way that lowered temperatures for centuries."
The study appears this week in Geophysical Research Letters. The research team includes co-authors from the University of Iceland, the University of California Irvine, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, and the Icelandic Science Foundation.
Far-flung regions of ice
Scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age range from the 13th century to the 16th century, but there is little consensus, Miller says. Although the cooling temperatures may have affected places as far away as South America and China, they were particularly evident in northern Europe. Advancing glaciers in mountain valleys destroyed towns, and paintings from the period depict people ice-skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, places that were ice-free before and after the Little Ice Age.
"The dominant way scientists have defined the Little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway," says Miller, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "But the time in which European glaciers advanced far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period."
Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact, collected from beneath receding margins of ice caps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. They found a large cluster of "kill dates" between 1275 and 1300 A.D., indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.
The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about 1450 A.D., indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.
To broaden the study, the researchers analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjkull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the coreswhich can be reliably dated by using tephra deposits from known historic volcanic eruptions on Iceland going back more than 1,000 yearssuddenly became thicker in the late 13th century and again in the 15th century due to increased erosion caused by the expansion of the ice cap as the climate cooled.
"That showed us the signal we got from Baffin Island was not just a local signal, it was a North Atlantic signal," Miller says. "This gave us a great deal more confidence that there was a major perturbation to the Northern Hemisphere climate near the end of the 13th century."
The team used the Community Climate System Model, which was developed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy with colleagues at other organizations, to test the effects of volcanic cooling on Arctic sea ice extent and mass. The model, which simulated various sea ice conditions from about 1150 to 1700 A.D., showed several large, closely spaced eruptions could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to trigger the expansion of Arctic sea ice.
The model showed that sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and created a self-sustaining feedback on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, according to the simulations.
The researchers set solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models. The simulations indicated that the Little Ice Age likely would have occurred without decreased summer solar radiation at the time, Miller says.
###
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Gifford Miller, CU Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research Fellow
303-492-6962
gmiller@colorado.edu
About the article
Title: Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks
Authors: Gifford Miller, Aslaug Geirsdottir, Yafang Zhong, Darren J. Larsen, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, Marika M. Holland, David A. Bailey, Kurt A. Refsnider, Scott J. Lehman, John R. Southon, Chance Anderson, Helgi Bjornsson, Thorvaldur Thordarson,
Publication: Geophysical Research Letters
On the Web
For news releases, images, and more
www.ucar.edu/news
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Jobs and housing are key issues on the minds of Florida Republican primary voters, the New York Times reported. That's because Florida suffers 9.9 percent unemployment and feels the brunt of the foreclosure crisis. One in 360 Florida homes is in foreclosure, the Times noted. While unemployment is down from its record-breaking 12 percent of December 2010, Florida's tied for sixth highest jobless numbers in the nation.
Here's what the two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, tell Florida voters they will do about joblessness and foreclosures:
Joblessness
* Gingrich told CBS News he would change the unemployment system, requiring workers to undergo training to qualify. Business would fund the programs. "We'd be paying you to improve human capital; we wouldn't be paying you to sit around and do nothing," he said.
* "It's fundamentally wrong to give people money for 99 weeks for doing nothing," Gingrich said.
* Gingrich's jobs platform would make temporary tax relief permanent; cut capital gains taxes; cut corporate income tax to 12.5 percent; allow 100 percent new equipment expensing; repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, the Community Reinvestment Act and Dodd-Frank; develop U.S. energy sources; replace health care laws with a "pro-jobs, pro-responsibility" health plan; and reform entitlement programs.
* If president, "?my highest priority would be worrying about your job, not saving my own," Romney said.
* "We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years," Romney said in June. "We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, anti-job strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it's harder and harder for people to find work."
* Romney's jobs platform would lower corporate taxes to 25 percent; promote new trade agreements; maximize leasing of existing open energy reserves and evaluate opening new ones; and consolidate worker retraining programs, turning administration over to states.
Foreclosures
* Romney would scale back Dodd-Frank, making it easier for banks to restructure foreclosures, the Kansas City Star reported.
* Gingrich would repeal Dodd-Frank, Business Week noted. "If they would repeal it tomorrow morning, you would have a better housing market the next day," Gingrich said.
* Gingrich told voters Romney profited from their homes losses, the Washington Post reported.
* Romney retorted a blind trust decides his investments. He noted Gingrich took paychecks from Freddie Mac, a lender implicated in the foreclosure crisis.
* Romney opposes government intervention to forestall foreclosure, telling struggling homeowners if a lender won't work with them, they may have to walk away from mortgage debt and start over. He likened foreclosure threat to banks facing going out of business, saying the solution to both is to hit reset, take the loss, and move on.
* Gingrich said the GOP is trying to drown him in mud raised with money from people and companies who foreclosed on Floridians. He said the power structure in Washington would rather manage decay than make changes.
What's that? You want an eight or ten inch WiFi tab, but failed to place your pre-order for one of Moto's latest earlier this month? Worry not, slate-seeking friend, for both the WiFi Xyboard 8.2 and 10.1 are officially on sale at Motorola's website, with free two-day shipping thrown in for good measure. As a quick refresher, the 8.2 comes in 16 and 32GB flavors for $400 and $500, respectively, while the same amount of memory in the 10-inch form factor will set you back $100 more. Sound good? Head on down to the source links below, credit card at the ready, and Moto will gladly send one your way.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The economy grew at its fastest pace in 1-1/2 years in the fourth quarter, but a rebuilding of stocks by businesses and slower business spending warned of weaker growth in early 2012.
Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.8 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday, a sharp acceleration from the 1.8 percent in the prior three months.
It was, however, a touch below economists expectations in a Reuters poll for a 3 percent rate, and two-thirds of the increase was due to the build-up in business inventories.
Soft underlying demand and a sharp slowing in core inflation supported the Federal Reserve's decision this week to keep in place an ultra easy monetary policy to nurse the recovery.
"The areas of strength are unlikely to be strong in the current quarter and the areas of weakness are more than likely to be weaker," said Steve Blitz, a senior economist at ITG Investment Research in New York. "Frankly, I don't think there is an awful lot the Fed can do about it."
On Wall Street the Dow ended down as investors took a dim view of the composition of growth. U.S. Treasury debt prices rose for a third day and the dollar hit a 6-1/2 week low against the euro.
The economy got a temporary boost from the rebuilding of inventories, which logged the biggest increase since the third quarter of 2010.
Excluding inventories, the economy grew at a tepid 0.8 percent rate, a sharp step-down from the prior period's 3.2 percent pace and a sign of weak domestic demand.
THE POLITICS OF GROWTH
For all of last year, the economy grew just 1.7 percent, and economists expect only a bit of quickening this year.
Sluggish growth could hurt President Barack Obama's chances of re-election in November, and might lead the Fed to launch a further round of bond purchases to spur the recovery.
"Clearly, much work remains to achieve the Fed's dual mandate of maximum sustainable employment in the context of price stability," New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley told reporters.
The central bank on Wednesday said it expected to keep interest rates at rock bottom levels at least through late 2014, and it warned the economy still faced big risks, a suggestion the euro zone debt crisis could still hit hard.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Friday also gave a lukewarm assessment of economy's prospects.
"We're still repairing the damage done by the financial crisis. On top of that we face a more challenging world. We have a lot of challenges ahead in the United States," he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
The robust inventory accumulation in the fourth quarter - a $56 billion build-up - suggests the recovery will lose a step at some point in early 2012 when businesses throttle back.
But economists said there was no sign businesses were uncomfortable yet with the amount of inventory they had on hand, suggesting they could add more in the current quarter.
"We had dealer stock build in the fourth quarter, but it was really to make sure we had the inventories that support the going-rate in terms of days' supply," Ford Motor Corp Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth said on a conference call.
"I think we're at 58 days, which is actually lower than our typical level," he said.
Weak spots during the quarter included business investment spending, which advanced at just a 1.7 percent annual rate, the slowest since 2009.
A sharp drop in defense spending and still weak outlays at state and local authorities combined to yield a fifth straight quarterly contraction in government spending.
Though exports held up, an increase in imports left a trade gap that also chipped growth, and while home construction rose at the fastest pace since the second quarter of 2010, it was helped by unseasonably mild winter weather.
SLUGGISH INCOME GROWTH
Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, also accelerated, stepping up to a 2 percent rate from the third-quarter's 1.7 percent.
However, it was largely driven by pent-up demand for cars. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami had disrupted supplies early last year, leaving showrooms bereft of popular models.
Consumers also benefited from a moderation in inflation.
A price index for personal spending rose at a 0.7 percent rate in the fourth-quarter, the slowest increase in 1-1/2 years.
A core measure that strips out food and energy costs rose at a 1.1 percent pace, off sharply from the prior quarter and the slowest in a year. The slowdown could worry the Fed, which would prefer it nearer its 2 percent inflation target.
High unemployment has led to sluggish income growth, which in turn has prompted households to tap savings and credit cards to fund their purchases.
A sustained GDP growth pace of at least 3 percent would likely be needed to make noticeable headway in absorbing the unemployed and those who have given up the search for work.
"Though the unemployment rate has improved, the jobs market remains a major challenge," said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago.
"The high level of people out of the workforce and underemployed people show there isn't really much income generation to contribute to a better spending pattern."
Even so, another report on Friday showed consumer sentiment reached its highest level in nearly a year this month.
(Additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Neil Stempleman and Tim Ahmann)
WASHINGTON ? Just how rich is Mitt Romney? Add up the wealth of the last eight presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Then double that number. Now you're in Romney territory.
He would be among the richest presidents in American history if elected ? probably in the top four.
He couldn't top George Washington who, with nearly 60,000 acres and more than 300 slaves, is considered the big daddy of presidential wealth. After that, it gets complicated, depending how you rate Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Herbert Hoover's millions from mining or John F. Kennedy's share of the vast family fortune, as well as the finer points of factors like inflation adjustment.
But it's safe to say the Roosevelts had nothing on Romney, and the Bushes are nowhere close.
The former Massachusetts governor has disclosed only the broad outlines of his wealth, putting it somewhere from $190 million to $250 million. That easily could make him 50 times richer than Obama, who falls in the still-impressive-to-most-of-us range of $2.2 million to $7.5 million.
"I think it's almost hard to conceptualize what $250 million means," said Shamus Khan, a Columbia University sociologist who studies the wealthy. "People say Romney made $50,000 a day while not working last year. What do you do with all that money? I can't even imagine spending it. Well, maybe ..."
Of course, an unbelievable boatload of bucks is just one way to think of Romney's net worth, and the 44 U.S. presidents make up a pretty small pond for him to swim in. Put alongside America's 400 or so billionaires, Romney wouldn't make a ripple.
So here's a look where Romney's riches rank ? among the most flush Americans, the White House contenders, and the rest of us:
_Within the 1 percent:
"Romney is small potatoes compared with the ultra-wealthy," said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies the nation's elites.
After all, even in the rarefied world of the top 1 percent, there's a big difference between life at the top and at the bottom.
A household needs to bring in roughly $400,000 per year to make the cut. Romney and his wife, Ann, have been making 50 times that ? more than $20 million a year. In 2009, only 8,274 federal tax filers had income above $10 million. Romney is solidly within that elite 0.006 percent of all U.S. taxpayers.
Congress is flush with millionaires. Only a few are in the Romney realm, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Kerry's ranking would climb much higher if the fortune of his wife, Teresa Heinz, were counted. She is the widow of Sen. John Heinz, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune.
Further up the ladder, top hedge fund managers can pocket $1 billion or more in a single year.
At the top of the wealth pile sits Bill Gates, worth $59 billion, according to Forbes magazine's estimates.
_As a potential president:
Romney clearly stands out here. America's super rich generally don't jockey to live in the White House. A few have toyed with the idea, most notably New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom Forbes ranks as the 12th richest American, worth $19.5 billion. A lesser billionaire, Ross Perot, bankrolled his own third-party campaigns in 1992 and 1996.
Many presidents weren't particularly well-off, especially 19th century leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant. Nor was the 33rd president, Harry Truman.
"These things ebb and flow," said sociologist Khan. "It's not the case that all presidents were always rich."
A few former chief executives died in debt, including Thomas Jefferson, ranked in a Forbes study as the third-wealthiest president.
Comparing the landlocked wealth of early Americans such as Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, with today's millionaires is tricky, even setting aside the lack of documentation and economic changes over two centuries.
Research by 24/7 Wall St., a news and analysis website, estimated Washington's wealth at the equivalent of $525 million in 2010 dollars.
Yet Washington had to borrow money to pay for his trip to New York for his inauguration in 1789, according to Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon, Washington's Virginia estate. His money was tied up in land, reaping only a modest cash income after farm expenses.
"He was a wealthy guy, there's no doubt about it," Pogue said, and probably among the dozen richest Virginians of his time. But, "the wealthiest person in America then was nothing in comparison to what these folks are today."
_How does Romney stand next to a regular Joe?
He's roughly 1,800 times richer.
The typical U.S. household was worth $120,300 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau's most recent data, although that number is sure to have dropped since the recession. A typical family's income is $50,000.
Calculations from 24/7 Wall St. of the peak lifetime wealth (or peak so far) of Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama add up to a total $128 million ? while Romney reports assets of up to $250 million.
If you consider only those presidents' assets while in office, without millions earned later from speeches and books, their combined total would be substantially lower, and Romney's riches would leave the pack even further behind.
This is 16-year-old Lori Brownell. As you can see in the video, Lori is very sick. Her symptoms started last August. Nobody could diagnose her at the time, and since then 17 more kids have developed the same symptoms in the same geographical area. More »
LOS ANGELES ? Alexander Payne, director of "The Descendants," likens it to "inviting people to my home for dinner."
"Bridesmaids" helmer Paul Feig describes it as spending hundreds of hours waiting for that "one aha moment."
Tate Taylor, who wrote and directed "The Help," uses starker terms when describing the process of crafting the perfect acting ensemble: "One bad casting choice, one weak link, can spell death for your movie. That's why you see tons of people and you don't stop until it's right."
"The Help," "The Descendants" and "Bridesmaids," along with the silent movie "The Artist" and Woody Allen's "Midnight In Paris," are all vying for the Screen Actors Guild's ensemble trophy at Sunday night's 18th annual SAG Awards.
SAG began giving its movie ensemble award in 1994, after an equivalent trophy for favorite television cast proved popular in its inaugural awards show a year earlier. The honor, says SAG Awards producer Kathy Connell, originated with the guild and reflects its desire to "acknowledge the creativity of chemistry and the teamwork that actors do."
Which is fine by the directors of this year's nominees, many of whom spent more time casting their movies than making or editing them.
Payne began casting "The Descendants" nine months before filming began, starting with George Clooney, whom he had politely rejected for the lead role in his last movie, "Sideways." Payne takes a unique approach to building an ensemble, working with a single casting director, longtime associate John Jackson, for hiring the lead roles, the locals and the extras.
"I don't like the Hollywood system of hiring three different people for casting," Payne says. "I don't want to explain myself three times over. I think one person should be in charge of all the flesh in front of the camera and bring a single vision to that."
Critics frequently praise Payne's knack for placing actors in unlikely roles. (Think Kathy Bates' twice-divorced mother who enjoys a "white hot" sex life in "About Schmidt.") He and Jackson did that several times over in "The Descendants," starting with casting Clooney as a clueless father who wears, as the actor puts it, "khakis up to his armpits."
"If I cast against type, I do so unwittingly," Payne admits, "because in reality I don't see that many contemporary American films. So I don't know the actor's type to begin with."
That wasn't the case for Taylor, who, when adapting longtime friend Kathryn Stockett's best-seller, wrote the roles of Minny and Charlotte specifically for two other dear friends ? Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney, respectively. In fact, Taylor and Spencer were roommates in Los Angeles when Taylor wrote the screenplay.
Taylor also wanted Viola Davis for the lead role of maid Aibileen, and pushed the film's start date to accommodate her schedule. Determined not to "cast from the covers of magazines," Taylor threw the doors open for the rest of the movie's large ensemble, hiring, among others, Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain before they became in-demand actresses.
Three weeks before filming, Taylor brought the cast to Mississippi, rehearsing in the locations where they eventually filmed.
"Mississippi infiltrated the cast and a family dynamic formed," Taylor says.
Rehearsals were critical for the "Bridesmaids" ensemble as well, Feig says. The cast met two months prior to filming, reading through the script and then going through rigorous improv sessions so Feig and the movie's writers could tailor new material to the actresses' strengths and personalities.
During this revision process, the filmmakers expanded Melissa McCarthy's part, most notably, putting her in a key, emotionally layered scene opposite Kristen Wiig late in the movie. McCarthy wound up being the one individual "Bridesmaids" cast member nominated for a SAG Award.
"It's when you're rehearsing more and more, you start to think, `Wow. These girls together are strong," Feig says. "That's also when, as a director, you get nervous. You're thinking, `Oh boy. I'm the only thing that could throw this all off.' "
Since SAG began giving its ensemble awards, other groups, like the Broadcast Film Critics Association, have jumped on the bandwagon. Television's Emmy Awards added three casting categories in 2000 and some in the industry, like "Modern Family" co-creator Steve Levitan, believe an acting ensemble award should be added, too.
Meanwhile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which added an animated film category in 2001, has no plans to supplement its four acting honors.
As it stands, members of popular ensembles, like Chastain and Spencer in "The Help," often find themselves in competition for a film's top accolade.
"If the actors give distinctly different performances, they stand on their own and don't cancel each other out," says Kristopher Tapley, executive editor of awards coverage website In Contention.
The beauty of SAG's ensemble award, says Taylor, is that, for one night at least, "everyone's on the same team."
"It's going to be a great reunion," Taylor adds. "It might get a little loud, though."
DAVOS, Switzerland ? The founder of Wikipedia has hailed the online encyclopedia's role in helping halt U.S. legislation aimed at cracking down on Internet piracy.
Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that the idea to black out Wikipedia's English pages for 24 hours came from the site's volunteer editors, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move.
Wales says the two bills that Congress postponed indefinitely last week were "very badly designed, technologically incompetent, and just something that we felt needed to be stopped."
Wikipedia was among a number of sites that argued the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act would hurt technological innovation and infringe on free-speech rights.
According to its first-quarter sales figures—to the tune of 37.04 million units—Apple sold 377,900 iPhones every day of the 98-day fiscal quarter. The average number of children born—worldwide—tallied only 371,000 new humans. More »
Since its discovery 150 years ago, scientists have puzzled over whether the winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx represents the missing link in birds' evolution to powered flight. Much of the debate has focused on the iconic creature's wings and the mystery of whether ? and how well ? it could fly.
Some secrets have been revealed by an international team of researchers led by Brown University. Through a novel analytic approach, the researchers have determined that a well-preserved feather on the raven-sized dinosaur's wing was black. The color and parts of cells that would have supplied pigment are evidence the wing feathers were rigid and durable, traits that would have helped Archaeopteryx to fly.
The team also learned from its examination that Archaeopteryx's feather structure is identical to that of living birds, a discovery that shows modern wing feathers had evolved as early as 150 million years ago in the Jurassic period. The study, which appears in Nature Communications, was funded by the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
"If Archaeopteryx was flapping or gliding, the presence of melanosomes [pigment-producing parts of a cell] would have given the feathers additional structural support," said Ryan Carney, an evolutionary biologist at Brown and the paper's lead author. "This would have been advantageous during this early evolutionary stage of dinosaur flight."
The Archaeopteryx feather was discovered in a limestone deposit in Germany in 1861, a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Paleontologists have long been excited about the fossil and other Archaeopteryx specimens, thinking they place the dinosaur at the base of the bird evolutionary tree. The traits that make Archaeopteryx an evolutionary intermediate between dinosaurs and birds, scientists say, are the combination of reptilian features (teeth, clawed fingers, and a bony tail) and avian features (feathered wings and a wishbone).
The lack of knowledge of Archaeopteryx's feather structure and color bedeviled scientists. Carney, with researchers from Yale University, the University of Akron, and the Carl Zeiss laboratory in Germany, analyzed the feather and discovered that it is a covert, so named because these feathers cover the primary and secondary wing feathers birds use in flight. After two unsuccessful attempts to image the melanosomes, the group tried a more powerful type of scanning electron microscope at Zeiss, where the group located patches of hundreds of the structures still encased in the fossilized feather.
"The third time was the charm, and we finally found the keys to unlocking the feather's original color, hidden in the rock for the past 150 million years," said Carney, a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, studying with Stephen Gatesy.
Melanosomes had long been known to be present in other fossil feathers, but had been misidentified as bacteria. In 2006, coauthor Jakob Vinther, then a graduate student at Yale, discovered melanin preserved in the ink sac of a fossilized squid. "This made me think that melanin could be fossilized in many other fossils such as feathers," said Vinther, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas?Austin. "I realized that I had opened a whole new chapter of what we can do to understand the nature of extinct feathered dinosaurs and birds."
The team measured the length and width of the sausage-shaped melanosomes, roughly 1 micron long and 250 nanometers wide. To determine the melanosome's color, Akron researchers Matthew Shawkey and Liliana D'Alba statistically compared Archaeopteryx's melanosomes with those found in 87 species of living birds, representing four feather classes: black, gray, brown, and a type found in penguins. "What we found was that the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty," Carney said.
Next, the team sought to better define the melanosomes' structure. For that, they examined the fossilized barbules ? tiny, rib-like appendages that overlap and interlock like zippers to give a feather rigidity and strength. The barbules and the alignment of melanosomes within them, Carney said, are identical to those found in modern birds.
What the pigment was used for is less clear. The black color of the Archaeopteryx wing feather may have served to regulate body temperature, act as camouflage or be employed for display. But it could have been for flight, too.
"We can't say it's proof that Archaeopteryx was a flier. But what we can say is that in modern bird feathers, these melanosomes provide additional strength and resistance to abrasion from flight, which is why wing feathers and their tips are the most likely areas to be pigmented," Carney said. "With Archaeopteryx, as with birds today, the melanosomes we found would have provided similar structural advantages, regardless of whether the pigmentation initially evolved for another purpose."
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NEW DELHI (AP) ? The ramshackle neighborhoods of northeast Delhi are home to 2.2 million people packed along narrow alleys. Buildings are made from a single layer of brick. Extra floors are added to dilapidated buildings not meant to handle their weight. Tangles of electrical cables hang precariously everywhere.
If a major earthquake struck India's seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods ? India's most crowded ? would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the water-soaked subsoil to jelly, which would intensify the shaking.
The Indian government knows this and has done almost nothing about it.
An Associated Press examination of government documents spanning five decades reveals a pattern of warnings and recommendations that have been widely disregarded. Successive governments made plans and promises to prepare for a major earthquake in the city of 16.7 million, only to abandon them each time.
The Delhi government's own estimates say nine out of every 10 buildings in the city are at risk of moderate or significant quake damage, yet the basic disaster response plan it had promised to complete nearly three years ago remains unfinished, there are nearly no earthquake awareness drills in schools and offices and tens of thousands of housing units are built every year without any earthquake safety checks.
Fearing many buildings could lie in ruins after a quake, the Delhi government began work in 2005 with U.S. government assistance to reinforce just five buildings ? including a school and a hospital ? it would need to begin a rudimentary relief operation to deal with the dead, wounded and homeless. Six years later, only one of those buildings is earthquake-ready.
"At the end of the day, people at the helm of affairs are not doing anything," said Anup Karanth, an earthquake engineering expert.
In its attitudes to disaster preparedness India is like many other poor nations ? aware of the danger but bogged down by both sheer inertia and more immediate demands on its resources.
But Delhi faces immense earthquake risks. Last September, two minor jolts sent thousands of scared residents into the streets, and experts say a big one looms on the horizon.
As far back as 1960, after a moderate quake cut power and plunged Delhi ? then a city of 2.7 million ? into darkness, the Geological Survey of India advised that all large buildings in the capital needed to have a plan for earthquake safety.
A series of reports by other agencies have expanded on that conclusion in recent years, but both the city and national governments have ignored almost all of the recommendations.
Some reports were ignored because of sheer apathy, others because of shifting priorities. In a city and country growing at lightning speed with huge problems of poverty and hunger that need more immediate solutions, earthquake preparedness has simply never been at the top of the list. Some plans begun with good intentions simply fell by the wayside.
That's what happened to the 2005 plan to prepare five important buildings in the capital for an earthquake.
Government engineers were sent to California to train. But the following year ? with only the school made earthquake ready ? all the engineers were taken off the project. They were reassigned to build stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an athletic competition held in Delhi, said M. Shashidhar Reddy, the vice chairman of India's National Disaster Management Agency.
The scale of the problem "really hasn't sunk into the minds of the people," Reddy said.
Just last year, a Delhi government agency ordered all new home buyers to get a building safety certificate that would mark their homes as structurally sound before registering property. But it later withdrew the order, saying there weren't enough engineers trained to conduct such inspections.
"That's like saying let's not have any traffic rules because we don't have enough policemen," said Hari Kumar, who heads Geohazards India, an organization that promotes earthquake awareness.
India, a still developing country plagued by corruption, isn't alone in being unprepared. More than 80 percent of deaths from building collapses in earthquakes in the last three decades occurred in corrupt and poor countries, according to a 2011 study published in the science journal Nature.
The study by Roger Bilham, a geologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Nicholas Ambraseys, a civil and environmental engineer at Imperial College London, compared the loss of life in two magnitude 7.0 earthquakes in 2010. In Haiti, 300,000 died; in New Zealand none did, though a subsequent 6.1 quake there in early 2011 killed 182.
New Zealand, a developed nation, tied for first as the least corrupt in Transparency International's most recent Corruption Perceptions Index. Much poorer Haiti came in 175th out of 178 countries.
In Turkey, which ranked 61st, a 2010 report revealed that the earthquake-prone nation had failed to enforce stricter building codes put in place after a 1999 earthquake killed 18,000 people. Last year, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 5.7 flattened some 2,000 buildings, killed 644 people and left thousands homeless.
In contrast, Japan, which was 14th on the corruption scale, requires that all structures meet a 1981 building code and offers subsidies to retrofit buildings to meet more stringent guidelines set in 1995. About 75 percent of homes and public buildings meet the newer standards.
In India, which ranked 95th, contractors routinely flout regulations, use substandard material and add illegal floors to buildings, while bribing government inspectors to look the other way, said Reddy, the disaster management official. A 2001 quake in the western state of Gujarat killed more than 13,000.
Delhi, which sits near a highly seismically active area, is ranked four out of five on a seismic threat scale used in India.
Geologists believe the Central Himalayan Gap, a 310-mile (500 kilometer) stretch between Nepal and India, is ripe for a major quake. A 6.8 quake along the fault in March 1999 damaged many buildings in Delhi, just 125 to 300 miles (200 to 500 kilometers) from the gap.
Studies show such a large buildup of energy that a shifting of the tectonic plates could cause an 8.7-magnitude earthquake, Bilham said.
Experts also fear the potential damage from a smaller quake closer to the capital. The city lies between two fault lines, and a 4.2 quake in September woke up residents, with many fleeing their buildings. The same month, a magnitude 6.8 quake in India's remote northeast was also felt in the capital.
Either type of quake would cause moderate damage to an estimated 85.5 percent of Delhi's buildings and severe damage to another 6.5 percent, Delhi's disaster management authority said in a 2010 vulnerability assessment. It could also open cracks in the ground several centimeters wide and spread "fear and panic," the report said.
It was India's Department of Meteorology that found northeast Delhi particularly vulnerable in a never-released 2005 study obtained by the AP. That "microzone" study divided the city into nine segments to evaluate the possible impact of an earthquake in each.
While the microzone study is a positive step, the report is only rudimentary and most builders haven't even heard of it, said earthquake engineering expert Karanth, who as a student lived through the Gujarat quake.
India has developed national standards for constructing earthquake-resistant buildings, but they are not mandatory and widely ignored, said Kumar of Geohazards.
Meanwhile, many residents don't realize the danger, or wrongly believe they are safe from it.
When Karanth decided to buy an apartment in 2010, he picked a builder who promised to deliver an earthquake-resistant building. He visited the site often, took photographs of the construction and talked to the engineers in charge.
Last year, he realized the project had none of the promised earthquake safety features. "This is not one or two apartments that I'm talking about. These are thousands of apartment units being constructed," he said.
He complained and demanded an explanation.
Instead, the construction company offered to give him back his deposit.
MADRID (AP) -Real Madrid will likely abandon its defensive strategy and go on the attack against Barcelona in the second leg of the Copa del Rey quarterfinals on Wednesday.
Madrid coach Jose Mourinho has come under fire for his choice of tactics following last week's 2-1 loss to Barcelona, with the Portuguese coach repeatedly jeered during a 4-1 league win over Athletic Bilbao on Sunday.
But that victory displayed the potent attack available to Madrid, which leads Barcelona by five points in the Spanish league after scoring 67 goals in 19 games to complete the first half of the season.
Still, Mourinho did not apologize for Madrid's approach to the first leg, which has polarized much of the Portuguese coach's support, not only among fans but also the usually staunch Madrid press. On Sunday, Marca newspaper reported divisions inside the club's dressing room while Mourinho's name was jeered throughout the Bilbao match at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium for the first time since his arrival in 2010.
"Whoever says the changing room is divided or that some kind of fracture exists is lying," Sergio Ramos wrote on Twitter on Monday, a day after revelations of an argument between the Madrid defender and Mourinho were reported. "This is a great group that is well united, regardless what is said."
Madrid's attack could get a boost if Argentina forward Angel di Maria returns from injury.
Defender Pepe's availability is uncertain after the Portugal international was benched against Bilbao following the fallout from his stamp on Lionel Messi's hand in the first leg.
Madrid has won only one of its last 13 meetings against Barcelona - April's Copa del Rey final - with nine losses over that period.
Barcelona is coming off a 4-1 league win at Malaga in which Messi notched his 10th career league hat trick for the European champions. Messi now has 36 goals in all competitions this season, while teammate Alexis Sanchez has also found his rhythm with the Spanish champions, the Chile forward scoring three goals in his last four games.
"They lead the league, they can still reach the semifinals of the Copa and they are into the next round of the Champions League. From an outside perspective, it's hard to read whether or not they have problems," Barcelona midfielder Andres Iniesta said on Monday.
Also, Mirandes needs to beat Espanyol to become the first third division club to reach the semifinals since Fugueres in 2002. Mirandes trails 3-2 going into Tuesday's match at its 6,000-capacity Andova Municipal stadium.
Meanwhile, Valencia and Athletic Bilbao hold comfortable leads going into their away return legs.
Valencia travels across town to Levante on Thursday holding a 4-1 advantage and Bilbao is 2-0 up ahead of its game at Mallorca on Wednesday.
? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Barca awaits Real Madrid again
Real Madrid probably will abandon its defensive strategy and go on the attack against Barcelona in the second leg of the Copa del Rey quarterfinals on Wednesday.
Stefano Rellandini / Reuters
That's a reason?
AC Milan's Kevin-Prince Boateng is hurt again, and his girlfriend says it's because they have sex "7-10 times a week." Oh.
iMore is heading over to the newly rebranded 2012 Macworld | iWorld Expo in San Francisco next week, to check out the accessories and talk to the awesome app developers
BENGHAZI, Libya (AP) ? The head of Libya's transitional government on Sunday suspended delegates from Benghazi, the city that kicked off the movement that toppled ruler Moammar Gadhafi last year.
The suspension the latest sign of discord within the body that led the anti-Gadhafi uprising but has struggled to establish an effective government to replace his regime.
The move follows protests in Benghazi accusing the body of corruption and not moving fast enough on reform. It was prompted by street protests and rejected by the delegates,
The announcement came the day after protesters stormed the National Transitional Council offices in Benghazi and carted off computers, chairs and desks while Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, head of the NTC, was holed up inside.
Abdul-Jalil told The Associated Press he suspended the six representatives from Benghazi, the main city in eastern Libya. They can continue to serve only if approved by the local city council.
Abdul-Jalil said he appointed a council of religious leaders to investigate corruption charges and identify people with links to the Gadhafi regime.
The body's deputy head, Abdel-Hafiz Ghoga, resigned in protest over the suspensions. Ghoga, known for his polished language and expensive suits, was a prominent spokesman during the eight-month civil war that ended with Gadhafi's capture and killing in October.
Another delegate, Fathi Baja, called the move "illegitimate" and said he would stand down only if the people of Benghazi asked him to. Baja, a well known critic of Gadhafi even before the uprising, also criticized the appointment of religious leaders, saying that when he was criticizing Gadhafi, "they were calling on people to obey the leader."
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Public release date: 30-Jan-2012
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