Reward of $30,000 to catch killer of Anne Pressly

The Anne Pressly Reward Fund has raised $30,000 (£20,000) to catch the killer of the television news anchorwoman who was found savagely beaten in her bed.

 

Anne Pressly, a news presenter in Little Rock, Arkansas, was found unconscious in her home

Miss Pressly died from her injuries on Saturday.

Doctors had been initially been “guardedly optimistic” that the 26-year-old might recover from severe injuries sustained in what police believe was a random burglary on her house in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Miss Pressly, who had a small role in the George Bush biopic W, was discovered by her mother at 4.30am last Monday morning, half an hour before she was due to present the local station KATV’s Daybreak show.

She was lying unconscious and bleeding from the head after being hit repeatedly in the face, head and neck with a blunt instrument.

On Saturday, doctors said the swelling in her brain had improved and they were reducing her sedatives.

However, late that night, her former channel KATV announced that she had died.

The Little Rock television station set up the reward fund for anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for her death.

By 10pm, $30,000 (£20,000) had been donated to the Anne Pressly Reward Fund.

Detectives have not completely ruled out that Miss Pressly might have been targeted because of her media profile, but said they had found no evidence to support the theory.

Oliver Stone, the director of W, a cinematic send-up of President George W Bush, reportedly gave her a small part in the film after she visited the set for a story and he noticed her resemblance to Ann Coulter, a conservative pundit.

UPDATE: Hudson Thanks Fans, Asks for Prayers

Jennifer Hudson has posted a message on her MySpace page, thanking fans and friends for their words of support and appealing for help to find her missing 7-year-old nephew, according to TMZ.

 

Julian King was reported missing Friday from the family’s home, where Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson, 57 and brother, Jason Hudson, 29, died of multiple gunshot wounds.

 

Hudson reached out to her fans in an online message, accompanied by a picture of Julian King, who is believed to have been abducted at the time of the murder.

 

The message reads, “”Thank you all for your prayers and your calls. Please keep praying for our family and that we get Julian King back home safely. If anyone has any information about his whereabouts please contact the authorities immediately. Here is a picture of Julian and what he was last seen wearing. Once again thank you all for being there for us through this tough time.”"

 

Yesterday, Julia Hudson, the 31-year-old sister of the actress made a public plea at a Chicago church for the return of her son, AP reports.

 

Hudson’s sister spoke from the podium at Pleasant Gift Missionary Baptist Church alongside the boy’s father, Greg King, AP reports. She says her son “”doesn’t deserve this.”"

 

The Oscar-winning actress’ brother-in-law William Balfour has been arrested over the double murder, and is currently being questioned by the police, but no charges have been filed.

 

He is being held by the Illinois Department of Corrections, however, due to breaking the terms of his parole. A source tells TMZ, the “”homicide investigation is still active and ongoing.”"

 

Balfour’s mother told police that Darnell Donerson had thrown Balfour out of the house last winter. She denied that her son had anything to do with the slayings.

 

Hudson — who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her tremendous performance in Dreamgirls, and whose song “Spotlight” has hit the top of the R&B charts — credits her mother and family for keeping her grounded.

 

In a recent interview with AP, Hudson said: “”My faith in God and my family, they’re very realistic and very normal, they’re not into the whole limelight kind of thing, so when I go home to Chicago that’s just another place that’s home. I stand in line with everybody else, or, when I go home to my mom I’m just Jennifer, (so she says), ‘You get up and you take care of your own stuff.’ And I love that; I don’t like when people tell you everything you want to hear — I want to hear the truth, you know what I mean?”"

2 dead in Arkansas campus shooting; one suspect in custody

Two students were killed and another person was wounded in a shooting at the University of Central Arkansas on Sunday evening, according to a hospital spokesman.

 

A police van on the University of Central Arkansas campus following a shooting Sunday.

The shooting, which happened outside a dorm, prompted a campus lockdown and the cancellation of Monday classes.

One person was detained for questioning but has not been arrested, according to Lt. Rhonda Swindle, a spokesman for the campus police.

“At this time we do have some pretty good leads,” Swindle said.

One student died on the scene, and a second died at Conway Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokesman said.

 

The hospital spokesman said the person who died there was an 18-year-old male, but he did not have any additional information.

A third person, a 19-year-old male, was released from the hospital after being treated for a gunshot wound to his leg, a hospital spokesman said.

The shots were fired near Arkansas Hall and the Snow Fine Arts Center at 9:22 p.m. (10:22 p.m. ET), Swindle said.

Freshman Sam Hausen was about 50 feet away from the shooters when the gunfire began.

“I heard about five or 10 shots and, at first, I thought it was just firecrackers, because everybody always clowns around out there, but I just realized that it wasn’t firecrackers,” Hausen said.

As he began running away, he saw one of the wounded students hit the ground and another stumbled into the dorm, he said.

“I saw a couple cars speed off,” Hausen said. “I don’t know if they were the shooters or not.”

Student Lauren Knight was walking to the library when it happened. She said chaos erupted, with students scurrying for safety. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your story

When the campus lockdown was ordered, Knight was stuck with other students for several hours inside the library.

Classes were canceled for Monday at the university which serves about 12,500 full-time students in Conway, Arkansas.

Faculty and students were called and e-mailed through an automated system after 9:30 p.m. Sunday about the shooting. The messages urged them to stay inside and lock doors, according to The Associate Press. It was first time the system had been used since the university purchased it after the Virginia Tech massacre last year. 

Political videos put McCain, Obama in dancing roles

John McCain and Barack Obama have argued about how to rescue the economy, expand health care and win the war on terrorism. But what the people really want to know is: Can the candidates dance?

Last week, Obama shook his groove thing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “I’m convinced I’m a better dancer than John McCain,” Obama boasted. No word yet as to whether a dance-off is planned.

But, to see the candidates bust a move, look no further than the television and Internet. Politicians and their look-alikes have recently gotten jiggy with it, proving that they’ll do anything—even dance in public—to win your vote.

Obama’s appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” last Wednesday was the second time he had shown off his moves on the program. See the video: at YouTube. But Michelle Obama, in an appearance with DeGeneres in September, called-out her husband, saying, “I’m a better dancer.” Snap.

In a clever video, dancers dressed as Obama and McCain, with the candidates faces superimposed, engage in an energetic break dancing back-and-forth at Minimovie.com. The winner, though, is a surprise contender who rocks the house—aSarah Palin-faced dancer. (No Joe Biden anywhere in sight.)

The real Palin, although sitting, showed some decent moves during her appearance on Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” on Oct. 18. See the video at NBC.com. Take that, dancing Obamas!

An online spoof of “Dancing With the Stars” pits a McCain impersonator—”the maverick who’s a maniac on the dance floor”—against an Obama impostor—”heavy on rhetoric but light on his feet!” See it: Minimovie.com.

For the folks who’d like to join in at home, there are at least two pro-Obama dances making the rounds:here and here. Lyrics include: “Check your booty-booty-booty-booty-booty Obama.” Hardly poetry, but it has a good beat.

In a music video released Sunday for her song “Paris for President,” spoof-candidate Paris Hilton shimmies in a white bathing suit and delivers lines such as, “Your commander in bikini.”

Group of 7 Meeting in Tokyo Tackles Yen’s Rise

Finance officials of the Group of 7 industrialized nations said Monday that they were “concerned” about the yen’s exchange rate, a rare statement issued as the Japanese currency soars and stock markets sink. The statement could indicated that policy makers might take more dramatic steps to halt the yen’s rise to stabilize global financial markets.

The statement from the G-7 officials and a surprise rate cut in South Korea highlighted the depth of concern over the latest wave of financial turmoil, which has wreaked havoc not only in the debt and stock markets, but also in the currency markets. In the last few months, the yen has appreciated dramatically, while the euro and won have dived.

The statement, which said the G-7 would “monitor the markets closely and cooperate as appropriate,” came as countries in Asia, spooked by the relentless sell-offs in the stock markets, scrambled to support their economies.Japan’s prime minister, Taro Aso, said the government would expand a plan that gives banks access to public funds and would strengthen regulation on the short-selling of shares. In South Korea, the central bank staged its deepest-ever interest rate cut during an emergency session in Seoul, while the Australian central bank intervened in the currency markets for a second day.

In Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States, the yen’s rise has hit the key export industry, as corporate giants like Sony are seeing their goods become more expensive in the crucial markets in Europe and the United States.

Like Japan, South Korea is heavily dependent on exports, and fears that consumers in export markets like the United States will drastically cut spending as the economy slows have hit South Korea especially hard.

Adding to concerns about South Korea, is the fact that local banks, hit by the rise in borrowing costs for the U.S. dollar, are now struggling to pay billions of dollars in short-term loans coming due.

The government of President Lee Myung Bak of South Korea has struggled, but with limited effect, to contain what analysts have termed a “crisis of trust” for Asia’s fourth-largest economy. It has stressed that South Korea has $240 billion of currency reserves, more than enough to pay all the country’s short-term foreign debts, and that its companies and banks are more competitive than 10 years ago.

Microsoft polishes Vista into Windows 7

Last week, Apple launched the latest in its series of ads attacking PCs, this time ridiculing Microsoft for spending millions on advertising rather than on “fixing” its Windows Vista operating system.

On Tuesday, Microsoft finally will be able to change the subject.

At the company’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the company is expected to detail for the first time its successor to Vista, Windows 7.

Rather than a major overhaul, Microsoft is spinning Windows 7 – in the words of CEO Steve Ballmer – as “Windows Vista – a lot better.”

In turn, the company expects that the approach will eliminate some of the problems that hampered Vista’s premiere almost two years ago and continue to define the operating system’s reputation.

When Microsoft introduced Vista in early 2007, the company changed the underlying architecture of the operating system’s predecessor – Windows XP – to improve security. That had the unintended consequence of making a number of applications not work well with Vista – an issue that Microsoft says it has since fixed.

PCs designed to run XP also needed much more memory to run Vista. And some Windows XP PCs, heralded as “Vista Capable,” could not run premium versions of the operating system.

But Microsoft has promised that there will be much greater compatibility between Vista and the new operating system, which is expected to premiere in early 2010.

“How do you not repeat this with Windows 7? All those architectural changes we made? Not doing that again. All that application investment we did to improve Windows Vista? All appear in Windows 7,” said Mike Nash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Product Management. “So that will be a very big difference in terms of the initial experience with 7 and the initial experience of Vista.”

“The applications and devices that work well with Windows Vista should work by and large with Windows 7.”

Microsoft has been close-lipped about what exactly the new operating system will bring.

During a conference earlier this month, Ballmer said there would be a “clean-up” in the operating system’s user interface, as well as performance improvements.

Nash – who would not specify features ahead of this week’s announcement – said that the operating system would embrace new trends, such as the increasing number of applications that are run on the Internet, as well as the growing popularity of laptops.

“As laptops become more the norm, you have to realize laptops are more than just desktops with a battery and a fold up screen. They get used different,” he said. “That requires a system to really be able to adapt.”

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also indicated during a conference last spring that the operating system would support multi-touch technology.

Nash said that on both an architectural level as well as a user interface level, when compared to the difference between XP and Vista, the changes between Vista and Windows 7 represented “more of an enhancement.”

“It’s not like we’re blowing the whole thing up,” he said. “But rather looking at what we have there, making sure we can enhance it to make it more compelling.”

Neil MacDonald, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc., said the strategy presents risks.

“Here’s the dilemma,” he said. “If they do too much, they break applications and they’ll have the same problems. If they do too little, it will be treated like Vista bar two.”

MacDonald, who described Windows 7 as “more of a finish and polish release than a major release,” said that, in addition to some new features, he expects Microsoft to revamp its operating system’s user interface.

“They need to visually reinforce that this is not Vista,” he said.

Michael Cherry, an analyst at Redmond’s Directions on Microsoft, also said it is key that the company move beyond Vista.

“They need to address some of the perception of the problems that are in Vista,” he said.

Apple, of course, has been working away at any positive perceptions of the Vista brand that remain.

One of the ads that Apple launched last week suggests that Microsoft no longer wants to use the “Vista” brand.

Nash dismissed the notion.

“What do you call the thing that follows Vista? Trista?” he asked. “It’s not intended to minimize or disrespect Windows Vista.”

But he acknowledged that it is difficult to change widely held opinions of the operating system.

“The problem is the cognoscenti, the people who are most influential, established their perception of the product back in 2007. Getting them to change their minds is kind of hard,” he said.

Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists

Report Says Militants Haven’t Used Twitter to Launch Attacks but Lays Out Possible Scenarios

Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks. 

 

A draft Army intelligence report thinks Twitter could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.

This recent presentation — put together on the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website — focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mash-ups of it all.

 

The report is roughly divided into two halves. The first is based mostly on chatter from Al-Qaeda-affiliated online forums. One Islamic extremist site discusses, for example, the benefits of “using a mobile phone camera to monitor the enemy and its mechanisms.” Another focuses on the benefits of the Nokia 6210 Navigator, and how its GPS utilities could be used for “marksmanship, border crossings, and in concealment of supplies.”

Such software could allow jihadists to pick their way across multiple routes, identifying terrain features as they go. A third extremist forum recommends the installation of voice-modification software to conceal one’s identity when making calls. Excerpts from a fourth site show cell phone wallpapers that wannabe jihadists can use to express their affinity for radicalism:

Then the presentation launches into an even-more theoretical discussion of how militants might pair some of these mobile applications with Twitter, to magnify their impact. After all, “Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention,” the report notes.”The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”

Terrorists haven’t done anything similar, the Army report concedes – although it does note that there are “multiple pro and anti Hezbollah Tweets.” Instead, the presentation lays out three possible scenarios in which Twitter could become a militant’s friend:

Scenario 1: Terrorist operative “A” uses Twitter with… a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages, and to receive messages, from the rest of his [group]… Other members of his [group] receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

Scenario 2: Terrorist operative “A” has a mobile phone for Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative “A” also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative “B” has the detonator and a mobile to view “A’s” Tweets and images. This may allow “B” to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near real time movement and imagery that is being sent by “A.”

Scenario 3: Cyber Terrorist operative “A” finds U.S. [soldier] Smith’s Twitter account. Operative “A” joins Smith’s Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This information is then used for… identity theft, hacking, and/or physical [attacks]. This scenario… has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as My Space and/or Face Book.

Steven Aftergood, a veteran intelligence analyst at the Federation of the American Scientists, doesn’t dismiss the Army presentation out of hand. But nor does he think it’s tackling a terribly seriously threat. “Red-teaming exercises to anticipate adversary operations are fundamental. But they need to be informed by a sense of what’s realistic and important and what’s not,” he tells Danger Room. “If we have time to worry about ‘Twitter threats’ then we’re in good shape. I mean, it’s important to keep some sense of proportion.”

Google Earth Comes To The iPhone, And It’s Awesome

Washington Post

Color me impressed: Google has released a custom Google Earth application for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and it’s stunning.

The Google Earth geographical software has been altered to make maximum use of the iPhone’s screen and functionality. You’re able to tilt the device to adjust your view when browsing mountainous terrain, use the ‘My Location’ feature to jump right to where you are in the blink of an eye, and use Google’s local search engine to look for information on cities, places and businesses. Google has also added additional layers to the application, namely Panoramio and Wikipedia, for geo-located high-quality photos and informative articles respectively.

This marks the main differentiator between the official Google Earth app and the one Earthscape released last May. More recently, the Earthscape application dropped its price from $10 to free, but will most likely be trumped by the official app now.

As CNET points out, Google Earth for iPhone has a small Webkit-based browser to show the specific information users click on, and includes a link to the Safari browser Apple builds into the iPhone. When you click the address of a business using the local search engine, the iPhone will intercept the command and show it on the Google Maps application, enabling you to get directions instantly.

The app is free and available today in all languages the iPhone currently supports (18) and will gradually be released for 22 countries in total. Check the iTunes App Store to see if you’re among the lucky ones.

Product Manager Google Earth Peter Birch, who is the one demonstrating the app in the video below, has also announced that a similar application running on Android is high on the priority list for the future, but that there’s nothing to announce at this point. More features, like integration of 3D buildings and advanced mapping functionalities, are in the pipeline. It’s likely Google is also looking at ways to monetize the mobile traffic.

Toyota, Univ of Tokyo unveil robot that does household chores

Toyota Motor Corp and a research body of the University of Tokyo have jointly developed a prototype for what many busy career people have been dreaming of for a long time: A hardworking robot that handles household chores. In a demonstration for reporters last week, the robot cleaned up rooms, smoothly put away dishes from a dining table and picked up shirts and put them in a washing machine.

 

The 155-cm, 130-kg humanoid robot excels in the capacity to distinguish and perceive objects such as furniture and cleaning equipment, its developers said. The robot also analyzes past failures and corrects its behavior patterns, they said. The robot is equipped with two arms, five recognition cameras and laser sensors. It gets around on wheels.

Toyota and Tokyo University’s Information and Robot Technology Research Initiative said the robot has been designed to help cope with the predicted labor shortage stemming from Japan’s aging society and low birthrate.

The developers said they will keep improving the robot and hope to start marketing it in around seven years.

Actress Kyoko Hasegawa marries Pornograffitti guitarist

 

Kyoko Hasegawa

Popular actress and model Kyoko Hasegawa has tied the knot with Haruichi Shindo, guitarist of the popular rock duo Pornograffitti, her office said Thursday.

The office said Hasegawa, 30, popularly known as “Hasekyo” by her fans, met Shindo, 34, through a mutual acquaintance around spring and started to date around summer.