Saturday, December 29, 2012

Maine gets set to ring wedding bells for same-sex couples


Same-sex couples in Maine were counting down the hours on Friday until the first wedding bells were due to ring, less than two months after state residents approved gay marriage in a historic vote.
The city clerk's office in Portland, the state's largest city with a metropolitan population of 250,000, planned to open a minute after midnight and stay open for three hours to accommodate same-sex couples rushing to wed. City clerk offices in Maine typically are closed on Saturdays.
Along with voters in Maryland and Washington state, Maine residents approved same-sex unions on November 6, Election Day, becoming the only states to pass such a measure by popular vote.
Nine of the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. now have legalized gay marriage. Another 31 states have passed constitutional amendments banning it.
In Bangor, Maine, the city clerk's office was planning to be open on Saturday from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. for residents to obtain marriage licenses.
The Brunswick town clerk's office was set to be open from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday by appointment and, as of midday on Friday, five same-sex couples had booked appointments, the office said.
Same-sex weddings are being booked starting in the spring at the On the Marsh Bistro in Kennebunk, said owner Denise Rubin.
"We support it wholeheartedly," she said. "We look forward to being part of a whole new wave of wonderful thinking."
The tide of public opinion has been shifting in favor of allowing same-sex marriage. In May, President Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to say he believed same-sex couples should be allowed to get married.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review two challenges to federal and state laws that define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
The nation's highest court said this month it will review a case against a federal law that denies married same-sex couples the federal benefits that heterosexual couples receive.
It also will look at a challenge to California's ban on gay marriage, known as Proposition 8, which voters narrowly approved in 2008.
Washington state's law legalizing same-sex unions took effect on Sunday, December 9, and Maryland's law takes effect on January 1, 2013.
A Pew Research Center survey from October found 49 percent of Americans favored allowing gay marriage, with 40 percent opposed.

Friday, December 28, 2012

UCLA rallies to upset No. 7 Missouri 97-94 in OT


After two defeats to ranked opponents and a surprising loss to Cal Poly that knocked them out of the Top 25, the UCLA Bruins are starting to find their way.

Highly touted freshman Shabazz Muhammad hit a go-ahead 3-pointer with 1:01 left in overtime to help them upset No. 7 Missouri 97-94 on Friday night and extend their winning streak to five games.
''This is one of the biggest wins we could possibly get,'' he said. ''We're right back where we want to be to start Pac-12 play.''

Travis Wear, who finished with a career-high 22 points, added a jumper with 12 seconds remaining to close out the Bruins' first win over a top-10 nonconference opponent since 2007.

''I wanted to put it all together this game,'' he said. ''Throughout the season so far, I haven't played particularly well. I tried to go out and bring energy.''

Muhammad tied his career high with 27 points, David Wear scored 16, Jordan Adams had 12 and Larry Drew II added 12 assists for the Bruins (10-3). They had earlier losses to ranked Georgetown and San Diego State, while wins over Texas, Prairie View A&M, Long Beach State and Fresno State had failed to get them back into the Top 25.

The Bruins practiced on Christmas night, forcing three players to miss the holiday with their families.
''They practiced really good the last three days. It's an attitude,'' coach Ben Howland said. ''I'm really happy with how our guys kept fighting.''

Phil Pressey missed a 3-pointer with 5 seconds to go before Laurence Bowers grabbed the rebound and missed a 3-pointer in front of the Tigers' bench as time expired.

''The play was for Earnest on a screen but Phil took the shot off a ball screen action and he didn't make it,'' Missouri coach Frank Haith said.

Pressey finished with 19 points and a career-high 19 of Missouri's 21 assists, including all 12 of his team's in the first half. Keion Bell and Bowers had 17 points each, Earnest Ross added 16 and Jabari Brown had 14 for the Tigers (10-2). They were playing their first true road game of the season but had a vocal group of fans among the 11,854 at Pauley Pavilion.

''The Wear twins played great. Shabazz played great. They had a lot of confidence,'' Bowers said. ''I don't think we executed our game plan. We shot ourselves in the foot with certain plays.''
Scrambling near the baseline, Drew found Muhammad on the right perimeter and hit him with the pass that led to the winning basket, his second 3-pointer of overtime.

''I'm really comfortable. I like taking the big shots,'' Muhammad said. ''Larry trusted me on the shot and I just hit it.''

His first one gave the Bruins a 91-88 lead before Brown tied it with a 3-pointer, the Tigers' season-high 12th of the game. He had four of those.

Ross got fouled with 45 seconds to go. He missed the first and made the second to draw the Tigers within one before Travis Wear's last basket. The Tigers blew an eight-point lead with 4:04 to play in regulation.
''We made some really gambling plays and that really cost us,'' Haith said. ''We need to learn how to finish a game out in the last three minutes.''

As the nation's top rebounding team, the Tigers controlled the boards, 50-36, but they committed 17 turnovers that led to 36 points by the Bruins.

Adams' layup tied the game at 88 with 11 seconds to go in regulation. The Bruins were forced to foul, and Adams grabbed Pressey and flung him to the ground with 4 seconds left. Pressey lay briefly before getting up.

After a timeout, Brown's jumper missed and Travis Wear came up with a block when Bell went for the offensive rebound as regulation expired.

The team's traded runs in the second half, with the Bruins ending on an 11-2 spurt to force overtime. Missouri preceded that burst with 12 straight points of its own to turn a three-point deficit into an 86-77 lead, its largest since midway through the opening half. Pressey scored the first five, Bell stole the ball and dunked on the fast break, and Bowers capped it with a three-point play.

Tied 47-all at the break, the Bruins opened the second half on a 16-7 run to go up 63-54. Missouri fought back from the perimeter, hitting four 3-pointers to close to 77-74.

The Bruins' hadn't beaten such a highly ranked nonconference opponent since Nov. 20, 2007, when they defeated No. 10 Michigan State.

The game was another thrilling chapter in the teams' history. The Bruins beat the Tigers 75-74 in the second round of the 1995 NCAA tournament when Tyus Edney banked in the winning shot at the buzzer after a full-court dash with 4.8 seconds to play. UCLA went on to win its record 11th national championship. Edney is now the school's director of basketball operations.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Obama invites congressional leaders to cliff talk


A deadline looming, President Barack Obama will meet with congressional leaders at the White House on Friday in search of a compromise to avoid a year-end "fiscal cliff" of across-the-board tax increases and deep spending cuts.

The development capped a day of growing urgency in which Obama returned early from a Hawaiian vacation while lawmakers snarled across a partisan divide over responsibility for gridlock on key pocketbook issues. Speaker John Boehner called the House back into session for a highly unusual Sunday evening session.

Adding to the woes confronting the middle class was a pending spike of $2 per gallon or more in milk prices if lawmakers failed to pass farm legislation by year's end.

Four days before the deadline, the White House disputed reports that Obama was sending lawmakers a scaled-down plan to avoid the fiscal cliff of tax increases and spending cuts.

Administration officials confirmed the Friday meeting at the White House in a bare-bones announcement that said the president would "host a meeting."

An aide to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the Kentucky lawmaker "is eager to hear from the president."

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner issued a statement that said the Ohio Republican would attend and "continue to stress that the House has already passed legislation to avert the entire fiscal cliff and now the Senate must act."

While there was no guarantee of a compromise, Republicans and Democrats said privately elements of any agreement would likely include an extension of middle class tax cuts with increased rates at upper incomes as well as cancellation of the scheduled spending cuts. An extension of expiring unemployment benefits, a reprieve for doctors who face a cut in Medicare payments and possibly a short-term measure to prevent dairy prices from soaring could also become part of a year-end bill, they said.

That would postpone politically contentious disputes over spending cuts for 2013.

Top Senate leaders said they remain ready to seek a last-minute agreement. Yet there was no legislation pending and no sign of negotiations in either the House or the Senate on a bill to prevent the tax hikes and spending cuts that economists say could send the economy into a recession.

Far from conciliatory, the rhetoric was confrontational and at times unusually personal.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Boehner of running a dictatorship, citing his refusal to call a vote on legislation to keep taxes steady for most while letting them rise at upper incomes. The bill "would pass overwhelmingly," Reid predicted, and said the Ohio Republican won't change his mind because he fears it might cost him re-election as speaker when the new Congress convenes next week.
Boehner seems "to care more about keeping his speakership than keeping the nation on a firm financial footing," he said in remarks on the Senate floor.

A few hours later, McConnell expressed frustration and blamed the standoff on Obama and the Democrats. "Republicans have bent over backwards. We stepped way, way out of our comfort zone," he said, referring to GOP offers to accept higher tax rates on some taxpayers.

"We wanted an agreement, but we had no takers. The phone never rang, and so here we are five days from the new year and we might finally start talking," McConnell said.

Still, he warned: "Republicans aren't about to write a blank check for anything the Democrats put forward just because we find ourselves at the edge of the cliff."

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Boehner, responded in a similar vein to Reid's comments. "Harry Reid should talk less and legislate more if he wants to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to do so," he said, referring to a measure that extends existing cuts at all income levels.
Addressing the GOP rank and file by conference call, Boehner said the next move is up to the Senate, which has yet to act on House-passed bills to retain expiring tax cuts at all income levels and replace across-the-board spending cuts with targeted savings aimed largely at social programs.

"The House will take this action on whatever the Senate can pass - but the Senate must act," he said, according to a participant in the call.

Boehner told Republican lawmakers the House would convene on Sunday evening. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., an ally of the speaker, quoted him as having said "he didn't really intend to put on the floor something that would pass with all the Democratic votes and few of the Republican votes."

The risk of higher milk prices stems from the possibility that existing farm programs will expire at year's end, and neither chamber of Congress has scheduled a vote on even a temporary extension to prevent a spike. There have been unverified estimates that the cost to consumers of a gallon of milk could double without action by Congress.

The president flew home from Hawaii overnight after speaking with top congressional leaders.
Before leaving the White House last Friday, the president had called on lawmakers to pass scaled-down legislation that prevents tax increases for the middle class, raises rates at upper incomes and renews expiring unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless. He said he still supports a more sweeping measure to include spending cuts to reduce deficits, but said they could wait until the new year.
That capped an unpredictable week in which Boehner pivoted away from comprehensive deficit reduction talks with Obama to an aborted attempt to push legislation through the House that retained existing tax levels except above $1 million. Anti-tax Republicans rebelled at raising rates on million-dollar earners, and Boehner backpedaled and canceled the planned vote.

Without congressional action, current tax rates will expire on Dec. 31, resulting in a $536 billion tax increase over a decade that would touch nearly all Americans. In addition, the military and other federal departments would have to begin absorbing about $110 billion in spending cuts.

Failure to avoid the "fiscal cliff" doesn't necessarily mean tax increases and spending cuts would become permanent, since the new Congress could pass legislation cancelling them retroactively after it begins its work next year.

But gridlock through the end of the year would mark a sour beginning to a two-year extension of divided government that resulted from last month's elections in which Obama won a new term and Republicans retained their majority in the House.

The tax issue in particular has been Obama's first test of muscle after his re-election in November. He ran for a new term calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, and postelection public opinion polls show continued support for his position.

Boehner's decision to support higher rates on million-dollar earners marked a significant break with long-standing GOP orthodoxy, but the resistance among his rank and file so far has trumped him as well as any mandate the president claims.

Private picture of Mark Zuckerberg's family leaked


Even Mark Zuckerberg's family can get tripped up by Facebook's privacy settings.
A picture that Zuckerberg's sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.
That didn't sit well with Zuckerberg's sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was "way uncool." Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.
The picture shows four people standing around a kitchen staring at their phones with their mouths open while Mark Zuckerberg is in the background.
Randi Zuckerberg,who used to run Facebook's marketing department and now produces a reality television show, eventually said Schweitzer was able to see the picture because they had a mutual friend. Those tweets have since been taken down.
Schweitzer declined to comment when reached by The Associated Press. Randi Zuckerberg didn't reply to a message via Twitter seeking comment.
Randi Zuckerberg used the dustup to write about online sharing etiquette.
"Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency," she posted on Twitter.
But Randi Zuckerberg's comments sparked sharp reactions from people who thought the issue wasn't about etiquette, but rather Facebook's often changing and often confusing privacy settings.
"The thing that bugged me about Randi Zuckerberg's response is that she used her name as a bludgeoning device. Not everyone has that. She used her position to get it taken it down," said Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group in San Francisco.
While Facebook has made improvements in explaining the social network's privacy settings, Galperin said they remain confusing to most people. She added that with people using Facebook as part of their everyday lives, the consequences of fumbling privacy settings can become serious.
"Even Randi Zuckerberg can get it wrong. That's an illustration of how confusing they can be," she said.
The Menlo Park, Calif., company recently announced it is changing its privacy settings with the aim of making it easier for users to navigate them.
The fine-tuning will include several revisions that will start rolling out to Facebook's more than 1 billion users during the next few weeks and continue into early next year.
The most visible change — and perhaps the most appreciated — will be a new "privacy shortcuts" section that appears as a tiny lock at the top right of people's news feeds. This feature offers a drop-down box where users can get answers to common questions such as "Who can see my stuff?"
But Galperin said Wednesday's incident also illustrates a general concern about Internet privacy. Essentially, she said, if you share information or a photo with your social network, people in your network have the ability to share that with whomever else they choose.
The mobile photo-sharing service Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc., had to answer to backlash to privacy concerns recently when new terms of service suggested user photos could be used in advertisements. The company later said it would remove the questionable language.