Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan's Disney Vacation






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02/17/2013 at 10:00 AM EST







Kelly Ripa with Joaquin (front), Michael and Lola in Disney World


Todd Anderson/Disney


Call it an on-location family vacation.

Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan are taping four episodes of Live in Orlando, but the morning show co-hosts are also making time to embrace their inner children (and their real ones!) at Walt Disney World.

The Live co-hosts spent the day with their families at the park on Saturday, where Ripa rode the Epcot attraction Test Track with her kids Joaquin (next to Ripa), 9, Michael, 15, and Lola, 11.

Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan's Disney Vacation| Live with Regis & Kelly, Kelly Ripa, Mark Consuelos, Michael Strahan

Michael Strahan and Gaston

Todd Anderson / Disney

Elsewhere, it was a tale of dueling biceps (and expressive eyebrows) when Strahan matched up for some arm wrestling with Beauty and the Beast character Gaston.

Ripa's husband Mark Consuelos also joined his family on the trip, while Strahan was accompanied by his children, fiancée Nicole Murphy, and her kids.

The Orlando episodes of Live will air Monday through Thursday on ABC.

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UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows


GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.


U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.


Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.


He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.


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Florida hit by "tsunami" of tax identity fraud


MIAMI (Reuters) - Bruce Parton was only a few weeks from retirement after 30 years as a mail carrier in sunny Florida.


He never lived to fulfill his retirement plan of moving back to a quiet life in the Catskill mountains of New York, not far from where he grew up on Long Island.


Instead, he was gunned down on his daily mail route in December 2010 by members of an identity theft ring who stole his master key as part of a scheme to claim fraudulent tax refunds.


Using stolen names and Social Security numbers, criminals are filing phony electronic tax forms to claim refunds, exploiting a slow-moving federal bureaucracy to collect the money before victims, or the Internal Revenue Service, discover the fraud.


Parton was a victim of what officials say has ballooned into a massive, and dangerous, illegal industry that could cost the nation $21 billion over the next five years, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.


While that is a relatively small sum compared to the $1.1 trillion collected from individual tax payers in the last fiscal year, the crime has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last three years.


"We are on the top of a national trend that is causing a hemorrhage of tax dollars," said Wifredo Ferrer, United States Attorney for south Florida. "It's a tsunami of fraud."


While the IRS says it has detected cases in every state except North Dakota and West Virginia, the fraud's epicenter is Florida, and it is mostly concentrated in Miami and Tampa.


Miami has 46 times the per-capita rate of false tax refund claims than the rest of the country, and 70 times the national average in dollar terms, Ferrer told Reuters.


"For whatever reason, we always tend to lead the nation when it comes to fraud," he said, noting that his office has been battling massive Medicare fraud in recent years that has since spread to other parts of the country.


Florida's high proportion of older residents, who can be more vulnerable to fraud, may be one reason for the high levels of fraud in the state.


Nationwide, the number of cases of tax identity theft detected by authorities sky-rocketed to more than 1.2 million cases in 2012 from only 48,000 in 2008, according to the Treasury Department.


The real number of phony tax filings is likely much higher as the fraud is hard to track, according to a November General Accountability Office report.


GANG LINKS


The tax ID theft problem is particularly troubling as, unlike Medicare fraud, it is associated with violent crime and armed gangs.


Tampa police first detected it in 2010 when officers discovered wanted street criminals engaged in tax fraud. "They were holed up in hotels with laptops churning out tax claims," said congresswoman Kathy Castor, who represents the area and is pressing the IRS to get tougher on the fraud.


When agents raided a Howard Johnson in East Tampa in late 2010, they found suspects smoking marijuana and four laptop computers being used to file fraudulent tax returns on Turbo Tax, the tax preparation software, according to police records.


The suspects had lists of personal information containing more than 1,000 names and confidential personal information, multiple re-loadable debit cards, and records of numerous financial transactions. The investigation revealed that the suspects had been camped out in the hotel room for more than a week filing claims.


Tax identity fraudsters are apparently drawn by the ease of the crime, officials say.


"The scheme is very basic, it works virtually the same in almost every case," said Ferrer. "All they need is your name and the tax ID number."


Armed with that information a refund claim can be filed electronically, making up other details on the form, including addresses, employer data, income and deductions.


Criminals obtain the vital numbers using various tactics, often by bribing office workers with access to personnel files inside companies, as well as large public institutions such as hospitals and schools, according to prosecutors.


Last summer a hacker stole 3.8 million unencrypted tax records from the South Carolina Department of Revenue in what is believed to be the largest security breach of a U.S. tax agency. Authorities say they do not know the hacker's motive.


One North Miami man, Rodney Saint Fleur, was charged last year with using the LexisNexis research service account at the law firm where he worked to access names and Social Security numbers of 26,000 people as part of an identity theft scheme, according to court documents.


Victims in Florida have varied from hospital patients, to Holocaust survivors at an elderly Jewish community center, as well as active duty military serving overseas.


In December, a former U.S. Marine from North Miami was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for stealing the identities of more than 40 fellow Marines stationed at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan as part of a plot to claim $54,000 in fraudulent income-tax refunds.


In Parton's case the criminals were after his master key that gives postal workers access to mail drop-off boxes and apartment mailboxes. He was shot twice in the chest by a gunman as part of a plot to steal identities in people's mail for tax refund fraud.


The gunman, Pikerson Mentor, 31, was sentenced last month to life plus 42 years.


More than 600 people turned up for Parton's funeral, including postal workers and people who got to know him on his route. "He had been doing that mail route for 10 years and he always had a smile for everyone," said his daughter, Nina Parton.


The criminals stay under the radar using identities of the elderly or the very young, who are unlikely to be filing for earned income, as well as the deceased. They typically claim small refunds, around $3,000, but use multiple identities, with payments often made to pre-paid debit cards.


FIGHTING BACK


The IRS said last week it is intensifying a crackdown on identify theft, with 3,000 agents devoted to tackling the problem, double the number assigned in 2011.


The number of IRS criminal investigations into identity theft more than tripled in the year to September 2012, and it was on pace to double again this year, acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller told reporters.


The tax collection agency prevented $20 billion in attempted tax refund fraud in fiscal year 2012, up from $14 billion a year earlier, he said.


"It's one of the biggest challenges that faces the IRS today," Miller said. "We're doing much better on all fronts but we have much more to do."


Despite the increase in investigations, the agency still had a backlog of 300,000 cases of people waiting for legitimate refunds after they were victims of fraud. It takes an average of six months to resolve a case, Miller said.


"The IRS have put a lot of resources on it, but they always seem to be behind the curve," said Keith Fogg, a tax professor at Villanova University School of Law.


Electronic filing, which now accounts for 80 percent of returns and was introduced to speed up delivery of refunds, has made the system more vulnerable to fraud.


The IRS is seeking to speed up the loading of data from W-2 payroll forms issued at the beginning of the tax season, a time lapse which gives fraudsters a window of opportunity to file using false data.


The IRS is also looking for ways to authenticate the identity of tax filers at the time of filing to pre-empt fraud, as well as working with the Social Security Administration to limit access to a registry of social security data of deceased tax payers, the so-called "Death Master File", a frequent target of fraud.


"We will not be prosecuting our way out of this. That's not going to be the answer. We're going to have to make it more and more difficult for criminals to profit from this behavior," said Miller. "If they're not successful they will move onto something else."


(Editing by Mary Milliken and Claudia Parsons)



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IHT Rendezvous: Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic?

THE HAGUE — Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.

The group, led by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:

We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power to restore affected habitats and prevent more dangerous debris from accumulating.

While 280 million tons of plastic were produced globally last year, less than half of that plastic has ended up in landfills or was recycled, according to the scientists’ data. Some of the unaccounted for 150 million tons of plastic is still in use, but much of it litters roadsides, cities, forests, deserts, beaches and oceans. (Just think of the great floating garbage patches at sea).

Unlike other forms of solid waste, such as uneaten food, scrap metal or last year’s clothes, plastics take an especially long time to break down. And when they finally do, they create hazardous, even toxic particles that can harm wildlife, ecosystems and humans.

For now, the group — led by Chelsea M. Rochman of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and Mark Anthony Browne at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California — is calling for the reclassification of plastics that are particularly difficult to recycle and that are most toxic when degrading: PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate.

The scientists say these types of plastics — used in construction, food containers, electronics and furniture — make up an estimated 30 percent of all plastics produced.

Join our sustainability conversation. Does it make sense to re-classify common plastics as hazardous, or are there better ways to reduce the amount of plastics we throw out?

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Is the Facebook Hack Part of a Bigger Spy Threat?






In the latest admission from a major company that it had been hacked, Facebook announced in a blog post on Friday afternoon that its “systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack” and that “Facebook was not alone,” which immediately raised the cyber-espionage question of the moment: Was China behind this one, too? High-profile disclosures of months-long Chinese malware attacks from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal raised the public stakes late last month, but the FBI, the Obama administration, and private security experts are monitoring what is a much wider espionage campaign against major American organizations — and Facebook, which appears to have been hacked late last month or in early February, could very well be its latest victim.


RELATED: China May (or May Not) Be Behind the Twitter Hack






Facebook does not detail where the malware compromise was initiated in its blog post, and company spokespeople are telling journalists it “won’t comment on hack origins.” But there is an important admission in the official post: “Facebook was not alone in this attack. It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.” That sounds awfully familiar to Twitter’s hacking announcement from another Friday evening this month, which some speculated had to do with China because of Twitter’s nod to the Times and the Journal. In its own blog post, Twitter said, “We do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.” Facebook said it shared details with other possibly compromised companies—maybe Twitter was one of them? On the technical side, both Facebook and Twitter also mentioned a Java browser plug-in exploit, which may point to a connection between the hacks, even though 250,000 of Twitter’s accounts were affected and none of Facebook’s were.


RELATED: 83 Million Facebook Users Are Not Real People


It remains unclear if the Facebook attack has anything to do with the Chinese cyber-espionage campaign against high-profile U.S. companies, publications, websites, and more. There is another key word in Facebook’s admission — “sophisticated” — that makes the hack seem high-level enough. And per Facebook’s spokesperson, the attack “didn’t reach the legal threshold for user notification,” so they did have to even say anything. Neither did the Times or the Journal, both of which mentioned an ensuing FBI investigation in their admissions. Facebook also says it has handed over the case to law enforcement officials, Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan told Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher. This week, after President Obama issued an executive order and talked about cyber-security threats in his State of the Union address, major companies started sharing hack-attack information with more federal investigators.


RELATED: Chart: Google+ Hit 10 Million Users 50 Times Faster Than Facebook


Sullivan, the Facebook security boss, goes on to say that the Facebook hack “looked like a new campaign that wasn’t linked to previous Advanced Persistent Threat activities,” referring to the cyber-security term for espionage that targets governments and big companies. So maybe this is isolated and not part of the wave of Chinese cyber threats. Or maybe the “sophisticated” Chinese spying operation just has a fancy new hacking technique to add to its trail of malware malfeasance. But if Facebook’s new trouble is related to the Twitter hack, one would think the pattern would “appear to be related” to something, right? Guess we’ll have to see which big company comes clean next.


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Fugitive Ex-Cop Christopher Dorner May Have Committed Suicide















02/16/2013 at 10:00 AM EST







Undated photo of Christopher Dorner


LAPD/AP


Ex-LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner pledged to kill a lot of cops in his revenge-fueled killing spree, but once he was surrounded on Tuesday, Dorner apparently turned one of his many weapons on himself – ending one of Southern California's largest-ever manhunts with a self-inflicted gunshot.

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon told reporters Friday evening that Dorner died from "a single gunshot wound to the head."

This supports early media reports that officers in a shootout last week with Dorner (which left one deputy dead) said they stopped being fired upon after hearing a single gunshot from inside the house where Dorner sought refuge. However, McMahon stopped short of confirming Dorner committed suicide, saying the manner of death is "still under investigation."

McMahon primarily used the press appearance to explain how deputies – who searched door to door for Dorner in Big Bear Lake the previous Thursday – failed to find him when he was apparently in a condominium only a few hundred feet from where his burned truck was abandoned.

McMahon said his deputies searched the complex, but the unit where Dorner apparently hid was locked, and deputies were not authorized "to force entry into residences that did not show signs of being broken into."

Officials said that during his rampage, which left four people dead in three counties, Dorner used
"numerous canisters of CS gas and smoke; multiple assault rifles equipped with suppressors; semi-automatic hand guns; and a military-style Kevlar helmet, among other weapons and equipment.

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UN warns risk of hepatitis E in S. Sudan grows


GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region.


U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver.


Edwards said Friday that the camps have been hit by 6,017 cases of hepatitis E, which is spread through contaminated food and water.


He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.


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G20 defuses talk of "currency war", no accord on debt


MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no 'currency war' and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets in an indication of concern about the fragile state of the world economy.


Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by financial policymakers from the G20, which groups developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.


After late night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.


A draft communique seen by delegates on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed at price stability and growth.


"The language has been strengthened since our discussions last night," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters. "It's stronger than it was, but it was quite clear last night that everyone around the table wants to avoid any sort of currency disputes."


The communique did not single out Japan for aggressive monetary and fiscal policies that have seen the yen drop 20 percent, a trend that may now continue.


"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."


The statement reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's statement by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.


"We all agreed on the fact that we refuse to enter any currency war," French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici told reporters.


NO FISCAL TARGETS


The text also contained a commitment to credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals.


A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.


European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said he expected concrete debt targets to be agreed at the September meeting.


"We have a common view on the need to have a credible medium-term plans for fiscal consolidation, which is also essential so we have foundation for sustainable growth," he told Reuters.


The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt-cutting goals.


Backing in the communique for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.


QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but creates money, much of which has leaked into emerging markets, threatening to destabilize them.


That was offset in the communique by a commitment to minimize "negative spillovers" of the resulting financial flows that emerging markets fear may pump up asset bubbles and ruin their export competitiveness.


"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.


"Major developed countries' implementation of excessively relaxed currency policy has an influence on the world economy."


Russia, this year's chair of the G20, said the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and also expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other big emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.


Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said a rebalancing of global growth required more than an adjustment of exchange rates.


"Structural reforms in all countries, either with a positive or negative balance of payments, should play a bigger role," he said in an address to Saturday's talks.


The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.


On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".


It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.


(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)



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IHT Rendezvous: Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic?

THE HAGUE — Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.

The group, lead by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:

We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power to restore affected habitats and prevent more dangerous debris from accumulating.

While 280 million tons of plastic were produced globally last year, less than half of that plastic has ended up in landfills or was recycled, according to the scientists’ data. Some of the unaccounted for 150 million tons of plastic is still in use, but much of it litters roadsides, cities, forests, deserts, beaches and oceans. (Just think of the great floating garbage patches at sea).

Unlike other forms of solid waste, such as uneaten food, scrap metal or last year’s clothes, plastics take an especially long time to break down. And when they finally do, they create hazardous, even toxic particles that can harm wildlife, ecosystems and humans.

For now, the group — led by Chelsea M. Rochman of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and Mark Anthony Browne at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California — is calling for the reclassification of plastics that are particularly difficult to recycle and that are most toxic when degrading: PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate.

The scientists say these types of plastics — used in construction, food containers, electronics and furniture — make up an estimated 30 percent of all plastics produced.

Join our sustainability conversation. Does it make sense to re-classify common plastics as hazardous, or are their better ways to reduce the amount of plastics we throw out?

Read More..

Apple to expand U.S. distribution with new Staples deal









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