Huston's "Infrared" wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It's the prize no author wants to win.

Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel "Infrared," whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.

The choice was announced by "Downton Abbey" actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.

Judges of the tongue-in-cheek prize — which is run by the Literary Review magazine — said they were struck by a description of "flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements," and by a long passage that builds to a climax of "undulating space."

Huston, who lives in Paris, was not on hand to collect her prize. In a statement read by her publicist, the 59-year-old author said she hoped her victory would "incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers' bodies in all states of array and disarray."

The Canada-born Huston, who writes in both French and English, is the author of more than a dozen novels, including "Plainsong" and "Fault Lines." She has previously won France's Prix Goncourt prize and was a finalist for Britain's Orange Prize for fiction by women.

She is only the third woman to win the annual Bad Sex prize, founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of "crude, tasteless and ... redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels."

Some critics, however, have praised the sexual passages in "Infrared." Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday newspaper said there were "none of the lazy cliches of pornography or the purple prose of modern romantic fiction" — though she conceded the book's sex scenes were "more perfunctory than erotic."

Huston beat finalists including previous winner Tom Wolfe — for his passage in "Back to Blood" describing "his big generative jockey" — and Booker Prize-nominated Nicola Barker, whose novel "The Yips" compares a woman to "a plump Bakewell pudding."

Previous recipients of the dubious honor, usually accepted with good grace, include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.

___

Online: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk

Read More..

Stocks close lower as budget talks continue

Stocks are closed slightly lower on Wall Street as budget talks continue in Washington.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 14 points to close at 12,952 Tuesday. It traded in a narrow range of just 82 points.

The Standard and Poor's 500 index lost two points to 1,407. The Nasdaq composite was down five and a half points at 2,997.

Investors are waiting on developments from Washington in the budget talks, which are aimed at avoiding a series of sharp government spending cuts and tax increases that begin to kick in Jan. 1.

Big Lots soared after the discount retailer raised its forecast for full-year profits.

Falling stocks narrowly outnumbered rising ones on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was light at 3.2 billion shares.

Read More..

Two Mexican nationals charged in killing of U.S. Coast Guardsman

Federal prosecutors charged two Mexican nationals in connection with killing U.S. Coast Guardsmen Terrell Horne III after they allegedly rammed his vessel with a drug-smuggling panga boat.

The two men, boat captain Jose Mejia-Leyva and Manuel Beltra-Higuera, are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to face charges that they killed a federal officer.

Horne, 34, of Redondo Beach, was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers in a panga rammed his vessel off the Ventura County coast. He died of severe head trauma, officials said.

The Redondo Beach resident was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had come under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat, a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Read More..

'Twilight' wins weekend, 'Skyfall' trails closely

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Holdover films remained tops at the weekend box office as the "Twilight" finale finished at No. 1 again with $17.4 million and the James Bond tale "Skyfall" ran a close second with $16.6 million.

The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:

1. "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2," Summit, $17,416,362, 4,008 locations, $4,345 average, $254,598,866, three weeks.

2. "Skyfall," Sony, $16,555,894, 3,463 locations, $4,781 average, $245,585,083, four weeks.

3. "Rise of the Guardians," Paramount, $13,388,852, 3,672 locations, $3,646 average, $48,836,105, two weeks.

4. "Lincoln," Disney, $13,376,696, 2,018 locations, $6,629 average, $83,566,169, four weeks.

5. "Life of Pi," Fox, $12,151,853, 2,928 locations, $4,150 average, $48,512,994, two weeks.

6. "Wreck-It Ralph," Disney, $6,948,550, 3,087 locations, $2,251 average, $158,184,813, five weeks.

7. "Killing Them Softly," Weinstein Co., $6,812,900, 2,424 locations, $2,811 average, $6,812,900, one week.

8. "Red Dawn," FilmDistrict, $6,500,245, 2,781 locations, $2,337 average, $31,272,953, two weeks.

9. "Flight," Paramount, $4,479,067, 2,603 locations, $1,721 average, $81,465,903, five weeks.

10. "The Collection," LD Entertainment, $3,104,269, 1,403 locations, $2,213 average, $3,104,269, one week.

11. "Silver Linings Playbook," Weinstein Co., $3,090,131, 371 locations, $8,329 average, $10,740,112, three weeks.

12. "Anna Karenina," Focus, $2,245,570, 384 locations, $5,848 average, $4,106,921, three weeks.

13. "Argo," Warner Bros., $2,010,349, 1,043 locations, $1,927 average, $100,990,766, eight weeks.

14. "Talaash," Reliance Big Pictures, $1,638,706, 172 locations, $9,527 average, $1,638,706, one week.

15. "Taken 2," Fox, $467,975, 496 locations, $943 average, $137,163,554, nine weeks.

16. "Hitchcock," Fox Searchlight, $408,692, 50 locations, $8,174 average, $787,574, two weeks.

17. "Pitch Perfect," Universal, $387,070, 403 locations, $960 average, $63,099,243, 10 weeks.

18. "The Sessions," Fox, $333,315, 226 locations, $1,475 average, $4,582,181, seven weeks.

19. "Cloud Atlas," Warner Bros., $243,338, 194 locations, $1,254 average, $26,181,455, six weeks.

20. "Here Comes the Boom," Sony, $224,797, 334 locations, $673 average, $42,352,250, eight weeks.

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

___

Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.

Read More..

Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

Read More..

Text messaging celebrates 20th anniversary

You might not believe it, but text messaging is already past its teen years.

The thumb-numbing communications format that has become a favorite of teenagers and created a language of its own turned 20 on Monday.

The very first SMS was sent out on Dec. 3, 1992 when English engineer Neil Papworth, while working at the English tech company Sema, wrote "Merry Christmas" on his computer and sent it off to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. 

Quiz: What set the Internet on fire in 2012?

You can hear a little more about the original text message from the very first person to send one in this commercial below by Best Buy, which was released earlier this year.

Since that time, of course, text messaging has changed quite a bit. We've gone from T9 predictive text messaging, to full QWERTY keyboard devices such as BlackBerrys, touchscreen smartphones and most recently, we can tell our voice-dictation services such as Siri to write our messages for us.

Text messaging has also gone mainstream, from being an activity exclusive to teens and young adults to becoming an essential way to communicate for many older adults.

According to a study by Experian, a research and analysis firm, 85% of adults 18 to 24 in the U.S. text message. On average they send and receive nearly 4,000 messages each month. That's followed by adults 25 to 34, about 80% of whom send and receive more than 2,000 messages every month. Even adults 55 and older are sending and receiving about 500 text messages on a monthly basis, though only about 20% of them text.

In recent years, alternative, free Internet-based text messaging services such as Apple's iMessage, Facebook messages and apps like WhatsApp and textPlus have also grown in popularity and dug into the number of SMS-based messages we send.

According to Chetan Sharma, a consulting firm, the 2012 third quarter was the first time text messaging in the U.S. saw a decline in both volume and revenue. Chetan Sharma's report listed free alternatives as the major reason for the decline.

But regardless of what the future may hold, hppy bday, txting :).

ALSO:

Pope Benedict XVI officially joins Twitter with live tweet event

Some new iMacs appear to have been assembled in the U.S.

Yahoo: iPhone 5 top searched gadget, second overall to 'election'

Read More..

Northridge residents stunned by multiple slayings

Shane Grady woke up "from a dead sleep" early Sunday when he heard gunshots.

He dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the traffic on Devonshire Street blocked his view.

"If there was yelling or screaming, I couldn't hear it," he said.

Police arrived minutes later and began canvassing the neighborhood, a helicopter flying low overhead. By mid-morning, detectives were still at the house across from Grady's, where four people were found shot dead.

Investigators are still working to determine a motive and found no weapon at the scene, LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said. No suspects are in custody.

L.A. Councilman Mitchell Englander, whose district includes parts of the San Fernando Valley, said the incident appeared to be isolated. He said the home was believed to be an unlicensed boarding home with multiple tenants.

Neighbors said rooms at the home were rented out and the residents appeared to be single men who primarily kept to themselves. At least four people live in an upstairs area, they said, but they did not know how many boarders in all reside there.

The neighbors also said there was nothing unusual about the home, except for some occasional loud music.

One woman who lives around the block from the residence said she heard loud music and yelling from the house about 1:30 a.m. She fell asleep about an hour later but said the music was still playing.

"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," she said.

Others described the street as quiet, the kind where neighbors know one another and people walk to the Jewish temple just houses away from where the shooting occurred. There have been a few incidents — a car chase last summer, a murder 10 years back — they said, but nothing like this.

"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58.

Rutherford heard the shots as well. The helicopter that came next, he said, was so low it "was shaking the rooftop."

Jeff Kaye, 62, said the helicopters weren't unusual — the Devonshire police station is just a few blocks away. But the shootings were unusual, he said.

"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."

Englander said he was "shocked" by the shootings.

"Typically, you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.

Grady said the same thing.

"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.

Crime for last six months in Northridge:
Violent crimes (89)
   
Property crimes (895)
   
The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles city neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide among the 89 violent crimes reported. The location of the homicides discovered Sunday is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.

Since 2007 -- prior to Sunday's quadruple homicide -- Northridge had 11 homicides, all but one south of Nordhoff Street, according to L.A. County coroner's data compiled in The Times Homicide Report. The most recent took place Sept. 25, when Louis Villegas, 25, was fatally shot near Balboa Boulevard and Parthenia Street. Villegas was riding in a Lexus that had pulled over to the side of the road when a man approached and began shooting.

Read More..

Young down by boardwalk for benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn't see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.

Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross' storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.

People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.

"I couldn't see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual," he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.

Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $75 and $150, although Young notes there's no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.

Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York's Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there's enough star power there, he said.

"It wasn't going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference," he said.

Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon's "Imagine."

Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to "anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play."

It's hard to resist wondering whether Young's epic "Like a Hurricane" will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.

"Anything's possible," Young said. "We have the equipment."

Read More..

Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

Read More..

Port-strike talks continue even on Sunday, but stalemate goes on

At least they are talking, even on Sunday.

Labor contract negotiations are set to resume today in the now six-day-old strike at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Talks had continued past 9 p.m. Saturday night.

The strike, by the 800-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit, has shut down 10 of the 14 cargo container terminals at the nation's busiest seaport complex.

The labor fight pits the union against a group of shipping lines and cargo terminal operators calling themselves the Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor Employers Assn.

The strike is considered a potentially disastrous event for the Southern California economy because the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the leading contributors to the region's goods movement industry that employs about 595,000 people.

Last year, the two ports handled 39.5% of the total value of all cargo container imports entering the U.S. from origins worldwide, according to Jock O'Connell, international trade economist and adviser to Beacon Economics.

The union, which handles the vast amount of paperwork associated with the ports' container cargo, has been working without a contract since June 30, 2010.

The strike has crippled the port because of support from the ILWU dockworkers, who have 50,000 members on the U.S. West Coast, in Canada and in Hawaii. The dockworkers negotiate their contracts separately, but the 10,000 members who work at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports have honored the smaller union's picket lines.

As a result, seven of the eight cargo container terminals at the Port of Los Angeles remain closed. Three of the six cargo container terminals at the Port of Long Beach are also closed.

The union says that its main issue is what it claims is the outsourcing of its jobs, which are being lost through attrition, retirements, illnesses or other reasons.

The shipping lines and terminal operators say the union's outsourcing claims are bogus and say they have offered "absolute job security."

The employers have repeatedly said the union members are the highest-paid clerical workers in the U.S., having a total compensation package of $165,000 a year, including wages, benefits, pension contributions and paid vacation. That package would be worth $195,000 a year under management's new offer, the employers have said.

On Saturday, the union offered a rebuttal, saying that the employers' claims were misleading. Wages reached $40 to $41 an hour, for an annual pay level of $80,000 to $82,200 a year, not counting overtime, retirement or benefits. The union has asked for a 2.5% raise, said union spokesman Craig Merrilees.

Merrilees added that the union has had one pay increase in the past four years.

Since the strike started, nine ships have either diverted at sea or briefly anchored outside the ports before leaving to unload at another harbor.

There were no new ship diversions reported on Sunday, said Capt. Dick McKenna, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which tracks vessel movements.

Other than the lightly manned picket lines, the ships were the biggest evidence of the strike on Sunday.

Nine cargo container ships were anchored offshore Sunday: the APL London; the Hanjin ships Constantza, Algeciras and Chongqing; the Hyundai Hong Kong; the Ital Contessa; the Kota Wangsa; the Maersk Merlion; and the Liberian-flagged Talassa.

Normally, those ships would have gone straight to dock for unloading, but there is no room for them yet because of the strike.

Three more container ships are due to arrive today and 11 more container ships are scheduled to arrive on Monday.

ALSO:

New airline fees discussed

Warehouse workers slam Wal-Mart

Port talks shift into higher gear, but strike continues

Read More..