Patrick Dempsey wants to buy Tully's Coffee









McDreamy latte, anyone?


Patrick Dempsey, the actor who plays Dr. Derek Shepherd on “Grey’s Anatomy,” is leading a group that hopes to purchase Tully’s Coffee -- a coffee shop chain based in Seattle.


Tully’s filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in October, due to cash flow problems. Since then, the company has closed some of its unprofitable locations and reduced overhead.





Dempsey couched his bid as a way to save jobs in the Seattle area.


“I’m excited about the opportunity to save hundreds of jobs, give back to Seattle and become a larger part of the economic growth and fabric of the community,” he said in a statement. “I’ve always loved this city, and with the purchase of Tully’s Coffee, I plan to spend a lot of time in Seattle and at the stores connecting with the community and growing the Tully’s brand.”


“It looks like Seattle may be my home away from home in the very near future,” he added.


Tully’s was founded in 1992 and has 46 stores in Washington and California, as well as 58 licensed locations throughout the U.S.


Dempsey may have some competition when it comes to purchasing the company, however. Early in December, Baristas Coffee Co. made an offer of $10.4 million to purchase Tully’s, according to Nation's Restaurant News.


Baristas  has been called the “Hooters of coffee” because it hires scantily clad women to pour coffee drinks, but Baristas CEO Barry Henthorn said if he were to take over Tully’s he would not try to remake it in his other chain’s image.


“Tully’s is an icon in Seattle,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  “Tully’s will remain Tully’s.”


Tully’s will go up for a bankruptcy auction on Jan. 3.


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Starbucks uses coffee cup messages to push for 'fiscal cliff' deal


Not just McDonald's: Denny's, some Starbucks open on Christmas


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Lakers snap Christmas Day streak with win over Knicks









Lakers 100, Knicks 94 (final)

The Lakers closed out the New York Knicks on Christmas Day to win their fifth in a row, avenging a Dec. 13 loss in New York, the low point of the season during a four-game losing streak. 

The Lakers haven't dropped a game since.

With the Lakers up by three points, Pau Gasol found a lane to the basket from the high post and flushed down a dunk to seal the victory with 11.6 seconds left.  Steve Nash, in his second game back from a leg injury, scored 16 points and dished 11 assists.

The Lakers shot 48.1% from the field but it was their defense that was instrumental in the victory, holding New York to only 16 points in the fourth quarter.

The Knicks shot 42.7% from the field despite 34 from Carmelo Anthony (13-23 shooting), who exploded in the third quarter to give the Knicks a nine-point lead.  The Lakers never led by more than five points.

Kobe Bryant also scored 34 points on 14-for-24 shooting.  Metta World Peace fouled out after scoring 20.  For the second consecutive game, Pau Gasol had six assists.

Knicks center Tyson Chandler also fouled out, finishing with six points and nine rebounds.  J.R. Smith helped carry the offensive load for New York with 25 points.

The Lakers will play on Wednesday night against the Nuggets in Denver.

Knicks 78, Lakers 77 (end of third quarter)

The Lakers survived a 17-point quarter from Carmelo Anthony to close to within one point after three quarters.

Falling behind by as many as nine points after halftime, the Lakers had a chance to go up by a point but Kobe Bryant missed a pair of free throws with 2.6 seconds left in the quarter.

Anthony climbed to 27 points for the game on 11-for-20 shooting while his Knicks shot 43.8% through three.  J.R. Smith contributed 20 points off the bench.

The Lakers were led by Bryant's 26 points on 11-for-18 shooting, while getting 18 points from Metta World Peace and 14 from Steve Nash.

Some of New York's lead was earned from behind the three-point line with eight makes in 22 tries.  The Lakers shot 48.3% from the field but only five of 18 (27.8%) from three-point range.

World Peace started the second half in place of Darius Morris but Anthony had the hot hand.

Lakers 51, Knicks 49 (halftime)

For the second consecutive quarter, the Lakers closed well against the Knicks. After New York's reserves had helped push the Knicks to a six-point advantage, the Lakers rallied to take a two-point lead at halftime.

Carmelo Anthony and Metta World Peace battled through a very physical period, challenging each other in the post. Anthony finished the half with 10 points while World Peace had a game-high 16 points after coming off the Lakers' bench.

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Tajikistan blocks scores of websites as election looms






DUSHANBE (Reuters) – Tajikistan blocked access to more than 100 websites on Tuesday, in what a government source said was a dress rehearsal for a crackdown on online dissent before next year’s election when President Imomali Rakhmon will again run for office.


Rakhmon, a 60-year-old former head of a Soviet cotton farm, has ruled the impoverished Central Asian nation of 7.5 million for 20 years. He has overseen constitutional amendments that allow him to seek a new seven-year term in November 2013.






The Internet remains the main platform where Tajiks can air grievances and criticize government policies at a time when the circulation of local newspapers is tiny and television is tightly controlled by the state.


Tajikistan’s state communications service blocked 131 local and foreign Internet sites “for technical and maintenance works”.


“Most probably, these works will be over in a week,” Tatyana Kholmurodova, deputy head of the service, told Reuters. She declined to give the reason for the work, which cover even some sites with servers located abroad.


The blocked resources included Russia‘s popular social networking sites www.my.mail.ru and VKontakte (www.vk.com), as well as Tajik news site TJKnews.com and several local blogs.


“The government has ordered the communications service to test their ability to block dozens of sites at once, should such a need arise,” a senior government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.


“It is all about November 2013,” he said, in a clear reference to the presidential election.


Other blocked websites included a Ukrainian soccer site, a Tajik rap music site, several local video-sharing sites and a pornography site.


VOLATILE NATION


Predominantly Muslim Tajikistan, which lies on a major transit route for Afghan drugs to Europe and Russia, remains volatile after a 1992-97 civil war in which Rakhmon’s Moscow-backed secular government clashed with Islamist guerrillas.


Rakhmon justifies his authoritarian methods by saying he wants to oppose radical Islam. But some of his critics argue repression and poverty push many young Tajiks to embrace it.


Tighter Internet controls echo measures taken by other former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where authoritarian rulers are wary of the role social media played in revolutions in the Arab world and mass protests in Russia.


The government this year set up a volunteer-run body to monitor Internet use and reprimand those who openly criticize Rakhmon and other officials.


In November, Tajikistan blocked access to Facebook, saying it was spreading “mud and slander” about its veteran leader.


The authorities unblocked Facebook after concern was expressed by the United States and European Union, the main providers of humanitarian aid for Tajikistan, where almost a half of the population lives in abject poverty.


Asomiddin Asoyev, head of Tajikistan’s association of Internet providers, said authorities were trying to create an illusion that there were no problems in Tajik society by silencing online criticism.


“This is self-deception,” he told Reuters. “The best way of resolving a problem is its open discussion with civil society.”


Moscow-based Central Asia expert Arkady Dubnov told Reuters that Rakhmon’s authoritarian measures could lead to a backlash against the president in the election. “Trying to position itself as the main guarantor of stability through repression against Islamist activists, the Dushanbe government is actually achieving the reverse – people’s trust in it is falling,” he said.


(Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Pravin Char)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Jessica Simpson's Christmas gift: She's pregnant


NEW YORK (AP) — Jessica Simpson's daughter has the news all spelled out: "Big Sis."


Simpson on Tuesday tweeted a photo of her baby daughter Maxwell playing in the sand, the words "Big Sis" spelled out.


The 32-year-old old singer and personality has been rumored to be expecting again. The tweet appears to confirm the rumors.


"Merry Christmas from my family to yours" is the picture's caption. Simpson used a tweet on Halloween in 2011 to announce she was pregnant with Maxwell. She is engaged to Eric Johnson and gave birth to Maxwell in May.


One possible complication regarding her pregnancy: She is a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.


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Vaulting into car history at the Petersen museum









Chris Brown's voice is giddy as the elevator in the Petersen Automotive Museum begins its descent to the basement. He is as excited as his visitors, but before the doors open he strikes a tone of caution.


"No touching, no photos and watch your step," he says. "Old cars are like little dogs: They tend to leave puddles."


The group chuckles nervously and follows him down a corridor lit by dim fluorescent lights into an enormous cavern filled with hundreds of neatly parked cars.





Brown, 38, is the museum's marketing director, but today he's exchanged suit and tie for a black racing jacket with "Petersen Museum" emblazoned in red letters on the back. Like an impresario, he faces his visitors and gestures out over the showroom, a place that has a nearly legendary status among automotive insiders around the world, a place known as the vault.


Taking up a city block on Wilshire Boulevard's Museum Row, the Petersen has drawn visitors since 1994. Its collection is considered one of the finest in the country, with detailed dioramas and presentations that provide historic and cultural context.


The vault — once restricted to high-ranking museum personnel and visiting VIPs, but now open to the public through Jan. 6 — is far different than the galleries upstairs. Inside, in a space the size of a football field, are 150 cars parked as if in a city lot. There are no special displays with manikins, velvet ropes and faux boulevards.


Many of the cars have been displayed at other times in the museum, but to see them in such simple circumstance is a chance to appreciate the swoop of a fender, the rake of a radiator grille or the grain of a leather interior.


"When you see a car upstairs," said Jay Leno, who visited the vault before its opening, "it's all polished up and roped off and everything. For a car guy like me, I prefer to walk up to a car and see it without all the pomp and circumstance."


Brown begins the hourlong tour following a clockwise pattern. To his right is a black 1952 Ferrari Barchetta once owned by Henry Ford. Behind him is the burgundy 1953 Cadillac coupe that Prince Aly Khan gave to Rita Hayworth. Herbie the Love Bug is against a far wall.


The tour group huddles in close so as not to miss a word. Stopping before a black Lincoln with undulating front fenders that hang over brilliant whitewalled tires, Brown raises a hand for dramatic effect.


"It was the first armored car ever commissioned for White House service," Brown says, his voice bouncing off the concrete walls.


Ordered the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1942 Lincoln was built with steel plating nearly a quarter-inch thick and has windows made up of nine panes of laminated glass.


Craig Parry, visiting from Morganville, Kan., is impressed. He is with his wife, Terri, and their son David. They hadn't intended to visit the vault but thought it would be an opportunity to see history. Crossing his arms, he looks out over the collection.


"I've never seen or heard of many of the cars they have here," Parry said. "We got lucky."


At a time when museums across the country are struggling to boost attendance, Petersen officials know the value of their collection and are eager to capitalize on any aspect of it that might increase the visitor count.


Terry Karges came up with the idea of marketing the vault (tours cost $25 on top of the museum's $12 admission fee). He is the executive director of the Petersen, and when he was hired in August he realized that he had a challenge. There was a time when Petersen officials hoped to draw 400,000 visitors a year. At best, the museum has succeeded in drawing half that number. Karges believes the problem has been underexposure.


"The Petersen is largely considered to be the crown jewel of automotive museums," he said. "You just stand back and say, 'There's so much more we can do to attract people.'"


Automobile museums are a hard sell.


"All museums have to get creative to bring in those crowds — whether that's a new exhibit, or opening the vault, whatever," said Jackie L. Frady, executive director of the National Automobile Museum in Reno and president of the National Assn. of Automobile Museums.


In Reno, Frady oversaw an exhibit that featured a group of wild cars from the Burning Man festival, including one automobile that resembled a plump baked potato and another that looked like two matching pink bunny slippers.





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Dueling Santa trackers are off and running













Google's Santa Tracker


A screen grab from Google's Santa Tracker.
(Google / December 24, 2012)





































































All year long Santa keeps an eye on you. Now it's time to turn the tables.


One day a year, you are invited to keep an eye on Santa as he whips around the world in his sleigh, delivering a dizzying number of presents to children all over the world.


If you'd like to see where Santa is at the moment, you've got choices. Google and NORAD, which used to team up for your Santa tracking pleasure, have gone their separate ways this year and created two distinct tracking options.





Google's Santa Tracker is the slicker of the two. It takes you to Santa's Dashboard, where you can see Santa's current location, his next location, the number of miles traveled, and the number of presents delivered. Santa is also adding Twitter like status updates. The most recent one as of this writing: "Rudolph's nose just turned red." 


PHOTOS: Google Doodles of 2012


You can also click on the map and see where Santa has been, as noted by little present icons on the map. Click on the icon and you'll see how many presents Santa has delivered in each city. When Santa is on the move, you'll see him flying on the map in a sleigh. When he's stopped to deliver presents, you'll see him shoving presents down a chimney.


Over at the official NORAD Tracks Santa website you'll also find a running tally of how many presents Santa has delivered as well as what city he just left and what city he's currently headed toward. NORAD also offers Santa Cams that show animations of Santa flying around the world. 


Both Santa tracking services offer loads of extras. If you visit Santa's Village on Google's tracker you can send a message from  Santa to a friend or family member. And NORAD has more than 1,200 volunteers staffing a Santa hotline to answer all your Santa questions.  (877-HI-NORAD).


In the spirit of the season you might try them both out, but hurry up. The trackers shut down a few hours before Christmas morning. 


Happy tracking!


ALSO:


Rumored iPad 5 to be thinner -- and land in March



Battle of the Santa trackers: Google takes on NORAD


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Find room for God in fast-paced world, pope says on Christmas eve






VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, leading the world’s Roman Catholics into Christmas, on Monday urged people to find room for God in their fast-paced lives filled with the latest technological gadgets.


The 85-year-old pope, marking the eighth Christmas season of his pontificate, celebrated a solemn Christmas Eve mass in St Peter’s Basilica, during which he appealed for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and an end to the civil war in Syria.






At the mass for some 10,000 people in the basilica and broadcast to millions of others on television, the pope wove his homily around the theme of God’s place in today’s modern world.


“Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him,” said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments.


“The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full,” he said.


The leader of the world’s some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said societies had reached the point where many people’s thinking processes did not leave any room even for the existence of God.


“Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the ‘God hypothesis’ becomes superfluous,” he said.


“There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so ‘full’ of ourselves that there is no room left for God.”


PEACE CANDLE


Bells inside and outside the basilica chimed when the pope said “Glory to God in the Highest,” the words the gospels say the angels sang at the moment of Jesus’ birth.


Earlier on Monday the pope appeared at the window of his apartments in the apostolic palace and lit a peace candle, as a larger-than-life nativity scene was unveiled in St Peter’s Square below.


Reflecting on the gospel account of Jesus born in a stable because there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn, he said when people find no room for God in their lives, they will soon find no room for others.


“Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing.


“Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognise him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world,” he said.


He asked for prayers for the people who “live and suffer” in the Holy Land today.


The pope called for peace among Israelis and Palestinians and for the people of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq and prayed that “Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side-by-side in God’s peace.”


The Vatican is concerned about the exodus from the Middle East of Christians, many of whom leave because they fear for their safety. Christians now comprise five percent of the population of the region, down from 20 percent a century ago.


According to some estimates, the current population of 12 million Christians in the Middle East could halve by 2020 if security and birth rates continue to decline.


At noon (1100 GMT/6 AM ET) the pope will deliver his twice-yearly “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica.


(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Myra MacDonald)


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Thousands sign US petition to deport Piers Morgan


LONDON (AP) — Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the U.S. over his gun control views.


Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his "Piers Morgan Tonight" show an "unbelievably stupid man."


Now, gun rights activists are fighting back. A petition created Dec. 21 on the White House e-petition website by a user in Texas accuses Morgan of engaging in a "hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution" by targeting the Second Amendment. It demands he be deported immediately for "exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens."


The petition has already hit the 25,000 signature threshold to get a White House response. By Monday, it had 31,813 signatures.


Morgan seemed unfazed — and even amused — by the movement.


In a series of Twitter messages, he alternately urged his followers to sign the petition and in response to one article about the petition said "bring it on" as he appeared to track the petition's progress.


"If I do get deported from America for wanting fewer gun murders, are there any other countries that will have me?" he wrote.


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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track





How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?




Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.


Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.


That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.


Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.


In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.


In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.


Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.


In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.


But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.


The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.


The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.


Other rumors also spring from real events.


In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.


Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.


So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.


Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.


In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.


The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.


Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”


The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.


The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.


The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.


The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.


The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.


In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.


In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.


Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.


But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.


More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”


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Online holiday shoppers spent $1 billion on 'Free Shipping Day'









Shoppers scrambling to buy last-minute presents but avoid the malls spent $1.01 billion on this year's Free Shipping Day.


The annual event is scheduled to take place on the last day that orders delivered by ground can be guaranteed to arrive by Christmas. This year, that was Monday, Dec. 17, when more than 1,000 retailers offered free shipping.


Free Shipping Day was the beginning of a hectic workweek for online merchants, who raked in $3.69 billion during last week's five weekdays, up 53% from the same period last year, according to research firm ComScore.





"The fact that Free Shipping Day occurred on a Monday, combined with the fact that so many retailers extended their promotions into the middle of the week -- with guaranteed shipping by Christmas -- helped deliver an encouraging late-season surge," said ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.


The busiest online shopping day of the year was again Cyber Monday -- Nov. 26 this year -- with a record $1.47 billion of spending, followed by Tuesday, Dec. 4, and then Dec. 10 (also known as Green Monday).


During the holiday shopping season online retailers racked up a dozen days that each surpassed more than $1 billion in spending, topping last year's total of 10 days.


ALSO:


Stores offer same-day delivery to compete with Amazon


Best Buy extends deadline for founder to make takeover bid


Stores hope last-minute Christmas shoppers revive holiday sales


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