New Zealand becomes Middle Earth as Hobbit mania takes hold












WELLINGTON (Reuters) – New Zealand‘s capital city was rushing to complete its transformation into a haven for hairy feet and pointed ears on Tuesday as stars jetted in for the long-awaited world premiere of the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy.


Wellington, where director Peter Jackson and much of the post production is based, has renamed itself “the Middle of Middle Earth“, as fans held costume parties and city workers prepared to lay 500 m (550 yards) of red carpet.












A specially Hobbit-decorated Air New Zealand jet brought in cast, crew and studio officials for the premiere.


Jackson, a one-time printer at a local newspaper and a hometown hero, said he was still editing the final version of the “Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey” ahead of Wednesday’s premiere screening.


The Hobbit movies are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book and tell the story that leads up to his epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings“, which Jackson made into three Oscar-winning films about 10 years ago.


It is set 60 years before “The Lord of The Rings” and was originally planned as only two movies before it was decided that there was enough material to justify a third.


New Zealand fans were getting ready to claim the best spots to see the film’s stars, including British actor Martin Freeman, who plays the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Elijah Wood.


“It’s been a 10-year wait for these movies, New Zealand is Tolkien’s spiritual home, so there’s no way we’re going to miss out,” said office worker Alan Craig, a self-confessed Lord of the Rings “nut”.


The production has been at the centre of several controversies, including a dispute with unions in 2010 over labor contracts that resulted in the government stepping in to change employment laws, and giving Warner Brothers increased incentives to keep the production in New Zealand.


The Hobbit did come very close to not being filmed here,” Jackson told Radio New Zealand.


He said Warners had sent scouts to Britain to look at possible locations and also matched parts of the script to shots of the Scottish Highlands and English forests.


“That was to convince us we could easily go over there and shoot the film … and I would have had to gone over there to do it but I was desperately fighting to have it stay here,” Jackson said.


Last week, an animal rights group said more than 20 animals, including horses, pigs and chickens, had been killed during the making of the film. Jackson has said some animals used in the film died on the farm where they were being housed, but that none had been hurt during filming.


The films are also notable for being the first filmed at 48 frames per second (fps), compared with the 24 fps that has been the industry standard since the 1920s.


The second film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” will be released in December next year, with the third “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” due in mid-July 2014.


(Editing by Paul Tait)


Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders





For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.




Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.


This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.


Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.


But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.


The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.


Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”


The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?


Habits of Thought


It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.


Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.


Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.


Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.


Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.


“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”


Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”


Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.


In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.


These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.


Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.


This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.


It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.


Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.


“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.


Resisting Simplification 


It was easier said than done.


The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.


A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.


The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.


Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.


Read More..

Holiday sales soar on Cyber Monday









Web shopping soared on Cyber Monday, continuing a strong start to the holiday season.

Online sales were up 26.6 percent from last year by Monday evening, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks data from 500 retail sites. ComScore meanwhile, expected online sales to hit a record of about $1.5 billion by day's end.

Cyber Monday has become the biggest online shopping day in recent years as employees head back to the office but continue to cybershop for holiday gifts. The growth of smartphones and tablets has only increased that ability, an opportunity Web retailers have been eager to exploit.

This year, retailers aggressively pushed "Pre-Black Friday" promotions and flooded consumers with emails touting good deals in the days before Thanksgiving. As a result, the big shopping days of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have blurred into a sale-laden week.

Some retail analysts had worried that strong online sales growth on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday would entice shoppers to buy earlier, threatening revenue later in the season.

"So far, that is not the case," said Jay Henderson, the strategy director for IBM Smarter Commerce. "Extending the shopping season has really just fueled additional online spending rather than cannibalizing days later in the season."

Sales across Amazon.com, the largest online retailer, had risen 52 percent from the previous year by midmorning Monday, according to ChannelAdvisor, which offers services to third-party sellers on e-commerce sites. Meanwhile, eBay sales volume increased 57 percent, the firm said.

The average online order size on Cyber Monday was $130.30. That was down from almost $200 during the whole of Cyber Monday last year, according to IBM.

But Monday's discounts on the websites of bricks -and-mortar retailers weren't necessarily as broad or as deep as consumers could find if they shopped in the days before, according to Michael Brim, founder of deal site BFAds.net. "We're not seeing across the board the lowest prices like we do on Black Friday or Thanksgiving," he said. "It's better than the average weekly sales, but it's not on the level of Black Friday … yet," he said.

Most retailers — about 97 percent — were expected to offer Cyber Monday deals this year, up from 90 percent last year, according to the National Retail Federation. That means good deals were there for the finding on sites that might not normally have sales, Brim said.

Laptops and apparel at specialty sites were popular items Monday, Brim said.

Amazon offered $30 off its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet, which usually sells for $159. The deal was available only on Cyber Monday.

Hoffman Estates-based retailer Sears said it found that a number of its shoppers opted to buy online and pick up merchandise in the store, according to spokesman Tom Aiello, who declined to say whether online traffic increased Monday. Shoppers want "to save on shipping, or they want to touch it — and get it the same day and make sure they've got that gift in their hands," he said.

Tribune news services contributed.

crshropshire@tribune.com

Twitter @corilyns



Read More..

Pfleger points police to suspect in fatal stabbing









During an argument with his wife Wednesday, Demetrius Jackson allegedly stabbed to death a 55-year-old man who intervened, then called St. Sabina Catholic Church to pray with the Rev. Michael Pfleger.


Shortly after a Cook County judge ordered Jackson, 32, held without bond on Sunday on a charge of first-degree murder, Pfleger, reached by phone, recounted the conversation he had with Jackson on Friday, a day before he turned himself in.


"He told me the guy who he allegedly stabbed is his best friend," Pfleger said. "He said (the victim) punched him in the face. He told me he just reacted. He asked me to pray with him, and I prayed with him."





Jackson, who lives in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, hung his head in Cook County Bond Court as a judge said he faced a murder charge in the death of William Terry of the 10300 block of South Forest Avenue.


Jackson and his wife were arguing in their home, also in the 10300 block of South Forest, Wednesday night when he allegedly grabbed a knife and threatened to kill her, prosecutors said. The wife fled to Terry's home and called 911, prosecutors said.


Before police arrived, Jackson's wife and Terry decided to walk back to Jackson's home. Still holding a knife, Jackson confronted the two outside and continued to berate his wife, authorities said. Terry stepped between them, "trying to calm" the defendant, Assistant State's Attorney Brad Dickey said. Terry fell to the ground, and Jackson leapt on top of him, stabbing him multiple times in front of several witnesses, authorities said.


"Terry was able to stagger to his home," Dickey said. Gasping for breath, he collapsed on his front porch. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn shortly after 8 p.m. and pronounced dead, according to police. Other county officials said Terry lived in Riverdale.


Jackson, who appears to have no criminal record, worked with St. Sabina on the Safe Passage project, public defender Stephen Herczeg said. A Chicago Public Schools program, Safe Passage employs community members to help improve safety by standing guard along the routes children travel to schools.


When the two spoke, Pfleger encouraged Jackson to turn himself in to police.


"I told him, 'I'm not a court or a lawyer or a judge,'" Pfleger said. "I told him I wouldn't judge him. I just encouraged him to turn himself in and not run. A lot of times, people are afraid to go to the police directly. I said I would try to set it up."


When Jackson agreed, Pfleger said he called police at the Gresham District, telling them of Jackson's intentions.


As promised, Jackson showed up at a police station Friday morning and gave a video-taped confession, according to court documents.


"Thank God it worked," said Pfleger. "It's very sad. I feel bad about the man who got killed, too. It's a loss of two lives."


efmeyer@tribune.com



Read More..

Betfair pulls out of Greece over permits row












LONDON (Reuters) – Online gambling exchange Betfair said it would withdraw from the Greek market until there was greater clarity on gaming regulation in the country.


Betfair, which has not yet applied for a permit to operate in Greece, questioned the cost and conditions attached to permits required by gaming firms to trade in the country.












“According to legal advice received, the value of these permits is unclear and we consider the gambling legislation in the country to be inconsistent with European law,” Betfair said on Monday.


“The associated fiscal conditions attached to these permits, which may include payment of taxes on historical revenues, make the market economically unattractive.”


Earlier this month the Greek Gaming Commission said gambling firms operating in Greece without a permit would face financial penalties and criminal sanctions.


Betfair said it believes there are “significant issues with the legality of this decision” by the Greek Gaming Commission.


It added that it was disappointed the European Commission had not moved to prevent what Betfair calls “protectionist behavior.”


Earlier this month Betfair, which launched 12 years ago and operates an exchange system that allows gamblers to bet against each other rather than the bookmaker, withdrew its online sports betting exchange in Germany because of a tax levied on stakes on sports events from July 2012.


The European Commission last month said it was not proposing EU-wide legislation to regulate online gambling.


Prior to Betfair’s decision to withdraw from the market, it had been expected to generate 13 million pounds ($ 20.81 million) of revenue from the Greek market in the current financial year.


($ 1 = 0.6246 British pounds)


(Reporting by Rhys Jones; editing by James Davey)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Dog bite sidelines ‘Dirty Dozen’ trumpeter Towns












NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Dirty Dozen Brass Band trumpeter Efrem Towns is recovering at home in New Orleans from a vicious attack by a Rottweiler at an Atlanta motel.


He missed performances in Colorado and New Orleans after the attack on Nov. 18, and doesn’t know if he’ll make the band’s next scheduled gig on Dec. 28, The Times-Picayune (http://bit.ly/XOJoNr) reported.












He and baritone sax player Roger Lewis said the dog surged from an open motel room door after Towns knocked on the door of Lewis’ room.


“I didn’t know if it was a dog, wolverine, bear, mongoose or what. I just knew something had me,” Towns said.


He said the dog‘s owner came out of the next room, and they were able to subdue it.


At Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, he received 30 stitches in his groin. Towns, who has health insurance through his wife, Tracie, said he will be seeing a urologist this week.


The Dirty Dozen Brass Band formed in 1977, and is credited with creating the contemporary, funk-infused brass band sound. It’s been featured on albums with David Bowie, Elvis Costello and the Black Crowes.


Towns said he probably could practice while convalescing. “But I’m very uncomfortable right now,” he said Friday evening. “I’m basically immobilized — it’s hard getting around. I’m kind of miserable.”


The experience hasn’t soured Towns on dogs. He and his wife own three miniature schnauzers, a standard schnauzer and a mixed breed. On Friday, his daughter’s dachshund was visiting.


“I’m a dog person,” he said. “And even though I got bit, I hope they don’t put that dog to sleep.”


___


Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com


Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails


Thomas Patterson for The New York Times


Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.







In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.








Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.






But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.


After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.


Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.


Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.


Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.


More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?


“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.


Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.


Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.


While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.


Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.


As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.


But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.


Read More..

Thanksgiving weekend sales top $59B








More people hit the stores this Thanksgiving weekend than did last year, as big-box retailers opened their doors earlier than ever on Thursday.

Spending per shopper averaged $423 -- $25 more than last year -- from Thursday to Sunday, while total spending increased nearly 13 percent, to an estimated $59.1 billion, according to a survey the National Retail Federation released Sunday afternoon.

"I think the only way to describe the Thanksgiving openings is to call it a huge win," said Matthew Shay, the trade group's president and chief executive. Shopping, he said, "has really become an extension of the day's festivities."

About 35 million people visited stores and shopping websites Thursday, up from 29 million last year. More than double that number -- 89 million, up from 86 million -- shopped on Black Friday.

"There were more people shopping every single day of the weekend," Shay said. "Black Friday is a little bit different than historically, but it certainly is not dead."

But whether increased sales over the Thanksgiving weekend will translate to higher sales throughout the holiday shopping season remains to be seen. Analysts have been predicting mediocre sales this year, as shoppers remain uncertain about the broader economy.


Overall holiday sales are expected to increase 4.1 percent from 2011, compared with sales growth of 5.6 percent last year, the National Retail Federation said. Overall holiday sales are projected to total about $586.1 billion.


On average, Americans are expected to spend $749.51 this holiday season, up $9 from last year but still below 2006 figures.

In an effort to defy the stingy projections, some retailers opened at 8 p.m. on Thursday, while others offered to match the prices of their online competitors. But some analysts have projected that retailers would only succeed in prompting customers to buy gifts earlier in the holiday season, rather than to spend more.

Most of the weekend's shoppers -- roughly 58 percent -- bought clothing and accessories, whereas 38 percent bought electronics and 35 percent shelled out for toys.

Much of the weekend's shopping took place online, as consumers logged on to take advantage of Internet-only specials beginning early Thursday morning. The average shopper spent more than $172 online this weekend, which made up approximately 41 percent of the total weekend spending. That is up from 38 percent last year.

"There is no question that online is a real bright spot in the retail industry," Shay said. "For the first time, more than half of those who shopped this weekend said they shopped online."

Online sales are slated to pick up even more, as many retailers kick off Cyber Monday sales a day or two early. Wal-Mart began offering online discounts on Saturday, and Amazon.com started on Sunday with plans to offer deep savings for Internet shoppers all week.






Read More..

Hard-fought victory assures Irish spot in national title game









LOS ANGELES — Deliverance arrived on a crisp southern California night, welcomed in a frenzy of leaps and hugs and arms wind-milling helmets and cathartic screams. Notre Dame waited decades for this, all right, the end to the interminable search for its long-lost promise. It just needed to climb to the top of college football to find it.

The Irish will play for a national championship in January, inextricably No. 1 and 12-0 after a 22-13 victory over USC before 93,607 witnesses Saturday night at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a sparkling moment of rapture in the City of Angels. Whether Notre Dame is back maybe isn't the point right now. It's that the Irish have arrived.

"We had a dream," linebacker Manti Te'o said, "and we put in the work to make sure that dream came true."

It was a grinding, imperfect but relentless effort Saturday to get there, and maybe there couldn't be any other way. Everett Golson, the redshirt freshman quarterback, cramped up but cut loose for 217 yards passing and was mistake-free. Theo Riddick, the senior tailback who was a slot receiver at this time last year, stampeded to 146 yards and a score.

And the Heisman hopeful, Te'o, picked off another pass and helped spearhead another adrenalized, fourth-quarter goal-line stand that stomped out USC's last hope and created a save-the-date for Jan. 7. There Notre Dame will play in the BCS title game, almost assuredly against the winner of the SEC, becoming the most galvanizing foil yet to that league's dominance.

"The way it's set up, only two teams can play for a national championship," Irish coach Brian Kelly said. "It feels great that you have that opportunity."

One game now, to look upon everyone else from the summit for the first time since 1988.

"Ecstatic," Irish safety Zeke Motta said. "There's no other feeling like it that I could have ever imagined. You think about the hard work and the competing that we did in the offseason, and to witness it pay off, and to be in this position we're in right now, there's no other feeling like it."

There were other, substantially less exultant feelings swirling in the same stadium tunnel a scant four years ago. Athletic director Jack Swarbrick could laugh about that Saturday night: About being pinned against a wall to discuss the downward spiral of the Charlie Weis era then, and being cornered to talk about a head-spinning revival now.

A year after that utter demolition by USC in 2008, Swarbrick made his coaching change and brought in Kelly. He brought in his program-builder. He thought it was the perfect fit. He also thought it would take longer than this.

"I gotta tell you, I always thought it was next year," Swarbrick said. "From Day 1, I thought it was next year. So it's cool. It's cool to be ahead of schedule."

In fact, maybe the only guy not taken aback was the guy responsible for it all.

"You get this far into it, and now you start to look up and go, oh, we're 11-0 — you want to finish it off," Kelly said.

"It's easy to say well, yeah, I'm surprised. But when you go in that locker room and you're around the guys I'm around, you're not surprised. What they've done, the commitment they've made, they've done everything I've asked them to do. Everything. So it doesn't surprise me anymore."

Notre Dame had USC where it wanted the Trojans early, on-heels and tested, on the spot to demonstrate any mettle or desire at the end of a season gone wrong and going nowhere. The Irish thundered to a 10-0 first-quarter lead, first scoring on a Kyle Brindza 27-yard field goal and then a Riddick 9-yard score.

If this was the last hurdle to the BCS title game, it appeared knee-high. But USC showed it could be resolute, swiftly moving to an 11-yard Robert Woods touchdown reception to reignite some drama. From there, it was field goal after field goal after field goal for both sides, a constant thrust and parry, all the way to a Brindza 33-yarder that made it a 19-10 lead entering the fourth quarter.

"We understood that it was going to be a dogfight, and that's what it was," Te'o said.

Then Notre Dame watched in glee as USC coach Lane Kiffin began exacting self-torture. First came the pre-snap timeout that might have wiped out a touchdown catch, only to watch the ensuing pass sail out of the end zone.

And after the fifth Brindza field goal created a two-score cushion with six minutes left, the pain became excruciating. A 53-yard Marqise Lee reception after a long kickoff return set up a goal-to-go situation for the Trojans. Two pass interference penalties put them on the 1-yard line. They ran once. They ran again. They ran again. Then they threw an incomplete pass.

Notre Dame had made its stand, everyone exploding off the sideline and into celebration.

"If you have followed us all year, that's how we play," Kelly said. "We come up big defensively at some time during the game. We did that again."

All that remained were 21/2 minutes to burn. Irish fans in attendance counted down the Coliseum clock, as if it was New Year's Eve.

And then the celebration began, wild and joyous, for a date decades in the making. Players bobbed and chanted in front of the fans. Te'o grabbed Kelly in the tunnel in a spontaneous embrace, telling his coach he loved him.

Notre Dame will play for a national title. A moment so many waited for, and never saw coming.

"I haven't really grasped the whole situation," Riddick said, sitting on a table in a Coliseum tunnel. "What can I say? We're going to Miami."

bchamilton@tribune.com

Twitter @ChiTribHamilton



Read More..

Saudi telco regulator suspends Mobily prepaid sim sales












(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia‘s No.2 telecom operator Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily) has been suspended from selling pre-paid sim cards by the industry regulator, the firm said in a statement to the kingdom’s bourse on Sunday.


Mobily’s sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, sim cards will remain halted until the company “fully meets the prepaid service provisioning requirements,” the telco said in the statement.












These requirements include a September order from regulator, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC). This states all pre-paid sim users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and that this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the sim card was bought, according to a statement on the CITC website.


This measure is designed to ensure customer account details are kept up to date, the CITC said.


Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC’s decision would be “insignificant”, claiming data, corporate and postpaid revenues would meet its main growth drivers.


The firm, which competes with Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi, reported a 23 percent rise in third-quarter profit in October, beating forecasts.


Prepaid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.


Customers on monthly, or postpaid, contracts are also less likely to switch provider, but the bulk of customers remain on pre-paid accounts.


Mobily shares were trading down 1.4 percent at 0820 GMT on the Saudi bourse.


(Reporting by Matt Smith; Editing by Dinesh Nair)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..