Gasol's start sparks Lakers to victory over Wolves

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ? Pau Gasol knew he could play like this. Kobe Bryant and Ricky Rubio did, too. The only person in Laker land who seemed to doubt what the gifted post player could do was the man in charge.

Now maybe coach Mike D'Antoni will become a believer as well.

Gasol had 22 points and 12 rebounds in his return to the starting lineup and Bryant nearly had a triple-double in leading the Los Angeles Lakers to a 111-100 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Friday night.

"It was a good feeling out there," Gasol said. "Like the good old days."

Bryant had 17 points, 12 rebounds and eight assists and Steve Nash added 17 points and seven assists for the Lakers, who played without Dwight Howard due to a sore right shoulder. They have won four of their last five games and beat the Wolves for the 20th straight time, the longest active streak in the NBA.

"It's been a rough season so far, no way around it," said Gasol, who topped 20 points for just the third time this season. "Just stay with it, keep playing. You never know when things can change direction. Just play your game when you're out there. Tonight I was able to start, play more minutes, get a good flow. It was a good game."

The mini surge has helped the Lakers (21-26), who started the day 10th in the West, begin to climb out of a big hole. If they are going to get back into the playoff race, Bryant knows Gasol is going to have to be a bigger factor.

"When he's featured, this is what he does," Bryant said. "It's nothing out of the ordinary or unexpected. This is the Pau that helped us get back-to-back championships."

Alexey Shved scored 18 points and Rubio had nine points and seven assists for the Timberwolves, who lost their sixth straight game. They trailed by 29 in the second quarter, but climbed within four in the fourth.

Stumbling into Target Center on an eight-game road losing streak, the Lakers found out at shootaround that they would be without Howard, who flew back to Los Angeles to get platelet-rich plasma therapy on his torn labrum. That put Gasol back in the starting lineup and the disgruntled four-time All-Star responded with 13 points in the first quarter.

"I told him last night to take it easy on us because we needed the win," Rubio said of his Spanish buddy. "And he was saying, 'We need a win, too.' He's great."

With only four healthy guards ? three of them point guards ? Wolves coach Rick Adelman had few options to deal with Bryant. Adelman started out with 6-foot Luke Ridnour on Bryant, and it was a colossal failure. Bryant backed Ridnour down in the post mercilessly, forcing double teams and then finding teammates for wide-open 3s.

The Lakers hit eight of their first 10 3-pointers and shot a staggering 71 percent in the first 15 minutes of the game. And when Bryant and Gasol went to the bench, it only got worse for Minnesota. Steve Blake and Jodie Meeks kept drilling 3s, ripping off a 17-1 run to put the Lakers up 61-32.

"We can't start games like we did today," Rubio said. "I take my fault (in it) because we started too slow. We started with no energy."

These were the Lakers of old. Deep, versatile, talented and relentless.

Then, all of a sudden, they turned into the Old Lakers, and Rubio pounced.

Sensing a letup in intensity, Rubio picked up the pace. Looking like the player he was before tearing the ACL in his left knee ? at home against these Lakers on March 9 ? Rubio threaded no-look passes to cutting teammates for layups and 3-pointers and crossed over Nash to get to the rim, the kind of move he just hasn't been able to pull off since returning in December. An 11-1 run near the end of the second quarter gave the Wolves a glimmer of hope, and a switch to a zone defense completely befuddled Los Angeles.

After hitting 22 of their first 30 shots, the Lakers missed 19 of their next 24 attempts. A steal and layup by Ridnour made it 72-64 early in the third quarter, and the ghost of blown leads past started to hover over the Lakers.

Two days after the Lakers gave up a 13-point lead with 10 minutes to play to Michael Beasley and the lowly Suns, the Wolves pulled to 94-90 with just under 6 minutes to play on a 3 by Shved. Gasol and Bryant both went without a field goal in the second and third quarters, but Bryant snapped an 0-for-6 skid with a putback, Gasol had a dunk and finished the three-point play, and the Lakers never looked back.

"It's hard," Rubio said. "We've been losing a lot. Even if we make the effort, sometimes it's not enough."

NOTES: Gasol's 3-pointer in the first quarter was his first since Dec. 28. ... The Lakers outrebounded the Wolves 57-40 and grabbed 17 offensive rebounds. ... Antawn Jamison had 18 points and seven rebounds off the bench for the Lakers. ... Derrick Williams finished with 15 points and nine boards for Minnesota. ... The Wolves went 8 for 18 on free throws.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gasols-start-sparks-lakers-victory-over-wolves-050700489--spt.html

born this way foundation lytro camera lytro camera andrew brietbart branson mo monkees songs rail gun

'Mountain devil' may join US endangered list

Steve Kroschel / US Fish and Wildlife via Reuters

A wolverine is seen in a 2009 photo.

By Matthew Brown, The Associated Press

BILLINGS, Mont. --?The tenacious wolverine, a snow-loving carnivore sometimes called the "mountain devil," could soon join the list of species threatened by climate change ? a dubious distinction putting it in the ranks of the polar bear and several other animals the government says will lose crucial habitat as temperatures rise.

Federal wildlife officials Friday proposed Endangered Species Act protections for the wolverine in the Lower 48 states. That's a step twice denied under the Bush administration, then delayed in 2010 when the Obama administration said other imperiled species had priority.

It likely means an end to trapping the animals for their fur outside Alaska.

But federal officials said they won't use the animal's status as a means to regulate greenhouse gases blamed in climate change. And other human activities ? from snowmobiling and ski resorts to timber harvest and ? would not be curtailed because they do not appear to be significant threats to wolverines, officials said.

---

There are an estimated 250 to 300 wolverines in the contiguous U.S., clustered in small, isolated groups primarily in the Northern Rockies of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington. Larger populations persist in Alaska and Canada.

Maxing out at 40 pounds and tough enough to stand up to grizzly bears, the animals will be no match for anticipated declines in deep mountain snows female wolverines need to establish dens and raise their young, scientists said.

In some areas, such as central Idaho, suitable habitat could disappear entirely, officials said.

Yet because those losses could take decades to unfold, federal wildlife officials said there's still time to bolster the population, including by reintroducing them to the high mountains of Colorado.

"This is a species there is still time to do something about," said Mike Thabault, ecological services director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's mountain-prairie region.

Wildlife advocates, who sued to force the government to act on the issue, said the animal's plight should be used by the Obama administration to leverage tighter restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

As with the polar bear, the government is sidestepping that thorny proposition with the wolverine, and said in Friday's proposal that listing the animal as threatened "will not regulate greenhouse gas emissions."

Thabault said the agency would be on tenuous scientific grounds if it tried to draw a link between specific emission sources and impacts on wolverines.

Advocates expressed disappointment, with Noah Greenwald from the Center for Biological Diversity saying the administration "should not be exempting greenhouse gas emissions from the Endangered Species Act."

A Washington, D.C., attorney, John Martin, who represented the energy industry during litigation over polar bears, said he expects no change in the administration's policy against using endangered wildlife to regulate emissions.

Friday's proposal also allows Colorado's wildlife agency to reintroduce an experimental population of wolverines that eventually could spill into neighboring portions of New Mexico and Wyoming.

It would shut down wolverine trapping in Montana, the only one of the Lower 48 states where the practice is still allowed an annual quota of five animals.

This year's trapping season was blocked by a state court order, but Montana officials hoped to restore trapping next year.

Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said the state will review the federal proposal and had not settled on a response.

Once found throughout the Rocky Mountains and in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, wolverines were wiped out across most of the U.S. by the 1930s due to unregulated trapping and poisoning campaigns, said Bob Inman, a wolverine researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the decades since, they have largely recovered in the Northern Rockies but not in other parts of their historical range.

While reintroducing the animals further south might seem counterintuitive, Inman said Colorado's abundance of 14,000-foot mountains would make it well suited as a refuge for the animals as warmer temperatures set in at lower elevations.

Only one wolverine currently inhabits the state, a male that wandered down several years ago from northern Wyoming's Teton Range, about 500 miles away. Inman said Colorado has enough high-mountain territory to support up to 100 more of the animals.

"That's like a 30 percent increase in their population size," he said.

Any reintroduction into Colorado would require approval from state wildlife commissioners and the Legislature, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said.

Representatives of the state's ski and agriculture industries in the past have raised concerns that bringing wolverines back could hurt their industries. Hampton said no decision has been made and it could take years to work out all the details.

Other areas where wolverines once roamed also could serve as future refuges.

Those include portions of Utah, Oregon's Cascade Range, Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, said Shawn Sartorius, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service based in Montana.

?

?

?

Related story:?Wolverines' winter food caches at risk to warming

? 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/01/16810069-mountain-devil-feds-want-to-list-wolverine-as-endangered-species-stop-trapping-citing-climate-change?lite

ncaa bracket ramon sessions portland trail blazers nba trade blagojevich new mexico state kevin rose

Cadillac Lets Drivers Customize Their Gauge Cluster ? Jessup Auto ...

Car owners may be used to being able to choose certain features of their vehicles. You know when you stroll onto the lot of Jessup Auto Plaza that you will have a choice of paint colors and maybe the size of the tires on your vehicle. The new Cadillac XTS, however, is bringing driver customization to another level by allowing drivers to select the design of their gauge cluster.

The available themes of the gauge cluster range from the basic ?simple? approach that offers a minimalistic look at the vehicle?s information to a ?performance? option that provides a huge array of detail.? This means that you can control just how much information about your car that you can see at any given time. Maybe you are the type of driver that really only needs to know the speed you are going and how much fuel you have. On the other hand, perhaps you are the type that is interested in the actual driving dynamics of the vehicle. Maybe it is more important to you that the display is visually organized and easy to read. However a gauge would be most user-friendly for you, the Cadillac XTS high-end trim options can make it happen.

Don?t worry about making a final decision, however. The beauty of this customizable gauge cluster is that you can change between different options whenever you please. A multidirectional switch located right on the steering wheel lets you switch among the four options on the 12.3 inch LCD display screen quickly and easily. This also means that if there is more than one driver of the vehicle each can select the gauge cluster display that is best for his driving personality.

Come on down to your Cathedral City Cadillac dealer to test out the full array of intuitive features offered on the newest Cadillac models. The experts will help you pick out the model that will fit your needs and your driving personality.

Like this:

Be the first to like this.

Source: http://blog.jessupautoplaza.com/2013/01/31/cadillac-lets-drivers-customize-their-gauge-cluster/

jason whitlock beach boys tony bennett joe walsh the civil wars duggar miscarriage roman holiday

Stevie Nicks? Voice Is Music to Hillary Scott?s Baby?s Ears

"I was thinking that the first voice that our baby?s ever heard is Stevie Nicks," Scott says. "I just thought, 'What a lucky kid already.'"

Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/eyP9E_lRMHI/

charlie st cloud celtics nba playoffs rosario dawson young jeezy world wildlife fund gsa

Chinese hackers said to wage cyberwar on The New York Times

After a lengthy newspaper investigation on China's prime minister, The New York Times claims that its computer systems were infiltrated and attacked by Chinese hackers.

The attacks began four months ago and culminated with hackers stealing the corporate password for every Times employee, according to the newspaper. The personal computers of 53 of these employees were also broken into and spied on.

The Times discovered the attacks after observing "unusual activity" in its computer system. Security investigators were then able to get into the system and track the hackers' movements, see what the infiltrators were after, and eventually "expel them."

Hackers penetrated the newspaper's computers as one of its reporters, David Barboza, was wrapping up an investigation into the family wealth of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Once the story published in October, the hackers' activity intensified. According to The New York Times, they were after information on the sources and contacts for Barboza's story.

In order to find out more of who was behind the cyberattacks, The Times hired computer security firm Mandiant. Experts from this firm were able to detect and block the attacks, while watching the hackers every move.

The newspaper's executive editor Jill Abramson said, "no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied."

According to The New York Times, the methods these hackers used were similar to past attacks by the Chinese military. These methods include routing attacks through U.S. university computers, constantly changing I.P. addresses, using e-mail malware to get into the computer system, and installing custom software to target specific individuals and documents.

China's Ministry of National Defense has denied that the government had anything to do with the hacking spree. "Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security," the Ministry told The New York Times. "To accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless."

It's not unusual for governments to wage cyberattacks against other country's media, agencies, and facilities. Iran allegedly waged an attack on the U.K.'s BBC News last March; and earlier this month, the U.S. government claimed Iran was responsible for a massive wave of cyberattacks on U.S. banks. The U.S. has also allegedly waged its own hacking war against Iranian power plants, oil companies, and nuclear facilities with three viruses called Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu.

Chinese cyber-espionage against the U.S. has reportedly been a growing threat for some years now. The U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission on China sent a report to Congress in November that urged lawmakers to take preventative action. The report called China the "most threatening actor in cyberspace" and found that in 2012, Chinese state-sponsored hackers continued to target computer systems run by the U.S. government, military, as well as the private sector.

Despite The New York Times being able to shut out the hackers for now, it doesn't mean the newspaper won't become the target of another attack.

"This is not the end of the story," Mandiant's chief security officer Richard Bejtlich told The New York Times. "Once they take a liking to a victim, they tend to come back. It's not like a digital crime case where the intruders steal stuff and then they're gone. This requires an internal vigilance model."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/JhqR/~3/9sI19D5gw7M/

i will always love you whitney houston 2012 grammy awards powerball results pebble beach golf beverly hilton roland martin whitney houston dead at 48

Contrary to reports, the Irish haven't legalized drunk driving

Reports concerning an Irish county council's proposal to allow rural inhabitants to drive after drinking have been greatly exaggerated.

By Jason Walsh,?Correspondent / January 23, 2013

Reported around the globe as a license to drive drunk, an Irish council's motion to permit rural pub-goers to get behind the wheel not only lacks force of law, it's also a slightly odd solution to a serious issue.

Skip to next paragraph

Recent posts

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

It's not often that a vote by five county councilors in rural west Ireland makes headline news, but Danny Healy-Rae managed it this week when he and four colleagues passed a motion to allow drinkers to drive home ? albeit at a severely restricted speed and only on barely-used backroads.

The political response? The same as that of the Irish public: bafflement and embarrassment.

Leo Varadkar, minister for transport, said he disagreed with the council's motion and stressed the affect of the story spreading across the globe. "It doesn't really send out a good message internationally about Ireland," he said.

One fact that has barely been reported in the scramble to play-up rural Irish alcoholic clich?s: It's not going to happen. As a county council motion, the proposal has no legal status.

Irish people are keenly aware of the country's drink-sodden image, with many feeling Mr. Healy-Rae's motion plays to outdated prejudices about the country.

The move may not seem so out of the blue as it first sounds, though. Not quite, anyway.

Healy-Rae proposed the motion as a response to isolation in rural areas, particularly among the elderly and would help to counter "depression and suicide." He said permits could be issued allowing holders to have "two or three drinks" and then still drive home.

"They're traveling on very minor roads, often on tractors, with very little traffic and it's not right they're being treated the same as the rest of the traveling public and they have never killed anyone," he said.?"The only outlet they have then is to take home a bottle of whiskey," he says, "and they're falling into depression, and suicide for some of them is the sad way out."

To be sure, pubs in country areas of Ireland are at the center of community life and are more than just drinking dens, which is something even the motion's critics acknowledge. And going to the pub and drinking nonalcoholic drinks is already an option, as is the option of hiring a bus.

Healy-Rae is a member of a colorful County Kerry political dynasty known for rural populism ? and occasional support for strange causes including, most recently, removing the number 13 from vehicle license plates.

He is also a pub owner ? as are three more of the total five councilors who supported the idea. Three voted against the idea, seven abstained, and 12 were absent from the meeting.

Despite widespread criticism, the motion has attracted some support. Independent Galway councilor Michael Fahy says he will raise the idea at the next council meeting.

The chances of the government agreeing to the idea? Less than the amount of alcohol in a glass of tap water. The country has worked hard in recent decades to reduce road deaths, both by upgrading the road network and by stricter enforcement of the rules of the road.

Ireland's road death rate hit an all-time low in 2012, with 161 lives lost, 25 fewer than the previous year. It is has the sixth lowest road death rate the in EU.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/ChkwObD-QGA/Contrary-to-reports-the-Irish-haven-t-legalized-drunk-driving

axl rose google earnings pat burrell hilary rosen grilled cheese allen west north korea missile

Growing Your Audience With Search Engine Optimization | Web ...

One of the most effective Internet marketing strategies that you can employ is search engine optimization process. If your website is near the top of the list on SERPs, you?ll experience a lot of traffic visiting it every day. Here are some suggestions you can use to get better search engine results.

Use the companies to help market your site. SEO refers to marketing your website to rank highly on search engine result pages (SERPs). You can often find great deals with these services.

Social media websites have a very important role to play in search engine optimization.

To get a lot of traffic, you need content that?s unique and interesting. Visitors will stay on your site if you offer them relevant and useful information.

Find out how many years of experience. You also need to be aware of any risks are involved in order to make the best decisions for your site.

If you feature a good number of videos on your site, realize the search engine crawlers will have troubling locating these, even though they could have new and relevant content. To help website crawlers recognize your website?s videos, create a site map listing videos you posted on your site to allow web crawlers can see them.

SEO is how you can get more people to your customers find you. Many business owners do not take this really is.

This particular tag should not be more than 30 words. You should not exceed 100 KB on the page.

Think like a consumer when you are coming up with tags to include. Determine what string of words your target audience are typing into search the web.

This means repeating keywords as often as possible without breaking your article flow. As search engine rankings are built off the presence of keywords, you will find your rankings improving.

Add a site map if you?re trying to get more visitors. A site map is a great tool to help people locate pages within your entire website.

This trend has been established through metrics such as Quantcast scores. Discussion areas are a good way to interest visitors in spending time on your site.

Do not copy content from another website; if a search engine detects duplicate content on our website, Google will catch it and drop your rank.

Focus on just one area of SEO strategy at a time. There just isn?t enough time in the day for you to learn every technique, so learn one and exploit it extensively.

A vital step towards optimizing your search engine optimization is to include a site map. Spiders are much better at crawling a website if a site map to find out information regarding your website. A big site might require more than 1 site map. A good rule to go by is to show only 100 links maximum on each site map.

Pay-per-click models can be great ways to practice affiliate marketing in a really effective way. This is the easiest service to provide to affiliates, and the pay is fairly low, but the total pay can add up quickly.

The publicity offered can only lead to an increase of website traffic. Don?t ever turn away free publicity.

Many people are under the impression that keywords in comment tags will create a more visible to search engines.

The SEO tips in this article can help your website achieve the rank that you want right now; however, these tips may not be as useful tomorrow. Search engines constantly change the way they rank websites. Make sure you stay current with the latest SEO techniques so that your website will not slip down the search rankings.

Source: http://www.webdesignssg.com/growing-your-audience-with-search-engine-optimization/

nfl draft d rose iman shumpert mayweather vs cotto shumpert hopkins hopkins