Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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President Nixon gets the star treatment

Paul J. Carter was 9 when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, watching the televised speech with his dad, a loyal Republican who had come home from work early for the event.

"I … didn't grasp the magnitude of it," said Carter, now 47 and a lawyer in Long Beach.

Nearly four decades later, the boy's puzzlement over the nation's 37th president had evolved into a grown-up project, "Native Son Richard Nixon's Southern California: My Life on a Map!"

Made like a guide to Hollywood stars' homes, the fold-out map is an illustrated romp through the life of the only White House occupant born and raised in Southern California. It's a hot item at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, with more than 500 copies snapped up last year at $4.99 each.

"It's a really, really good seller," said Jonathan Movroydis, spokesman for the Richard Nixon Foundation.

He expects sales to jump with Sunday's launch of a year-long celebration of the centennial of Nixon's Jan. 9, 1913, birth. The small farmhouse where Nixon entered the world is pictured on the map, with the long-gone citrus trees his father had planted on 9 acres surrounding the home.

The copyrighted map — whose cover depicts its bemused subject reading it — is dotted with photos and with drawings by artist Jean-Louis Rheault and includes milestones in Nixon's controversial career. But check out Nixon as a frowning schoolboy at Yorba Linda Elementary, where, the map notes, he "often went to school barefooted" (which may explain the scowl).

There's the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where Nixon sports his 1933 Whittier College football uniform against USC: "Whittier lost 51-0." Elsewhere, infant Tricia pops from the roof of the hospital where the first of Pat and Richard Nixon's two daughters was born in 1946.

And there's a Bundy Drive home where, the caption says, Nixon stood on the roof with his hose in 1961 as a fire raged through the neighborhood. The map says he hit a hole-in-one at the Bel-Air Country Club the same year.

Does anybody recall a slogan for Nixon's losing 1962 gubernatorial campaign against Pat Brown? Here's one on a billboard: "Click with Dick…"

World leaders commemorated at the Nixon library make an appearance — Mao Tse-tung, Charles De Gaulle, Golda Meir. A miniature Nikita Khrushchev points angrily, as if repeating his 1956 "We will bury you!" threat.

For those who remember the famous photograph of Nixon walking on the beach in wing-tip shoes, there is this counterpoint: an illustration of a hairy-chested Nixon in red trunks in the ocean off San Clemente. The president was swimming there, the caption says, when the "First Article of Impeachment was voted up by Congress" in 1974.

Carter said he wanted the map to be fun, easily understood and hard to stop looking at — and a more complete picture of the man still known largely for the Watergate scandal.

A map of Carter's Nixon-related life might start with the Palos Verdes Peninsula home of his childhood, then move on to Cal State Fullerton, where he was a student in the early 1990s. The political science major's service-minded mother suggested her son volunteer at the Nixon library, where he met the former president several times.

"I had assumed he was mean," Carter said in a recent interview in his office with a view of the Queen Mary. "But he was very nice, and that got me intrigued and wanting to know more about him."

Carter admired Nixon's devotion to his family and the loyal friends who stood by him for life. "If you were a bad guy," Carter said, "people wouldn't stick with you like that."

After graduating from Drake University's law school in 1995, Carter began planning his "native son" project. A chance meeting with the mayor of Whittier in 2009 finally got it off the ground.

"I said something like, 'It must be fascinating to have all these places marked where [Nixon] grew up,' " Carter recalled. But the mayor said, " 'Well, we've kind of lost track of them.' I couldn't believe it."

After more than 18 months of research and six more working with the artist, the map was published.

By then, Carter was a partner in a busy law firm, serving on the board of a local hospital and its foundation, supporting area Republicans and volunteering with his college alumni association. He and his wife, Sandra, a Democrat (she's "very, very tolerant," her husband says wryly), had adopted four children, now 4, 6, 7 and 11.

"But the finished project was worth it," he said, and he's recouped his $2,000 investment.

In fact, he's already at work on another bio-map, of Ronald Reagan. Carter said Nixon's younger daughter, Julie, and her husband, David Eisenhower, grandson of President Eisenhower, have asked for one on Ike.

Carter said he'd like to do all the presidents, but that one may have to wait. After the Reagan project, Carter plans one on a Democrat. He hasn't decided between Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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Anglicans Open a Path to Bishopric for Gay Men

LONDON — Wading once more into an issue that has caused angry divisions among Anglicans around the world, the Church of England said Friday that gay clergymen in civil partnerships could become bishops as long as they vowed to remain celibate.

“The House has confirmed that clergy in civil partnerships, and living in accordance with the teaching of the church on human sexuality, can be considered as candidates for the episcopate,” or the office of bishop, Bishop Graham James of Norwich said in a statement.

The issue has been simmering here for years, most publicly in 2003, when the Rev. Jeffrey John, a Church of England priest who was in a long-term relationship with another male priest, was appointed bishop of Reading. Though the pair said they were celibate, the appointment provoked fury here and abroad, and Mr. John was pressed to step down.

He subsequently became the dean of St. Albans, and in 2007 entered into a civil partnership with his companion, the Rev. Grant Holmes.

The new policy was introduced in December, when the House of Bishops, a body within the church, published a list of recent decisions. One of those was to lift the ban on clergymen in civil partnerships becoming bishops. In 2005, the church ruled that people in civil partnerships could become clergy members, but the ruling did not apply to bishops.

The decision does not affect women in the church, who are not allowed to become bishops at all.

Nor does the policy have any bearing on gay priests not in civil partnerships, since they are also expected to be celibate, said a spokesman for the Church of England, the Rev. Arun Arora.

“The church makes a big distinction between sexual orientation and practice,” he said in an interview. “The bottom line is that we have no issue with sexuality — God loves you either way, and you can serve in the ministry. But when it comes to sex, the only way we understand it is that it should be expressed within the confines of marriage — whether you’re straight or gay.”

The British government has proposed allowing same-sex marriage, but, Mr. Arora said, that would not affect the church definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The issue has caused furious divisions within the worldwide Anglican Communion, whose members range from very conservative to very liberal — the Episcopal Church in the United States already allows gay clergy members, as well as women, to serve as bishops, for instance. Evangelical groups condemned the move, saying that the issue should have been taken up with the General Synod, the Church of England’s legislative body.

“That would be a major change in church doctrine and therefore not something that can be slipped out in the news,” Rod Thomas, chairman of Reform, a conservative church group, told the BBC. “It is something that has got to be considered by the General Synod.”

In his statement explaining the decision, Bishop James said that “all candidates for the episcopate undergo a searching examination of personal life and discipline.”

He added that “it would be unjust to exclude from consideration for the episcopate anyone seeking to live fully in conformity with the church’s teaching on sexual ethics or other areas of personal life and discipline.”

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How BuzzFeed Is Betting on Hollywood, Long-Form Writing to Grow

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Last January, BuzzFeed, then an aggregator of memes and cat videos, secured a $ 15.5 million round of venture capital to beef up a craft that most traditional media was downsizing: journalism.

It hired dozens of reporters and editors, opened bureaus in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and became a must-read for political junkies during the 2012 presidential election.

On Thursday, the company took another step.

It added adding a fourth round of capital investment – this time worth $ 19.3 million. And it plans to expand in two major ways: literary, long-form journalism like the kind practiced by New York magazine and the New Yorker, and – with two former Los Angeles Times staffers newly on board – its Hollywood coverage.

BuzzFeed’s been on a roll. According to the privately held company‘s internal traffic numbers, the 8 million unique monthly visitors it drew in 2008 has swelled to 40 million, and revenue for 2012 may triple that of 2011, a spokeswoman for BuzzFeed told TheWrap.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Tom Gara reported that some analysts place the company’s valuation at $ 200 million and say that revenues may reach $ 40 million this year.

Most of BuzzFeed’s traffic currently comes from its odd mix of news and eccentricity on the homepage. Friday morning, spotlighted stories ranged from J.J. Abrams screening his new “Star Trek” for a dying fan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin talking about breaking the glass ceiling to: “How to Murder Your Friend’s Facebook Page” and “Here Are Some Elephants Eating Christmas Trees.”

But there’s no question things are changing.

The first thing CEO Jonah Peretti did with his 2012 investment cash was hire Ben Smith, a Politico veteran, as the site’s first editor-in-chief. Smith then kicked off a hiring spree of reporters and got to work. Already BuzzFeed is beginning to break stories and get quoted by aggregators.

McKay Coppins, the site’s political editor, embedded with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign. John Stanton, a veteran reporter in Washington, was named BuzzFeed’s first D.C. bureau chief. Michael Hastings, the dogged journalist whose Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s private disagreements with President Obama over Afghanistan led to his resignation, joined the team.

Then, less than a year into its political foray, the site hired former Spin magazine chief Steve Kandell to make the push for longform journalism.

It began with an experiment – a 7,118-word post from last October titled “Can You Die From a Nightmare?” that garnered more than 115,000 hits. Another in October titled “Making Mitt: The Myth of George Romney” drew nearly 130,000 views. This convinced Smith and his team that literary journalism had a niche in the viral news market.

Despite the internet school of thought that briefer is better, Kandell said he has no plans to restrict stories’ word counts.

“If someone has a story that has to be 10,000 words, I don’t know why that couldn’t be,” Kandell said.

“I don’t think people necessarily have a certain fatigue level when it gets to a certain length and people start trailing out.”

Kandell says he plans in the coming months to start publishing at least one long-form story a week and may even start packaging and selling the stories as Amazon Kindle singles or as audiobooks.

Kandell assembled a “Best of 2012″ post for his nascent section of the site. The stories ranged from the tale of BuzzFeed’s own political editor Coppins, a Mormon, watching attitudes toward his and Romney’s religion change throughout the campaign to an inside look at the “Dark World of Online Sugar Daddies.”

Plans are to cover more foreign policy and national security issues from a Washington-centered perspective – and to add Hollywood into the mix. The only hands-off topic, apparently, will be international news.

“We’ve played around with ways to make world news more sharable, just like every editor at every publication,” he said, noting that readers liked a roundup of Instagram photos of the civil war in Syria. “It’s really hard, it’s not something we want to jump into without really knowing what we’re doing.”

As for Hollywood, BuzzFeed hired Richard Rushfield, former entertainment editor of LATimes.com, and ex-Times television editor Kate Aurthur, also a former Daily Beast staffer, to jump-start its bureau.

Smith said he plans to forge a presence in Los Angeles second only to its flagship New York bureau. A Hollywood vertical is expected to launch on January 7.

To that end, the site is entering a crowded space – one dominated by publications like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Vulture and the Times – but Rushfield said he plans to cover entertainment through BuzzFeed’s social-web lens: If it’s irresistibly share-worthy, it’s publishable.

“We have a unique position, despite how crowded the beat is,” Rushfield told TheWrap, adding that they won’t be competing with trades over stories concerning studio executives and casting deals. “One of our advantages is that we are not going to be going after every single story that the trades are – we have more room to take the things that we think can be interesting. What BuzzFeed is about is writing news that will be of interest to the social web.”

Now the trick is to make all these editorial investments worthwhile financially.

Revenue growth from its advertising model has been climbing, chief operating officer Jon Steinberg told TheWrap.

Forgoing the usual banners and display ads, BuzzFeed offers its clients “branded content.” For example, Scope mouthwash sponsored a “listicle” on the most “courageous” mustaches.

To that end, the advertising team, which is made up of 20 people that report to Steinberg, works with brands from General Electric to Virgin Mobile to devise sharable pieces of content.

The ratio of advertorial to editorial content on the homepage is usually about one to every six or so stories,” he said.

Those branded-content headlines garner 10-20 times the click-through rates of blinking banner and display ads, Steinberg told TheWrap.

“You compare those ads in the 1950s to modern advertising, you realize how broken modern advertising is,” Steinberg said. “Most publishers and media companies say you can’t make money on modern advertising.”

But – though he declined to reveal exact numbers, as BuzzFeed is a private company – the model helped to increase revenue last year and has allowed the publication to focus solely on its advertising stream.

He said the company has no immediate plans to enter the conference business popular with online publications including the Business Insider, AllThingsD and TheWrap.

“This is our Google ad words,” Steinberg said of the innovative advertising tool that Google pioneered in the mid-2000s. “If we were Apple, this would be our manufacturing of great hardware products.”

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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FDA proposes sweeping new food safety rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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Saving thousands of adoptable animals, one at a time

I hate to be a party pooper. So I've been eager to join the celebration over "No-Kill December" — the first time that Los Angeles city animal shelters have managed to go an entire month without euthanizing any adoptable dogs or cats.

But I couldn't help worrying that "No-Kill December" would lead to January slaughter.

What happened to all those dogs and cats — 1,000 in a typical December — the city shelters are forced to put to death every year? There's no way shelter employees could have found homes for all of them.

Not all, said L.A. Animal Services director Brenda Barnette. But enough to spark hope in animal lovers like me.

December capped a year in which fewer dogs and cats were impounded and more were adopted out, she said. That gave shelters space to keep animals longer — and saved the lives of almost 4,000 that might have been euthanized last year.

A coalition of animal welfare and rescue groups helped make that happen. Led by Best Friends Animal Society, which brought together volunteers and shelter officials, the group has mounted an effort to end euthanasia in Los Angeles in five years.

That seems impossible in a city that puts to death more than 50,000 would-be pets yearly. The numbers make it easy for cynics like me to consider last month's no-kill campaign little more than a feel-good gesture aiming at putting a happy face on a very ugly situation.

But I've come to see it as a promising example of what can happen when animal lovers work together, doing what they do best.

Small rescue groups are bailing animals out of shelters, housing them with volunteers and working overtime to get them adopted. Big animal welfare groups are pouring money into spay-neutering programs, subsidizing pet adoptions and showcasing animals to a national audience.

They are also bringing marketing savvy to an animal services department that, until now, could hardly manage its own website.

The branding campaign for No-Kill Los Angeles goes beyond the typical scenes of scraggly kittens and sad-eyed mutts, relying instead on comic YouTube videos and edgy documentaries.

Moving animals like merchandise, it turns out, can save their lives.

Los Angeles is overflowing with unwanted Chihuahuas. Philadelphia doesn't have enough. So Best Friends scooped up dozens from L.A. shelters and airlifted them to cities where yappy, purse-sized dogs are in demand. They gave the program a catchy name, and rescued 1,200 animals this year through Pup My Ride.

Another group, Found Animals, capitalized on the fact that many families look for dogs or cats as Christmas gifts. They offered discount coupons for hard-to-place pets — older animals, black dogs and cats, shy or overweight ones, those with medical issues. The group's Twelve Pets of Christmas campaign found homes for about 3,000 dogs and cats, more than double what organizers expected.

And if you watched the Rose Parade, you saw the blurb for L.A.'s animal shelters when the Beverly Hills Pet Care Foundation's "adopt an animal" float rolled by.

::

The month wasn't exactly no-kill; 620 animals were euthanized because they were considered too ill or too dangerous to be adopted. Even that can be considered progress though; that's 400 fewer than the number put to death last December because of illness or behavioral issues.

That drop is due to a push by rescue volunteers. They accuse the department of being too quick to give up on homeless animals who might just need a little more patience or personal attention.

"No-Kill December" hasn't gone over well with some of those animal activists, who see it as a smoke-and-mirrors way to hide the failings of a system that doesn't really care about cats and dogs. I've heard complaints from volunteers of overflowing shelters, where dogs were crammed five or six to a tiny kennel to make the December numbers look good.

But Best Friends director Marc Peralta said last month's success was a building block for a movement that doesn't seem like such a long shot anymore.

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Central Africa on the Brink, Rebels Halt Their Advance

Ben Curtis/Associated Press

A convoy of soldiers from Chad who are fighting in support of President Francois Bozize of the Central African Republic, traveled on the road to Damara, north of the capital, Bangui, on Wednesday.

Rebel forces halted their advance on Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, on Wednesday and said they were prepared to enter into peace talks with the government.

The announcement, made by rebel spokesmen, heralded the possibility of a peaceful resolution to a conflict that has driven thousands of civilians from their homes and into the dense Central African forest, seeking refuge from the violence that has accompanied similar uprisings in recent years.

President François Bozizé has in recent days declared his willingness to negotiate, and peace talks are already being planned in nearby Gabon, though the government gave no official response to the rebels’ negotiation offer. In a separate development, Mr. Bozizé announced in a radio address on Wednesday that he had fired his son from his post as defense minister and would fill that position himself. Mr. Bozizé has criticized the army for failing to contain the rebel uprising.

As a precondition to talks, the rebels have demanded that government forces stop arresting members of the Gula tribe, from which many rebels hail, said Col. Djouma Narkoyo, a rebel spokesman. In negotiations, the rebels would insist upon the departure of Mr. Bozizé, another spokesman said.

The rebels were refusing peace talks just a few days ago. Their decision to change course may be linked to the arrival in the Central African Republic of additional troops from a coalition of neighboring countries, sent as reinforcements for Central African government forces.

The rebels of the Seleka Coalition, an alliance of several factions mostly from the country’s north, have overrun and occupied several northern cities in a drive toward Bangui, in the south, that gathered speed last month, seeking to depose Mr. Bozizé. A military officer who seized power in 2003, Mr. Bozizé has since been elected president twice; the rebels say he has not given the north a voice in government and has failed to live up to the terms of peace agreements signed with rebels beginning in 2007.

Confronted by a growing multinational African force outside Damara, the final strategic city on the road to the capital, the rebels halted their advance, according to news reports. A contingent of about 700 soldiers was deployed to the city on Wednesday, including soldiers from Chad, Gabon, Cameroon, Angola, and the Republic of Congo.

“I have asked our forces not to move their positions starting today because we want to enter talks in Libreville for a political solution,” said another rebel spokesman, Eric Neris-Massi, referring to the Gabonese capital, Reuters reported. He said the rebels continued to demand that President Bozizé step down “because we doubt his sincerity,” according to Agence France-Presse. He could not be reached for further comment.

Should the rebels press on with their offensive, they risk setting off a regional conflict, according to the commander of the multinational African force in the country, which operates under the aegis of the Economic Community of Central African States.

“If the rebels attack Damara, it’s a declaration of war” against the 10 member states, said Jean-Félix Akaga, the Gabonese general leading the coalition force. “Damara is the red line that the rebels cannot cross.”

Coalition forces are preventing Central African soldiers from advancing north of Damara as well, General Akaga told journalists.

In Bangui, residents have stockpiled food and water. Clusters of soldiers and police officers are stationed throughout the city, and a curfew is in effect from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m.

France, the former colonial power, has deployed about 600 French soldiers to Bangui to protect French assets and citizens in the Central African Republic. President François Hollande has insisted that France will not use its military to defend Mr. Bozizé’s government, as it has in the past.

Hippolyte Marboua contributed reporting from Bangui, Central African Republic.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 4, 2013

An article on Thursday about a halt by rebels who had been advancing on the Central African Republic capital, Bangui, misidentified, in some editions, one of the countries contributing soldiers to a growing multinational African force that confronted the rebels on Wednesday outside Damara, the final strategic city on the road to Bangui. It is the Republic of Congo, not the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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iPad still dominates tablet Web traffic; Microsoft Surface has smaller share than PlayBook

The iPad is still by far the most widely used tablet for surfing the Web in North America, but it can no longer claim to lord over 90% of all North American tablet traffic. Via AppleInsider, the latest numbers from mobile advertising firm Chitika show that the iPad accounted for roughly 79% of all mobile traffic in the last week of December, a dominant share that was nonetheless a seven percentage point drop from the previous week.

[More from BGR: Samsung confirms plan to begin inching away from Android]

In contrast, Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle Fire HD saw its traffic grow by three percentage points over the same period to account for 7.5% of all North American tablet traffic while Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Tab models saw their share increase by nearly 1.5 percentage points to 4.39% of all North American tablet traffic.

[More from BGR: ‘iPhone 5S’ to reportedly launch by June with multiple color options and two different display sizes]

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface was practically a non-factor in Chitika’s measurements, accounting for 0.4% of North American tablet traffic — even less than RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry PlayBook.

This article was originally published by BGR

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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