Seattle bankruptcy hearing to decide Tully’s sale

SEATTLE (AP) — The auction for beleaguered coffee company Tully’s will likely conclude Friday in federal bankruptcy court, with an ownership group led by actor Patrick Dempsey in position to take over the chain. But Starbucks isn’t’ out of the running.

Dempsey — dubbed “McDreamy” in the “Grey’s Anatomy” hospital TV drama — claimed victory last week after an auction.

But a company that teamed up with Starbucks to bid for the Tully’s chain filed an objection Wednesday. AgriNurture Inc. says it’s still willing to proceed with its combined bid with Starbucks of about $ 10.6 million. The bid from Dempsey’s company, Global Baristas LLC, was for $ 9.2 million.

Tully’s has 47 shops in Washington and California with more than 500 employees. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October.

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Well: Calling All Cauliflower

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.

This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:

Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually it is located somewhere in the Mediterranean). This week I landed in Sicily. I was nosing around my cookbooks for some cauliflower recipes and opened my friend and colleague Clifford A. Wright’s very first cookbook, “Cucina Pariso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily.” The cuisine of this island is unique, with many Arab influences – lots of sweet spices, sweet and savory combinations, saffron, almonds and other nuts. Sicilians even have a signature couscous dish, a fish couscous they call Cuscusù.

Cauliflower is a favorite vegetable there, though the variety used most often is the light green cauliflower that we can find in some farmers’ markets in the United States. I adapted a couple of Mr. Wright’s pasta recipes, changing them mainly by reducing the amount of olive oil and anchovies enough to reduce the sodium and caloric values significantly without sacrificing the flavor and character of the dishes.

I didn’t just look to Sicily for recipes for this nutrient-rich cruciferous vegetable, but I didn’t stray very far. One recipe comes from Italy’s mainland, and another, a baked cauliflower frittata, is from its close neighbor Tunisia, fewer than 100 miles away across the Strait of Sicily.

Here are five new ways to cook with cauliflower.

Sicilian Pasta With Cauliflower: Raisins or currants and saffron introduce a sweet element into the savory and salty mix.

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Baked Ziti With Cauliflower: A delicious baked macaroni dish that has a lot more going for it nutritionally than mac and cheese.

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Cauliflower and Tuna Salad: Tuna adds a new element to a classic Italian antipasto of cauliflower and capers dressed with vinegar and olive oil.

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Tunisian Style Baked Cauliflower Frittata: A lighter and simpler version of an authentic Tunisian frittata.

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Sicilian Cauliflower and Black Olive Gratin: A simple gratin that is traditionally made with green cauliflower, but is equally delicious with the easier-to-obtain white variety.

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Your Money: She’ll Tell You, It’s Time to Think Ahead

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Once Chanel Reynolds had enough emotional distance from her husband's death, she built the site that attempts to convince others to take a couple of hours now to spare themselves countless hours of hardship later.

In the days after Chanel Reynolds’s husband was hit while riding his bicycle near Lake Washington here and the best cases just kept getting worse, she was not yet consumed by grief. There were no dogged middle-of-the-night Web searches for faraway cures for his crushed upper spine or tearful bedside vigils with their 5-year-old son.

Instead, the buzz in her brain came from a growing list of financial tasks that grown-ups are supposed to have finished by the time they approach middle age. And she and her husband, José Hernando, had not finished them.

“I was finding it really hard for me to stay present and in the room and to be able to hear what the doctors were saying because I was so overwhelmed with not knowing how much money we had in our checking account, and the fact that we had our wills drafted but not signed,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to float a family by myself.”

In the many months of suffering after Mr. Hernando’s death in July 2009, she beat herself up while spending dozens of hours excavating their financial life and slowly reassembling it. But then, she resolved to keep anyone she knew from ever again being in the same situation.

The result is a Web site named for the scolding, profane exhortation that her inner voice shouted during those dark days in the intensive care unit. She might have called it Getyouracttogether.org, but she changed just one word.

The site offers some basic financial advice, gives away free templates for a master checklist and provides starter forms to draft a will, living will and power of attorney. There’s also a guide to starting a list of all of the accounts in your life that someone might need to access and shut down in your absence.

All of these forms and lists are already out there on the Web in various places, though rarely in one place. But there are two things that make Ms. Reynolds’s effort decidedly different.

First, the world of personal finance suffers from an odd sort of organizational failure. We tend to organize our thinking around products: retirement accounts, mortgages, long-term care insurance.

But in the real world, it’s a big life event that often governs our hunt for solutions. Sometimes, it’s a happy one, like getting married. But there are few ready-made tool kits like the one Ms. Reynolds has assembled for people considering the possibility of serious illness or death.

The other thing that compelled me to sprint here right after I stumbled across her site Tuesday night was that it is not neutered, stripped of the mess of feelings that govern much of what we do with our money. Sometimes, we just need to meet the person in personal finance. Maybe, just maybe, hearing the story of someone who has been there, in the worst possible way, can finally push us all into action.

And we desperately need to act. According to a survey that the legal services site Rocket Lawyer conducted in 2011, 57 percent of adults in the United States do not have a will. Of those 45 to 64 years of age, a shocking 44 percent still have not gotten it down.

People who get a fatal diagnosis from a doctor at least have a bit of time to sort things out. But Ms. Reynolds and her husband had made only a few plans.

Mr. Hernando was 43 years old on the day in July 2009 when a van mowed him down while making a left turn into the path of his bicycle. He was a self-taught engineer who played guitar in a band called Moonshine back when Seattle was the world capital of rock. At the time of his death, he rode for a cycling team and was a Flash developer working at the highly regarded firm Frog Design.

Given all that vitality, death was the farthest thing from Ms. Reynolds’s mind when she kissed him goodbye after failing to persuade him to take their son along for the ride. Which was why she was confused when she checked her phone from a party two hours later and found 14 missed calls, none of which were from numbers she recognized.

After his death, this much was clear: The family with the six-figure income and the four-bedroom house that they had bought in the Mount Baker neighborhood one year before had a will with no signature, little emergency savings and an unknown number of accounts with passwords that had been in Mr. Hernando’s head.

What saved Ms. Reynolds, now 42, from ruin was life insurance. They didn’t have a lot, but they had just enough (a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the end) to keep her from having to go right back to work as a freelance project manager and sell the house at a big loss right away. It helped pay for the education of their son, Gabriel, who is now 9, and for Mr. Hernando’s daughter from a previous relationship, Lyric, who is 16 and still close to Ms. Reynolds and her brother. Ms. Reynolds now carries a $1,000,000 term policy on her own life.

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Wired Oscars: Share Your Picks for the 2013 Academy Award Nominees

The nominees for the 85th Academy Awards were announced this morning, with Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln and Les Miserables leading in nominations for the most prestigious golden statues of bald men awarded annually in the world of film.

The nominees were selected by members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – after a delay due to technical difficulties with the first ever online voting system — and the winners will be announced at the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on Feb. 24.

But who cares what they think! Regardless of what happens in the “canonical” version of the Oscars, Wired will be assembling its own alternate universe version of how the most prestigious awards in film should go down, and we’d like your input. Tell us your choices for the winner in nine of the most important categories — or write in your own nominees if you think the Academy dropped the ball. (How could they forget best directors Ben Affleck/Quentin Tarantino/Kathryn Bigelow/Joss Whedon! The humanity!)

Share your picks below in our two-page poll and then keep scrolling for the full slate of nominees, from Best Actor to Best Live Action Short Film.

Complete list of 2013 Academy Awards Nominees:

BEST PICTURE
Amour - Nominees to be determined
Argo - Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck and George Clooney, Producers
Beasts of the Southern Wild – Dan Janvey, Josh Penn and Michael Gottwald, Producers
Django Unchained – Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin and Pilar Savone, Producers
Les Misérables – Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward and Cameron Mackintosh, Producers
Life of Pi – Gil Netter, Ang Lee and David Womark, Producers
Lincoln – Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers
Silver Linings – Playbook Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen and Jonathan Gordon, Producers
Zero Dark Thirty – Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Megan Ellison, Producers

DIRECTOR
Amour – Michael Haneke
Beasts of the Southern Wild – Benh Zeitlin
Life of Pi – Ang Lee
Lincoln – Steven Spielberg
Silver Linings Playbook – David O. Russell

LEAD ACTOR
Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln
Hugh Jackman in Les Misérables
Joaquin Phoenix in The Master
Denzel Washington in Flight

LEAD ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva in Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild
Naomi Watts in The Impossible

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin in Argo
Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master
Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln
Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams in The Master
Sally Field in Lincoln
Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables
Helen Hunt in The Sessions
Jacki Weaver in Silver Linings Playbook

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Brave – Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman
Frankenweenie – Tim Burton
ParaNorman – Sam Fell and Chris Butler
The Pirates! Band of Misfits – Peter Lord
Wreck-It Ralph – Rich Moore

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Anna Karenina – Seamus McGarvey
Django Unchained – Robert Richardson
Life of Pi – Claudio Miranda
Lincoln – Janusz Kaminski
Skyfall – Roger Deakins

COSTUME DESIGN
Anna Karenina – Jacqueline Durran
Les Misérables – Paco Delgado
Lincoln – Joanna Johnston
Mirror Mirror – Eiko Ishioka
Snow White and the Huntsman – Colleen Atwood

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
5 Broken Cameras – Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
The Gatekeepers – Nominees to be determined
How to Survive a Plague – Nominees to be determined
The Invisible War – Nominees to be determined
Searching for Sugar Man – Nominees to be determined

DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
Inocente – Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine
Kings Point – Sari Gilman and Jedd Wider
Mondays at Racine – Cynthia Wade and Robin Honan
Open Heart – Kief Davidson and Cori Shepherd Stern
Redemption – Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill

FILM EDITING
Argo – William Goldenberg
Life of Pi – Tim Squyres
Lincoln – Michael Kahn
Silver Linings Playbook – Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers
Zero Dark Thirty – Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Amour – Austria
Kon-Tiki – Norway
No – Chile
A Royal Affair – Denmark
War Witch – Canada

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
Hitchcock – Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane
Les Misérables – Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell

ORIGINAL SCORE
Anna Karenina – Dario Marianelli
Argo – Alexandre Desplat
Life of Pi – Mychael Danna
Lincoln – John Williams
Skyfall – Thomas Newman

ORIGINAL SONG
“Before My Time” from “Chasing Ice” Music and Lyric by J. Ralph
“Everybody Needs A Best Friend” from “Ted” Music by Walter Murphy; Lyric by Seth MacFarlane
“Pi’s Lullaby” from “Life of Pi” Music by Mychael Danna; Lyric by Bombay Jayashri
“Skyfall” from “Skyfall” Music and Lyric by Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth
“Suddenly” from “Les Misérables” Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg; Lyric by Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Anna Karenina – Production Design: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Production Design: Dan Hennah; Set Decoration: Ra Vincent and Simon Bright
Les Misérables – Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Anna Lynch-Robinson
Life of Pi – Production Design: David Gropman; Set Decoration: Anna Pinnock
Lincoln – Production Design: Rick Carter; Set Decoration: Jim Erickson

ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Adam and Dog – Minkyu Lee
Fresh Guacamole – PES
Head over Heels – Timothy Reckart and Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly
Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare” – David Silverman
Paperman – John Kahrs

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
Asad – Bryan Buckley and Mino Jarjoura
Buzkashi Boys – Sam French and Ariel Nasr
Curfew – Shawn Christensen
Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw) – Tom Van Avermaet and Ellen De Waele
Henry – Yan England

SOUND EDITING
Argo – Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn
Django Unchained – Wylie Stateman
Life of Pi – Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton
Skyfall – Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers
Zero Dark Thirty – Paul N.J. Ottosson

SOUND MIXING
Argo - John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia
Les Misérables – Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes
Life of Pi - Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin
Lincoln – Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins
Skyfall – Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson

VISUAL EFFECTS
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White
Life of Pi – Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott
Marvel’s The Avengers – Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick
Prometheus – Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill
Snow White and the Huntsman – Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Argo – Screenplay by Chris Terrio
Beasts of the Southern Wild – Screenplay by Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin
Life of Pi – Screenplay by David Magee
Lincoln – Screenplay by Tony Kushner
Silver Linings Playbook – Screenplay by David O. Russell

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Amour - Written by Michael Haneke
Django Unchained - Written by Quentin Tarantino
Flight - Written by John Gatins
Moonrise Kingdom - Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
Zero Dark Thirty - Written by Mark Boal

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Architecture writer Ada Louise Huxtable, awarded first Pulitzer for criticism, dead at 91

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic who was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has died. She was 91.

Huxtable, who was the architecture critic for the New York Times from 1963 to 1982 and, later, the Wall Street Journal, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the Journal reported.

Huxtable was a firm believer in the power of tall buildings to enhance a city and decried the cookie-cutter suburban developments springing up around New York in the 1960s.

“The promise of… a new, improved suburbia in the greater metropolitan area, the dreams of beauty and better living are mire in mud,” Huxtable wrote in Newsweek magazine. She added that these suburban landscapes – including those in Staten Island “could not be better calculated to destroy the countryside if….planned by enemy action.”

In her final piece for the Journal – a look at the renovation plans for the landmark New York Public Library, dated December 3, 2012 – Huxtable wrote: “Buildings change; they adapt to needs, times and tastes. Old buildings are restored, upgraded and converted to new uses. For architecturally or historically significant buildings with landmark protection, the process is more complex; subtle, subjective and difficult decisions are often required. Nothing, not even buildings, stands still.”

A native New Yorker, Ada Louise Landsman was born March 14, 1921, the daughter of a doctor. She graduated from Hunter College in 1941. A year later, she married L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer, and together they produced tableware for the Four Seasons Hotel.

Throughout the 1940s, she continued graduate school at New York University but was more interested in her work as a curatorial assistant for architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

From 1950 to 1963, she contributed articles to “Progressive Architecture” and “Art in America.” She became the first architecture critic of the Times in 1963. She wrote more than 10 books. Her early essays were collected in the book “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?”

She was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1970. In 1981 she was awarded a MacArthur genius grant.

She also served for a time a juror for the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

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F.D.A. Requires Cuts to Dosages of Ambien and Other Sleep Drugs

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Thursday that it was requiring manufacturers of popular sleeping pills like Ambien and Zolpimist to cut their recommended dosage in half for women, after laboratory studies showed that they can leave people still sleepy in the morning and at risk for accidents.

The agency issued the requirement for drugs containing the active ingredient zolpidem, by far the most widely used sleep aid. Using lower doses means less of the drug will remain in the blood in the morning hours, and leave people who take it less exposed to the risk of impairment while driving to work.

Women eliminate zolpidem from their bodies more slowly than men and the agency told manufacturers that the recommended dosage for women should be lowered to 5 milligrams from 10 milligrams for immediate-release products like Ambien, Edluar and Zolpimist. Dosages for extended-release products should be lowered to 6.25 milligrams from 12.5, the agency said. The agency also recommended lowering dosages for men.

An estimated 10 to 15 percent of women will have a level of zolpidem in their blood that impairs driving eight hours after taking the pill, while only about 3 percent of men do, said Dr. Robert Temple, deputy director for clinical science in the F.D.A.'s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Doctors will still be told that they can prescribe the higher dosage if the lower one does not work, Dr. Temple said.

“Most people thought that by the morning it is gone,” he said. “What we’re reminding people is that is sort of true, but that in some women who take a full 10 milligram dose, and in a lot of people who take the control release dose, it is not entirely true. Some people will be impaired in the morning.”

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Colleges Expect Lower Enrollment

 An annual survey of colleges and universities found that a growing number of schools face declining enrollment and less revenue from tuition.

  The survey, released by the credit reporting agency Moody’s Investors Service on Thursday, found that nearly half of colleges and universities that responded expect enrollment declines for full-time students, and a third of the schools expect tuition revenue to decline or to grow at less than the rate of inflation.

  Moody’s analysts say the problems are particularly acute at smaller, tuition-dependent schools and lower-rated universities, which have less ability to raise prices or attract students.

   “The cumulative effects of years of depressed family income and net worth, as well as uncertain job prospects for many recent graduates, are combining to soften student market demand at current tuition prices,” said Emily Schwarz, a Moody’s analyst and lead author of the report, in prepared remarks.

  The growing financial challenges for colleges and universities come a time when students and graduates have amassed more than $1 trillion in student debt, and many of them are struggling to pay their bills. Nearly one in six people with an outstanding student loan balance is in default, the federal government says.

  Before the financial crisis of 2008, colleges and universities routinely raised tuition and saw little impact on the number of prospective students who applied. Indeed, some private colleges said that applications actually increased when they boosted prices, apparently because families equated higher prices with quality.

  But that attitude has changed, in part because families’ income has declined. Ms. Schwarz also noted, “Tougher governmental scrutiny of higher education costs and disclosure practices is adding regulatory and political pressure to tuition and revenue from rising at past rates.”

  In addition, she noted that budget negotiations in Congress could lead to cuts in student aid programs, even as the share of students that depend on government help continues to rise. At public universities, federal loans fund a median of 40 percent of student charges; at private schools, the median is 21 percent.

  Overall, 18 percent of private universities and 15 percent of public schools that responded to the survey projected a decline in net tuition revenue for fiscal 2013. A much larger share, about one-third, said net tuition revenue would decline or grow by less than 2 percent.

  “Such weak revenue growth often means a college cannot afford salary increases or new program investments unless it cuts spending on staff and existing programs,” the Moody’s report said. By comparison, in fiscal 2008, only 11 percent of private schools and 9 percent of publics failed to grow tuition revenue by 2 percent or more.

  Growing awareness of student debt has focused increased attention on the value and cost of higher education, which has risen faster than inflation for decades as a result of increased spending on administrators, financial aid and debt for new buildings, and higher costs for items that have impacted all businesses, like health care.

  The Moody’s survey included 165 non-profit private universities and 127 responses from four-year public universities.

 

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LAPD says serial killer suspect may have more victims

Los Angeles police officials said they plan to comb through scores of old unsolved murders to see whether a reputed 72-year-old serial killer carried out slayings in the city beyond the three women he is suspected of killing in the 1980s.

Samuel Little, who authorities allege also killed women in Florida and Mississippi, currently is being held at California's Wasco state prison. He was charged Monday and is expected to return to Los Angeles for arraignment this week on the counts of murder with special circumstances.

LAPD's cold case homicide detectives now plan to take a methodical look at evidence from scores of unsolved murder and death cases dating back to the 1980s and early 1990s to determine whether Little may have been involved.

Prosecutors have charged Little in connection to three L.A. killings that appear to be sexually motivated strangulations: Carol Alford, 41, found dead on July 13, 1987; Audrey Nelson, 35, whose body was discovered Aug. 14, 1989; and Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, found Sept. 2, 1989. Their bodies were discovered in the Central Avenue-Alameda Street corridor, just south of downtown, although police have not released the exact locations where the victims were found.

LAPD detectives Mitzi Roberts and Rick Jackson, who investigated the cases, said there is DNA evidence linking Little, but declined to elaborate further because of the ongoing investigation. Roberts and Jackson spent months criss-crossing the country following Little’s path.

Two years ago, the LAPD arrested a man they said was the notorious “Grim Sleeper,” allegedly responsible for at least 10 slayings in South L.A. After his arrest, LAPD detectives examined hundreds of unsolved deaths involving women in the city with "high-risk lifestyles."

Detectives said they will focus on sexually motivated strangulations. But they also expect inquiries from law enforcement agencies around the country because Little has a criminal record in 24 states dating back to the 1950s.

Detectives said they believe he committed thefts during the day to make money to finance the bar-hopping that brought him into contact with his alleged victims.

“It was theft by day and murder by night,” Jackson said.

Little, who also used the name Samuel McDowell, served relatively little time in state prison or county jail, the detectives said. In the early 1980s, he was accused of two murders and two attempted murders in Gainesville, Fla., and Pascagoula, Miss.

Little was acquitted by a Florida jury in the strangulation death of Patricia Ann Mount, 26, whose body was discovered Sept. 12, 1982.

He was never brought to trial in the Mississippi cases, which include the strangulation death of Melinda LaPree, 24, on Sept. 14, 1982. That case has been reopened by the Pascagoula Police Department in light of new evidence, authorities said.

Little moved from the South to California in the mid-1980s, settling first in San Diego.

He served more than two years in state prison after being convicted of assault and false imprisonment of two San Diego women in separate cases, police said. Shortly after being paroled, he moved to Los Angeles.

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Raspberry Pi Quickly Approaches 1 Million Units Sold

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced yesterday that Element14, a division of electronics maker Premier Farnell, has manufactured their 500,000th Raspberry Pi unit — an impressive pace for the $35 bare-board Linux computer that was released in February of 2012.

The milestone becomes even more noteworthy when coupled with the fact that they utilize a second manufacturer as well, RS Components. The team behind the tiny computers make note of the implication in their announcement, stating, “We don’t have completely up-to-date figures from RS Components yet, but Farnell’s news suggests that we’re well on the way to having sold our millionth Raspberry Pi.”

A million units sold at $35 amounts to $35 million dollars, which amounts to a massive success, and that’s before adding in additional revenue from accessory and case sales. The feat is noteworthy considering that message boards and Twitter feeds are often brimming with complaints about retailers being sold out of the diminutive computer boards.

In commemoration of the quickly approaching milestone, Raspberry Pi published an infographic from Element14 about their board sales, including a note that if stacked up end-to-end, the tower would rise 25.6 miles — a mile and a half higher than Felix Baumgartner’s RedBull Stratos space jump.

The chiefs at the Raspberry Pi Foundation are understandably excited by the results of the partnership. “Since the Raspberry Pi was launched globally in February 2012 it has been a tremendous success story,” says Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. “The younger generation has demonstrated significant intrigue in learning how to build and program their own computer device. And what has been great to see is the enormous growth in the hobbyist market. I have seen projects from Twittering chickens to home beer-brewing kits being created using the Raspberry Pi and its accessories.”

Not content to rest, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is partnering with Element 14 to distribute the product worldwide in 2013, further spreading the seeds of the creative computer. While busy expanding their global footprint, Element 14 is also proud to have relocated their manufacturing lines from China to England, proving that high-volume consumer electronics can be produced in the west.

Illustration: Element14 

Joseph Flaherty writes about design, DIY, and the intersection of physical and digital products. He designs award-winning medical devices and apps for smartphones at AgaMatrix, including the first FDA-cleared medical device that connects to the iPhone.

Read more by Joseph Flaherty

Follow @josephflaherty on Twitter.

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Oprah to interview Armstrong for Jan. 17 show

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lance Armstrong has agreed to an interview with Oprah Winfrey in which he is to address allegations he used performance-enhancing drugs during a career in which he won seven Tour de France titles.

According to Winfrey’s website on Tuesday, this will be a “no holds-barred interview.” It will be the first with Armstrong since his cycling career crumbled under the weight of a massive report by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. The report detailed accusations of drug use by Armstrong and teammates on his U.S. Postal Service teams.

It’s unclear if the interview at Armstrong’s home in Austin, Texas, has already been taped. Nicole Nichols, a spokeswoman for Oprah Winfrey Network & Harpo Studios, declined comment.

The show will be broadcast Jan. 17 at 9 p.m. EST on OWN and Oprah.com.

Armstrong has strongly denied the doping charges that led to him being stripped of his Tour de France titles, but The New York Times reported Friday he has told associates he is considering acknowledging the use of performance enhancers.

The newspaper report cited anonymous sources, and Armstrong lawyer Tim Herman told The Associated Press that night he had no knowledge of Armstrong considering a confession.

Earlier Tuesday, “60 Minutes Sports” reported the head of USADA told the show a representative for Armstrong offered the agency a “donation” in excess of $ 150,000 several years before an investigation by the organization led to the loss of Armstrong’s Tour de France titles.

In an interview for the premiere on Showtime on Wednesday night, USADA chief executive Travis Tygart said he was “stunned” when he received the offer in 2004.

“It was a clear conflict of interest for USADA,” Tygart said. “We had no hesitation in rejecting that offer.”

Herman denied such an offer was made.

“No truth to that story,” Herman wrote Tuesday in an email to the AP. “First Lance heard of it was today. He never made any such contribution or suggestion.”

Tygart was traveling and did not respond to requests from the AP for comment. USADA spokeswoman Annie Skinner said Tygart’s comments from the interview were accurate. In it, he reiterates what he told the AP last fall: He was surprised when federal investigators abruptly closed their two-year investigation into Armstrong and his business dealings, then refused to share any evidence they gathered.

“You’ll have to ask the feds why they shut down,” Tygart told the AP. “They enforce federal criminal laws. We enforce sports anti-doping violations. They’re totally separate. We’ve done our job.”

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