Judge Halts California Internet Sex-Offender Law

A federal judge late Friday blocked enforcement of a California voter-approved measure that would have dramatically curtailed the online, First Amendment rights of registered sex offenders.

Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote in November, would have required anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco also said the measure was overbroad.

“The challenged provisions have some nexus with the government’s legitimate purpose of combating online sex offenses and human trafficking, but the government may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals,” he wrote.

The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would also have forced sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or online forums and in internet chat rooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately filed suit after its passage. The measure would currently affect some 75,000 sex offenders registered in California, but the law also requires those convicted of human trafficking to register as sex offenders, thus widening the pool of people affected.

The measure carries three-year prison penalties.

Henderson had tentatively blocked enforcement of the measure immediately after it passed. His decision Friday is in the form of a preliminary injunction. Next up is a trial on the lawsuit’s merits, if it gets that far.

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

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Simon Rattle to quit Berlin Philharmonic in 2018

BERLIN (Reuters) – Renowned British conductor Simon Rattle said on Thursday he would step down as head of the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic in 2018 when his current contract with the orchestra expires and before he turns 64.

“In 2018 I will be nearly 64 years old,” the 57-year-old said in a statement on the Philharmonic’s website. “As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles’ question ‘Will you still need me… when I’m 64?’” he joked.

“This was not an easy decision. I love this orchestra and therefore wanted to tell them my decision as early as possible.”

Rattle, known for his youthful energy, his readiness to take risks and his mop of curly grey hair, took over the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s leading orchestras, in 2002.

The first Briton to hold a post previously associated with such giants of German music as Herbert von Karajan, Rattle has sometimes upset music traditionalists in his adopted land with his love of experimentation and his unorthodox approach.

Rattle has described his sometimes turbulent relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic as “a love affair”.

Critics have accused him of lacking appropriate German gravitas in such a high-profile cultural role and of caring more about the public image of the orchestra than about the music.

But his many supporters have welcomed efforts to reach out to new audiences as well as his success in forging relations with other orchestras around the world, including Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.

“With his outstanding musicality and creativity he has filled new listeners with enthusiasm for the orchestra every day and has shaped the national and international perception of the Berliner Philharmonic as a vital cultural ambassador for Berlin,” said Martin Hoffmann, the orchestra’s general manager.

Rattle, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, worked as conductor of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in central England for 18 years before moving to Berlin.

(Reporting by Gareth Jones; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

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Mutual Funds Found Big 2012 Gains, Despite Political Worry

ECONOMIC growth remained sluggish and politics often intruded on the markets, yet stocks achieved solid returns last year all the same. It wasn’t the first time that investors scaled a wall of worry, but it might be the only instance when the main source of concern, at least in the fourth quarter, was thought to be a cliff.

Tim Kelly/Reuters

A computer factory in Kobe, Japan. A resurgence in China's economic growth this year could help the stocks of various kinds of companies, including commodity providers.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 13.4 percent for the year, even with a 1 percent decline in the fourth quarter. In those last months, doubts rose about whether Congress and President Obama could reach an agreement on taxes and spending in time to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff — and the recession that was thought to lie below.

The drama in Washington was one of several throughout the year that kept investors focused more on capitols than corporate boardrooms. European leaders were continually devising plans to rescue the euro and some of the economies that use it, and China underwent a change of leadership.

Although the fourth-quarter loss was worse soon after Election Day and stocks raced ahead at the start of the new year, investors’ concerns may yet prove well founded. The immediate concerns related to taxes were resolved only at the 11th hour — just past midnight, really — and much remains to be sorted out on spending. Investment advisers said that politics, at home and abroad, would continue to guide markets.

“The political environment and uncertainty revolving around policy decisions has been a really big factor,” said Jeremy DeGroot, chief investment officer of the fund provider Litman Gregory. “There are significant deficit issues that developed economies are facing, and the markets are hanging on every development.”

One bit of uncertainty was eliminated on Jan. 1, when Congress agreed to limit the scope of scheduled tax increases, although the deal still resulted in higher tax rates on payrolls, dividends and capital gains.

Worries also abated when European Union finance ministers agreed in the fourth quarter to place big banks under the supervision of the European Central Bank. That followed the bank’s announcement that it would support the bond markets of weaker economies, which are concentrated along the region’s southern periphery.

THE moves on both sides of the Atlantic helped stock funds achieve modest fourth-quarter gains. The average domestic fund in Morningstar’s database rose 0.9 percent. International funds fared better, up 4.8 percent, on average, with portfolios that focus on European stocks returning 7.4 percent and emerging-market funds rising 6.2 percent. Full-year returns exceeded 14 percent for all four categories.

Yields on short- and long-term debt remained low all year as the Federal Reserve and other central banks maintained the easy monetary policies in force since the 2008 crisis. While that could account for much of stocks’ strength during 2012, the influence on bond returns, at least on high-quality government issues, may be waning.

The average bond fund rose a healthy 8.4 percent on the year, but the fourth-quarter gain was a slim 1.3 percent, dragged lower by a 1.1 percent loss for portfolios of long-term government bonds. High-yield bond funds rose 3.1 percent for the quarter, on average, and funds that specialize in debt issued in emerging economies gained 3.9 percent.

Just how helpful low interest rates were for economic growth is hard to discern. American economic output has continued to expand at a sluggish pace. And Europe is widely seen to be in recession.

“The trend of deterioration in Europe is not slowing down,” said Virginie Maisonneuve, head of global and international equities at Schroder Investment Management. She noted, though, that some indicators suggested that conditions were stabilizing at very low levels along the continent’s troubled southern fringe.

Whatever the economic impact of low interest rates, they seem to be helping corporate America. Corporate debt issuance last year exceeded $1 trillion for the first time.

Increased indebtedness provides leverage that lifts profit margins, said Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist of the fund management company GMO. Margins have reached record levels as a proportion of economic output and are “weirdly high,” in his opinion, “unless we’re in one of those wonderful secular shifts that people talk about but almost never see.” He doesn’t glimpse any such new normal, however, and cites high margins as a reason to be cautious about most stocks.

Rising debt of another kind is a pressing concern for many investors. With the national debt above $16 trillion, the second part of the fiscal cliff debate, focusing on spending cuts, is expected to be played out over the next month or so in Washington.

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Southbound 5 Freeway at Grapevine reopened

Southbound Interstate 5 at the Grapevine was reopened Friday morning about 8 a.m. but the northbound lanes remained closed because of icy road conditions, the California Highway Patrol said.

Drivers were being escorted by CHP cruisers on the southbound side of the freeway as a precaution, officials said. CHP planned to escort cars on the northbound side Friday morning, but don't know what time that will begin.

The freeway was closed at the steep Grapevine grade Thursday afternoon as a cold winter storm pounded Southern California. 

Stranded motorists jammed hotels and parking lots of food outlets off Interstate 5 in Lebec on Thursday evening, trying to determine whether to wait out the reopening or find an alternate route. Truck drivers lined up along roadsides just off the freeway, near various food outlets.

At the Best Western Hotel in Lebec, which sold out of all rooms by early Thursday evening, many who were stranded crowded around tables in the breakfast room, watching the news and hoping for updates on the reopening of Interstate 5.

Tanya Viau said she sat for two hours on the freeway before being diverted off around 4:30 p.m. The deckhand for San Francisco ferries was headed from the Sacramento area to San Diego to visit her son, who had recently graduated.

"I felt fortunate to get a room," Viau said. "I've been driving this route for 30 years and this is the first time I've ever been stranded."

Jim McCluskey hurried out of the Best Western around 6:30 a.m. to try his luck getting onto the 58 Freeway and traversing the desert to try to get south. McCluskey had been headed to Castaic and turned up at the Best Western after being diverted from the freeway Thursday afternoon. 

"I've been stuck several times in the past, I'm used to it," he said.

Floyd Osborne and Dan Tobias, who were headed from Bakersfield to Lancaster, pored over computer maps to determine alternate routes.

Truck driver Samuel Watson, 23, said he arrived in Lebec around 1:30 p.m. Thursday and ended up getting stranded. He didn’t find out about the Grapevine being closed until he was already on the road from Ripon, Calif., to Torrance.

Watson ended up sleeping in the cab of his rig loaded with hazardous materials. He had extra warm clothing, adding he was always prepared and always had something to sleep on.

He was hoping to make it back to the Stockton area by Saturday to celebrate his 24th birthday.

Truck driver Ricardo Roman set out for an eight-hour trip from Sacramento and arrived in Lebec at 4 a.m. He was headed to Santa Fe Springs and was expected to make a delivery for Kohl’s department store at 8 a.m. Friday.

He said he had been in the trucking business for eight years and had enough clothes and food to get him through the ordeal.

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FAA Launches Review of Boeing 787 Dreamliner

The FAA will be conducting a “comprehensive review of the design and production of the Boeing 787,” according to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Concern over Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner has grown this week after a lithium ion battery caught fire on board one of the new airliners in Boston on Jan. 7, one of several issues that have arisen since the airplane entered service more than a year ago.

Both the FAA and Boeing emphasized that the airplane is safe to fly and that all of the recent incidents with the aircraft were typical of a new jet entering commercial service. Secretary LaHood says he has confidence both in the certification of the airplane and the airplane itself.

“Throughout the development of the Boeing 787, the FAA logged 200,000 hours on the certification of the aircraft to ensure it met our high level of safety,” Secretary LaHood said during today’s press conference. “I believe this plane is safe, and I would have absolutely no reservation of boarding one of these planes and taking a flight. These planes are safe.”

The 787 will continue to be flown by airlines during the review.

Indeed, there appeared to be plenty of support for the Dreamliner from both Secretary LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. Both repeated on multiple occasions their belief that the Boeing 787 is safe, raising the question of why a review is being conducted if the airplane underwent such a rigorous certification process and is considered safe to fly by both administrators.

“The purpose of the review is to validate the work that we have done and to look at the quality and other processes to ensure that effective oversight is being done,” FAA Administrator Huerta told reporters. He said the FAA wants to look at the entire design and production process and not simply focus on recent events. But Huerta did add there would be an emphasis on the 787′s electrical systems, which have caused the bulk of the issues affecting the new airliner.

At separate points during the press conference both Huerta and LaHood referenced this week’s incidents. “Our focus is on developing a complete picture of these incidents and focusing on whatever actions we need to take to resolve them,” Administrator Huerta said.

Monday’s fire in Boston happened after passengers had disembarked the airplane. The fire was traced to one of the lithium ion batteries used for the auxiliary power unit at the back of the airplane. Administrator Huerta dodged a question about the safety of using a lithium ion battery in the 787 after a reporter asked about past concerns over shipping the batteries in transport airplanes having been addressed by different aviation agencies. But in the past the agency mandated that lithium ion batteries be removed from a jet model made by Cessna and replaced with non-lithium ion batteries after a fire concern was raised by the manufacturer.

Boeing points out that Monday’s battery fire was contained to the electronics bay where the battery was located, adding that if a fire were to occur during a flight, the area is designed to contain the fire and protect critical systems. The fuel leak that occurred on Jan. 8 has been blamed on a valve that was accidentally left open, causing the fuel to flow into a surge tank and out a vent as it is designed to do.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and CEO Ray Conner emphasized these design features today when answering questions about the fire and other recent issues. “Once the incidents have happened, the airplane has performed exactly as designed,” he said. “The redundancies that we have put into this machine are phenomenal, and the airplane performed perfectly in that respect.”

He added that the company of course would prefer if the incidents did not happen at all, and the goal of the new review is “root cause, corrective action.”

There were four other electrical issues on 787s over the past year and three of the incidents have been traced to a problem with a single batch of circuit boards manufactured by a supplier in Mexico according to the Seattle Times. Another electrical fire during flight testing of the airplane was traced to “foreign object debris,” because somebody dropped something in an electrical bay that led to the fire.

Conner noted the 787 has flown more than 50,000 commercial hours since entering service in December 2011 and there are more than 150 Dreamliner flights every day around the world with well over a million passengers flown. He says the 787′s entry into service is “on par” with the company’s last all new airplane, the 777.

“We are not seeing anything that is exceptionally unusual in terms of what we’re going through” Conner said.

Aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group agrees, mostly. He says so far the issue affecting the 787 appear to be minor, no show stoppers. But he believes the 787 has experienced an abnormal number of issues, something that could be expected because of the large number of new technologies being used on the airplane.

“There are certainly a lot more unusual incidents than with the 777,” Aboulafia told Wired. “But on the other hand we’re not looking at anything like a repeat of the [McDonnell Douglas] DC-10 which is the only American jetliner to have its certification withdrawn for any period of time.”

After multiple crashes of the DC-10 in the 1970s, the FAA suspended the aircraft’s type certificate in 1979 for a month following the investigation of a crash in Chicago.

Aboulafia says the extra-close scrutiny of the 787 may be focusing more attention on the teething issues Boeing is experiencing. The comparison made by Boeing’s Ray Conner between the 787 and the 777 is accurate as far as the dispatch rate of both airplanes is concerned during the early part of their respective entries into commercial service. And the 777 entered service in 1995, long before the media saturation of the internet allowed close scrutiny of the general public via countless news outlets and blogs.

There have been no passenger or crew fatalities with the 777 and only two “hull loss” crashes, where the airplane is subsequently scrapped, since it was introduced.

The FAA said there was no timetable set for the current review of the 787 design and production and it will largely depend on the information that is generated by the review, “we are driven by data, and what the data shows us.” But Adminsistrator Huerta said it will occur, “as expeditiously as possible.”

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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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