Outstanding ?Legal? U.S. Immigrants in 2011 ? Survivaltimes's Blog

Dear Readers,

? It?s a fact!? ?Legal? immigration in the U.S. provides amazing success stories every year.? This article captures just a few remarkable stories.

? Enjoy ?

Bob Grafe

Editor & Columnist?

By?Dan Moffett,?About.com Guide

Immigrant Americans grabbed their share of headlines in 2011. But not all those headlines were flattering.

It Was a Year of Scandal for the Governator

After leaving office as California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger made plenty of headlines ? most of them in the tabloids.

Schwarzenegger admitted fathering a child with his longtime housekeeper, and wife Maria Shriver filed for divorce. It was Hasta la vista, Arnold!By the end of 2011, there were rumors of reconciliation for the couple, however.

Born in Thal, Austria, in 1947, Schwarzenegger moved to the United States when he was 21.?He may have violated immigration laws by overstaying his visa before becoming a U.S. citizen in 1983 and the Hollywood superstar we all know and try to love.

Natalie Hershlag, better known to moviegoers as Natalie Portman, has dual Israeli and American citizenship.

Portman was born in Jerusalem in 1981, and her family moved to the United States in 1984. She graduated from Harvard College in 2003 and went on to take graduate courses at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In February, she won the Oscar for best actress in a leading role for her performance in Black Swan. She also won a Screen Actors Guild award and Golden Globe for the role.

Madeleine Albright Receives USCIS Honor

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services honored former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright with its Outstanding American by Choice award.

Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), in 1937, she emigrated to the United States as a teenager as her family fled communist rule in the Soviet bloc.

Albright became the first woman to serve as secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her in 1996. Albright was a strong supporter of an expanded NATO and the Clinton administration?s ?assertive multilateralism.? ,p>She became a U.S. citizen while studying at Wellesley College in the 1950s.

Ozzie Guillen Named Miami Marlins Manager

The newly renamed Miami Marlins?signed Ozzie Guillen to a four-year, $10 million deal to manage the ballclub.

Along with his wife and son, the Venezuelan native took the Oath of Allegianceon Jan. 20, 2006, his 42nd birthday and only three months after he led the Chicago White Sox to the World Series Championship.

?A lot of people fight and die to be American citizens,? says Guillen. ?A lot of Latin people are dying to be where I am today.?

Miami is just the place for this outspoken skipper who never leaves people guessing what he?s thinking.

Indra Nooyi Leads PepsiCo.?s Global Expansion

CEO Indra Nooyi continued to grow PepsiCo.?s global markets and produce some staggering numbers. The company now has the world?s largest portfolio of billion-dollar food and beverage brands, including 19 different product lines that each generate more than $1 billion in annual sales.

As a school girl growing up in Chennai, India, Nooyi had no inkling that decades later, she would become the chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company and one of the world?s most influential women.

?I admired everything about this country,? she says of the United States. Nooyi became a U.S. citizen in 1990.

Pierce Brosnan Makes Frightening Return to TV

Irish actor Pierce Brosnan made a triumphant return to television, starring in the miniseries ?Bag of Bones,? an A&E Network production based on a 1998 Stephen King novel.

Brosnan?s last big gig on TV was as detective Remington Steele.

Brosnan played James Bond four times in the movies, but he says the one role that will serve him a lifetime is that of an American citizen. He took the oath in 2004. He said President George W. Bush made him do it:

?I became an American so I could have a voice and vote Bush out of office. It?s tragic what he has done, from the war in Iraq?to the environment.?

Huffington Sells Web Site to AOL and Pockets Millions

Born Arianna Stasinopoulou in Athens, Greece, she became a naturalized American citizen in 1990.

In February, AOL announced it was paying her $315 million to acquire The Huffington Post, the news site she co-founded.

As part of the deal, Huffington, 61, agreed to stay on as president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media group within AOL. Not bad for an on-line journalist who believes journalists should work for free.

?

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BP to pay $7.8 billion to settle Gulf oil spill lawsuit

By NBC News and msnbc.com staff

NEW ORLEANS -- BP and a committee representing 100,000 fishermen,?sickened cleanup workers?and others suing over the 2010 Gulf oil spill have reached an estimated $7.8 billion?agreement to settle the lawsuit,?company officials said late Friday.

Federal Judge Carl Barbier, who also announced the settlement pact but did not provide details,?said that as a result of?the deal, the?trial?scheduled to begin Monday has been postponed for a second time.

No new date was immediately set.

The agreement?will be filed with the court for approval, Barbier said.

The settlement will likely result in a realignment of the parties in this litigation and require substantial changes to the current trial plan, he?said. He didn't elaborate, and there was no mention in his order of anything about the status of BP's talks with the federal government and other parties.

Bob Dudley, BP Group CEO,?said in a statement obtained by NBC News that?the oil company worked for two years to meet its obligations to the Gulf Coast region.

"The proposed settlement represents significant progress toward resolving issues from the Deepwater Horizon accident and contributing further to economic and environmental restoration efforts along the Gulf Coast," Dudley said.

BP said it estimated that the cost of the proposed settlement, expected to be paid from a $20 billion trust set up after the spill, would be approximately $7.8 billion. This includes a BP commitment of $2.3 billion to help resolve economic loss claims related to the Gulf seafood industry.

Before?the proposed settlement, BP said, the company spent more than $22 billion, including paying out?more than $8.1 billion to individuals, businesses and government entities and?$14 billion?on?"operational response."

The proposed settlement does not include claims against BP made by the U.S.?Department of Justice or other federal agencies, including those under the Clean Water Act and for Natural Resource Damages under the Oil Pollution Act, or by?state and local governments, BP said.

The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing more than 200 million gallons of oil from an undersea well owned by BP. The spill soiling sensitive tidal estuaries and beaches, killing wildlife and shutting vast areas of the Gulf to commercial fishing.

The main targets of litigation resulting from the explosion and spill were BP, Transocean, Halliburton and Cameron International, maker of the well's failed blowout preventer. BP, the majority owner of the well that blew out, was leasing the rig from Transocean.

BP ?reported 2011 profits of $40 billion, $7.7 billion alone in the last quarter. It recently raised its dividend to shareholders by 14 percent. BP recently said it has 5 deep water rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico and expects to be operating an additional three by the end of 2012.

More content from msnbc.com and NBC News

Source: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/02/10565976-bp-says-it-reached-78-billion-deal-on-suit-over-2010-gulf-oil-spill

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Orwell's Startling World Is Officially Here ? Just Wondering ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Twitter RSS · Just Wondering ? Alternative News and Opinions ... Or was he blowing the whistle on what he'd found out while inside the Fabian Society with his predictive cohort Aldous Huxley? Something is super fishy for ...

Source: http://www.zengardner.com/censorship-2/orwells-startling-world-is-officially-here/

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Article 387: Principles of Venture Capital and Angel Investment ...

English: Diagram of venture capital fund struc...

Image via Wikipedia

In the information age, new approaches rise for managing resources and business in a more rigor ways depend on logic and reasoning and more realistic and pragmatic application of management theories. The topic we refer to here is Venture Capital Investment.(VCI)

Definition

Simply put, when we buy a new company, expand operations, acquire a business, or raise Capital. We have to decide to go for Venture Capital (VC) funding as a bank loan, or asking money from Angel Investors (AI).

Angel investors are people who invest in companies in return for partial ownership of the company. The AI ?share VC, in looking for a large return on their investment. Often angel investors seek companies with growth rates of no less than 30% a year. So if any one think they have a home run of a business on their hand, they may qualify for business funding from an angel investor.

VCI promotes business, it begins small, and become huge through time and successful management. It begins with innovative workable idea as a start up, and opportunities to expand. That is why Venture Capitalists are interested in beginning venture projects. Venture Capitalists in fact invest in hopes of big yields in the future rather than investing in already flourishing businesses.

?The Picture and Data about VCI and AI

On the negative side, the capital markets everywhere are a mess and with no liquidity, but on the positive side is that capital markets are efficient and will work around the bottleneck we are observing. ?Investors in venture capital, Angel & Private equity funds are discovering that their stakes are worth less than they paid for them.

There are plenty of people who believe the VC should follow a certain model. The debate recently, took off when recent study on the results of Venture Capital investments into angel-backed companies in the United States concluded that:

a) After a Venture Capital invests, ?chances of failing ?are ?increasing significantly;

b) 1000 of companies that deserve funding aren?t getting it. For example, ?VC funds financed only 167 start-ups in 2002. ?17.3% average return for early-stage VC funds during the 20-year;

c) Venture Capital has become a lottery system, examples, ?4% of all VC reaped over 65% of the rewards; only ?2% are ?home runs?, projects with annual returns of 100%.

?VCI and Conflict:

VCI cannot be smoothly managed without conflicts. Expertise and attitudes sometimes influence business free-conflict zone. ??It is true to say: ?Getting along better with others is easier said than done.? Therefore, attitudes of financiers, mangers and engineers are powerful factors to make business projects successful.

Saying this, people usually look for satisfaction of their strongest desire, which is to be treated fairly and with respect. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge each other to create foundation for mutual trust, credibility, and friendship.

The Win-Win Situation:

Management thinking should follow the ?Win-Win approach to be more successful. In VCI stock holders as well as mangers should always be open to negotiation looking for the benefits of both parties in any venture capitalists Investment project.

Projects

Many of us think of cross borders joint-venture projects. Some establish successful venture firms begins from one million to hundreds of millions in one or more projects cover several fields, such as the technology, the medicine, the pharmaceutical tools, and communication technology. Some invest part of their companies revenues for that purpose, a proportion between 5% to 50 % of their companies revenues for the purpose of venture investment. Almost all venture firms follow the ideal venture play invading wider markets. The most successful fields are those involved future health care, for example, followed by information and communication technologies. But some obstacles may stand ahead of some firms which lack raising venture capital, even though they have the ideas for investment. Therefore, failure of venture capital investment would be expected, where seven out of ten venture investments totally fail.

?VCI Failure:

What makes venture investment fail is looking to achieve a multiple or triple or even ten times return in a short time. If the goal of such firms failed, then the whole venture investment project will fail.

VCI Needs:

Venture Capitalists needs building several principles. For example, confidentiality, positive reputations, ?credibility, trust and clarity in addition to attitudes. One more factor influence VCI and AI success is optimism: to be optimistic, I believe, is an essential factor in taking risk, ?is not enough for achieving successful venture investment, because the function of committees, groups, meetings, teams may delay the process by creating more problems than easing the way to success. Endless meetings without taking actively decisions to improve productivity may prevent efforts to continue optimism.

About the author: Hasan A. yahya Professor, Dr. Hasan A. Yahya is an Arab American writer, scholar, and professor of Sociology,?SME Expert,?He graduated from Michigan State University with? 2 Ph.d degrees. He published 66 books plus (45 Arabic and?21 English), and?500 plus articles on sociology, religion, psychology, politics, poetry, and short stories. Philosophically, his writings concern logic, justice and human rights worldwide. Dr. Yahya is the author of Crescentologism: The Moon Theory,??Islam Finds its Way. His recent publication is : Jesus Christ Speaks Arabic. www.dryahyatv.com

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BumeBox Threw eBay A Social Media Party And 14M People Saw It

image001 (1)Startup BumeBox throws social media "parties to help brands engage with their customers. Its latest success story: eBay. Not that you actually need BumeBox to engage fans on social networks, but the service helps put together special, limited-time events, which can then be aggregated and embedded ? so fans could participate directly on Twitter, or they could jump into the conversion from the company's website.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/iMFR6rs159A/

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Walter to Lead I CARE Foundation Criminal Law Oversight Committee

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Upon graduation from law school in 1970, Mr. Walter was hired as a staff attorney by the New York City Legal Aid Society, rising to Attorney ?In- Charge of the Society's Bronx Criminal Court Office supervising about 35 ...

Source: http://pressreleases.bloginteract.com/2012/03/01/top-new-york-criminal-defense-lawyer-joel-s-walter-to-lead-i-care-foundation-criminal-law-oversight-committee/

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Acer S5201M

Interactive short-throw projectors like the Acer S5201M ($900 street) aren't as inherently impressive as interactive ultra-short-throw projectors like the Editor's Choice Optoma TW675UTi-3D ($1800 street, 4 stars), but they're less expensive. The S5201M is a fairly typical representative of the breed.

What makes ultra-short-throw projectors like the TW675UTi-3D or the Hitachi iPJ-AW250N ($1,800 street, 4 stars) so impressive is that they can throw big images from short distances. For the 78-inch wide image we use for most testing, they typically need only 10 to 15 inches between the projector and the screen.

For the same size image, the Acer S5201M needed 49 inches in my tests. That's enough farther to make it a little harder to avoid shadows when you're standing close enough to the image to interact with it. However, it's far closer than the nine or more feet a standard projector would need, close enough so shadows aren't a major issue, and not a bad tradeoff for the lower price.

The S5201M is also smaller and lighter than ultra-short throw projectors. When I reviewed the Hitachi iPJ-AW250N, I pointed out that unlike other ultra-short-throw models, including the Optoma TW675UTi-3D and Dell S500wi ($1,599 direct, 4 stars), it was light enough to serve as an occasional traveling companion. The S5201M is definitively in the portable category, at 3.9 by 11.4 by 10.0 inches (HWD) and 7.7 pounds.

The Basics
Aside from its interactive feature, the S5201M is a fairly typical portable projector. Built around a DLP chip, it offers a native XGA (1,024 by 768) resolution and a 3,000 lumen brightness rating. Setup is standard fare for an interactive projector, with more inputs than you might expect on a portable. Choices include two HDMI ports for computers or video sources, two VGA ports for computers or component video, and both composite video and S-video ports.

As you might expect from the DLP chip, the S5201M uses Texas Instrument's approach to interactivity, so it doesn't need calibration. The projector adds a grid over the image that the supplied interactive wand can see to report the position you're pointing to. Simply turn on the projector, set it to interactive mode, and point the wand (or pen if you prefer to call it that). Note too that the wand doesn't need to touch the screen, which means you can turn literally any surface into the equivalent of an interactive whiteboard.

Image Quality
The S5201M scored reasonably well for data image quality. Colors were a little dark in terms of a hue-saturation-brightness color model, and yellow was a little mustard, but still well saturated and acceptably bright. Beyond that, the projector did a good job even with some of the toughest screens on our standard suite of DisplayMate tests. Both black on white and white on black text were easily readable down to the smallest sizes we test with, and even with an analog connection, screens that tend to show pixel jitter were rock solid.

Video image quality wasn't in the same league as data image quality. The projector had a serious problem handling shadow detail (details based on shading in dark areas), losing details in scenes that few other projectors have problems with. With scenes that tend to bring out the problem, large areas of the screen turned into solid black. It handled brighter scenes well enough to be usable, but, as with most interactive projectors, the S5201M is clearly not designed for video, and I wouldn't use it for anything more than short clips at most.

Other Issues
One related issue is that the S5201M tends to show rainbow artifacts easily, with light areas breaking up into little red-green-blue rainbows. This is a potential problem for any single-chip DLP projector because of the way DLP chips create color. However, some projectors show the rainbows more easily than others, and people vary in how sensitive they are to seeing them.

With the S5201M the rainbows show relatively often, particularly with video. For data screens, even those who are sensitive to the effect will probably consider the projector acceptable. However, they will likely see rainbows often enough with video to find them annoying, which is another good reason to limit video on the S5201M to short clips.

As with most projectors in this weight class, the built-in audio is hardly worth having. The sound system, with two 5-watt speakers, was good enough in my tests to make out spoken words at low volume, but it suffered from distortion and clipping that only got worse at higher volumes. If you need good quality sound, plan on using an external audio system.

One final feature that demands mention, mostly because it's much more limited than you might expect, is 3D. To begin with, using 3D can get expensive, because you have to outfit your entire audience with DLP Link glasses at $70 to $100 each. That's a good reason by itself to ignore the feature. Also note that, as with most interactive projectors with 3D, you can't use 3D and interactive mode at the same time.

It's also not clear what the 3D ready feature is ready for. The documentation says it will work only over a VGA connection. But it also says it will work with an NTSC DVD player (which would not be connected by VGA) to play HQFS 3D DVDs. (Unfortunately, I don't have any 3D DVDs to test that claim. We basically ignore the format for testing, since the image quality is no match for Blu-ray 3D.) As of this writing, the Acer representative I spoke to has been unable to confirm whether, as with most 3D-ready projectors, the S5201M requires a computer with a Quadbuffered, Open GL 3D-compatible graphics card or, if not, what its requirements actually are.

Issues about 3D aside, I'd like this projector better if it didn't show rainbow artifacts so easily. Even as is, however, it can do the job it's meant for, in 2D at least. The interactivity works as promised, and the data image quality, portability, and low price are strong points. If you want an interactive projector and don't want to pay the extra cost that goes with an ultra-short throw like the Editors' Choice Optoma TW675UTi-3D, the S5201M is at least worth a look.

More Projector Reviews:
??? Acer S5201M
??? Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 3010e
??? Acer H9500BD
??? BenQ Joybee GP2
??? Epson EX7210 Multimedia Projector
?? more

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Yours for $400,000: A deserted French village

Sarah DiLorenzo / AP

The village of Saint Nicolas Courbefy, in Limousin, France, on Feb. 28, 2012. The entire hamlet was put up for sale with an asking price of just $400,000, the cost of a studio apartment in Paris.

Sarah DiLorenzo / AP

The village swimming pool could perhaps do with a spring clean.

The Associated Press reports from?Courbefy, France?? The village of Courbefy has rustic buildings with fireplaces and exposed beams, a horse stable, a tennis court and a swimming pool.

Sound nice? It's for sale.

The saga of the abandoned hamlet is a story of flight from rural France, bad economic times and real estate schemes gone awry. It's turned the mayor of the village next door into a minor celebrity whose office fields inquiries from places as far flung as Qatar and China.

The village in Limousin, about 280 miles southwest of Paris, was put on the block last week because its latest owners, who had run it as a luxury hotel and restaurant, had long stopped paying their mortgage.

The entire hamlet ? with more than a dozen buildings?? carried an asking price of just ?300,000 ($400,000) ? about the cost of a studio apartment in Paris.

Take an aerial tour of the village or continue reading the tale of its rise and fall.

?

Source: http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/01/10547897-for-sale-deserted-french-village-pool-included

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TED 2012: UPenn Flying Robots Play a Mean Keyboard

Some of the biggest leaps in aerial mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania have come straight out of professor Vijay Kumar's mechanical engineering lab. Small, unmanned aircraft can coordinate their positions across a group without the aid of any central coordinator.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/Dlk9_oI3pKo/

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China village election fever tests bounds of democracy (Reuters)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - Hundreds of Chinese clapped and cheered their favorite candidates on Wednesday ahead of the election of a new village committee, creating a front line of democratic activism after a violent standoff over corrupt land grabs.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/china/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120229/wl_nm/us_china_wukan_election

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