News Update Place

Star magazine has hit a baby bump in the road.
       Reese Witherspoon filed a lawsuit against the publication Wednesday, arguing that a “phony” June 26 cover story headlined “Reese & Julia–Baby #3″ and featuring shots of Witherspoon and        Julia Roberts was a “callous effort to boost the tabloid’s sagging sales,” according to court documents obtained by E! Online.
The Oscar winner is claiming she has suffered significant distress and damage to her good name because of the story.
In a statement, Star’s attorney called the lawsuit “frivolous.”
The magazine cover in question directed readers to check out the inside pages to “get all the happy details,” apparently referring to Witherspoon’s alleged pregnancy. “Going for Baby No. 3!” was the tagline in the issue’s table of contents. The cover photo also appeared front and center on Star’s Website.
The story, on pages 56 and 57 of the June 26 issue, went on to quote a source mulling over “what appeared to be a four-month baby bump” spotted on the 30-year-old actress while she was sunning on the beach in May. The unidentified observer also said that Witherspoon was wearing an “old-fashioned 1920s-style bathing suit that covered her tummy” and that she spotted the Legally Blonde star at another time coming out of a Santa Monica baby boutique “carrying a bag from the store.”
And, according to the article, the source had seen Witherspoon at least three times this past month “always wearing Empire-waist dresses or baggy clothes.”
Witherspoon’s complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, goes on to cite another large picture of her in the June 26 issue featuring a circle drawn around her stomach with the caption: “Reese went shopping in Beverly Hills June 7 wearing another loose-fitting Empire-waist dress. Hmmm…”
The mother of two has expressly denied everything implied by all of the above: Not pregnant. No baby bump. No weight gain. Hasn’t been shopping for baby-related items. Period.
Her legal camp also referred to what they called a “despicable” line from the article, which stated that Witherspoon has two movies coming up and she “just doesn’t want to break the news to producers just yet,” as equally false.
While the Star article did state that Witherspoon’s reps had denied she was expecting, it quoted the above source saying “she’s a very private person and doesn’t often talk about it when she’s pregnant.”
Court documents state that the defamatory cover story portrayed Witherspoon in a “false and offensive light in violation of her right of privacy,” and that her reps had alerted Star before the issue was published that the so-called scoop it was going ahead with was untrue, making the magazine’s cover a misappropriation of her image.
Aside from Star Editorial, Witherspoon is gunning for parent company American Media Inc.; the writers of the story, Maggie Harbour and Suzy McCoppin; and the as-yet unidentified editor(s) who worked on the piece.
Witherspoon is asking for an unspecified amount of damages and her lawyers noted in the suit that they are demanding a jury trial. The first hearing in the case has been set for Oct. 23.
“It is a frivolous lawsuit.? It has no legal merit and we intend to vigorously defend it and have every confidence that we will prevail,” said Mike Kahane, the general counsel for American Media.
Meanwhile, what we know for sure about Witherspoon’s public-private life is that she has two children with husband        Ryan Phillippe, six-year-old Ava Elizabeth and two-year-old Deacon, and that she’ll appear with        Christina Ricci in the romantic fable Penelope and is signed up to star in Sports Widow, a comedy about a frustrated wife who takes up her husband’s sport of choice–watching football–in order to get back at him for neglecting her.

LOS ANGELES - New earthquake research confirms the southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is overdue for a Big One. The lower section of the fault has not produced a major earthquake in more than three centuries.

The new study, which analyzed 20 years of data and is considered one of the most detailed analyses yet, found that stress has been building up since then, and that the fault could rupture at any moment.

“The southern section of the fault is fully loaded for the next big event,” said geophysicist Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Predicting exactly when that might happen, however, is beyond scientists’ ability.

The analysis was published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Experts have estimated that a quake on the southern San Andreas of magnitude-7.6 or greater could kill thousands of people in the densely populated greater Los Angeles area and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage.

It was the 800-mile San Andreas fault, which runs down California like a scar, that caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that led to about 3,000 deaths.

But scientists know very little about the 100-mile dormant southern segment, which slices through Southern California from San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, to near the Mexican border.

The section last popped in 1690, producing an estimated 7.7-magnitude quake, but caused little injury or damage because hardly anyone lived there at the time.

Using satellite radar and global positioning data, Fialko measured the movement of the southern San Andreas between 1985 and 2005. Small movements along a fault can relieve strain. Calculating those subtle motions allows scientists to figure out how much strain is building up.

Fialko found that the southern end of the fault has shown little movement and that significant strain is building up. The fault’s slip rate, or average annual movement, was measured to be about an inch a year — similar to previous estimates.

Surprisingly, Fialko found the two sides of the southern San Andreas behaved differently, with one side showing more flexibility than the other. This could help scientists understand potential earthquake risks, he said.

Ken Hudnut, a

U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist in Pasadena, who had no role in the study, said the latest research reaffirms the need to study the mysterious southern San Andreas more closely.

In the fall, Hudnut will head a $240,000 project that would conduct tests on the southern segment to get a better idea of the threat it poses.

___

On the Net:

U.S. Geological Survey: http://www.usgs.gov

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: http://www.sio.ucsd.edu

LOS ANGELES - New earthquake research confirms the southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is overdue for a Big One. The lower section of the fault has not produced a major earthquake in more than three centuries.

The new study, which analyzed 20 years of data and is considered one of the most detailed analyses yet, found that stress has been building up since then, and that the fault could rupture at any moment.

“The southern section of the fault is fully loaded for the next big event,” said geophysicist Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Predicting exactly when that might happen, however, is beyond scientists’ ability.

The analysis was published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Experts have estimated that a quake on the southern San Andreas of magnitude-7.6 or greater could kill thousands of people in the densely populated greater Los Angeles area and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage.

It was the 800-mile San Andreas fault, which runs down California like a scar, that caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that led to about 3,000 deaths.

But scientists know very little about the 100-mile dormant southern segment, which slices through Southern California from San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, to near the Mexican border.

The section last popped in 1690, producing an estimated 7.7-magnitude quake, but caused little injury or damage because hardly anyone lived there at the time.

Using satellite radar and global positioning data, Fialko measured the movement of the southern San Andreas between 1985 and 2005. Small movements along a fault can relieve strain. Calculating those subtle motions allows scientists to figure out how much strain is building up.

Fialko found that the southern end of the fault has shown little movement and that significant strain is building up. The fault’s slip rate, or average annual movement, was measured to be about an inch a year — similar to previous estimates.

Surprisingly, Fialko found the two sides of the southern San Andreas behaved differently, with one side showing more flexibility than the other. This could help scientists understand potential earthquake risks, he said.

Ken Hudnut, a

U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist in Pasadena, who had no role in the study, said the latest research reaffirms the need to study the mysterious southern San Andreas more closely.

In the fall, Hudnut will head a $240,000 project that would conduct tests on the southern segment to get a better idea of the threat it poses.

___

On the Net:

U.S. Geological Survey: http://www.usgs.gov

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: http://www.sio.ucsd.edu

WASHINGTON - Will you walk into my parlor, said a Cretaceous spider to an ancient fly. The classic spider’s web, like Charlotte would have woven, was invented just once, way back in the Cretaceous period some 136 million years ago, scientists report.

Called an orb web, it’s the generally circular style spun by two major types of spiders, which had raised the possibility of the two groups evolving this form separately.

But a paper in Friday’s issue of the journal Science says a comparison of the spider genes related to web making shows that the orb web developed just once.

Researchers led by Jessica Garb of the University of California, Riverside, compared orb-web building spiders in the genuses Deinopoidea and Araneoidea. Both build orb webs to catch prey and the deinopoids also include net-casting spiders that throw a modified orb web over their prey.

Araneoids include the orb weavers such as golden silk spiders with their traditional spiraling web as well as those that weave sheet webs.

Garb said in a statement that the finding “does not support a double origin for the orb web,” but indicates that the unique design evolved only once.

While the two groups probably developed orb-web spinning from a common ancestor, they came up with different ways of making the web catch prey.

Araneoid webs have glue droplets that make prey stick to the web, while deinopoids wrap their threads with a different type of silk fiber that “the spiders comb, until it almost has the appearance of Velcro under a microscope, and they snag insects that way,” Garb reported.

Not all spiders make orb webs. The black widow, for example, weaves a web that is a tangle of silk without the circular pattern.

In a separate paper in the same issue, a team of researchers including David A. Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History reports the discovery of a Cretaceous-era spider web encased in amber along with some captured insects.

The amber, found in Spain, preserved 26 strands of silk, many of them connected to one another. Glue droplets are visible on the web and prey includes a fly, a mite, a beetle and a wasp.

The amber was dated to about 110 million years ago and is the oldest known example of a web with trapped insects, according to Grimaldi.

This finding confirms that spiders and complex, sticky webs date back early enough to have affected the evolution of the most diverse groups of flying insects, the researchers said.

Garb’s research was funded by the        National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office while that of Grimaldi was supported by the Spanish-French Scientific Research Program and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.

On the Net:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it was investigating possible anticompetitive practices in airline passenger fares and cargo shipments, hours after UK authorities raided British Airways Plc in what was described as a transatlantic probe.
“The antitrust division is investigating the possibility of anticompetitive practices involving surcharges and rates for passenger fares and air cargo shipments,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

The statement did not identify which airlines were under investigation and Justice Department officials declined to comment.

Earlier Thursday, British Airways (BA) (BAY.L) said the UK’s Office of Fair Trading and the U.S. Justice Department were investigating passenger ticket prices and fuel surcharges. Two BA officials were suspended during the probe.

British authorities said they visited BA’s offices on June 13 as part of a civil and criminal investigation into alleged price coordination and that the probe was “at an early stage.”

American Airlines (NYSE:AMR - news), United Airlines (Nasdaq:UAUA - news) and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic (VA.UL) said they were also involved in the probe but were not direct targets.

The four airlines are the only carriers allowed to fly direct between London’s Heathrow Airport and the United States under bilateral treaties.

In February, the U.S. Justice Department and the        European Union’s executive arm raided several airlines on both sides of the Atlantic in a probe involving surcharges on airline cargo shipments.

Separating urine from the rest of sewage would save electricity at treatment facilities, says Jac Wilsenach, who is getting his Ph. D. by studying the idea.
 
Among the challenges: Toilets would all have to be replaced by new versions that do the separating, likely requiring men to sit down when they go Number 1.
Here’s why it might be worth it:
While urine accounts for less than 1 percent of wastewater, it contains 50 to 80 percent of the nutrients that need to be filtered out, said Wilsenach, of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.
By separating urine, phosphate and nitrogen that need to be removed can be extracted more effectively. Wilsenach concludes that if 50 percent of the urine is separately purified, the energy needed to do the treating would be cut by 25 percent.
An added bonus, Wilsenach says: Sewage wouldn’t stink so much.
Oh, and about those new toilets. Here’s how that setup would work: Urine would be collected in tanks that serve a building or a neighborhood, then periodically transported to a purification plant.
Another idea might be to use the pee to run a battery, a process perfected in separate research reported last year. Or, maybe the folks over at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be interested. They buy pee, as do drug companies, and it seems there’s never enough to go around.
Wilsenach’s study, announced today, has not been reported in a peer-reviewed journal.

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Original Story: Pee Power: Researcher Says Urine Deserves Separate Treatment