Utah home inspired by Disney movie 'Up' sold

In this July 6, 2011 photo, a full scale rendition of the house in the animated movie, "Up," located a in Herriman, Utah, will be part of this year's Parade of Homes. The house has been sold to a family who are self-described Disney and Pixar fanatics. Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif., are buying the home in Herriman, Utah, for $400,000. The Hamblins say they were searching for a home in California that was similar to the colorful cottage seen in the movie when they heard about the Disney-approved "Up" house in Utah. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Fraughton)

In this July 6, 2011 photo, a full scale rendition of the house in the animated movie, "Up," located a in Herriman, Utah, will be part of this year's Parade of Homes. The house has been sold to a family who are self-described Disney and Pixar fanatics. Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif., are buying the home in Herriman, Utah, for $400,000. The Hamblins say they were searching for a home in California that was similar to the colorful cottage seen in the movie when they heard about the Disney-approved "Up" house in Utah. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Fraughton)

FILE - This July 6, 2011 file photo shows a full scale rendition of the house in the animated movie "Up" lin Herriman, Utah. This highly detailed recreation of the house from the Academy Award-winning movie "Up" has become a curious visitor attraction in this suburban development south of Salt Lake City. It's now been sold by the builder to a couple who loved the movie as much as he did. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Fraughton, File)

This Oct. 13, 2011, photo shows details inside a house modeled after the home from the Pixar animated film "Up,"in Herriman, Utah. The home has been sold to a family who are self-described Disney and Pixar fanatics. Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif., are buying the home for $400,000. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Trent Nelson)

This Oct. 13, 2011, photo shows details in the front room inside a house modeled after the home from the Pixar animated film "Up,"in Herriman, Utah. The home has been sold to a family who are self-described Disney and Pixar fanatics. Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif., are buying the home for $400,000. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Trent Nelson)

This Oct. 13, 2011, photo shows a room inside a house modeled after the home from the Pixar animated film "Up,"in Herriman, Utah. The home has been sold to a family who are self-described Disney and Pixar fanatics. Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif., are buying the home for $400,000. (AP Photo/The Salt Lake Tribune, Trent Nelson)

(AP) ? Two self-described Disney "fanatics" have purchased a house in Utah modeled after the colorful home featured in the animated movie "Up."

Discovering the house in the Salt Lake City suburb of Herriman, Utah, was a dream come true for Clinton and Lynette Hamblin of Petaluma, Calif. The couple had been looking for a house with some of the same flourishes as the one in the movie, such as a multi-colored exterior or a blue kitchen with retro appliances.

They initially looked in California until they saw news reports about the house in Utah that included every possible detail from the movie and was even officially recognized as the "Up" house by Disney. Even more surprising was the $400,000 price tag, which was less than homes they looked at in California.

For them, however, the real attraction to the house was it underscored the overriding theme of the movie.

"We just love the message of the movie ? adventure is out there," Lynette Hamblin told The Salt Lake Tribune.

The house is modeled on its appearance early in the movie, when Carl and Ellie Frederickson are flush with the optimism of newlyweds. That was before infertility undid their hopes for a family and Ellie's death left Carl a curmudgeonly recluse who refuses to succumb to developers and sell his house.

Homebuilder Adam Bangerter told The Associated Press earlier this year that he and his brothers ? who collectively own Bangerter Homes ? wanted to replicate the house because it's iconic and plays an important role in the movie.

"It illustrates what homeownership really is, and it's not an investment. It's part of the American dream to have a house to care for, to improve and to make part of your family," Bangerter said during a tour of the house.

Herriman City spokeswoman Nicole Martin said about 45,000 people have visited the home for tours, and will continue to do so through the month of December. City leaders even recently passed a resolution honoring the house for its economic impact.

The Hamblins plan to move into the home after closing Jan. 4, which happens to be Lynette Hamblin's birthday.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2011-12-02-Disney-Up%20House/id-a5b48a6983624cc3849d7e247efd5617

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Source: Havelange resigns from IOC

(AP) ? Longtime Brazilian member Joao Havelange has resigned from the IOC, just days before facing suspension in a corruption case stemming from his days as president of FIFA, the Associated Press has learned.

A person familiar with the case says the 95-year-old Havelange ? the International Olympic Committee's longest-serving member ? submitted his resignation by letter Thursday.

The person spoke to the AP on Sunday on condition of anonymity because Havelange's decision has been kept confidential.

The move came a few days before the IOC executive board was due to sanction Havelange in the ISL kickbacks case. Havelange, an IOC member since 1963, faced a long suspension or even possible expulsion for allegedly receiving $1 million from FIFA's former marketing agency.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2011-12-04-OLY-IOC-Havelange-Resigns/id-2e06768caef34a0b815f00a09c5f667f

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Campaigns turning more to Web to link with voters

NEW YORK (AP) ? As they peruse the Internet, voters in New Hampshire and Iowa are probably seeing ads for Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama alongside those for shoes and holiday gifts. The ads will then follow those voters around the Web, popping up on news sites, Google searches and on social networking sites like Facebook.

Online advertising, once used primarily as a way to reach young and heavily wired consumers, has emerged as an essential communications tool in the 2012 presidential contest. While few expect Web ads to supplant television commercials anytime soon, strategists say online ads may be the most nimble, efficient and cost-effective way to reach voters.

"Online advertising cuts through because of its ability to target. It's unparalleled in any other medium," said Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt. "TV may be more effective for driving a big message, but per usage, the Internet is more powerful. We are probably one presidential cycle from everyone believing that."

Web ads can take many forms, from small display boxes to clickable videos to 15- or 30-second commercials known as "pre-rolls" a viewer sees before the start of a news clip or YouTube video.

Targeting is key. While campaigns invest heavily in television ads to reach a mass audience, Web ads are geared specifically to people based on their ZIP code, demographics and, most importantly, their Internet browsing history.

That means someone who has visited the Obama campaign website will likely start seeing his ads on a number of different Web pages. And those who use Google to search for information on the Republican candidates might notice a Romney campaign pre-roll the next time they watch a TV show online.

Campaigns also buy ads on websites that cater to the different demographic groups the campaigns are hoping to reach.

"When someone expresses interest in politics online, it's an incredibly good time for the campaigns to talk to them," said Andrew Roos, a Google account leader who works with Democratic campaigns on Web ad strategy. "You want to grab people when they are paying attention and ask them to take another action, like send money or attend an offline event. It's an old-school organization principle that has been working its way online."

Campaigns were slow to adapt to online advertising even as the corporate world flocked to the Web with product ads years ago. Internet ad revenue climbed to nearly $7.9 billion in the third quarter of 2011, up 22 percent from the same time last year, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, which tracks online ad spending.

Corporations now spend from 18 to 28 percent of their advertising budget online, while campaigns historically have spent no more than 5 percent.

Chris Talbot, a freelance campaign digital strategist, noted that big companies can devote considerable time, money and research to figuring out what works online and what doesn't. Campaigns don't have that luxury.

"There is no 'next quarter' in politics, so campaigns usually revert to a template of what's worked in the past," he said.

In 2008, Obama and Republican presidential rival John McCain both did limited online campaign advertising. Web ads grew more prevalent in the 2010 midterm elections, when 85 of the top-spending House races and 600 interest groups bought display ads on Google.

To be sure, plenty of Internet users say they aren't thrilled with the proliferation of online ads, particularly those that follow them from site to site.

A USA Today/Gallup poll taken in late 2010 found 9 out of 10 respondents said they pay little attention to online ads. Two-thirds said they don't believe advertisers should be able to target them based on their past Web searches.

"The only way it works is on a mass scale. Most people ignore ads on the Web," said Aaron Shapiro, head of the digital marking firm HUGE.

Web ads' biggest advantage, many strategists say, is accountability.

"Online ads are very metric driven ? you can figure out how many impressions you got, how many people clicked, how many people signed up for an email address. All of that is calculated in real time," Google's Roos said. "It's much more efficient than direct mail and TV."

The Romney campaign's Moffatt said Web ads became part of the media strategy when officials there realized how much their own viewing habits had changed.

"Strategists here acknowledge they really don't watch live TV," Moffatt said.

___

Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.

___

Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bfouhy

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2011-12-03-Online%20Campaign%20Ads/id-d0b3a436286348c59c0ed58328e14232

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Groom admits to setting hotel blaze during wedding party

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An angry hotel guest last week pleaded guilty to starting a fire at the hotel where he was celebrating his own wedding, the UK's Telegraph reports.

The fire - started at about 5 a.m. on Sunday, June 19 - caused about $9 million of damage to the Peckforton Castle Hotel in Cheshire, U.K., the story says. The hotel is "the only intact medieval style Castle in the country," its website says.

The blaze caused nearly 200 people including 11 children to be evacuated. Nearly 100 firefighters were required to extinguish it.

The night before the fire, Max Kay, 36, and his new wife had been heard arguing with the hotel's owners about a late payment for the wedding, the Telegraph says. Later that same night, they again argued with the owner about a bar bill.

No one was hurt in the fire, but prosecutor Duncan Bould said that luck played a role in the outcome, the Telegraph reports.

"Fortunately, and it is good fortune, the premises was equipped with a very efficient fire alarm and the combination of that and the staff meant that all the guests were able to be evacuated," he told the court.

Kay's lawyer Patrick Thompson said that his client committed the crime when he was "near bankrupt" and under significant stress.

The court heard that Kay was said to have consumed large amounts of vodka that day. Also, the hotel's closed-circuit TV system caught Kay on tape going in and out of the drawing room where the blaze started. He'll be sentenced on Jan. 3.

By Barbara De Lollis, USA TODAY

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Brazil: 33 dead in truck-bus crash

Workers check the rubble of a bus after an accident in Milagres, Brazil's Bahia state, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. Brazilian authorities said a tractor-trailer slammed into the bus carrying sugarcane cutters, killing at least 33 people and injuring 13 after the truck driver lost control as he was rounding a corner and heading down a hill early Saturday. (AP Photo/Ag. A Tarde/Agencia O Globo,Zenilton Meira) DO NOT PUBLISH IN BRAZIL - NAO PUBLICAR NO BRASIL

Workers check the rubble of a bus after an accident in Milagres, Brazil's Bahia state, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. Brazilian authorities said a tractor-trailer slammed into the bus carrying sugarcane cutters, killing at least 33 people and injuring 13 after the truck driver lost control as he was rounding a corner and heading down a hill early Saturday. (AP Photo/Ag. A Tarde/Agencia O Globo,Zenilton Meira) DO NOT PUBLISH IN BRAZIL - NAO PUBLICAR NO BRASIL

(AP) ? Brazilian authorities say a tractor-trailor has slammed into a bus carrying sugarcane cutters, killing at least 33 people and injuring 13 others.

A police spokesman says the truck driver lost control as he was rounding a corner and heading down a hill early Saturday near a town called Miracles in the northeastern state of Bahia. The truck was carrying a load of construction materials, which also slammed into the bus.

The driver of the truck survived and is in a local hospital. Some of the others injured are in grave condition.

The police official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to provide details.

He says an investigation is ongoing.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-12-03-LT-Brazil-Road-Deaths/id-ae33e23047854756a0d9338b64fa8518

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Has US learned the lesson of Enron 10 years later? (AP)

NEW YORK ? From humble origins as a natural gas distributor, Enron became a trading operation with the Midas touch. It made bets on oil, water, Internet traffic, even the weather. Wall Street's brightest worked there. Its stock tripled in two years.

Virtually no one knew how it had made so much money.

Ten years ago Friday came the answer: It hadn't.

Enron's bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, revealed a fraudulent illusion. Investors swore they would not be so profoundly deceived again. But it was only the beginning of a decade when so much in the economy was not as it seemed.

Can't-lose Wall Street guys turned out to be cheats. Home values did not go up forever. Promising signs of recovery after the Great Recession turned out to be nothing, and hard times endure.

The theme was shredded faith ? that and debt, the more the better.

"We have faith in the big score," financial historian Charles Geisst says, trying to explain why Americans have, time and again, believed in what was too good to be true.

In the simple story of the past decade, a journey from corporate scandals to a housing bubble, then to a collapse and a frustratingly slow recovery, the villain is Wall Street and the victim Main Street. The reality is more complicated.

THE BEGINNING

One reason people didn't know how Enron made money was that it was an amalgam of 3,000 private deals that came to light in its collapse, partnerships with names like Raptor, Condor and Chewbacca.

Behind those obscure names, Enron shunted billions of dollars of debt off its books. Investors were safe as long as they didn't ask too many questions. The company borrowed from Wall Street banks, mutual funds and insurers, pledging its hot stock as collateral.

The collapse wiped out $11 billion in stock value, nearly 10 percent in the 401(k) retirement accounts of Enron employees.

A month later, an outspoken, Harley-riding CEO with an uncanny ability to pull profits out of a seemingly dull New Hampshire manufacturer appeared on BusinessWeek's list of top corporate managers. His name was Dennis Kozlowski. By the end of 2002, he was indicted for stealing $150 million from shareholders, and his company, Tyco International, was bankrupt.

Several other heroes of capitalism toppled after him. Bernard Ebbers drove WorldCom into bankruptcy after misleading investors in his high-flying company in an $11 billion accounting fraud. John Rigas, who turned a $300 purchase into a cable TV empire, was convicted of fraud after prosecutors said he ran Adelphia Communications like a "personal piggy bank," including using $26 million of company money to buy timberland next to his home to preserve his view.

Martha Stewart, who built her cooking and decorating business on an image of homespun goodness, faced a grilling from regulators that suggested a life more tawdry than tidy: She had dumped shares of a drug company on what appeared to be an illegal tip from her Merrill Lynch broker. She was convicted of lying, though never accused of insider trading. The amount the one-time billionaire saved by selling early was $51,000.

It was a time of plummeting stocks, trashed retirement accounts, lost jobs and lost trust. One headline from 2002: "Scandals Shred Investors' Faith."

Regulators cracked down, offering hope. Congress created a board to police the accounting industry. It also passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, requiring executives to sign off on financial statements so they could be criminally liable for posting phony numbers.

Investors were thought more vigilant, too. But they got sloppy again, and almost immediately.

Around the time of Enron's collapse, press reports detailed how Italy, years earlier, had struck complicated "currency swap" deals with banks so it could borrow money without having to recognize the debt on its books. Later, Greece was shown to have camouflaged its debt in a similar way.

In 2002, no one seemed to care. By the end of the year, Italy was paying about 4 percent a year in interest on its national bonds, roughly what the U.S. was offering and a sign that few investors were worried.

THE HOUSING BUBBLE

In 2003, as jurors heard how Kozlowski got Tyco to pitch in $1 million for his wife's birthday party, featuring an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David that urinated vodka, the seeds of a new crisis were being planted.

American consumers had run up debt to record levels by the end of 2003, and more of them than ever were filing for bankruptcy. Yet the stocks of companies extending mortgages to the riskiest borrowers, so-called subprimes, were rising fast.

Subprime was a euphemism for people who had too little income, too much debt, a bad record of paying lenders back ? or all three. As home prices rose, worry that they would not meet their mortgage payments was replaced with faith that, even if they couldn't, they could always sell the home for more than they borrowed and return the money.

Lenders eventually grew so cocky that they seemed willing to give money to virtually anyone who wanted a home. They also offered mortgages on top of mortgages ? so-called home equity loans that allowed people to tap their magically rising values to raise cash for flat-screen TVs or Caribbean vacations. Or to pay their credit card bills.

"If your home keeps appreciating, why not use the equity," Robert Cole, CEO of mortgage lender New Century, said at the time.

If the lenders were duping Americans, they made easy targets.

Long before the housing boom, Americans were borrowing more, saving less and increasingly convinced they would not suffer the consequences. In the 1980s, Americans saved more than 6 percent of what they earned each year in income. Their debts totaled 70 percent of take-home pay. By 2007, they were saving nearly nothing, and debt had exploded to 140 percent of income.

"People were using their homes like automated teller machines," says David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates and a big critic of lending during the boom. "At some point, people have to own up to their mistakes."

Stoking all this borrowing was the Federal Reserve, which had slashed benchmark interest rates to 46-year lows after the 2000-2001 tech-stock bust, pushing the cost of loans lower. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that buy mortgages from lenders, played a role by targeting ever-riskier loans.

The biggest, most sophisticated Wall Street firms fooled themselves, too.

Banks bought subprime lenders whole. Elegant mathematical formulas from their "risk management" departments told them their gambles were fine. Standard & Poor's and other credit rating agencies provided reassurance by slapping their highest ratings on bundles of risky mortgages.

Wall Street was gripped by what chronicler Roger Lowenstein called a "mad, Strangelovian" logic. Not content to bundle thousands of subprime mortgages into mortgage securities, banks bundled the bundles into something called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Next, they created bundles of bundles of bundles, called CDO-squared.

They created something known as synthetic CDOs that didn't even contain mortgages but merely referenced them, exchanging cash between two parties taking opposing bets that a mortgage lender unconnected to them would get its money back.

Adding to the confusion, it wasn't clear which financial firms held many of the original mortgages on which everyone was betting. They had been bought and sold so many times among investors that no one could follow the paper trail.

By 2006, the men who had wounded a nation's faith in capitalism were finally getting justice. Enron's former president, Jeffrey Skilling, began serving 24 years in prison. Kenneth Lay, the chairman, died before he could be sentenced. Rigas, the cable titan, got 15 years, Ebbers and Kozlowski 25 each.

But we were about to discover that the lies we tell ourselves can be more damaging.

THE COLLAPSE

In 2007, subprime lenders went bust, one after another. Then all the mounting debt, made possible by years of half-truths and self-deceptions, turned the fall of a single industry into a worldwide financial crisis.

In March 2008, investors fearing bad mortgage bets at Bear Stearns pulled money out of the bank, leaving it to collapse into the arms of a rival.

Unable to untangle the web of mortgage risk, they began to wonder who was next. They focused on Lehman Brothers, and as that bank teetered, it became clear that the danger of complexity wasn't the only lesson from Enron that had been ignored.

Lehman had hidden debt just like Enron.

Using a financing technique called Repo 105, the bank had borrowed money in a series of deals structured to make it seem as though it had been "selling" assets to raise money. Lenders demanded money back, triggering a run on the bank and leaving ordinary investors scrambling to understand just how much the company had borrowed.

Lehman's bankruptcy in September 2008 froze credit worldwide and helped turn the U.S. recession into the worst since the Great Depression. Stocks eventually fell to 12-year lows, retirement accounts were devastated, and many Americans' biggest asset, their home, plummeted in value.

By the end of 2008, Bernard Madoff was arrested for lying to investors in a $60 billion Ponzi scheme over two decades. A few months later, President Barack Obama started talking up the strengths of the economy, but that soon proved a bit of a mirage, too.

More than a year later, the White House announced its "Recovery Summer," a series of public projects to goose economic growth. But a year and half later, the unemployment rate is stuck at 9 percent and economic growth uninspiring.

A sad footnote: After an overhaul of Wall Street rules last year, broker MF Global turned to the same Lehman-like Repo 105 deals to fuel its bet on indebted European governments. The heavy borrowing helped send the firm run by ex-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine into bankruptcy, throwing 1,000 people out of work and creating chaos in markets as brokerage customers scrambled to get their money back.

A month after the firm's collapse, regulators still can't find $1.2 billion of customer funds.

THE RECKONING

Now Europe is paying for years of using government debt to fund early retirements and long vacations that its citizens really couldn't afford. Streets are choked with protesters, governments are toppling and interest rates rising, some to crippling highs.

Rosenberg, the prescient housing critic, sees trouble for America, too.

Frightened investors are buying Treasury bonds, which is making it cheaper than ever for Washington to borrow despite its trillion-dollar-plus deficits. The danger is that low rates could lull Americans into believing that, even if they themselves can't borrow recklessly, it's OK for their government to.

"A government debt bubble is already creating misery in Europe," Rosenberg says. "If we don't watch out, we'll face the same problem."

Stocks have barely moved in the decade of lost faith. On the Friday before the Enron bankruptcy, the S&P 500 closed at 1,139. Last Friday it closed 19 points above that. The incomes of many middle-class Americans haven't kept up with inflation. Home prices are still falling.

Pretending we were wealthier has made us poorer.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111201/ap_on_re_us/us_enron_faith_no_more

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Lady Gaga Duets With Sugarland, Performs Solo on Grammy Special


Lady Gaga brought out the big guns last night, dueting with Sugarland and performing her latest single, "Marry the Night," on CBS' Grammy nomination special.

Gaga earned three 2012 Grammy Award nominations, Tweeting Wednesday: "I'm humbled + honored to have a Trinity of nominations from the Grammys."

"I love u all so much #PawsUp for our album's being nominated three years in a row. I could never do it without you. Together, we were #BornToBeBrave."

Mother Monster proved why she deserves it, delivering a pair of terrific numbers, first by herself and then with Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush.

Watch both of Gaga's performances below!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/lady-gaga-duets-with-sugarland-performs-solo-on-grammy-special/

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