KEZI9: Okay everyone, Santa is creeping closer. He's now in Portalegre, Portugal! A few more stops in Africa then he'll cross the Atlantic!

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AUGoldMine: RT @AUALERT: Auburn University is under a Tornado Watch until 5:00 PM CST. Monitor the weather and be prepared to seek shelter if a warn ...

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Occupy Berkeley campers face imminent eviction (Reuters)

BERKELEY, Calif (Reuters) ? Anti-Wall Street activists who have camped out since October in the college town of Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, braced for an eviction that city officials warned would be enforced late Wednesday night.

The city distributed flyers announcing plans to shut down the Occupy Berkeley encampment at Civic Center Park starting at 10 p.m. local time, citing an escalating rash of violence and other criminal behavior in recent weeks, capped by an attempted rape on Tuesday.

As the eviction deadline passed, a number of protesters were seen packing up their tents and belongings and leaving on their own, while others milled about waiting for police to arrive.

But police, whose headquarters sits just across the street from the park, remained out of sight as of 11:30 p.m., leaving protesters who lingered to speculate that a raid on the camp might not come until the wee hours of Thursday morning.

Some campers stood around a 12-foot Christmas tree erected in the middle of the park and adorned with electric lights powered by a car battery.

The camp is one of few remaining high-profile redoubts of a 3-month-old Occupy Wall Street movement that sprung up in parks and other public spaces across the United States to protest economic inequality, high unemployment and the excesses of a financial system seen as favoring the wealthy.

A sister Occupy protest on the nearby campus of the University of California at Berkeley, a cradle of 1960s student activism, was broken up in November by campus police who struck some students and faculty members with nightsticks.

Most of the larger protest camps in cities such as New York and Los Angeles were shut down by police in recent weeks.

Only about 25 tents remained at Berkeley's Civic Center Park Wednesday night, about half of the number pitched during the height of the encampment, which began on Oct 8.

Few of the demonstrators who spoke with reporters appeared to be actually still camping there, and some acknowledged that the compound had attracted a large number of homeless individuals and mentally ill people in recent days.

Miles Murray, a high school teacher who has been showing up at the camp on a daily basis after work since October, said the problems seen at the camp exist "all over society."

"The fact that the cops are going to roll through here tonight does upset me," he said. "I wish it was an army of social workers and rehab and housing and actual compassion."

The closure notice, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, warned that anybody found in the park after 10 p.m. on Wednesday, whether camping or not, would be subject to arrest.

City officials also distributed a list of emergency homeless shelters along with the park closure notice, city spokeswoman Mary Kay Clunies-Ross said.

Protest organizers issued a "call to action" in the wake of the announcement, asking for supporters to congregate at the protest site in advance of the expected closure, but the turnout was relatively light, with no more than about 150 people in all visible late Wednesday night.

(Additional reporting by Mary Slosson; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111222/us_nm/us_protest_berkeley

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NFL Notebook: Johnson half as good

CHRIS JOHNSONTennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson ran for 2,000 yards last season, but will be hard-pressed to reach 1,000 this season. (GETTY IMAGES)

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Talk about lowered expectations.

Just two years removed from a 2,000-yard rushing season, Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson is lowering his goals for where he?ll end this season.

With 930 yards through 14 games, Johnson said he?s hoping to gain 1,000 yards.

?Any running back who runs for over 1,000 yards, it puts you up there in a group with elite running backs,? Johnson told the Tennessean. ?Even though I am not having the best of years, to go over 1,000 yards, that?s something a lot of people thought probably wouldn?t happen this year.?

It would seem that given a running back of Johnson?s quality, that gaining 70 yards over his final two games should be money in the bank.

However, in a season that has contained more lows than highs, Johnson has failed to gain 35 yards rushing in six different games this season.

Last week against the Indianapolis Colts, Johnson gained just 55 yards while the previous week against the Saints he was held to 23 yards rushing.

On Saturday, Johnson and the Titans are home to the woeful Jacksonville Jaguars. He will face a much tougher test in the season finale when the Titans are on the road against Houston and their tough defence.

RODGERS WINS TOP ATHLETE AWARD

There is no doubt that Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers is the leading candidate to earn Most Valuable Player honours for his terrific season leading the Packers.

On Wednesday he received a major boost towards that goal when he was named the Associated Press male athlete of the year for 2011.

Rodgers received 112 votes from the 212 American news organizations that voted for the award. Detroit Tigers Cy Young winning Justin Verlander was a distant second with 50 votes.

Rodgers, who was voted the MVP of last year?s Super Bowl, is the third NFL quarterback to win the award in the past five years, following Drew Brees in 2010 and Tom Brady in 2007.

?Those guys are household names, the best of the best,? Rodgers said. ?It?s special to win the award, and something I?ll remember.?

Through the Packers? opening 14 games this season, where Rodgers has led them to a 13-1 record, he has completed 68.1% of his passes for 4,360 yards with 40 touchdowns and just six interceptions.

No doubt it will be the first of many awards that will go to Rodgers this season, especially if the Packers win their second consecutive Super Bowl.

MCCOY?S BELL STILL RINGING

For the second consecutive game, Cleveland Browns quarterback Colt McCoy will not be playing as he is still suffering from post-concussion syndrome and is unable to practise.

McCoy has been sidelined since taking a hit to the helmet from linebacker James Harrison on Dec. 8, in Pittsburgh. Harrison?s hit led to a one-game suspension.

McCoy was at the Browns? training facility Wednesday but has not yet been medically cleared to return which leaves veteran backup Seneca Wallace to make the start Saturday in Baltimore.

Browns coach Pat Shurmur has not officially chosen Wallace as his starter.

?Not yet, but it?s going to come soon, I?m sure,? he told the Plain Dealer.

The Browns? failure to check McCoy for a concussion after he was hit has led to a lot of criticism and has led the NFL to institute putting a certified trainer in the press box to help monitor head injuries.

Shurmur said he doesn?t know if McCoy would be cleared to play in the season finale against Pittsburgh on Jan. 1.

TEBOW-MANIA REVVING UP

Tim Tebow could be headed to the Pro Bowl.

With the fan voting portion coming to an end, Tebow finished third among all AFC quarterbacks and fifth in voting of all quarterbacks.

The leading vote-getter among AFC quarterbacks was Tom Brady with 1.45 million. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger finished second with 935,000 followed by Tebow who received 633,000 votes.

Tebow-mania could rev up another notch this weekend if the Denver Broncos down the Buffalo Bills and the Oakland Raiders lose to Kansas City, a scenario that would give the Broncos the AFC West division and send Tebow into the playoffs.

Fan voting, though is just part of the process.

NFL players and coaches vote on Pro Bowl rosters Wednesday and Thursday, and the rosters are chosen through a process that gives equal weight to the players? votes, the coaches? votes and the fans? votes.

Pro Bowl rosters will be announced next Tuesday with the game taking place on the Sunday before the Super Bowl, Jan. 29 in Honolulu.

Naturally, players on the Super Bowl teams will not participate in the Pro Bowl. A large number of other players aren?t available due to injuries.

?

Source: http://www.torontosun.com/2011/12/21/nfl-notebook-johnson-half-as-good

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New 'Hobbit' Photo: Martin Freeman's Greatest Adventure Lies Ahead

It's been so, so long since we last saw Middle Earth, almost a decade ago if you can believe it. The world returns in 2012's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," another Tolkien adaptation courtesy of Peter Jackson and a sure bet to make all kinds of money. Besides casting news and the general plot details, [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/12/20/hobbit-photo-martin-freeman-bilbo-baggins/

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Havel, Czech playwright and president, has died (AP)

PRAGUE ? Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.

Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic, his assistant Sabina Tancecova said.

Havel was his country's first democratically elected president after the nonviolent "Velvet Revolution" that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as "Absurdistan."

As president, he oversaw the country's bumpy transition to democracy and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Even out of office, the diminutive Czech remained a world figure. He was part of the "new Europe" ? in the coinage of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ? of ex-communist countries that stood up for the U.S. when the democracies of "old Europe" opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion.

A former chain-smoker, Havel had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating back to his years in communist jails. He was hospitalized in Prague on Jan. 12, 2009, with an unspecified inflammation, and had developed breathing difficulties after undergoing minor throat surgery.

Havel left office in 2003, 10 years after Czechoslovakia broke up and just months before both nations joined the European Union. He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought his Czech Republic into the 27-nation bloc, and was president when it joined NATO in 1999.

Shy and bookish, with wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Havel came to symbolize the power of the people to peacefully overcome totalitarian rule.

"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred," Havel famously said. It became his revolutionary motto which he said he always strove to live by.

Havel was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and collected dozens of other accolades worldwide for his efforts as a global ambassador of conscience, defended the downtrodden from Darfur to Myanmar.

Among his many honors were Sweden's prestigious Olof Palme Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award, bestowed on him by President George W. Bush for being "one of liberty's great heroes."

An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers such as Frank Zappa, he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish.

In an October 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Havel rebuked Russia for invading Georgia two months earlier, and warned EU leaders against appeasing Moscow.

"We should not turn a blind eye ... It's a big test for the West," he said.

Havel also said he saw the global economic crisis as a warning not to abandon basic human values in the scramble to prosper.

"It's a warning against the idea that we understand the world, that we know how everything works," he told the AP in his office in Prague. The cramped work space was packed with his books, plays and rock memorabilia.

Havel first made a name for himself after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally minded communists in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Havel's plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion. But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent analyses of what communism did to society and the individual.

One of his best-known essays, "The Power and the Powerless" written in 1978, borrowed slyly from the immortal opening line of the mid-19th century Communist Manifesto, writing: "A specter is haunting eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called 'dissent.'"

In the essay, he dissected what he called the "dictatorship of ritual" ? the ossified Soviet bloc system under Leonid Brezhnev ? and imagined what happens when an ordinary greengrocer stops displaying communist slogans and begins "living in truth," rediscovering "his suppressed identity and dignity."

Havel knew that suppression firsthand.

Born Oct. 5, 1936, in Prague, the child of a wealthy family which lost extensive property to communist nationalization in 1948, Havel was denied a formal education, eventually earning a degree at night school and starting out in theater as a stagehand.

His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew widening attention in the West.

Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails. His letters from prison to his wife became one of his best-known works. "Letters to Olga" blended deep philosophy with a stream of stern advice to the spouse he saw as his mentor and best friend, and who tolerated his reputed philandering and other foibles.

The events of August 1988 ? the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion ? first suggested that Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless apparatchiks who jailed them.

Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling Havel's name and that of the playwright's hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia's first president after it was founded in 1918.

Havel's arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him again in May.

That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students.

It was the signal that Havel and his country had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets.

In three heady weeks, communist rule was broken. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones arrived just as the Soviet army was leaving. Posters in Prague proclaimed: "The tanks are rolling out ? the Stones are rolling in."

On Dec. 29, 1989, Havel was elected Czechoslovakia's president by the country's still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a televised New Year's address: "Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine."

Although he continued to be regarded a moral voice as he decried the shortcomings of his society under democracy, he eventually bent to the dictates of convention and power. His watchwords ? "what the heart thinks, the tongue speaks" ? had to be modified for day-to-day politics.

And post-revolutionary life contained many challenges.

In July 1992, it became clear that the Czechoslovak federation was heading for a split. Considering it a personal failure, Havel resigned as president.

But he remained popular and was elected president of the new Czech Republic uncontested.

He was small, but his presence and wit could fill a room. Even late in life, he retained a certain impishness and boyish grin, shifting easily from philosophy to jokes or plain old Prague gossip.

In December 1996, just 11 months after his first wife, Olga Havlova, died of cancer, he lost a third of his right lung during surgery to remove a 15-millimeter (half-inch) malignant tumor.

He gave up smoking and married Dagmar Veskrnova, a dashing actress almost 20 years his junior.

Holding a post of immense prestige but little power, Havel's image suffered in the latter years as his people discovered the difficulties of transforming their society in the post-communist era.

His attempts to reconcile rival politicians were considered by many as unconstitutional intrusions, and his pleas for political leaders to build a "civic society" based on respect, tolerance and individual responsibility went largely unanswered.

Media criticism, once unthinkable, became unrelenting. Serious newspapers questioned his political visions; tabloids focused mainly on his private life and his flashy second wife.

Havel himself acknowledged that his handling of domestic issues never matched his flair for foreign affairs. But when the Czech Republic joined NATO in March 1999, and the European Union in May 2004, his dreams came true.

"I can't stop rejoicing that I live in this time and can participate in it," Havel exulted.

Early in 2008, Havel returned to his first love: the stage. He published a new play, "Leaving," about the struggles of a leader on his way out of office, and the work gained critical acclaim.

Theater, he told the AP, was once again his major interest.

"My return to the stage was not easy," he said. "It's not a common thing for someone to be involved in theater, become a president, and then go back."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111218/ap_en_ot/eu_czech_obit_havel

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A look at troubles for BlackBerry and its maker (AP)

Research In Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, gave disappointing guidance for the current quarter and announced a delay in new phones on Thursday, sending its stock down. It was the latest in a series of bad news for the company as it struggles to compete with Apple's iPhone and iPad and phones running Google's Android system.

Sept. 15: RIM reports a sharp drop in net income and revenue in the fiscal second quarter and says it has sold far fewer PlayBook tablet computers than it expected.

Oct. 10: Email and Internet services are disrupted for three days, primarily outside North America. RIM says a crucial link in its infrastructure had failed, and a backup didn't work either. By the third day, other users, including those in the U.S. and Canada, were affected by a backlog of traffic.

Oct. 25: RIM says it is delaying the launch of an upgraded operating system for the PlayBook until February, saying it isn't up to its standards yet. The company also says the new version initially won't have the popular messaging service BlackBerry Messenger. It's the third delay announced since the features were promised in April.

Dec. 1: RIM suspends two employees after their drunken rowdiness forced an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing to be diverted to Vancouver. The two are later dismissed from the company.

Dec. 2: RIM says it is writing off much of its inventory of PlayBook tablets after it had to sell them at a deep discount. The model originally priced at $500 now costs $200. The company says it's taking a pre-tax charge of $485 million in the just-ended quarter. RIM also says it will sell fewer BlackBerrys in the holiday quarter than in the one that just ended. It also says it won't meet full-year earnings guidance of $5.25 to $6 per share, the third cut in a row.

Dec. 5: Police in Indonesia say a senior RIM executive is a suspect in a stampede at a BlackBerry promotion there in November. Police say several people fainted and dozens were injured at the global debut of the BlackBerry Bold 9790.

Dec. 6: RIM says "BlackBerry 10" will be the new name for its next-generation system after the company loses a trademark ruling on its previous name, BBX.

Thursday: RIM says new phones deemed critical to the company's future won't be out until late 2012. The company says the BlackBerry 10 phones will need a highly integrated chipset that won't be available until mid-2012, so the company can now expect the new phones to ship late in the year. The company also says BlackBerry sales will fall sharply in the holiday quarter compared with the three months that ended Nov. 26. RIM says it would only ship between 11 million and 12 million BlackBerrys in the fourth quarter, down from 14.1 million in the third quarter.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/applecomputer/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111215/ap_on_hi_te/cn_earns_research_in_motion_glance

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