SAG Awards Flashback: Jon Hamm 2008

Jon Hamm's Mad Men role of "Don Draper" changed his life. After years of floating around in the acting world, he landed on a lead role on the period drama and has since been one of Hollywood's most popular actors. In 2008, it began with a flurry of fame, which he gratefully accepted.

The acclaim was instant. After the premiere season of Mad Men, Hamm and the show won Golden Globes, and he and the cast were nominated for two awards at the 2008 SAG Awards. It was a rapid rise, but Hamm was ready for it all and was reveling in it.

"You look stunning tonight. Can I just say that?" Hamm charms ET's former co-host Mary Hart, whom he had just met. "Blue is a great color. I'm on board."

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As for the reason that he was standing on the platform and charming Mrs. Hart to begin with, Hamm says he's excited that Mad Men has been an instant success and that his role has been so overwhelmingly acclaimed.

"It is a big deal and it's exciting because so many people worked so hard on [the show]," he says. "It's nice to see it being recognized by the community at large, and it feels great."

While the show's interwoven themes of period-related misogyny and racism have been contested throughout the show's five-season run, it has nevertheless been a hit with critics and its loyal audiences.

VIDEO: Globes Flashback '08: 'Mad Men' Wins Together

"I'm very proud of the show," he says. "We try to be true to the era that it takes place in in the early sixties, and that's sort of what happened [then]. A lot of people talk about the smoking and the drinking and sort of gloss over the misogynistic aspects of it, but fortunately we've come a long way from that time."

While the show has been adorned in Golden Globes and Emmys over the years, it hasn't had as much relative success at the SAGs. The cast has won two SAG Awards for Best Ensemble in a Drama, but Hamm has never won the Best Actor Award despite being nominated for all of Mad Men's seasons.

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Like clockwork, Hamm is nominated once again for Best Actor and the cast is nominated as well.

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Elderly woman struck and killed by private bus in Brooklyn

An elderly woman woman was struck and killed by a private bus in Brooklyn this morning, authorities said.

She was hit about 7:15 a.m. in Canarsie on Avenue K and East 105th Street and died at the scene, according to an FDNY spokesman.

No criminality is suspected, police said.

Benny J. Stumbo

Police at the scene today.

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Lennar design accommodates multigenerational families

In some cases, it may be Grandma moving in with the family. Other times, it may be a recent college graduate returning to the nest.

For all sorts of reasons — financial, medical, personal — a rising number of Americans are moving into extended family households.

Spotting a niche in the growing trend, Lennar Corp. has launched a new concept tailor-made for multigenerational family living.

It’s basically a house within a house: a smaller living unit next to the main home designed to provide independence but also access to the rest of the family household.

“People are really loving the whole concept,” said Carlos Gonzalez, president of the southeast Florida division of Lennar, a Miami-based home-building giant. “We adapted to the market from a design standpoint.”

In Miami-Dade County, Lennar is selling various versions of multigenerational homes in three new developments in Doral, Kendall and Homestead.

Louis Moreno of Kendall and his wife, Danilza Velez, signed a contract for a large NextGen home in The Vineyards development in Homestead last October — even before the models had been built.

“We loved it,” said Moreno, a 45-year-old engineer.

Moreno said his mother-in-law will be able to use the new suite when she visits, as will his family members who frequently come to town from Puerto Rico. “This will provide them with more comfortable space and more privacy,” he said. He also plans to use it as a game room and entertainment area.

The two-story Zinfandel home Moreno picked has three bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms in the main home with a family room and two-car garage. In addition, it has an ample 789-square-foot suite with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchenette. The suite has its own garage, a separate front entrance and an internal door connecting to the main home.

The Zinfandel, which has 2,249 square feet of air-conditioned space in the main house, starts at $283,990 in the Homestead community at 128 SE 28th Ter., but a similar home in Kendall would run about $100,000 more, primarily because of higher land costs, Fernandez said. (In Doral, there is a NextGen home priced at $677,990.)

Some multigenerational models have suites as small as 489 square feet, but all have a separate entrance, a bedroom, a bathroom and some sort of kitchen space.

The idea takes various shapes. One option at the Kendall Square development at 16950 SW 90th St. is a Granny unit above a detached garage.

“Independence is the key word,” said Frank Fernandez, director of sales and marketing for the southeast Florida division.

Depending on local zoning rules, some homes can have full kitchens, others are restricted to kitchenettes with a microwave but no stove. Similarly, some municipalities permit the space to be used as a rental, others prohibit it.

The choice is proving popular. Fernandez said in The Vineyards development in Homestead, 10 of the 14 homes sold to date are NextGen. At Kendall Square, 35 of 107 sales are multigenerational, and at the Isles at Grand Bay development at 11301 NW 74th Street in Doral, five of 48 houses are.

Adapting homes for special needs, such as wheelchairs and safety railings, is done at cost, Fernandez said: “That is company policy.”

As one of the nation’s largest home builders, Lennar has been rebounding strongly from the housing crash. Last week, the builder, whose shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, posted better than expected earnings for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2012.

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Wife of Boca Raton cop accused of running prostitution service

BOCA RATON It wasn’t the stereotypical prostitution ring where girls stop cars asking johns if they want a date and turn their pay over to a pimp. Nor was it as fancy as the escorts that wealthy men hire for weekend trips in Las Vegas, authorities say.

But a ring advertised online as Sara’s Entertainment Service provided thousands of dollars to two local women, allowing at least one of them to live in a nice home.

The women behind the business — Denise McCoy, the wife of a Boca Raton police officer, and Sara Marin, who goes by several different aliases — even engaged in the sexual trade themselves, authorities say.

The service came to a halt Tuesday when Marin, 42, and McCoy, 34, were taken into custody. Both were being held at the Palm Beach County Jail late Wednesday.

Before Tuesday, the women allegedly were living off the earnings of their own sexual activity with men and the earnings of at least six of their hired escorts. The business raked in tens of thousands of dollars since at least February 2012. Marin’s six-bedroom home, where the two women were arrested, is in Canyon Isles, a gated suburban Boynton Beach neighborhood.

The women face charges of money laundering and procuring prostitutes by living off their earnings, but they don’t face human-trafficking charges. Authorities “didn’t uncover anything that would make us believe that they were working against their will,” said John Vecchio, violent crimes supervisor for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Miami regional center.

Three agencies — city police, FDLE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — started investigating the service five months ago when one hired escort, Carla Sardinha, was detained on immigration violations.

Sardinha told authorities she was forced to work as a prostitute in the Boca Raton area for the past nine months. She had arrived from Brazil in August 2011 and met with a woman she knew as only “Sara,” a city police probable-cause affidavit said.

Marin, also originally from Brazil, allegedly told Sardinha she owned an escort service and offered her a job. In September, Sardinha called Marin, but spoke with McCoy — another Brazilian, who told jail officials she lives in suburban Boca Raton — instead.

At first, Sardinha told authorities, McCoy told her she wasn’t required to have sexual intercourse with the men she escorted. However, once McCoy found out Sardinha had only a fake passport, McCoy told her she would go to jail if she didn’t have sex with clients because she was in the U.S. illegally.

Sardinha and at least six other women between the ages of 21 and their mid-30s would meet their clients in at least two apartments in suburban Boca Raton. Law enforcement conducted surveillance at 9859 Boca Gardens Circle North and 22312 Calibre Court.

City police and FDLE conducted at least two undercover operations in October and November. In November, officers spoke with men who admitted to paying the service for sexual acts. The women often charged $200 per hour, and they’d give half to the business. The payments were the only source of income for McCoy and Marin, authorities said.

While documents showed no reported income since the first quarter of 2009, McCoy and Marin’s bank accounts showed they were making money. Marin was found to have $40,779 deposited between mid-July and mid-December, while McCoy had more than $29,000 deposited from mid-March to November, the affidavit said.

McCoy’s husband of six years, city police officer Samuel McCoy, was not arrested in the investigation and is not a subject of it at this time, Vecchio said. McCoy was suspended in 2009, the Sun-Sentinel reported, for looking at pornography on his work computer. That same year he was caught taking pictures of his genital area while on duty.

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Go forth and Tweet! Pope sees web networks as “portals of truth”

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict urged Catholics on Thursday to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to win converts, as he launched his own smartphone app streaming live footage of his speeches.

The websites – often associated with endless postings of idle gossip and baby photos – could be used as “portals of truth and faith” in an increasingly secular age, the pontiff said in his 2013 World Communications Day message.

“Unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people,” the 85-year old Pope said in the a letter published on the Vatican‘s website.

The Holy See has become an increasingly prolific user of social media since it launched its ‘new evangelization’ of the developed world, where some congregations have fallen in the wake of growing secularization and damage to the Church’s reputation from a series of sex abuse scandals.

The Pope himself reaches around 2.5 million followers through eight Twitter accounts, including one in Latin.

Belying his traditionalist reputation, the Pope praised connections made online which he said could blossom into true friendships. Online life was not a purely virtual world but “increasingly becoming part of the very fabric of society,” he said.

Social networks were also a practical tool that Catholics could use to organize prayer events, the pope suggested. But he called for reasoned debate and respectful dialogue with those with different beliefs, and cautioned against a tendency towards “heated and divisive voices” and “sensationalism”.

The websites were creating a new “agora”, he added, referring to the gathering spaces that were the centers of public life in ancient Greek cities.

The speech coincided with the launch of ‘The Pope App’, a downloadable program that streams live footage of the pontiff’s speaking events and Vatican news onto smartphones.

Pope Benedict‘s embrace of new media responds to the Church’s concern that it is invisible on the internet.

The Vatican commissioned a study of internet use and religion prior to the pope’s Twitter debut, which found the majority of U.S. Catholics surveyed were unaware of any significant Church presence online.

(Reporting by Naomi O’Leary; editing by Andrew Heavens)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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SAG Awards Flashback: Helen Mirren 2007

Helen Mirren has received many accolades for her acting over the years, but no year was more special for her than 2007. The nominations and awards came crashing over the English actress for her roles as Queens Elizabeth I and II. Backstage after winning an award at the SAG Awards, Dame Mirren finds her king.

At that year's SAGs, Mirren was nominated for both of her Queen Elizabeth performances: Best Actress in a TV Movie or Miniseries for Elizabeth I and Best Lead Actress for The Queen. She had just received Golden Globes for the two acclaimed performances and was nominated for what could be her first Oscar.

It was an exciting year for Mirren, who embraces her "Woman of the Year" tag from ET's former correspondent Jann Carl but wishes that the sweetness of her success weren't so concentrated.

VIDEO: Oscars Flashback '07: Helen Mirren and Jamie Foxx

Also having a career year for his acting was Forest Whitaker, who received a Golden Globe, SAG, and an Oscar for his role in The Last King of Scotland, which was also written by The Queen writer Peter Morgan.

Although he didn't literally play a king in the film, Whitaker takes on a royal persona when congratulating Mirren backstage for her win, spoiling her with compliments and kisses.

"There's nothing like that particular role," she says of her role as Elizabeth I. "...It demanded everything you had as an actress/actor and I gave it everything that I had, everything. It means so much to me for it to be recognized here in America."

RELATED: Helen Mirren to Play the Queen Again

Her success at that year's awards season was beyond mere recognition; it bordered more on the lines of idolatry. Or fittingly: worship.

Mrs. Mirren went on to win her other award that night for The Queen and also won the Oscar a few weeks later for her role in the film.

While she has since stepped down from her royal platform, she has another opportunity to add to her SAGs collection with a nomination for her leading role as Alfred Hitchcock's wife in Hitchcock.

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Rare posters seized by Nazis net $2.5M at NYC auction

A poster collection seized from a Jewish collector by the Nazis and only returned to his descendants in recent years has brought in approximately $2.5 million at a New York auction.

Born in 1881, Hans Sachs started collecting posters as a teen and became Germany's leading private collector with 12,500 posters. The Nazis seized the collection in 1938, and the posters were held behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin.

His grandson Peter Sachs went through a legal battle for several years to get back what was left of the collection.

Just over 1,200 posters were sold by Guernsey's over the weekend in the first of three sales.

AP

Peter Sachs poses in front of two posters, pieces from his father Hans Sachs' Poster Collection, in 2007.

A poster called "Kunstsalon Aktuaryus" dating to around 1900 sold for $57,950.

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Miami Dolphins slam Norman Braman, Marlins Park deal

The Miami Dolphins ramped up their public campaign for a tax-funded stadium renovation this week, buying full-page ads against their top critic and trying to distance the plan from the unpopular Marlins deal.

The team bought an ad in Tuesday’s Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald knocking auto magnate Norman Braman’s criticism of the Sun Life Stadium deal, which would have Florida and Miami-Dade split the costs with owner Stephen Ross for a $400 million renovation. The Dolphins would pay at least $201 million, with taxpayers using state funds and a higher Miami-Dade hotel tax to pay $199 million.

In a fact sheet sent to media Tuesday morning, the Dolphins listed ways their deal differs from the 2009 Marlins deal. First: Ross, a billionaire real estate developer, would use private dollars to fund at least 51 percent of the Sun Life effort, compared to less than 25 percent from Marlins owner Jeff Loria. Second, Sun Life helps the economy more than the Marlins park does.

“Just because the Marlins did a bad deal doesn’t mean we should oppose a good deal where at least a majority of the cost is paid from private sources and more than 4,000 local jobs are created during construction alone,” the fact sheet states. And while the Dolphins’ Miami Gardens stadium has hosted two Super Bowls since 2007 and is in the running for the 2016 game, “Marlins Stadium does not generate the ability to attract world-class sports events -- other than a World Series from time to time depending on the success of the team.”

NFL teams play eight home games a year if they don’t make the playoffs, while baseball teams have 81.

Miami and Miami-Dade built the Marlins a $640 million stadium at the site of the Dolphins’ old home at the Orange Bowl in Little Havana. The Marlins contributed about $120 million and agreed to pay between $2.5 million and $4.9 million a year for 35 years to pay back $35 million of debt the county borrowed for the stadium. As a publicly owned stadium, the Marlins ballpark pays no property taxes. Most of the public money came from Miami-Dade hotel taxes, along with $50 million of debt tied to the county’s general fund.

Sun Life is privately owned and pays $3 million a year in property taxes to Miami-Dade. It currently receives $2 million a year from Florida’ s stadium program, a subsidy tied to converting the football venue to baseball in the 1990s when the Marlins played there. The Dolphins also paid for a second full-page ad with quotes from leading hoteliers in Miami-Dade endorsing the stadium plan. Among them: Donald Trump, whose company recently purchased the Doral golf resort. “Steve Ross’ commitment to modernize Sun Life Stadium -- while covering most of the construction costs -- is the right thing for Miami-Dade,’’ the ad quotes Trump as saying.

Also on Tuesday, Ross and team CEO Mike Dee sent a letter to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and county commissioners requesting negotiations over the stadium deal. The letter said the deal Ross unveiled last week is a “baseline for debate” and asked for talks. The letter also urged the commission to adopt a resolution proposed by Commissioner Barbara Jordan endorsing the state bill that would allow taxes for Sun Life. The resolution is on the agenda for Wednesday’s commission meeting.

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Drug-tracking Fat Albert blimp in the Keys will be deflated in March

Fat Albert, the familiar military blimp based on the bayside of Cudjoe Key, is set to come down permanently on March 15 after keeping watch over the Lower Keys since 1980.

Due to federal defense funding cuts, the U.S. Air Force's Tethered Aerostat Radar System, comprising Cudjoe and eight other sites along the Gulf of Mexico, Mexican border and Puerto Rico, will shut down.

The surveillance program is "capable of detecting low-altitude aircraft at the radar's maximum range by mitigating curvature of the Earth and terrain-masking limitations," according to Air Force literature from the Langley, Va.-based Air Combat Command.

The Cudjoe Key aerostat's primary mission is to support counter-drug operations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Joint Interagency Task Force-South, the latter located in Key West, employ the data, among others.

"Its presence has a deterrent value to illicit trafficking here in the area," U.S. Coast Guard Sector Key West Cmdr. Al Young said on US1Radio this week. "It also allows us here at the Coast Guard to maintain real-time visibility of air and surface resources that we may have and on occasion, we have used that information to vector assistance resources to find search objects."

NAS Key West spokeswoman Trice Denny said the Navy doesn't use the system to any appreciable extent.

On Saturday, a Summerland Key man identified only as R.H. posted a petition on the White House's website asking to "keep the Tethered Aerostat Radar System operational in order to help secure the southern border of the United States.... If we truly are concerned with the war on drugs and wish to have a cost-effective sensor to fight that war, then this sensor must remain active."

By Tuesday, it had more than 300 signatures. To get a response from President Barack Obama's staff, the petition would have to get 100,000 or more signatures by Feb. 18. The petition is available through www.whitehouse.gov/petitions.

Contractor Exelis Systems Corp., based in Colorado Springs, operates the network of blimp-mounted radars. Following the March 15, shutdown, "the remainder of the fiscal year will be used to deflate aerostats, disposition equipment and prepare sites for permanent closure," according to a notice from Program Manager Tim Green.

The Cudjoe aerostat holds 275,000 cubic feet of helium and measures in at 186 feet with a 62.5-foot diameter. The normal operating altitude is around 12,000 feet and it has a radar detection range of some 230 miles.

Radar data is transmitted to a ground station, where it's digitized, then transmitted to various federal users. Up until 1992, the Air Force, U.S. Customs Service and U.S. Coast Guard operated the network. In 1992, Congress switched management over to the Department of Defense.

The average per-site annual cost for a TARS site in 2002 was $2.8 million, according to a history prepared by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Updated numbers weren't available Tuesday.

Other than off the aptly named Blimp Road on Cudjoe, there are TARS sites in Deming, N.M.; Morgan City, La.; Lajas, Puerto Rico; Fort Huachuca and Yuma in Arizona; and Eagle Pass, Marfa, Matagorda and Rio Grande City, all in Texas.

In April 2007, a 1997 Cessna 182Q crashed into the Cudjoe aerostat's tether, killing all three people aboard. The plane had violated a three-mile radius, 15,000-foot air-space restriction around the Cudjoe site.

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First “Firefox OS” Phones Previewed, to Launch in February

Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has been promoting its Firefox OS project (once known as “Boot to Gecko”) for some time now. A hardware partnership with Telefonica, the international telecom giant, had been announced, but no phones had yet been unveiled.

But in an announcement today on its blog, Mozilla announced the impending launch of its first “developer preview” phones, the Keon and the Peak. Made in partnership with Geeksphone, a Spanish smartphone producer which used to make Android phones, these devices are meant to help app developers preview their work on the small screen. But they may also serve as a sneak preview of Mozilla’s plan to enter the smartphone market.

Introducing Firefox OS

Designed as an alternative to Google’s Android for low-powered smartphones, Firefox OS’ claim to fame is that it’s “built entirely using open web standards,” or open-source code written in the programming languages which make up the web, like JavaScript. Likewise, Firefox OS apps are websites specially formatted to look and feel like apps, and to respond to touchscreen controls and access phone features like vibration and the GPS.

A selection of Firefox apps is already available in the Mozilla Marketplace, but developers will eventually be able to take the open-source code behind it and create their own app markets like it if they so choose. These apps also run on the preview “Aurora” version of Firefox for Android, which is available for download from Mozilla’s website.

“Say ‘hola’” to the Keon and Peak

The Keon is Mozilla’s entry-level developer smartphone, while the Peak has somewhat more modern hardware specs.

The Keon has a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, a 3.5-inch touchscreen, and 4 GB of flash memory, plus a microSD card slot to expand storage space. Its built-in camera is a basic 3-megapixel shooter, and lacks an LED flash. It’s roughly comparable to 2010′s iPhone 4 in terms of raw hardware specs, although it probably won’t be able to play the same kinds of 3D games since they’ll be written as web applications.

The Peak has a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, a 4.3-inch IPS display, and an 8-megapixel camera with a flash, plus a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. It has the same amount of RAM and flash storage as the Keon does, though.

Both the Keon and the Peak are unlocked GSM smartphones, which may mean they will work on AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks in the States.

Pricing and availability

According to Peters, the “First phones will be available in February.” Prices have yet to be announced.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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