Beckham rejects Euro offer to remain with Galaxy

DOHA, Qatar -- David Beckham is set to stay with the Los Angeles Galaxy after turning down a chance to join Paris Saint-Germain, the French club said Tuesday.

After weeks of negotiations with PSG, the 36-year-old midfielder and former England captain decided he doesn't want to move his family from the United States.

"David Beckham is not coming," PSG President Nasser al-Khelaifi said at the Qatar Open tennis tournament. "We feel a little disappointed. But both sides agreed it would be better that we not do the deal ... maybe in the future."

Beckham's five-year contract with the Galaxy ended after he won his first MLS Cup in November. He was wooed by several clubs across Europe.

"David Beckham is (with) Los Angeles," al-Khelaifi said. "And he's going to stay there."

Beckham will try to finalize a new, rolling one-year contract this week with the Galaxy, which was paying him an annual base salary of $6.5 million.

French media had reported Beckham would have been paid almost double that at PSG, whose Qatari owners have spent more than $100 million on players during six months in charge.

Beckham and wife Victoria, a former member of the "Spice Girls," moved to California in 2007 after he left Real Madrid.

The celebrity couple now have four children and decided during a Christmas break in England that they did not want to move back to Europe permanently.

"I'm very proud of the time that I've spent with the Galaxy and it might continue," Beckham stressed recently.

The Galaxy's recent success and the signing of Ireland captain Robbie Keane have shown Beckham that the LA club can meet his ambitions for the final years of his career, which began at Manchester United.

Beckham also has expressed hope of playing for Britain's soccer team at the London Olympics.

The new MLS season starts in March.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cbssportsline/home_news/~3/13StqD6f9hc/rss

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Funeral of Bahrain youth turns into street protest (Reuters)

DUBAI (Reuters) ? Bahraini police fired tear gas and sound grenades after hundreds of Shi'ite youths demonstrated on Sunday over the death of a 15-year-old protester a day earlier in the Sunni-ruled Gulf island kingdom, residents and activists said.

Confrontations between security forces and protesters take place almost daily in areas populated by majority Shi'ites, who led anti-government protests that were crushed last year.

"After the funeral, many of the mourners started protesting and the police began using tear gas and sound bombs. It is still going on hours later," a resident told Reuters from the mostly Shi'ite village of Sitra, south of the capital Manama.

At least one demonstrator was wounded after being hit in the head by a tear gas canister, activists said in Twitter messages.

The opposition said earlier that Sayed Hashim Saeed, who died on Saturday, had been hit by a tear gas canister at close range, but officials said the youth's body had extensive burns which could not have been caused by a tear gas canister.

"Preliminary investigations show that the deceased was among those who took part in attacks on security forces by throwing petrol bombs," the state news agency BNA quoted a police official as saying.

A coroner's report said the youth had a neck wound which may have been fatal and that the cause of death would be investigated.

Authorities said on Sunday they had arrested 11 "saboteurs" suspected of throwing petrol bombs at police during a protest on Friday in the village of Nuwaidrat, near Sitra, south of Manama, BNA reported.

Shi'ite youths chanting slogans against Bahrain's royal family clashed with riot police across the Gulf state on Friday and Saturday. Security forces fired tear gas to try to prevent them from blocking roads, a tactic often used by protesters.

Inspired by Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, thousands of mainly Shi'ite Bahrainis took to the streets in February and March demanding curbs on the power of the ruling Sunni Muslim Al-Khalifa family and an end to perceived discrimination.

The broader pro-democracy movement was suppressed with military backing from Bahrain's Sunni-led Gulf neighbors Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

At least 35 people, including five members of the security forces, were killed in the unrest, according to an inquiry Bahrain commissioned into the protests and their aftermath. The inquiry said it found evidence of systematic abuse and torture.

Bahrain has promised to implement the inquiry's recommendations, which the U.S. Congress has linked to its approval of a $53 million arms sale to Manama. Opposition groups doubt the kingdom's commitment to reform.

On Saturday, the independent daily Al Wasat said on its website that the head of the body tasked with implementing the recommendations, Ali al-Salih, had resigned. There was no official confirmation of the report.

Bahrain is important to Western interests in the Middle East because it hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet and faces Shi'ite giant Iran on the other side of the Gulf. Iran has denied Bahraini government accusations that it has incited the protests.

(Reporting by Nour Merza and Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/mideast/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120101/wl_nm/us_bahrain_protest

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What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits

U.S. soldiers at Long Binh base, northeast of Saigon, line up to give urine samples at a heroin detection center in June 1971, before departing for the U.S. AP

U.S. soldiers at Long Binh base, northeast of Saigon, line up to give urine samples at a heroin detection center in June 1971, before departing for the U.S.

It's a tradition as old as New Year's: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of M &Ms that our co-worker has helpfully positioned on the aisle corner of his desk. There will be exercise, and the learning of a new language.

It is resolved.

So what does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior? The answer to this question brings us ? strangely enough ? to a story about heroin use in Vietnam.

People, when they perform a behavior a lot, outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.

?

In May of 1971 two congressmen, Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy of Illinois, went to Vietnam for an official visit and returned with some extremely disturbing news: 15 percent of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, they said, were actively addicted to heroin.

The idea that so many servicemen were addicted to heroin horrified the public. At that point heroin was the bete noire of American drugs. It was thought to be the most addictive substance ever produced, a narcotic so powerful that once addiction claimed you, it was nearly impossible to escape.

In response to this report, President Richard Nixon took action. In June of 1971 he announced that he was creating a whole new office ? The Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention ? dedicated to fighting the evil of drugs. He laid out a program of prevention and rehabilitation, but there was something else Nixon wanted: He wanted to research what happened to the addicted servicemen once they returned home.

And so Jerome Jaffe, whom Nixon had appointed to run the new office, contacted a well-respected psychiatric researcher named Lee Robins and asked her to help with the study. He promised her unprecedented access to enlisted men in the Army so that she could get the job done.

Soon a comprehensive system was set up so that every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home. And in this population, Robins did find high rates of addiction: Around 20 percent of the soldiers self-identified as addicts.

Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.

A GI lights up a cigarette in Saigon in 1971. He poured grains of heroin into the menthol cigarette, from which he had first removed some of the tobacco. Enlarge AP

A GI lights up a cigarette in Saigon in 1971. He poured grains of heroin into the menthol cigarette, from which he had first removed some of the tobacco.

AP

A GI lights up a cigarette in Saigon in 1971. He poured grains of heroin into the menthol cigarette, from which he had first removed some of the tobacco.

"I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent," Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.

This flew in the face of everything everyone knew both about heroin and drug addiction generally. When addicts were treated in the U.S. and returned to their homes, relapse rates hovered around 90 percent. It didn't make sense.

"Everyone thought there was somehow she was lying, or she did something wrong, or she was politically influenced," Jaffe says. "She spent months, if not years, trying to defend the integrity of the study."

But 40 years later, the findings of this study are widely accepted. To explain why, you need to understand how the science of behavior change has itself changed.

Outsourcing The Control Of Behavior

According to Wendy Wood, a psychologist at University of Southern California who researches behavior change, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s scientists believed that if you wanted to change behavior, the key was to change people's goals and intentions.

"The research was very much focused on trying to understand how to change people's attitudes," Wood says, "with the assumption that behavior change would just follow."

So researchers studied how to organize public health campaigns, or how to use social pressure to change attitudes. And, says David Neal, another psychologist who looks at behavior change, these strategies did work.

Mostly.

"They do work for a certain subset of behaviors," Neal says. "They work for behaviors that people don't perform too frequently."

If you want, for example, to increase the number of people who donate blood, a public campaign can work well. But if you want them to quit smoking, campaigns intended to change attitudes are often less effective.

"Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they've done it enough, their behavior doesn't follow their intentions," Neal explains.

Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.

"People, when they perform a behavior a lot ? especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting ? outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says.

Outsourcing control over your behavior sounds a little funny. But understand consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car.

"Of course on one level, that seems like the simplest task possible," Neal says, "but if you break it down, there's really a myriad set of complex actions that are performed in sequence to do that."

You use a certain motion to put your key in the lock. And then physically manipulate your body to get into the seat. There is another set of motions to insert the key in the ignition.

"All of this is actually very complicated and someone who had never driven a car before would have no ability to do that, but it becomes second nature to us," Neal points out. "[It's] so automatic that we can do it while we are conducting complex other tasks, like having conversations."

Throughout the process, you haven't thought for a second about what you are doing, you are just responding to the different parts of the car in the sequence you've learned. "And very much of our day goes off in this way," Wood says. "About 45 percent of what people do every day is in the same environment and is repeated."

Environment's Key Role In Behavior

In this way, Neal says, our environments come to unconsciously direct our behavior. Even behaviors that we don't want, like smoking.

"For a smoker the view of the entrance to their office building ? which is a place that they go to smoke all the time ? becomes a powerful mental cue to go and perform that behavior," Neal says.

And over time those cues become so deeply ingrained that they are very hard to resist. And so we smoke at the entrance to work when we don't want to. We sit on the couch and eat ice cream when we don't need to, despite our best intentions, despite our resolutions.

"We don't feel sort of pushed by the environment," Wood says. "But, in fact, we're very integrated with it."

To battle bad behaviors then, one answer, Neal and Wood say, is to disrupt the environment in some way. Even small change can help ? like eating the ice cream with your non-dominant hand. What this does is alter the action sequence and disrupts the learned body sequence that's driving the behavior, which allows your conscious mind to come back online and reassert control.

"It's a brief sort of window of opportunity," Wood says, "to think, 'Is this really what I want to do?' "

Of course, larger disruption can also be helpful, which brings us back to heroin addiction in Vietnam.

It's important not to overstate this, because a variety of factors are probably at play. But one big theory about why the rates of heroin relapse were so low on return to the U.S. has to do with the fact that the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment where their addiction took hold of them.

"I think that most people accept that the change in the environment, and the fact that the addiction occurred in this exotic environment, you know, makes it plausible that the addiction rate would be that much lower," Nixon appointee Jerome Jaffe says.

We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple.

It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits?ft=1&f=1007

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iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S3 and more: The 10 gadgets we can?t wait to see next year

It?s hard to believe, but 2011 has almost wrapped. Of course, the latest, hottest gadgets don?t stop for recantations of Auld Lang Syne or annual Hootenannies, and 2012 will be packed with even more incredible kit. From the Samsung Galaxy S3 to a Kinect sequel, here?s what on our radar for 2012.

Apple TV
Steve Jobs left biographer Walter Isaacson several tantalising clues that a flatscreen Apple TV really could be happening, and the latest reports suggest Sharp is set to manufacture the screens for a summer release. We?ve already outlined how we think Siri could be used to control an Apple iTV, but as yet no-one?s peeped a glimpsed of what it?ll look like. The money?s on a gorgeous aluminium frame and not many buttons.

Samsung Galaxy S3
With Samsung hard at work on a quad-core chipset for mobile phones already, we?d have to figure the Samsung Galaxy S3 Android phone will be appearing soon ? perhaps at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. While details are scant right now, it seems highly probably it?ll run Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, overlaid with TouchWiz, and use a 720p AMOLED display, as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus already does. If so, it?s almost certainly going to be the only smartphone worth your time until the iPhone 5 rocks up. Speaking of which?

iPhone 5
Apple?s nomenclature is significant. The iPhone 4S isn?t the iPhone 5 because it?s still by and large the same design ? its only real differentiator is Siri. But make no mistake, Apple is already hard at work on a successor: whether this one ends up being the iPhone 5 or iPhone 6, we?re expecting an even sharper display, and maybe even some tight Apple TV integration.

The first Sony Android phone
Earlier this year, Sony finally got its act together and bought out telecoms partner Ericsson: Sony Ericsson is no more. The Japanese gadget giant has already said we?ll see the first Sony branded phones again next year, and it seems highly likely that they?ll pick up where SE left off, and run Android. Whether they?ll offer a better PlayStation experience than the lacklustre Xperia Play remains to be seen, but here?s hoping.

Kinect 2
Microsoft has wisely realised that Kinect, its motion sensing console add-on, is bigger than Xbox. It?s promised new Kinect hardware for PCs next year, and as you can see from its videos, it?s promising much more accuracy. You?ll even be able to play a virtual instrument, the trailers suggest. We hope so, and we?d love to see how a Kinect 2 could be used to give Windows 8 a real Minority Report vibe.

BlackBerry London
We know for sure that dual-core, 4G BlackBerry phones are on the way next year. Supposedly, what you see here will be the first of them: the BlackBerry London, a Porsche Design-inspired followed up of sorts to the popular Torch series of emailers. It sure looks tasty, but there is a question of timing: RIM says we won?t be seeing its new BlackBerry Ten models until the end of 2012. Humbug.

The Facebook Phone
Yes, yes, we?ve seen phones touted as that before, from the INQ1 to the HTC ChaCha and its rather superfluous physical F button. This time though, it really will be a Facebook Phone. The Wall Street Journal says that it?s coming next year, and will run a heavily modified version of open source Android ? and it?s being built by HTC. Could this be how HTC competes against Samsung?s mighty Galaxy line this year?

Xbox 720
We?ll be honest, we?d be surprised if the Xbox 720 goes on sale in 2012. Both Microsoft and Sony have been telegraphing that they?d quite like a detente for a little while longer in the console arms race. But consoles have long lead times to build anticipation and get games ready to go: it?s not out of the question that we?ll see an Xbox 720 at CES, as rumours have suggested. Hell, if Microsoft is happy to have the brand appearing in films set in the future, that?s as good a sign as any it?s coming.

iPad 3
Come on. We all know the iPad 3 is a shoe-in for next year. The only question is how thin will it be, and how sharp can the screen go? Don?t rule out an iPad 3 of a different size and form factor either, mind ? there?ve been too many reports and rumours of a smaller, more portable seven-inch iPad to ignore.

Amazon Kindle Fire 2
Word out out the Far East is that a follow up to Amazon?s successful but US-only Kindle Fire tablet is due around April ? and as we?ve suggested before, that could give Amazon enough time to sort out its contents rights agreements to launch in Europe. A Kindle Fire 2 with Lovefilm built-in? Don?t rule it out.

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Terra Noctis leads iPhone Games of the Week (Appolicious)

The holiday week has seen a freeze on adding new games to the iTunes App Store, but there are still plenty of great ones floating around. Leading this week?s charge is Terra Noctis, a side-scrolling platforming game that will remind players of the greats in the genre. Check it out, and four other quality titles, below.

A retro platformer with a great art style, Terra Noctis looks great and will remind you of the 2-D side-scrolling platformers of years past. The game?s touch controls are pretty solid on iOS, and there?s plenty of content to go around including hours of gameplay and massive boss fights. Terra Noctis does an admirable job of invoking classic games in the genre while adding a little something new to the equation. It looks and sounds great and includes support for achievements and leaderboards from Open Feint, as well as support for iCade.

Space is filled with valuable fuels, but powerful gravity wells created by huge asteroids make it impossible for spaceships to retrieve them. That?s where you and your remote-controlled probes come in. You?ll need to control your probe by firing its thrusters and using the gravity of asteroids to navigate each level. It?s your goal to grab the crystals and get out as fast as you can and with as little maneuvering as you can manage. The faster you go and the less fuel you use, the higher your score. It?s a pretty difficult game, but Gravity Rocks also requires some serious skills, which will appeal to players with a penchant for punishment.

A 3-D platformer, Crazy Hedgy looks a lot like console classics Crash Bandicoot or Sonic the Hedgehog, with a similar playing style. The main character is even a hedgehog himself, but instead of running around, Hedgy the Hedgehog chooses to roll, and you control him using your iOS device?s internal gyroscope. Tilting your device directs Hedgy around the screen, where you?ll need to snag gems to upgrade your abilities and fight off enemies. The game looks great, it?s optimized for newer iOS devices and its developers say Crazy Hedgy includes 10 or more hours of gameplay.

Great graphics and a challenging style mark Wind Up Robots, a base-defense strategy game that bucks the usual setup. The game?s controls are pretty simplistic. You choose which robots will be in your defense force at the beginning of each level, and then you deploy them as necessary. The idea is to defend your charge: a sleeping boy assaulted by nightmares. The nightmares fly across the level towards the boy with your robots standing in between, and you control them by tapping them and giving them orders on where to go. The robots do the rest, but the real strategy of the game is in choosing your forces, directing them in anticipation of enemies, and changing them out with other robots to keep them alive. Wind Up Robots looks good and offers plenty of challenge.

The latest of Telltale Games? licensed point-and-click adventure games takes on the iconic police/prosecutor drama, putting players in a story that includes appearances by tons of cast members from Law & Order. The first episode is a little straightforward, but it?s hard to argue with the quality of Telltale?s titles or with the production values found in this game. You?ll need to purchase future episodes through in-app purchases as they come out each month, but if you?re a fan of the Law & Order TV show, this is a fun way to get into the action in a new and different way.

Create a list of your favorite games

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