Cool weather will continue Saturday in South Florida with breezy conditions and low temperatures dipping below 70. Highs will be in the mid-70s.
On Sunday, forecasters expect the start of a warming trend, with highs near 80 and a low of about 70.
Monday will bring more breezes and partly sunny skies, with a high of 79 degrees and a 20 percent chance of rain after 8 a.m.
For up-to-date forecasts and maps, click here.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc said several of its online services have been blocked in China.
Traffic to Google’s services in China dropped sharply beginning Friday evening there, according to an online “Transparency Report” website operated by Google, which provides updates about access to its services in different parts of the world.
Among the sites affected were Google’s search engine and its Gmail web email product.
The disruptions come as China’s once-in-a-decade meeting to appoint new leadership gets underway.
A Google spokeswoman said the company did not know why the disruption was happening. Google said in a statement that it had “checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”
Google’s YouTube video service has been inaccessible in China since 2009, while access to other services in China are blocked sporadically.
In 2010 Google relocated its Chinese search engine to Hong Kong after a spat with authorities over censorship and cyber-attacks that Google said originated in China.
(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; editing by John Wallace)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
What had ET readers buzzing this week?
1. It's Brad vs. Zombies in World War Z
Zombie attack!!! Brad Pitt plays a family man and United Nations employee who faces a deadly zombie pandemic in World War Z -- we gave you an exclusive first look and now we've got the intense trailer!
Just when you thought that the zombie genre may be starting to generate less screams and more Zzzz's, World War Z arrives with an adrenaline shot in the arm for the genre -- complete with insane special effects and a claustrophobic urgency and realism not seen since the introduction of those "speed zombies" in 28 Days Later.
Directed by Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace), World War Z invades theaters June 21, 2013.
2. Oprah Reveals Her 2012 'Favorite Things'
It's officially the holiday season!
Oprah just revealed her "Favorite Things" for 2012, which includes such items as a $1,800 Jetson E-Bike, a $192 hand-picked Tom Ford lipstick palette and a $238 Lafco soap set.
"This luxuriously oversize, deliciously scented soap is my new go-to gift. I even brought a set to Mr. and Mrs. Colbert when I interviewed Stephen for Next Chapter," she says about the pricey soap set.
But of course if you don't have the income of Oprah, you can pick up O's December issue to learn how you can win all 49 of Oprah's favorite things, which hits newsstands November 6.
"Oprah's Favorite Things" is also getting its own two-hour, prime time special airing Nov. 18 on OWN. The special will surprise unsuspecting military spouses with items from the media mogul's exclusive must-have gift selections for the holiday season, and for the first time, viewers of Oprah's Favorite Things: 2012 will have the opportunity to watch and win select items featured in each segment of the show.
3. Brooke Burke-Charvet Reveals Cancer Diagnosis
Brooke Burke-Charvet released a video online Thursday to announce that she was recently diagnosed with a cancerous growth on her thyroid gland. In the video posted on her Modern Mom blog, the 41-year-old actress and TV host explained that a nodule was discovered on her thyroid and after a series of tests over the last few months, it was eventually determined to be cancerous and her thyroid will have to be removed.
"Which means that I'm going to have a nice big scar right her across my neck," Brooke said. "And I don't get to just walk around and pretend like nothing happened or not follow up or not share it, because it's going to be pretty much dead center."
Brooke said the discovery -- which originated from a regular physical -- came as a complete shock because she's otherwise healthy. "As crazy as it is, my head is in the right place, and it's going to be good," she said, adding that the doctors consider this a form of "good cancer" compared to many others and the prognosis is good. "I'm just going to make a positive out of this negative thing."
She said the surgery has been scheduled and she promised to keep her fans updated through her blog. "Now I'm ready to deal with it and I'm going to be fine. And I feel really, really strong."
Speaking on Thursday's episode of The Talk, Brooke's co-host on Dancing with the Stars, Tom Bergeron, commented on her cancer diagnosis. "My love and support are with you -- we are all there with her," he said. Bergeron added that he personally has a very positive outlook. "I've known about this for a few months. I have had experience with this in my family. You never want to hear the word cancer. But thyroid cancer is one of the most treatable cancers. It has an incredibly high success rate."
4. Kirstie on Secret Relationship with Swayze
Kirstie Alley reveals to ET's Chris Jacobs intimate details about what she says was a powerful attraction and hidden relationship with her North and South co-star, Patrick Swayze. Although both stars were married during filming of the mini-series, Alley tells Jacobs when she first saw Swayze, they had an intense attraction and she tried to avoid "going down that road," but they ultimately fell in love.
"Both of us were married. We did not have an affair. But again, I think what I did was worse. Because I think when you fall in love with someone when you're married, you jeopardize your own marriage and their marriage. It's doubly bad," said Alley.
Alley goes on to say that although she's friends with Patrick's wife, Lisa Niemi, who asked Alley to speak at Swayze's funeral, she is uncertain if Lisa is aware of their relationship.
5. One Direction & Drew Brees Play Catch - Exclusive
One Direction and Drew Brees teamed up last month to film an adorable Pepsi spot and during Thursday night's episode of The X Factor, the band will not only perform their newest singles, Live While We're Young and Little Things, but also reveal an alternate ending to the ad!
For those who missed the spot, the original ended with Drew Brees sacrificing his last can of Pepsi in order to become an unofficial member of One Direction. But, according to Angelique Krembs, VP Marketing for Pepsi, they also wanted to show fans what would happen if Drew won the last can of Pepsi. "Our latest Live For Now spot has received an enormous amount of buzz and online excitement," Krembs said. "And of course everyone wants to see the boys from 1D suit up in football gear and have some fun."
While you have to wait until Thursday to see the entire surprise ending to Pepsi's Live For Now television commercial, ETonline scored an exclusive sneak peek of One Direction tossing the pigskin around with Brees!
Tune in to The X Factor on November 8 at 8 p.m. to see the alternate ending!
On the eve of the Veterans Day parade, the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center staged a special gesture of honor: veterans tying yellow ribbons to a tree that survived the terror attack.
More than 100 ribbons were distributed at the Saturday morning ceremony. A wreath was laid near the tree, which thrives more than a decade after it emerged from the smoking rubble.
Standing for a moment of silence were veterans of wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as active service members and Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
They heard a violist playing "Amazing Grace" as ribbons were wrapped around the branches of the "survivor tree."
On Sunday, New York will honor veterans with a parade up Fifth Avenue.
Terra Group expects to break ground soon on a major mixed-use development in Doral, including 300 single-family homes and a grocery-anchored shopping center.
Separately, the Miami developer said it recently acquired four parcels on the edge of Miami’s Midtown/Design District near 36th Street and Biscayne Boulevard through Terra Skylar Investments, a new venture formed with partners Avra Jain and Joseph Del Vecchio, giving it a foothold in a rapidly emerging hotspot.
The Doral Commons project — which will span more than 90 acres between Northwest 97th Avenue and Northwest 107th Avenue on the north side of 74th Street — will be the first project to break with the Mediterranean-style architecture for which the city is known.
“We’re going to be doing modern architecture for the first time in the city of Doral. We plan to have clean lines with a lot of glass. It will be very interesting architecture,” said David Martin, Terra’s president and chief operating officer.
The 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot homes planned for two gated communities will start in the $600,000s, with larger homes in the $1 million range.
Pascual, Perez, Kiliddjian & Associates will be the architect for the Doral project, Martin said.
Terra closed on the purchase of the Doral land from Flagler Development about two weeks ago.
Terra currently has three residential projects under way in Doral: Doral Cay, Vintage and Las Ramblas.
“The problem with Doral is the scarcity of land,” Martin said. “This is our last opportunity to develop something in Doral, and we want to do something design driven.”
He said the homes will feature more garage, storage and closet space than the standard fare.
On the retail side, the Doral project will include a 150,000-square-foot neighborhood shopping center featuring a supermarket and other retail, such as food and beverage, fashion along with some space for banks, Terra said. Courtelis Co. will handle leasing.
Meanwhile near the Midtown/Design District neighborhood, which is in the midst of major development plans, Terra Skylar acquired a 50,000-square-foot office building at 3550 Biscayne Boulevard and several nearby parcels.
For now, Martin said the plan is to maintain the office building with its current tenants. Metro One is handling the leasing. Plans for the undeveloped lots are still in the making but will probably include residential, retail or hospitality, Martin said.
“It’s really a key piece of that neighborhood,” said Martin, who described the area as “where Miami’s creative class of tomorrow wants to live, work and play.”
Gov. Rick Scott’s top elections official acknowledged for the first time Friday that the state bears some responsibility for long lines and late vote counts that have once again made Florida a target of national ridicule following a presidential election.
“We could have done better. We will do better,” Secretary of State Ken Detzner said on CNN during pointed questioning from anchor Ashleigh Banfield.
Detzner, however, twice demurred when offered a chance to say he was sorry for inconveniencing so many voters. He said the length of the ballot and record turnout of 8.4 million contributed to bottlenecks that forced people in Miami-Dade to wait seven hours to vote. He did concede that the state should have allowed counties to add more early voting sites.
“The solution is that in current Florida law, there’s a limit on the number of locations that supervisors can use in early voting. We need to take a very serious look at that and open up the number of locations,” Detzner said.
From author Carl Hiaasen on CBS (“a freak show”) to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who tossed bleeped-out expletives at Florida, writers and comedians have had a field day lampooning the state’s latest electoral embarrassment. The scrutiny would have been immeasurably worse if Ohio had not sealed President Barack Obama’s re-election.
But it’s no joke, and the most ferocious criticism is aimed squarely at Scott, the former hospital-chain CEO who repeatedly urges people to hold him accountable for his performance.
Florida elections officials Friday were still counting absentee ballots in Palm Beach County, and though Obama held a 60,000-vote edge statewide, news organizations had yet to declare Obama the winner of Florida’s 29 electoral votes.
What Detzner did not say on TV was that for years, Republican legislators in Tallahassee have ignored pleas by county election supervisors to let them expand early voting to sites beyond their own offices, city halls and libraries, so crowds at each site would be smaller.
For the past three years, Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston, filed bills to add flexibility to the choices of early voting sites. The 2012 version, SB 516, was shelved and never heard by a committee chaired by Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, whose county had by far the longest lines and who voted with other Republicans to reduce early voting days.
“The Legislature wouldn’t hear that bill,” Rich said. “The governor and Republican-dominated Legislature caused this to happen, by reducing early voting days and by putting all of those constitutional amendments on the ballot.”
Rich and other Democrats say the limited sites and long ballot were a sinister plot by Republicans to make it harder for Democrats to vote.
Elections are run by counties in Florida, but are governed by state law.
Scott signed into law changes in 2011 that cut early voting days from 14 to eight. As the early voting lines grew longer, he refused requests to issue an executive order adding more days. The day after the election, he said: “Let’s look and see what we can improve.”
In turning down a request last week by Monroe County elections chief Harry Sawyer to add additional days of early voting, Detzner said the state had no authority to do so except during a state of emergency that could risk lives or property.
Thousands of Floridians have flooded Scott’s email in-box with criticism, some promising not to vote for him when he seeks re-election in 2014.
“The fact that Florida is an embarrassment yet again falls within your purview,” Danielle McWilliams, a teacher in Stuart, told Scott in an email. “This is yet another reason why you should be out of office.”
Paul Adams of Sarasota ridiculed Scott’s choice of Detzner, a former lobbyist for the beer industry, as the state’s chief elections officer.
“Your people can’t get it together,” Adams wrote Thursday. “Who won the election?”
CNN’s Banfield, who said she spent 14 hours at Miami-area voting sites Tuesday, peppered Detzner with tough questions and demanded he explain why the state didn’t anticipate the bottlenecks and expand the locations.
“We were following the law,” Detzner said. “It appears as though now we need to redress the issue regarding the locations. The governor has asked me to look at that issue.”
Banfield told viewers it was time for Scott to “face the music” and explain what went wrong.
As she closed her program, Friday, she spoke directly to Scott, noting that he has declined two offers to appear on the air.
“We’d really like you to join us,” she said, “and answer for your state.”
Tampa Bay Times researcher Natalie Watson contributed to this report.
LONDON (Reuters) – The solitary world of online foreign exchange trading is emerging from the shadows as solo investors turn to specialist social media networks to link up with their peers and seek market-beating strategies.
Individual or retail trading, estimated at 8-10 percent of the $ 2.5 trillion daily spot FX market, used to conjure an image of a lone trader with little contact with the outside world.
But that is changing. Thanks to specially tailored websites known as social trading networks, users are able to see and even copy the trades of top-ranked rivals, swap ideas and gauge the market mood in online chat with a community of contacts.
“In the world of trading there are a lot of signals but social media gives us the market sentiment and it is ideal for chatting to people across the world for trade ideas,” said Patrick Orini, who has been trading FX online since 2004.
Retail forex traders make their deals using personal accounts through brokers such as Alpari, FxPro and IronFX. Increasingly, traders are hooking up their broker accounts with social trading networks, such as eToro, Currensee and Tradeo.
Traders usually pay a subscription to use the service while the social network and the broker might share revenue on trades.
In a system reminiscent of microblog network Twitter, top players who make their trades visible can gather thousands of followers, some of whom pay to copy their strategies.
Orini’s trading account on a social trading network called Tradeo has 500 followers, of whom around 20 copy his trades.
If online investors do well in their trades, they will attract more followers and will be ranked higher on the trader “leaderboard” posted on the site.
Retail FX has grown over the last decade as brokers allow individual traders to take highly leveraged positions previously accessible only to institutional investors. The largest group of market players is based in Japan.
eToro, one the world’s largest social trading platforms has processed more than 20 million trades since it went live at the beginning of 2012.
Tradeo, a social network for forex traders based in Tel Aviv, launched three months ago and, according to its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Adest, the site has posted up to half a billion dollars of trades from around 10,000 traders since then.
“It’s not a broker, but a network for brokers — a bit like an online trading room,” Adest said.
He said Tradeo also combats a key hazard of online trading — inaccurate or bogus information. Traders often swap ideas on comment boards, but anonymity and low security makes it difficult to weed out spam.
“The idea of creating a niche social network for forex traders is to help verify commentators usually found in chat rooms and comment boards,” Adest said.
In its increased use of social media, online forex trading is catching up with developments in the equities market.
Retail equities trading is estimated to account for up to half of trade in UK small companies. Retail FX’s smaller share of the overall market reflects the fact that most trade is over-the-counter and lack of volatility that make it harder to turn a profit.
In the equities market, analysis of Twitter postings and news headlines has been used to predict stock price movements.
London-based hedge fund firm Derwent Capital is launching a new spread betting application for retail traders in January that will use Twitter’s 350 million daily tweets to create a sentiment indicator covering currency pairs and other assets.
Social media makes existing currency market sentiment models more effective, said John Hardy, head of FX strategy at Saxo Bank.
“It would be a new way to measure “sentiment” in real time, something that banks can do already via how people are actually trading…but the Twitter measures might be able to bring new nuances and sophistication,” he said.
Arguably, solo traders who hook up to social trading networks are seeking an edge in the “wisdom of crowds”.
“The reason why so many people, like myself, do share their activity and ideas is to help each other and build the community,” Orini said. “I got so many valuable ideas from other traders, that I’m more than happy to share my ideas as well.”
(Editing by Nigel Stephenson)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Now that Kristina's learned she'll have to undergo chemotherapy, Tuesday's all-new Parenthood shows The Braverman Family balancing the responsibilities of their daily lives while simultaneously preparing to embark on the next stage of her treatment.
RELATED - Monica Potter On Parenthood's Personal Storyline
First up: organic living!
Although, as you can see in ETonline's exclusive sneak peek at the November 13 episode, titled Together, Kristina doesn't take too kindly to Adam's first offering. Luckily the family has lots of help as both Camille and Crosby step up in a big way!
Parenthood airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
Gregory P. Mango
Robert Linhart
Now he faces up to a year on Rikers Island -- which is not La Isla Bonita.
A Madonna-besotted former city firefighter was convicted today of resisting arrest after flailing his arms as he was busted painting love notes on giant wooden boards outside the star's Central Park West building.
"Madonna I need you," read one sign. "Tell me yes or no," read another. "If it's yes, my dream will come true. If it's no, I will go. XXX"
Robert Linhart, retired in '98 from Ladder 30 in Harlem, was just trying to express himself -- until he went over the borderline and failed to comply with police attempts to arrest him, jurors said they found.
"If she invites me," Linhart joked as he left court, when asked if he would attend the Material Girl's concerts Monday and Tuesday at Madison Square Garden.
Linhart had every right to paint his signs peaceably, but no right to resist arrest, said jurors, who only afterward learned that the kooky ex-smoke-eater's object of affection was Madonna.
"We thought that he was a little, you know, different," said juror Dr. Harry Pong, 51.
"But that doesn't matter -- he has the right to free speech," Pong added.
"I feel that his rights were violated," agreed juror Elisa Rosario, 50.
"I don't think he did anything wrong," in painting his signs and blasting loud music on the wide sidewalks of Central Park West, she said.
"He was a typical New Yorker," she said. "He was on the sidewalk painting. I give Mr. Linhart a lot of credit. He stepped up to the plate. He did not take their crap," she said of trial exhibit video of the arrest, showing a cuffed Linhart cursing out his arresting officers.
Still, prosecutors presented credible police testimony showing that once cops made the decision to arrest him on Sept. 21, 2010, he resisted by flailing his arms, the two jurors said.
Linhart was acquitted of a second charge of resisting arrest from Sept. 18, 2010 -- the arresting officers' testimony in that incident was inconsistent and not credible, the jurors said.
Defense lawyer Lawrence LaBrew said he would appeal the conviction, because Linhart had been denied the right to present a doctor's testimony showing that at the time of the second arrest, he was suffering from a torn rotator cuff in his shoulder.
The injury was caused by cops' rough treatment of Linhart during the first arrest, and was the reason Linhart couldn't move his arms and comply with police attempts to cuff him, LaBrew said.
Linhart, of Huletts Landing, NY, is such an ardent fan, he tweets under the name @madonna_stalker. "Funny, I just heard Madonna say that she supports freedom of speach," he tweeted in August. "I think that she should inform her security of her beliefs."
Buying a foreclosed home is no longer the big bargain it used to be.
In South Florida, the discount for foreclosures narrowed to 2.9 percent below a comparable non-distressed home in September from 6.8 percent a year earlier, according to Zillow.
The foreclosure discount for the tri-county area of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties peaked in August 2008, when bank-owned homes fetched 22.7 percent less than non-distressed homes, the Seattle-based real-estate information firm said.
Nationwide, the foreclosure discount was 7.7 percent in September, down from 9.1 percent a year earlier, Zillow said. The widest gap nationally between foreclosed and non-distressed sales was 23.7 percent in September 2009.
“The smallest foreclosure discount is found in places where competition for homes is so high, people there are willing to pay the same amount for a foreclosure re-sale that they would for a non-distressed home simply to take advantage of historic affordability,” said Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist.
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