Natalie and Derrica Wilson Help Find the Missing






Heroes Among Us










02/28/2013 at 02:45 PM EST







Natalie Wilson (left) and Derrica Wilson


Shaul Schwarz


One spring day in 2004 a young African-American woman named Tamika Huston vanished from her Spartanburg, S.C., apartment.

Her family did everything they could to get the media to pay attention to the 24-year-old's disappearance, sending out emails, calling newspapers and TV stations – to no avail.

"It was painful watching them struggle for any kind of media coverage-local or national," says Derrica Wilson, who was born and raised in Spartanburg. "This could have been one of my family members."

One year almost to the day later, high school senior Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba. And that story, of course, was everywhere. "It made me angry but angry in a positive way," says Derrica. "I wanted to do something to help families like Tamika's."

So she turned to her own family to make that happen. In 2008, Derrica and her sister-in-law, Natalie Wilson, started the Black and Missing Foundation, a non-profit geared toward helping minority families find missing loved ones. By working closely with police, the media and the families themselves, they have helped locate more than 113 missing people – 71 of them alive.

It's a daunting task: Thousands of African-Americans go missing each year (one-third of all missing-persons cases). The problem has caught Hollywood's eye: Tyler Perry recently offered a $100,000 reward for tips leading to the discovery of two missing Florida men.

The Wilsons fund the foundation out of their own pockets and make themselves available day and night to grieving families – even though they both have full-time jobs and families of their own. "Let's just say it's a calling," says Derrica, 34. They have more than 2,000 cases in their database (they only take on cases in which police reports were filed).

"I believe in what they do," says Washington, D.C. assistant police chief Diane Groomes, who was so impressed with their work she joined their board of directors.

The sisters in law divvy up their duties based on what they do best. Derrica, a cop for years who currently works as an investigator for a D.C. agency, coaches families on how to deal with law enforcement and the media. Natalie, 43, a public relations expert, works on getting the cases coverage on radio, newspapers, the web and television.

They've also partnered with TV One and national radio host Michael Baisden to get ongoing coverage of different cases. "It's one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had," says Baisden, whose show has helped find 14 children. "There is nothing more traumatizing than losing your child and not knowing if they are alive or dead."

On Feb. 13, the sisters-in-law started a support group for families that meets weekly in Washington, D.C. "Coping with a missing loved one is traumatic and overwhelming," says Natalie. "We want families to know that they are not alone." On May 25, they will host a 5K run in Ft. Washington, Md. to raise awareness of the issue.

No one is more appreciative of these efforts than the families they are helping. "If I had the next hundred years I couldn't thank them enough," says Unique Harris, 45, who says Derrica and Natalie got the Washington, D.C. media to give some much-needed attention to the still-unsolved disappearance of her daughter Valencia, 24.

"When I talk to Natalie and Derrica I let them know I love them, "she says, "and they're like family now."

Know a hero? Send suggestions to heroesamongus@peoplemag.com. For more inspiring stories, read the latest issue of PEOPLE magazine

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Vt. lye victim gets new face at Boston hospital


BOSTON (AP) — The 2007 chemical attack left the Vermont nurse unrecognizable to anyone who knew her.


But now Carmen Blandin Tarleton's face has changed again following a facial transplant this month.


Doctors at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston said Wednesday that the 44-year-old's surgery included transplanting a female donor's facial skin to Tarleton's neck, nose and lips, along with facial muscles, arteries and nerves.


"I know how truly blessed I am, and will have such a nice reflection in the mirror to remind myself what selfless really is," Tarleton wrote on her blog Wednesday.


The Thetford, Vt., woman suffered burns on more than 80 percent of her body and was blinded after her estranged husband attacked her with a baseball bat and doused her with lye in 2007.


Tarleton, who once worked as a transplant nurse, has undergone more than 50 surgeries since the attack, including work to restore some of her vision.


The latest surgery took 15 hours and included a team of more than 30 medical professionals. The lead surgeon, Bohdan Pomahac, called her injuries among the worst he's seen in his career.


"Carmen is a fighter," the doctor said Wednesday. "And fight she did."


Pomahac's team has performed five facial transplants at the hospital. He said the patient is recovering very well and is in great spirits as she works to get stronger.


He said she was very pleased when she saw her face for the first time, and that her appearance will not match that of the late donor's face.


"I think she looks amazing, but I'm biased," he said with a smile.


The donor's family wants to remain anonymous, but released a statement through a regional donor bank saying that her spirit would live on through Tarleton and three other organ recipients.


The estranged husband, Herbert Rodgers, pleaded guilty in 2009 in exchange for a prison sentence of at least 30 years.


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IHT Rendezvous: Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDON — The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-ever stab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift? The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Benedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” Ms. Best recalled, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts” — that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared for them to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth?”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of additional mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this play — and all Shakespeare plays obviously — is that they are so magnificently and eminently flexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.


LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.






Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.


HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.


“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.


“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.


Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”


Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.


LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.


HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.


The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.


HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.


WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.


(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Kristen Bell Shows Off Her Growing, Bare Baby Bump















02/27/2013 at 02:25 PM EST



Kristen Bell isn't bashful when it comes to her belly!

The pregnant, pint-sized House of Lies star, 32, was photographed in L.A., exposing her bare, growing baby bump in public on Tuesday afternoon, as a friend took a snapshot.

It appeared to be a whole photo shoot for the actress and her pals, as a series of shots show her in different poses, with different looks on her face.

Bell's rep confirmed in November that she and her fiancé, Dax Shepard, 38, are expecting their first child.

"I feel like when I arrive at the hospital, I want a glass of whiskey, I want the epidural in my back," Bell has said of giving birth. She's due in late spring.

"And I want to get hit in the face with a baseball bat and wake me up when it's over, because I've seen the videos and it looks terrifying."

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FDA halts Amgen study after teen patient death


WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal health regulators have halted Amgen's studies of its thyroid drug Sensipar after the death of a 14-year-old patient in a company trial.


The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it is still gathering information about the death, but has shut down all studies of the drug in children.


Sensipar is approved in adults to treat over-activity of the parathyroid gland. It has been used since 2004 to treat symptoms of chronic kidney disease and parathyroid cancer.


Amgen Inc. had been studying the drug to see whether it works in children.


The Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based company said in a statement that it "is working as rapidly as possible to understand the circumstances of what happened."


The FDA said on its website that it is unclear whether Amgen's drug had a role in the patient's death, but it is reminding doctors to prescribe it carefully.


The drug is known to lower calcium levels, sometimes to a dangerous extent.


The agency says doctors should monitor patients' calcium levels monthly to make sure they don't fall to dangerous levels. Signs of a calcium deficiency include muscle cramping, convulsions and burning or prickling sensations.


The most common side effects of the drug in adults include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.


Amgen shares fell 7 cents to $89.48 in afternoon trading Tuesday.


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Wall Street rebounds as Bernanke defends policy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed on Tuesday, rebounding from their worst decline since November after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus before Congress.


Bernanke, in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, strongly defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus program and quieted rumblings that the central bank may pull back from its stimulative policy measures, which were sparked by the release of the Fed minutes last week.


Bernanke's testimony helped ease concerns about a stalemate in Italy after a general election failed to give any party a parliamentary majority, posing the threat of prolonged instability and financial crisis in Europe, and sending the S&P 500 to its worst decline since early November in the previous sessions.


Bernanke "certainly said everything the market needed to feel in order to get comfortable again," said Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital in Jersey City, New Jersey.


"The fear is we were going to see a rollover, and the first shot over the bow was what we saw out of Italy yesterday with the elections," Kenny said. "When it came to U.S. markets, we saw some of that bleeding stop because our focus shifted from the Italian political circus to Ben Bernanke."


Gains in homebuilders and other consumer stocks, following strong economic data, lifted the S&P 500 and a 5.6 percent jump in Home Depot to $67.38 boosted the Dow industrials. The PHLX housing sector index <.hgx> rose 3.3 percent.


However, the central bank chairman also urged lawmakers to avoid sharp spending cuts set to go into effect on Friday, which he warned could combine with earlier tax increases to create a "significant headwind" for the economic recovery.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> climbed 109.04 points, or 0.79 percent, to 13,893.21. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> gained 8.96 points, or 0.60 percent, to 1,496.81. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> advanced 13.46 points, or 0.43 percent, to 3,129.71.


Despite the bounce, the S&P 500 also failed to move above 1,500, a closely watched level that was technical support until recently, but it could now become a hurdle.


The uncertainty caused by the Italian elections continues to weigh on stocks in Europe. The FTSEurofirst-300 index of top European shares <.fteu3> closed down 1.4 percent. The benchmark Italian index <.ftmib> tumbled 4.9 percent.


Home Depot gave the biggest boost to the Dow and provided one of the biggest lifts to the S&P 500 after the world's largest home improvement chain reported adjusted earnings and sales that beat expectations. The stock climbed 5.6 percent to $67.47.


Macy's shares gained 3.6 percent to $39.90 after the department-store chain stated it expects full-year earnings to be above analysts' forecasts because of strong holiday sales.


Economic reports that showed strength in housing and consumer confidence also supported stocks. U.S. home prices rose more than expected in December, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Consumer confidence rebounded in February, jumping more than expected, and new-home sales rose to their highest in 4-1/2 years.


(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)



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IHT Rendezvous: Memories of Floating Over Luxor, Now Tinged With the Macabre

My 5-year-old son spent the entire hot-air balloon ride over Luxor crouched in the bottom of the basket, terrified of the flames that kept shooting into the balloon—the flames that produced the hot air that kept us afloat. He missed the glorious views: of the ancient ruins and the quilts of green grass, of the magnificent sunrise and the dancing shadows it created out of the dozens of other hot-air balloons with which we shared the early-morning sky.

We had hardly thought about danger when we booked the ride, a staple of Luxor vacations, worrying only about whether it would be worth the $240 pricetag for our family of four—and the 4:40 a.m. wake-up call. Less than two months later, with Tuesday’s horrific headlines about a crash on one of those very balloons that killed at least 18, it seems my son may have been on to something.

This is not my first there-but-for-the-grace experience. Days after I went skydiving in the Chicago suburbs to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday, I read that a skydiver who crash-landed into a lake we had flown over had drowned. While covering the small-plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota in 2002, I discovered that the day I had spent with him three weeks earlier was on the very same King Air A-100.

Skydiving and small-plane rides in rural areas are known risks. But a fatal hot-air balloon ride? Did not occur to me. (Maybe it’s that tourist mentality: I never inquired about whether the camels we rode through back roads and villages were insured, either.)

Before this morning, the balloon ride was easily one of the best memories of our weeklong adventure in Luxor and Cairo over New Year’s.

It did not begin well: The hotel failed to make that 4:40 a.m. wake-up call, and we were hopelessly late. That meant we kept a literal boatload of Chinese tourists waiting to cross the Nile. Aboard the rickety wooden boat there was instant coffee, tea, and, oddly, Twinkies. On the other side, we were shuttled in vans to the open field where these huge, colorful balloons were in various stages of life—some lying limp on the ground, others half-filled, some taking flight.

My twins hoped for one of the multicolored balloons, but we ended up in red. Some 20 strangers joined us in the basket, where the kids were just the right height to peer out of the footholds we had used to climb in. My daughter peeked; my son cowered. The blue flames roared, and we were
airborne.

The ride lasted perhaps a half-hour, each minute offering a landscape transformed by the relative height of our balloon, the others, and the emerging sun. It was remarkable, if was not quite peaceful — there were those loud, hot flames shooting up a few feet away every few seconds. It was flames like those that, for the doomed balloon, ignited the stream from a ripped gas hose at landing, sending it bouncing back into the air to explode.

For us, on Dec. 31, the landing was smooth. Once on the ground, each rider was given a signed certificate commemorating the flight. (We passed on the offers to purchase
photographs or video.)

My daughter excitedly pasted her certificate into the vacation journal she was keeping for kindergarten. Now that seems like a macabre piece of memorabilia. We will be waiting a long time to tell our children the postscript to our adventure.

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Mindy McCready Is Laid to Rest in Florida















UPDATED
02/26/2013 at 02:35 PM EST

Originally published 02/26/2013 at 02:20 PM EST



Nine days after troubled country singer Mindy McCready died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her lakefront home in Heber Springs, Ark., her family held her funeral in her hometown of Ft. Myers, Fla.

About 400 mourners filled the sanctuary of Crossroads Baptist Church. A white hearse, escorted by two police cars, delivered the singer's wooden casket to the service.

A large portrait of McCready graced the stage, and her casket was adorned with white roses. As McCready's songs were played, photos from her life were displayed on two large video screens on either side of the sanctuary.

The pictures included a glamorous shot of her and her onetime fiancé Dean Cain. Among the songs were "I'm Still Here" and "Ten Thousand Angels."

Attendees, besides being greeted with a handshake form McCready's mother, Gayle Inge, were presented with a program that included a color photo of McCready.

Through tears during the service, Inge told the mourners. "Mindy adored her two children. She wanted them to know that. Through much agony and pain, she went to heaven. She is no longer sick. She is healed. Thank you for all who are here. Please pray for those boys. No matter what, she will always be my little girl, sitting in her car seat, singing into a hairbrush. The world was her stage."

Stepfather Michael Inge played his guitar and sang Bobby Helms's "You Are My Special Angel." Pallbearers included McCready's three brothers – Timothy, Joshua and Skyler – along with some of her cousins.

Gayle Inge, who arranged what was called "A Celebration of Life," told PEOPLE in a statement: "Our family is devastated by the loss of our beautiful and talented daughter. Her life, no matter how brief, touched many, and she will forever be our special angel."

In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting that donations be made to the Mindy McCready Children's Trust, c/o John Ammons, Edison National Bank, 13000 S. Cleveland Ave., Ft. Myers, FL 33907.

McCready, who was 37, will be buried in Ft. Myers. A second memorial service for her professional colleagues to attend is to take place in Nashville in early March.

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