LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The 20-year-old son of Grammy award-winning rapper and producer Dr. Dre was found dead over the weekend at his home in Woodland Hills, California, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Andre Young Jr. was out with friends Friday night and his mother later found him “unresponsive in bed” when she tried to wake him early Saturday morning, coroner’s spokesman Ed Winter told Reuters. She immediately called paramedics, who later pronounced Young dead at the scene.

“Dr. Dre is mourning the loss of his son Andre Young Jr. Please respect his family’s grief and privacy at this time,” said a statement released by his spokeswoman.

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DENVER - Democrats were using the one-two punch of Hillary and Bill Clinton to unify their party against Republicans and argue that the nation would be safer — its economy as well as its citizens — under a Barack Obama administration.

Anticipating Wednesday night’s focus on national security at the Democratic National Convention, Republican John McCain contended in a new TV ad that Obama showed he was “dangerously unprepared” for the White House when he described Iran as a “tiny” nation that didn’t pose a serious threat.

“Iran. Radical Islamic government. Known sponsors of terrorism. Developing nuclear capabilities to ‘generate power’ but threatening to eliminate Israel,” says the ad, which was being run in key states. “Terrorism, destroying Israel — those aren’t ’serious threats’”?

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The number of people without health insurance fell in 2007 for the first time since President Bush took office in large part due to expanded government coverage for children, the U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday.

The number of people without health insurance dropped last year to 45.7 million, from 47 million in 2006, according to the bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance.

The rate of people without health insurance also declined to 15.3% in 2007, down from 15.8% a year earlier.

Some healthcare experts had expected the number of uninsured to increase as the long-term erosion of private, employment-based coverage continued. Instead, the figures showed a shift toward government coverage that added fuel to the debate over how to best expand access to healthcare.

“This is good news and is entirely attributable to the availability of government programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP),” said Lynn Blewett, a health services analyst with the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. “Programs like SCHIP and Medicaid are lifelines for providing Americans with the healthcare they need, especially during times when the economy is soft and more people feel vulnerable to losing employer-sponsored health insurance.”

Overall, the number of people covered by government programs rose to 83 million in 2007, up from 80.3 million in 2006. The number of people on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income residents, increased to 39.6 million from 38.3 million. And the number of children without insurance dropped to 8.1 million from 8.7 million as the number of children with public insurance rose by almost 1 million to 23 million.

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CAIRO, Egypt - A 27-year-old Egyptian woman gave birth to septuplets early Saturday in the coastal city of Alexandria, family members and the hospital director said.

Ghazala Khamis was in good condition after having a blood transfusion during her Caesarean section due to bleeding, said Emad Darwish, director of the El-Shatbi Hospital where she gave birth.

The newborns, four boys and three girls, weigh between 3.2 pounds and 6.17 pounds and are in stable condition, Darwish said. They have been placed in incubators in four different hospitals that have special premature baby units, he said.

“This is a very rare pregnancy — something I have never witnessed over my past 33 years in this profession,” Darwish told The Associated Press by phone from the hospital.

Darwish decided to carry out the Caesarean section at the end of Khamis’ eighth month of pregnancy due to the pressure on her kidneys. He said Khamis, who already has three daughters, took fertility drugs in an effort to have a son.

Khamis, the wife of a farmer in the northern Egyptian province of Beheira, was admitted to the hospital two months earlier, Darwish said.

“From the initial checkup, I say that none of the babies have any sort of deformities or incomplete organs,” Darwish said.

The woman’s brother, Khamis Khamis, said even though his sister was trying to conceive more children so she could have a son, the family was astonished when they found out she would give birth to multiple babies.

“We thought about an abortion, but then we felt it’s religiously forbidden. So we said ‘Let God’s will prevail,’” he told the AP by phone.

Egypt’s health minister announced that the seven babies will receive free milk and diapers for two years, the brother added.

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Bernie Mac blended style, authority and a touch of self-aware bluster to make audiences laugh as well as connect with him. For Mac, who died Saturday at age 50, it was a winning mix, delivering him from a poor childhood to stardom as a standup comedian, in films including the casino heist caper “Ocean’s Eleven” and his acclaimed sitcom “The Bernie Mac Show.”
 
Though his comedy drew on tough experiences as a black man, he had mainstream appeal — befitting inspiration he found in a wide range of humorists: Harpo Marx as well as Moms Mabley; squeaky-clean Red Skelton, but also the raw Redd Foxx.

Mac died Saturday morning of complications from pneumonia in a Chicago-area hospital, his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.

“The world just got a little less funny,” said “Oceans” co-star George Clooney.

Don Cheadle, another member of the “Oceans” gang, concurred: “This is a very sad day for many of us who knew and loved Bernie. He brought so much joy to so many. He will be missed, but heaven just got funnier.”

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BEIJING (AP)—Mariel Zagunis stood proudly atop the podium, the first American to do so at these Olympics.

A former president was in the front row—and three red, white and blue flags were rising to the rafters.

“It was a dream come true,” Zagunis said.

Zagunis won the first U.S. gold medal of the Beijing Games, leading an American sweep Saturday in women’s saber fencing. Zagunis took the gold with a 15-8 victory over Sada Jacobson, who won the silver. Becca Ward took the bronze.

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Barack Obama had breakfast Sunday with U.S. troops in Kabul as part of his visit to Afghanistan.

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Johnson said Obama went to an American base in the Afghan capital to dine with soldiers and sailors there.

The Democratic presidential candidate is part of a congressional delegation expected to meet later in the day with President Hamid Karzai.

Obama has made refocusing U.S. attention on terrorist threats in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan a centerpiece of his campaign for the November presidential election.

He opposed the Iraq war and has proposed sending about 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama has also criticized the effectiveness of Karzai and his Western-backed government.

SOurce:news.yahoo

By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK - The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, like the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, “Please buy anything you can to help out.”

Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills — and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother’s dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.

“This is not about downsizing. It’s about needing gas money,” said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.

At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.

Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sort of items on the Web, but said the rate of growth is “moving above the usual trend line.” He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.

In Daleville, Ala., Ellona Bateman-Lee has turned to eBay and flea markets to empty her three-bedroom mobile home of DVDs, VCRs, stereos and televisions.

She said she needs the cash to help pay for soaring food and utility bills and mounting health care expenses since her husband, Bob, suffered an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver in 2006 and is now disabled.

Among her most painful sales: her grandmother’s teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay.

“My grandmother raised me, so it hurt,” she said. “We’ve had bouts here and there, but we always got by. This time it’s different.”

Economists say it is difficult to compare the selling trend with other tough times because the Internet, only in wide use since the mid-1990s, has made it much easier to unload goods than, say, at pawn shops.

But clearly, cash-strapped people are selling their belongings at bargain prices, with a flood of listings for secondhand cars, clothing and furniture hitting the market in recent months, particularly since January.

Earlier this decade, people tapped their inflated home equity and credit cards to fuel a buying binge. Now, slumping home values and a credit crisis have sapped sources of cash.

Meanwhile, soaring gas and food prices haven’t kept pace with meager wage growth. Gas prices have already hit $4 per gallon in some places, and that could become more widespread this summer. The weakening job market is another big worry.

Christine Hadley, a 53-year-old registered nurse from Reading, Pa., says she used to be “a clotheshorse,” splurging on pricey Dooney & Bourke handbags. But her live-in boyfriend left last year, and she has had trouble finding a job.

Piles of unpaid bills forced her to sell more than 80 items, including the handbags, which went for more than $1,000 on a site called AuctionPal.com. Now, except for some artwork and threadbare furniture, her house is looking sparse.

“I need the money for essentials — to pay my bills and to eat,” Hadley said.

At AuctionPal.com, which helps novices sell things online, for-sale listings rose 66 percent from February to March, much faster than the 25 percent to 30 percent average monthly pace since the company was formed in September, CEO Maureen Ellenberger said. She said she was surprised to see that most of her clients desperately needed to sell items to raise cash.

For LiveDeal.com, a classifieds and business directory site, for-sale listings for January through March rose 10 percent from the previous year.

“We can definitely detect economic stress on the part of the consumer,” said John Raven, the site’s chief operating officer.

On Craigslist, Buckmaster said, three of the four fastest-growing for-sale categories are tied to gas — recreational vehicles like campers and trailers, cars and trucks, and boats.

Raven noted more and more listings for furniture, particularly in areas around Miami and Las Vegas and other regions hardest hit by the housing crisis.

Baughman, who runs eBizAuctions, said that over the past four months she’s been working with mostly desperate sellers instead of mainly casual ones. Most are middle-class customers who can’t pay their bills and now want to be paid up front for the items instead of waiting until they are sold, she said.

The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity’s national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.

And secondhand buyers want better deals now as well, driving prices down. Secondhand merchandise online is going for 25 to 35 percent below what it commanded a year ago, estimated Brian Riley, senior analyst at research firm The TowerGroup.

“It won’t hit the saturation point until the (economy) hits the bottom and right now, we don’t know when that is,” he said.

In Alabama, Bateman-Lee said that she only received $30 for her TV and $45 for her DVD player at a local flea market. She doesn’t have too much left to sell, but she’s going back to “sort through more things.”

Source:news.yahoo

While we may never know what it looks like inside a black hole, astronomers recently obtained one of the closest views yet. The sighting allowed scientists to confirm theories about how these giant cosmic sinkholes spew out jets of particles travelling at nearly the speed of light.

Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading hypothesis suggested the black hole’s gigantic mass distorts space and time around it, twisting magnetic field lines into a coil that propels material outward.

Now researchers have observed a jet during a period of extreme outburst and found evidence that streams of particles wind a corkscrew path away from the black hole, as the leading hypothesis predicts.

“We got an unprecedented view of the inner portion of one of these jets and gained information that’s very important to understanding how these tremendous particle accelerators work,” said Boston University astronomer Alan Marscher, who led the research team. The results of the study are detailed in the April 24 issue of the journal Nature.

The team studied a galaxy called BL Lacertae (BL Lac), about 950 million light years from Earth, with a central black hole containing 200 million times the mass of our Sun. Since this supermassive black hole’s jets are pointing nearly straight at us, it is called a blazar (a quasar is often thought to be the same as a blazar, except its jets are pointed away from us).

The new observations, taken by the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope, along with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and a number of optical telescopes, show material moving outward along a spiral channel, as the scientists expected.

These data support the suggestion that twisted magnetic field lines are creating the jet plumes. Material in the center of the galaxy, such as nearby stars and gas, gets pulled in by the black hole’s overwhelming gravity and forms a disk orbiting around the core (the material’s inertia keeps it spiraling in a disk rather than falling straight into the black hole). The distorted magnetic field lines seem to pull charged particles off the disk and cause them to gush outward at nearly the speed of light.

“We knew that material was falling in to these regions, and we knew that there were outbursts coming out,” said University of Michigan astronomer Hugh Aller, who worked on the new study. “What’s really been a mystery was that we could see there were these really high-energy particles, but we didn’t know how they were created, how they were accelerated. It turns out that the model matches the data. We can actually see the particles gaining velocity as they are accelerated along this magnetic field.”

The astronomers also observed evidence of another phenomenon predicted by the leading hypothesis — that a flare would be produced when material spewing out in the jets hit a shock wave beyond the core of the black hole.

“That behavior is exactly what we saw,” Marscher said.

Source:news.yahoo

By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Writer

LUSAKA, Zambia - Southern African leaders discussed Zimbabwe’s deepening electoral crisis in a marathon summit that ended before dawn Sunday with a weak declaration that failed to criticize the absent President Robert Mugabe.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who claims to have won the March 29 election outright, had wanted the leaders to press Mugabe to resign after 28 years as Zimbabwe’s leader.

Western powers, the United Nations and regional church, democracy and human rights groups had called for the meeting to demand an immediate announcement of the long-delayed election results.

Instead, the declaration issued at the end of the 12-hour summit called for the expeditious verification of results in the presence of the candidates or their agents “within the rule of law.” The declaration also urged “all parties to accept the results when they are announced.”

Independent tallies indicate Mugabe lost the election, but garnered enough votes to force a runoff.

The summit promised to send observers if there were a second round of elections. The team it sent in March was led by a junior minister from Angola, a country that has not held elections since 1992.

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa had called the emergency summit with 48 hours’ notice. Afterward, his foreign affairs minister told reporters there was no crisis in Zimbabwe, echoing statements made by South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki said Saturday there was “no crisis” after he had to fly to Zimbabwe before Saturday’s summit to engage Mugabe, who reportedly was not taking calls from African leaders last week.

Mbeki’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” on Zimbabwe has been likened to appeasement that allows Mugabe to continue his autocratic rule unimpeded. The Southern African Development Community that held the summit has been accused of pandering to Mugabe with disregard for its own constitution to promote democracy.

Presidents at the conference rushed away when the meeting ended, refusing to answer questions. They left Zambia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Kabinga Pande to declare, “We listened to both parties, the opposition and the government, and both have said there is no crisis.”

Tendai Biti, the secretary-general of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Party, denied that was what it said. Tsvangirai had hurriedly left the summit four hours before it closed and did not return as promised.

Biti repeated charges that Mugabe has orchestrated a campaign of violence to intimidate opponents who voted against him, with allegations of beatings and burnings of huts corroborated by local and international human rights groups.

“We have a militarized, polarized situation,” Biti said in a news conference. “There is violence, intolerance, hate speech and vitriolic propaganda.”

Pande said the rival parties had agreed at the summit that the elections were free and fair.

Biti said, “We maintain that Zimbabwe is not capable of producing a free and fair election.”

Still, he said, the leaders’ response was “a major improvement” and that the economic bloc “has acquitted itself relatively well.”

“The very fact that they had the guts to actually hold this extraordinary summit acknowledges that things are not right in Zimbabwe,” Biti added.

Inviting Tsvangirai to the meeting was an unprecedented move that probably accounted for Mugabe’s absence.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said it would conduct a full recount of the presidential and parliamentary vote on April 19, the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper reported. Commission chairman George Chiweshe said candidates, party representatives and observers would be allowed to witness the process, the paper said. Mugabe’s party had demanded a recount, even without results of presidential elections announced.

Pande said the summit could not demand election results while Zimbabwe’s High Court is considering opposition application asking a judge to order the immediate publication of results. The court, stacked with judges loyal to Mugabe, has dallied more than a week over the urgent appeal.

There was no comment from Mugabe or the three hard-line ministers he sent to represent him at the summit.

Mugabe’s allies indicated Saturday’s summit was part of a Western plot to overthrow him because of his land reform program, which was touted as an effort to redistribute the wide swathes of fertile land owned by the tiny white community to poor blacks. Instead, farms went to Mugabe’s relatives, friends and cronies and the economy of the former food exporter collapsed.

“This time, African leaders are supposed to do the bidding of the white West, that is to pressure Zimbabwe to abet regime change agenda,” said a column in the state-run Herald newspaper Saturday.

With Mugabe on the defensive after the election, ruling party officials have encouraged militants to invade the country’s few remaining white-owned farms and some farms owned by black opponents, saying they were trying to protect Zimbabweans from encroaching colonialism. Opposition officials say such attacks are a smoke screen for assaults on mainly black opposition supporters.

The summit was seen as a major test for the Southern African Development Community.

“The very integrity and utility of the SADC is at stake,” said New York-based Freedom House, which charts democracy’s progress around the world.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, of Ghana, warned the leaders they had “a grave responsibility to act, not only because of the negative spillover effects on the region, but also to ensure that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are respected.”

An estimated one-third of Zimbabwe’s population has fled the country as it descended into political and economic chaos.

Before the summit declaration, U.S. Ambassador Carmen Martinez said the United States was looking for “at least one step forward.”

“If SADC cannot even get a state to release their election results, it’s going to be very difficult for SADC,” she said.

The release of Zimbabwe’s election results ceased after results from legislative races held the same day as the presidential vote showed Mugabe’s party lost control of parliament for the first time.

Mwanawasa, the Zambian leader, had opened the summit with a reassuring message for Zimbabwe’s leaders, saying “This summit is not intended to put President Robert Mugabe in the dock.”

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Associated Press writers Joseph J. Schatz in Lusaka, Zambia, and Angus Shaw in Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed to this report.