LOS ANGELES – Brittany Murphy, the actress who got her start in the sleeper hit "Clueless" and rose to stardom in "8 Mile," has died in Los Angeles. She was 32.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Spokeswoman Sally Stewart said Murphy died at 10:04 a.m. (1804 GMT) Sunday. She would not provide a cause of death, or any other information.
The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a call at 8 a.m. (1600 GMT) Sunday from a home that is listed as belonging to British screenwriter Simon Monjack, who is married to Murphy, spokesman Devon Gale said. Gale said one person was transported to a hospital.
Los Angeles police have opened an investigation into Murphy's death, Officer Norma Eisenman said Sunday afternoon. Investigators have been dispatched to Murphy's home in the hills of West Hollywood.
Messages left for Murphy's manager, agent and publicist by The Associated Press weren't immediately returned.
Born Nov. 10, 1977 in Atlanta, Murphy grew up in New Jersey and later moved with her mother to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
Her career started in the early 1990s with small roles in television series, commercials and movies. She is best known for parts in "Girl, Interrupted," "Clueless" and "8 Mile."
Her on-screen roles declined in recent years, but Murphy's voice gave life to numerous animated characters, including Luanne Platter on more than 200 episodes of Fox's "King of the Hill" and Gloria the penguin in the 2006 feature "Happy Feet."
She is due to appear in Sylvester Stallone's upcoming film, "The Expendables," set for release next year.
Her role in "8 Mile" led to more recognition, Murphy said told AP in 2003. "That changed a lot," she said. "That was the difference between people knowing my first and last name as opposed to not."
Murphy credited her mother, Sharon, with being a key to her success.
"When I asked my mom to move to California, she sold everything and moved out here for me," Murphy said. "I was really grateful to have grown up in an environment that was conducive to creating and didn't stifle any of that. She always believed in me."
She dated Ashton Kutcher, who costarred with Murphy in 2003's romantic comedy "Just Married."
Kutcher sent a message on Twitter Sunday morning about Murphy's death: "2day the world lost a little piece of sunshine," Kutcher wrote. "My deepest condolences go out 2 Brittany's family, her husband, & her amazing mother Sharon."
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AP Entertainment Writer Anthony McCartney contributed to this report.

Piano Lessons

The very tall cabinet piano was introduced about 1805 and was built through the 1840s. It had strings arranged vertically on a continuous frame with bridges extended nearly to the floor, behind the keyboard and very large sticker action. The short cottage upright or pianino with vertical stringing, made popular by Robert Wornum around 1815, was built into the 20th century.

They are informally called birdcage pianos because of their prominent damper mechanism. Pianinos were distinguished from the oblique, or diagonally strung upright made popular in France by Roller & Blanchet during the late 1820s. The tiny spinet upright was manufactured from the mid-1930s until recent times. The low position of the hammers required the use of a "drop action" to preserve a reasonable keyboard height.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – It was the slap heard 'round the coalfields: Cordelia Ruth Tucker, wearing the fluorescent-striped shirt of a miner, strode past West Virginia state troopers and into a stream of marchers protesting mountaintop removal mining to deliver an audible smack.
The 54-year-old Rock Creek woman isn't talking as she awaits trial on a battery charge. Her neighbor, environmental activist Judy Bonds, says she was on the receiving end of the slap.
And Bonds — like many in a place where labor disputes have a violent history — fears more blows will follow as the fight escalates over mountaintop removal, the uniquely Appalachian form of strip mining that involves blowing tops off mountains and dumping the rubble in valleys.
For nearly a decade, environmentalists and the mining industry battled in courtrooms and the Capitol. Arrests were unheard of.
This year, as mountaintop removal has drawn more scrutiny from regulators, policy makers and the public, the activists' strategy changed.
There have been nearly 100 arrests in 20 protests, most involving trespassing. Led by a new group called Climate Ground Zero, the activists have chained themselves to giant dump trucks, scaled 80-foot trees to stop blasting and paddled into a 9 million-gallon sludge pond. They've blocked roads, hung banners and staged sit-ins.
Virginia-based Massey Energy claims a single 3 1/2-hour occupation at Progress Coal Co. in Twilight cost the company $300,000. Two environmentalists pleaded no contest to battery after that incident for trying to push past a miner and climb a 20-story, earth-moving crane.
Mountaintop removal foes say the industry and its allies are stoking fear and anger among miners and their friends by accusing environmentalists, Congress and the Obama administration of trying to kill coal through regulation and permitting.
Massey equates anti-coal with anti-American. Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy blames the planned layoffs of 482 miners on a lawsuit by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.
Both sides are fighting for a way of life. The miners see the mountains as their livelihood. The environmentalists see them as divine and irreplaceable creations.
Since that slap in June, conflict has manifested itself mainly in harsh words and shows of force: Shout-downs by hundreds of miners at an Army Corps of Engineers hearing; a bare-bellied miner's profane, throat-slitting gesture at a picnic for environmentalists on Kayford Mountain; a curse-laden online tirade in which someone using the screen name "Superhippieslayer" warns, "Look out violence is coming your way. There is a group ready as we speak to eliminate the threat."
The bitter feelings bubble up in comments posted on YouTube video links to incidents like the June 23 protest march where Bonds was slapped. Hundreds of comments were posted after she spoke at a Dec. 7 rally in Charleston, many laced with profanities.
It's to the point where Bonds, a diminutive 57-year-old, has installed home-security cameras, carries a handgun and checks her car for dangling bomb wires.
"I feel a sense of dread," she said. "You're taking your life in your hands if they know who you are."
Lorelei Scarbro, an activist with Coal River Mountain Watch, said the industry provokes the miners as it demonizes the environmentalists.
"It's not the working man that's the problem here," Scarbro said. "It's the industry and the way they continue to use and exploit people on both sides of the issue, whether it's the working man trying to take care of his family or the environmentalist trying to take care of us all."
Environmentalists use words like "corrupt," "greedy" and "thugs" to describe the pro-coal establishment. Industry counters with words like "hippies," "extremists" and "terrorists."
The West Virginia Coal Association dismisses much of the inflammatory language as harmless rhetoric, to be expected when jobs are on the line.

"We absolutely don't condone people who use threats, intimidation and general thuggism," said senior vice president Chris Hamilton. However, "from our standpoint, it's more difficult to engage in constructive discussion with someone who has as their primary objective to shut the industry down."

Neither side is backing down.

"People are not going to just roll over and let their livelihood be regulated out of business," said Beckley coal truck supplier Carl Hubbard, who bemoaned "limp-wristed greeniacs" in a recent newspaper column. "God put that coal here for us to mine, in my view."

There have been pleas to tone things down.

In July, after the South Charleston Museum board of directors canceled the premiere of the film "Coal Country" over unspecified security concerns, the West Virginia Council of Churches begged both sides to respect the rights of lawful assembly and free speech.

Months later, executive director Dennis Sparks is still waiting: "There's not a day goes by that we don't lift it up in prayer."

Politicians and power brokers have generally responded by inciting or standing indifferent. Take state Senate Majority Leader Truman Chafin: "The Lord didn't create many things without a purpose. But mosquitoes and the EPA come close, I think."

U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd recently became an important exception, rebuking the industry.

"The most important factor in maintaining coal-related jobs is demand for coal," he said. "Scapegoating and stoking fear among workers over the permitting process is counterproductive."

Elsewhere, rhetoric might be dismissed as just that, but the coalfields have a bloody history.

In 1920, a shootout between unionizing miners and coal company security guards left 12 men dead on the streets of Matewan, W.Va. The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, an armed union uprising, eventually required the intervention of federal troops. During a union strike in the 1980s, car windows were smashed and shots were fired.

"But this is different," said William Kovarik, an associate professor at Radford University in Virginia who studies and teaches the history of environmental movements worldwide.

Now the conflict is between miners and people within their own communities.

"Union and nonunion workers are being told by management that their livelihoods are at great risk from out-of-state environmentalists," Kovarik said. "Management is going out of its way to equate them with terrorists, when in reality, they are their own neighbors, grandparents, retired coal miners and college students."

And dehumanizing your opponent, Kovarik said, can open the door to real violence.

Activist Chuck Nelson, a former underground miner from Glen Daniel, said the longer surface miners face uncertainty, the more the danger grows: The federal government must act soon, one way or the other.

And if the EPA comes down on the environmentalists' side?

"Well," Nelson said, "there's a possibility it might not be safe to live in the Coal River Valley."

Creators Syndicate –
If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post's report from the Danish capital.

"Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenari — who is representing all of Africa here — unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. ...

"Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. ... This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure ... as too low."

There was a time when a U.S. diplomat would have burst out laughing after listening to a Third World con artist like this.

But not the Obamaites. They are already ponying up.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests. Thus, America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.

When you slice through the blather about marooned bears and melting ice caps, oceans rising and cities sinking, global warming is a racket and a crock. It is all about money and power.

Copenhagen has always been about an endless transfer of wealth from America, Europe and Japan and creation of a global bureaucracy to control the pace of world economic and industrial development.

End game: enrichment and empowerment of global elites at the expense of Western peoples whose leaders have been bamboozled by con artists.

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and Rita came ashore in Texas in 2005, we were told this was due to global warming, and hurricane seasons would now get worse and worse until the world radically reduced the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

President Bush ignored the hysteria. What happened?

As Michael Fumento reports, the 2009 hurricane season ended quietly, with the fewest hurricanes since 1997, and not one hurricane made landfall in the United States.

When the feds sought to list the polar bear as an endangered species, Gov. Sarah Palin protested this "politicized science" and sued, claiming the polar bear was a healthy species whose numbers had doubled in recent years.

Was she wrong?

Is the Arctic ice cap melting? So we are told. But what harm has befallen mankind other than to have a Northwest Passage opened up to maritime traffic in the summer?

The Antarctic ice sheet is nine times as large as the Arctic, and here is what the British Antarctic Survey wrote last April:

"(D)uring the winter freeze in Antarctica this ice cover expands to an area roughly twice the size of Europe. Ranging in thickness from less than a metre to several metres, the ice insulates the warm ocean from the frigid atmosphere above. Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade."

One hundred thousand square kilometers a decade?

This would mean Antarctic sea ice expanded by 300,000 square kilometers since the 1970s, or 116,000 square miles, which is an area larger than all of New England.

How can the Antarctic ice cap grow for three decades as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily increased, unless carbon dioxide has little or nothing to do with global warming?

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica is a continent, and while chunks of ice are cracking off in Western Antarctica, in Eastern Antarctica, four times larger, the ice sheet is thickening and expanding. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research reported last April that the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades."

In April 1992, as the alarm over the Earth's end times began, scientists worldwide issued what was called the Heidelberg Appeal, aimed at just the kind of hysteria we are witnessing now in Copenhagen.

"We are ... worried ... at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development," said the scientists.

"We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look towards the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man's first appearance in the biosphere. ... (H)umanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.

"We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet's destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data."

Since then, 4,000 scientists and 72 Nobel Prize winners have signed on. Again, it needs be said: Global warming is cyclical, and has been stagnant for a decade. There is no conclusive proof it is manmade, no conclusive proof it is harmful to the planet.

Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM

SAN FRANCISCO – Even search engines can get suckered by Internet scams.
With a little sleight of hand, con artists can dupe them into giving top billing to fraudulent Web sites that prey on consumers, making unwitting accomplices of companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Online charlatans typically try to lure people into giving away their personal or financial information by posing as legitimate companies in "phishing" e-mails or through messages in forums such as Twitter and Facebook. But a new study by security researcher Jim Stickley shows how search engines also can turn into funnels for shady schemes.
Stickley created a Web site purporting to belong to the Credit Union of Southern California, a real business that agreed to be part of the experiment. He then used his knowledge of how search engines rank Web sites to achieve something that shocked him: His phony site got a No. 2 ranking on Yahoo Inc.'s search engine and landed in the top slot on Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, ahead of even the credit union's real site.
Google Inc., which handles two-thirds of U.S. search requests, didn't fall into Stickley's trap. His fake site never got higher than Google's sixth page of results, too far back to be seen by most people. The company also places a warning alongside sites that its system suspects might be malicious.
But even Google acknowledges it isn't foolproof.
Some recession-driven scams have been slipping into Google's search results, although that number is "very, very few," said Jason Morrison, a Google search quality engineer.
On one kind of fraudulent site, phony articles claim that participants can make thousands of dollars a month simply for posting links to certain Web sites. Often, the victims are asked to pay money for startup materials that never arrive, or bank account information is requested for payment purposes.
"As soon as we notice anything like it, we'll adapt, but it's kind of like a game of Whac-A-Mole," he said. "We can't remove every single scam from the Internet. It's just impossible."
In fact, Google said Tuesday it is suing a company for promising "work at home" programs through Web sites that look legitimate and pretend to be affiliated with Google.
Stickley's site wasn't malicious, but easily could have been. In the year and a half it was up, the 10,568 visitors were automatically redirected to the real credit union, and likely never knew they had passed through a fraudulent site.
"When you're using search engines, you've got to be diligent," said Stickley, co-founder of TraceSecurity Inc. "You can't trust that just because it's No. 2 or No. 1 that it really is. A phone book is actually probably a safer bet than a search engine."
A Yahoo spokeswoman didn't respond to requests for comment. Microsoft said in a statement that Stickley's experiment showed that search results can be cluttered with junk, but the company insists Bing "is equipped to address" the problem. Stickley's link no longer appears in Bing.
To fool people into thinking they were following the right link, Stickley established a domain (creditunionofsc.org) that sounded plausible. (The credit union's real site is cusocal.org.) After that, Stickley's site wasn't designed with humans in mind; it was programmed to make the search engines believe they were scanning a legitimate site. Stickley said he pulled it off by having link after link inside the site to create the appearance of "depth," even though those links only led to the same picture of the credit union's front page.
The experiment convinced Credit Union of Southern California that it should protect itself by being more aggressive about buying domain names similar to its own. Domains generally cost a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars each — a pittance compared with a financial institution's potential liability or loss of goodwill if its customers are ripped off by a fake site.
"The test was hugely successful," said Ray Rounds, the credit union's senior vice president of information services.
Stickley's manipulation illuminates the dark side of so-called search engine optimization. It's a legitimate tactic used by sites striving to boost their rankings — by designing them so search engines can capture information on them better.
But criminals can turn the tables to pump up fraudulent sites.

"You can do this on a very, very broad scale and have a ton of success," Stickley said. "This shows there's a major, major risk out there."

Robert Hansen, a Web security expert who wasn't involved in Stickley's research, said ranking high in search engine results gets easier as the topic gets more obscure. An extremely well-trafficked site such as Bank of America's would always outrank a phony one, he notes.

Still, Hansen said, criminals have been able to game Google's system well enough to carve out profitable niches. He says one trick is to hack into trusted sites, such as those run by universities, and stuff them with links to scam sites, which makes search engines interpret the fraudulent sites as legitimate.

"I don't think we're anywhere near winning" the fight against such frauds, said Hansen, chief executive of the SecTheory consulting firm.

Roger Thompson, chief research officer for AVG Technologies, who also wasn't involved in the research, said search results can be trusted, for the most part.

"But the rule is, if you're looking for something topical or newsworthy, you should be very cautious about clicking the link," he said. That's because criminals load their scam sites with hot topics in the news, to trap victims before the search engines have a chance to pull their sites out of the rankings.

"The bad guys don't have to get every search," he said. "They just have to get a percentage."

Consumers can protect themselves from scam sites by looking up the domain at http://www.whois.com, which details when a site was registered and by whom. That can be helpful if the Web address of a phony site is similar to the real one.

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AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this report from San Francisco.

COPENHAGEN – Developing nations who face huge climate change burdens are demanding that wealthy nations shoulder more of the costs, as a leaked Danish document and fresh evidence of a hotter planet raised temperatures at the U.N. climate conference.
Negotiators on Wednesday were trying to bridge the difficult gaps among 192 nations and stem a growing chasm between rich and poor on the third day of the U.N. climate conference.
A key speaker will be U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson, whose agency just gave President Barack Obama a new way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. Obama will join more than 100 national leaders converging on Copenhagen for the final days of bargaining late next week.
Jackson headlines a U.S.-sponsored meeting entitled "Taking Action at Home." The EPA determined Monday that scientific evidence clearly shows greenhouse gases are endangering Americans' health and must be regulated, either by Congress or by itself, the agency responsible for air pollution. That gave Obama a new way to regulate those gases without needing the approval of the U.S. Congress.
Meanwhile, small island nations, poor countries and those seeking money from the developed world to preserve their tropical forests were among those upset over competing draft texts attributed to Denmark and China outlining proposed outcomes for the historic Dec. 7-18 summit.
Some of the poorest nations feared too much of the burden to curb greenhouse gases is being hoisted onto their shoulders. They are seeking billions of dollars in aid from the wealthy countries to deal with climate change, which melts glaciers that raise sea levels worldwide, turns some regions drier and threatens food production.
Diplomats from developing countries and climate activists complained the Danish hosts pre-empted the negotiations with their draft proposal.
Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, the head of the 135-nation bloc of developing countries, said the $10 billion fast-track pledge from the U.S., European Union, Japan and other wealthy nations paled compared to the more than $1 trillion spent to rescue financial institutions.
"If this is the greatest risk that humanity faces, then how do you explain $10 billion — unless it is an inducement for some countries to accept the western-backed proposal?" he said. "Ten billion will not buy developing countries' citizens enough coffins."
The Danish draft proposal would allow rich countries to cut fewer emissions while poorer nations would face tougher limits on greenhouse gases and more conditions on money available to adapt.
"(It focuses) on pleasing the rich and powerful countries rather than serving the majority of states who are demanding a fair and ambitious solution," said Kim Carstensen of the environmental group WWF.
A sketchy counterproposal attributed to China would extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which required 37 industrial nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming by an average 5 percent by 2012, compared with 1990 levels.
The Chinese text would incorporate specific new, deeper targets for the industrialized world for a further five to eight years. Developing countries, on the other hand, including China, would be covered by a separate agreement that envisions their taking actions to control emissions, but not in the same legally binding way. No targets would be specified for them.
Poorer nations believe the two-track approach would best preserve the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto treaty.
Such draft ideas are the usual grist early in such long, difficult international talks. These two proposals were not yet even recorded as official conference documents.
"It has no validity," key European Union negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said, speaking of the Danish proposal. "It's only a piece of paper. The only texts that have validity here are those which people negotiated."
Earlier Tuesday, the U.N.'s weather agency unveiled data showing that this decade is on track to become the hottest since records began in 1850, with 2009 the fifth-warmest year ever. The second warmest decade was the 1990s.
Only the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average, the World Meteorological Organization said, though Alaska had the second-warmest July on record. In central Africa and southern Asia, this will probably be the warmest year, it said.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Find behind-the-scenes information, blog posts and discussion about the Copenhagen climate conference at http://www.facebook.com/theclimatepool, a Facebook page run by AP and an array of international news agencies. Follow coverage and blogging of the event on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/AP_ClimatePool.

TEHRAN, Iran – An Iranian nuclear official says the purpose of a U.N. warning station set up in Turkmenistan near the border with Iran is "espionage."
The U.N. announced last week the new nuclear warning station — one of dozens such observatories worldwide that monitor for seismic activity and radioactivity.
The station, just miles from the Iranian border, can detect extremely weak blasts and even shock waves from nuclear experiments.
The Iranian official, Abolfazl Zohrehvand, says the station will only give world powers an opportunity to spy on Iran. Zohrehvand, an adviser to Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, spoke on Wednesday to state IRNA news agency.
The West worries Tehran seeks to build a nuclear weapon, a charge Iran denies.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An Iranian nuclear official says the purpose of a U.N. warning station set up in Turkmenistan near the border with Iran is "espionage."
The U.N. announced last week the new nuclear warning station — one of dozens such observatories worldwide that monitor for seismic activity and radioactivity.
The station, just miles from the Iranian border, can detect extremely weak blasts and even shock waves from nuclear experiments.
The Iranian official, Abolfazl Zohrehvand, says the station will only give world powers an opportunity to spy on Iran. Zohrehvand, an adviser to Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, spoke on Wednesday to state IRNA news agency.
The West worries Tehran seeks to build a nuclear weapon, a charge Iran denies.

Why do some people love the Toyota Prius, but others couldn't care less about driving a hybrid vehicle? Why do some of your friends spend hours trying to reduce their carbon footprint, while others wonder what's the point of even recycling?

[See 15 Cars Fueling the Auto Recovery.]

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review last year, McKinsey consultants Sheila Bonini and Jeremy Oppenheim wrote that a third of U.S. consumers "are ready to buy green products or have already done so." Although market researchers have some idea of the size of the market, exactly what makes someone a "green consumer" is not as apparent. It may seem that all Prius drivers are Democrats and that Republicans are behind the wheels of Hummers, but a new book from Duke University social scientists Scott de Marchi and James T. Hamilton argues that political affiliation has very little to do with consumer decisions. In You Are What You Choose, de Marchi and Hamilton make the case that green consumerism--along with many other consumer habits--is largely determined by basic personality traits, not political beliefs.

Economists have long studied a few personality traits that play into consumer and financial decisions. How careful are consumers about risk? How much information does a consumer seek out before making a purchase? These traits tend to vary greatly from one person to the next. So de Marchi and Hamilton decided to look beyond what people bought and consider their personalities and habits. Each survey question counted as a mark toward or against a certain trait. Someone who said he or she always slows down for a yellow light, for example, would score more strongly as a person with a risk-averse trait. Someone who doesn't like to try new restaurants and instead sticks to old favorites would score high with the "stickiness" personality trait.

Armed with data on the personality traits of individuals, the authors then examined a range of everyday decisions--from what people buy to whom they vote for--and analyzed their choices to see how much of their decision-making differences were caused by differing personality traits. "We're better at predicting how you vote than if we asked about your policy opinions," de Marchi says. So--to use one prominent example from the book--what kind of a person is a green consumer?

1. Idea consumers. According to the authors, green consumers not only buy stuff, but they also buy ideas. Most consumers' daily purchases aren't motivated by ideology. Many people think only about the practicality of the things they buy, not the ideas they express by buying those things. For example, the act of buying a Prius often says something about the buyer--that he or she is concerned about gasoline consumption. For green consumers, that ideological benefit of the purchase often outweighs the practical benefit. "In a purely I-want-to-save-the environment sense, the extra money to buy a Prius makes no sense," says de Marchi. "You could buy a $10,000 or $15,000 cheaper car and use that money in a way to save the environment." In the book, he and Hamilton say a consumer could use that money to buy and preserve 120 acres of the Amazon rain forest.

For green consumers, certain intangible parts of a purchase are often more important than the product's practical use. Altruism is another trait de Marchi and Hamilton looked at. If someone donates blood or regularly gives to charities, he or she probably ranks high with the altruism trait, which green consumerism was found to be associated with. But you don't need to actually accomplish anything good to let altruism guide your consumer choices. The feeling of doing good--the "smile that recycling a can puts on your face," de Marchi suggests--is enough to make an altruistic person a green consumer.

2. Time minders. A key consideration in how consumers make most decisions--not just financial ones--is the degree to which they balance short-term costs and benefits versus long-term costs and benefits. For example, children are more likely to prefer one lollipop now to two lollipops a few days later. As they mature, many people become more willing to make sacrifices now for future returns. But not always: "Credit cards exist for a reason, even with the often spectacular rates they charge," says de Marchi.

Not surprisingly, green consumers come down hard on one side of this divide. They tend to think much more about the future and consider questions like "If I spend an extra $100 to get a better washing machine, how much energy will I save?" says de Marchi. "Most people are not going to think that far ahead." According to de Marchi, political affiliation has very little to do with being a green consumer in this case. "Some Republicans have switched on the environmental issue because they worry about their kids. But that's proof of a time trait they care about, instead of equally important issues like the budget or jobs," he says.

3. "Me too"-ers! The very fact that a restaurant is busy will draw in more patrons, as it indicates an establishment's popularity. Some people pay close attention to the decisions of others when making choices for themselves. De Marchi and Hamilton call this the "me too" personality trait. For those in this group, "if other people in their network go green, they're going to do it too so they're part of a team," says de Marchi.

In some cases, however, following a social network can make a person less likely to be a green shopper. For example, if your friends and family don't care about the environment, you might go along with them. For businesses selling green products, it pays to consider how social networks affect their target audiences, says de Marchi. If a marketer knows that customers are more concerned with how they will be perceived for using a product than they are about the product's affordability or functionality, then the marketer should change strategies accordingly. Perhaps because hybrid-car buyers have the "me too" trait, the Toyota Prius has already captured the minds of many green consumers, making it hard for competitors. "There already is a big fan club. Creating another one, given that everyone who wants to be in the club already owns a Prius, is going to be tough," says de Marchi. The bottom line: Businesses trying to market green products should try to find original ideas instead of trying to improve on what's already out there.

NEW YORK – Luxury department store retailer Saks says it eked out a surprise third-quarter profit by trimming expenses and scaling back on promotions and clearance merchandise.
Although sales at stores open more than a year declined 10.1 percent, less discounting boosted profit margins.
The retailer says it earned $1.9 million, or 1 cent per share, in the three months that ended Oct. 31. It's a turn from a loss of $43.7 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier.
Revenue fell 8.5 percent to $631.4 million from $690.3 million a year earlier.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who usually exclude one-time items, forecast a loss of 11 cents per share on revenue of $625.6 million.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Pirates off the coast of Somalia have attacked two vessels, and at least one of those has been captured.
The European Union's anti-piracy force says pirates hijacked a chemical tanker on Monday named the MV Theresa with 28 North Koreans on board.
In a second incident, pirates attacked a Ukrainian cargo ship. Cmdr. John Harbour, a spokesman for the EU force, says that private security guards on board fired on the pirates, wounding two. Harbour says the Ukrainian ship was not hijacked.
A Somali man who claims to be a spokesman for the pirates, Gedi Ali, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that pirates had captured the Ukrainian ship. Ali also says two pirates were wounded in the attack.

KABUL (AFP) –
Afghan President Hamid Karzai vowed Tuesday that his new government would eradicate corruption and offered an olive branch to Taliban insurgents, launching his programme for another five years in office.

Under pressure from US President Barack Obama to wipe out corruption and world leaders to unify the war-torn nation, Karzai used his first appearance since electoral authorities declared him president to pledge a cleaner rule.

"Afghanistan's image has been tainted by corruption. Our government's image has been tainted by corruption," Karzai told a press conference flanked by his controversial vice president Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who is widely accused of rights abuses.

"We will strive, by any means possible, to eradicate this stain."

Karzai was declared president for another five years after the cancellation of a run-off ballot by the country's election commission, which followed the withdrawal at the weekend of his only challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. Related article: US urges Kharzai on corruption

The president said it would have been better for Afghanistan, which is rife with ethnic rivalry, to have voted in a second round following a fraud-tainted first election on August 20, and bemoaned Abdullah's withdrawal.

Karzai has been urged by a number of world leaders to ensure his next government can command the support of all the Afghan people.

"The future government will be a government that reflects all the people of Afghanistan ... We hope that no-one feels themselves isolated from this future government," he said.

The 51-year-old president, whose warm relations with the West have cooled over corruption and spiralling insecurity, also urged his Taliban "brothers" "to come home and embrace their land".

The Taliban insurgency is now at its deadliest, contributing to record US fatalities eight years since the militia was driven out of Kabul by a US-led invasion, paving the way for Karzai to take power.

The Islamists ridiculed Karzai as a "puppet" president, however, and said his re-election without a second round showed the West was dictating events.

"What is astonishing is two weeks ago they were arguing that the puppet president Hamid Karzai was involved in electoral fraud... but now he is elected as president based on those same fraudulent votes, Washington and London immediately send their congratulations," said a Taliban statement.

Obama and UN chief Ban Ki-moon led world powers in congratulating Karzai, but the US president called for "a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption" and a "new chapter" in cooperation between the two countries. Related article: Karzai faces array of challenges.

"This has to be (the) point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter based on improved governance," Obama said he had told Karzai in a phone call.

Karzai "assured me that he understood the importance of this moment but... the truth is not going to be in words, it's going to be in deeds", added Obama who is to decide whether to deploy thousands more troops in the coming weeks.

The New York Times reported the Obama administration was pressing Karzai to set up an anti-corruption commission, which would establish "strict accountability" for national and provincial government officials.

US and European officials are also seeking the arrests of what one US envoy termed "the more blatantly corrupt" people in government, the paper added.

Abdullah quit the contest on Sunday, saying there were no safeguards against a repeat of widespread fraud that resulted in the rejection of nearly a quarter of votes cast in August.

Karzai's anointment by the Independent Election Commission sought to draw a line under two months of political chaos in the conflict-ridden nation where 100,000 NATO and US troops are battling the Taliban.

Ban met Karzai and Abdullah amid a concerted diplomatic push to bring a quick end to the paralysis, which has undermined Western efforts to cultivate democracy in Afghanistan. Analysis: Afghan vote blunders.

IEC chief Azizullah Ludin, a Karzai appointee who oversaw the fraud-riddled first round, said the decision had been made in line with the provisions of Afghan law and was "consistent with the high interest of the Afghan people".

There had been widespread unease about staging the November 7 run-off poll.

First-round turnout was as low as five percent in areas and Taliban had threatened fresh attacks.

What's at stake in Tuesday's election:
GOVERNORS:
Voters in two states, New Jersey and Virginia, are electing governors.
_The New Jersey race has centered on the economy and the state's highest-in-the-nation taxes. Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, the billionaire former Wall Street executive, is fighting to earn a second term. His opponents are Republican former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie and an independent candidate, former state environmental official Chris Daggett.
_In Virginia, where Democrats last year handed the GOP its first presidential defeat in 44 years, the GOP is trying to stage a comeback. Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat R. Creigh Deeds, a state senator who narrowly lost the attorney general's race to McDonnell four years ago, are running to replace the term-limited Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine.
MAYORS:
Mayors are being elected in several major cities.
_In Atlanta, six candidates are seeking to succeed term-limited Mayor Shirley Franklin in an election that is expected to lead to a December runoff. The top contenders include City Councilwoman Mary Norwood, who was trying to become the city's first white mayor in a generation.
_In New York, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to spend more than $100 million of his fortune in a bid for a third term, the most expensive self-financed campaign in American history.
_In Houston, four candidates were competing to succeed three-term Mayor Bill White, including city Controller Annise Parker, who would be the city's first openly gay mayor.
_The mayors of Boston, Detroit and Pittsburgh are up for re-election.
U.S. HOUSE:
Two special elections, one in northern California and one in upstate New York, won't change the balance of power of the 435-member House, where Democrats hold 256 seats. Both seats were vacated when the incumbent took a job in the Obama administration.
_A special election in New York's rural and strongly Republican 23rd Congressional District highlighted divisions in the GOP when some prominent Republicans, including former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, backed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. The defections lead the GOP candidate, Dierdre Scozzafava, to bow out and support Democrat Bill Owens.
_Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi faced off with Republican attorney Dave Harmer for a Northern California congressional seat.
BALLOT MEASURES:
_Voters in Maine have the opportunity to make it the first state to approve gay marriage at the ballot box with a referendum on whether to accept or reject a same-sex marriage law approved by legislators in May.
_In Washington, voters will be deciding whether to keep a Legislature-approved "everything but marriage" domestic partnerships law, which grants registered partners the same legal rights as married couples.

_Ohio voters will decide whether to bring casinos to the state.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) –
The United States on Thursday announced plans to designate more than 200,000 square miles in Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears, a key step towards increasing protection for the threatened species.

"Proposing critical habitat for this iconic species is one step in the right direction to help this species stave off extinction, recognizing that the greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change," Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland said in a statement announcing the move.

The habitat would cover 200,541 square miles (519,399 square kilometeters) and include barrier islands along Alaska?s coast, sea ice habitat, land and rivers near the coast where the bears make their dens.

The United States listed the polar bear as a threatened species in May last year, saying climate change has caused a drastic loss of Arctic sea-ice, which is essential for the survival of the bears.

But although the Endangered Species Act calls for a critical habitat to be designated at the same time as a species is declared threatened, wildlife officials under the previous administration of president George W. Bush held off on naming the habitat area.

The Bush administration also pushed forward with the sale of offshore exploration leases in parts of Alaska where polar bears dwell, insisting that developing oil activities in Alaska would not harm the bears.

By contrast, Strickland said the administration of President Barack Obama "is fully committed to the protection and recovery of the polar bear."

But the designated critical habitat for the bears would include "areas where oil and gas exploration activities are known to occur," according to the Fish and Wildlife Services, the branch of the Department of the Interior in charge of nature conservancy.