Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who?died Saturday at the age of 92, was known for sharply questioning presidents and her ability to pry loose information about the inner workings of the federal government, as well as for stirring controversy in her later years.
As news of her death spread, friends, admirers, former colleagues and critics took to Twitter to voice their reactions. Here is a sample.
DALLAS - The Dallas Cowboys announced Thursday afternoon that Josh Brent will retire from football.
"Over the last few weeks, there has been plenty of debate on whether the Cowboys would remove Josh Brent from the roster or the NFL would perhaps suspend the defensive tackle," read a statement from the Dallas Cowboys. "On Thursday, Brent removed himself."
The Cowboys said he'll be placed on the reserved/retired list.
In late December, Brent was charged with intoxication manslaughter in the death of his teammate and friend Jerry Brown Jr.
"I am at a point where my main focus is all about getting the priorities in my life in order," Brent said in the statement. "Those priorities are more important than football."
When asked about Brent's retirement Thursday, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said the move was something the player needed to do as he faces trial.
"I think in my mind it speaks for itself," he said. "He basically wants to concentrate on what he needs to concentrate on and this allows him to do that."
Jones said he wouldn't speculate on whether Brent would return to the NFL.
"He certainly has the ability to play," he said.
He also addressed whether Brent's retirement would ease the Cowboys movement forward.
"I don;t quite think about it that way," he said. "From the very beginning, we did everything we could to show that we think a lot of him, and we do as a team and Cowboys family. This was a tragedy; we didn't want to do anything in any way that would inpact opinions relative to how it's adjudicated, so it can be sorted out off the football field"
The former defensive tackle was released from the Dallas County Jail earlier this month after he was booked in late June. Prosecutors said he tested positive for marijuana and failed two drug tests, including one in May and June. Upon his release, a judge ordered Brent to wear a drug-detecting patch and was forbidden to drive.?A hearing on the failed tests is scheduled for Friday.
Brent was signed as a rookie with the Cowboys in 2010 and played 39 games.
Friday, the Cowboys will head to Oxnard, Calif. to start training camp. Brent's trial date is scheduled for Sept. 23.
The teachers union slapped the city with a lawsuit Thursday to stop?Mayor Bloomberg?from opening more charter schools in traditional public school buildings ? after he leaves office.
PITTSBURGH (AP) ? A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press.
After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.
Although the results are preliminary ? the study is still ongoing ? they are a boost to a natural gas industry that has fought complaints from environmental groups and property owners who call fracking dangerous.
Drilling fluids tagged with unique markers were injected more than 8,000 feet below the surface, but were not detected in a monitoring zone 3,000 feet higher. That means the potentially dangerous substances stayed about a mile away from drinking water supplies.
"This is good news," said Duke University scientist Rob Jackson, who was not involved with the study. He called it a "useful and important approach" to monitoring fracking, but cautioned that the single study doesn't prove that fracking can't pollute, since geology and industry practices vary widely in Pennsylvania and across the nation.
The boom in gas drilling has led to tens of thousands of new wells being drilled in recent years, many in the Marcellus Shale formation that lies under parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. That's led to major economic benefits but also fears that the chemicals used in the drilling process could spread to water supplies.
The mix of chemicals varies by company and region, and while some are openly listed the industry has complained that disclosing special formulas could violate trade secrets. Some of the chemicals are toxic and could cause health problems in significant doses, so the lack of full transparency has worried landowners and public health experts.
The study done by the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh marked the first time that a drilling company let government scientists inject special tracers into the fracking fluid and then continue regular monitoring to see whether it spread toward drinking water sources. The research is being done at a drilling site in Greene County, which is southwest of Pittsburgh and adjacent to West Virginia.
Eight new Marcellus Shale horizontal wells were monitored seismically and one was injected with four different man-made tracers at different stages of the fracking process, which involves setting off small explosions to break the rock apart. The scientists also monitored a separate series of older gas wells that are about 3,000 feet above the Marcellus to see if the fracking fluid reached up to them.
The industry and many state and federal regulators have long contended that fracking itself won't contaminate surface drinking water because of the extreme depth of the gas wells. Most are more than a mile underground, while drinking water aquifers are usually within 500 to 1000 feet of the surface.
Kathryn Klaber, the CEO of the industry-led Marcellus Shale Coalition, called the study "great news."
"It's important that we continue to seek partnerships that can study these issues, and inform the public of the findings," Klaber said.
While the lack of contamination is encouraging, Jackson said he wondered whether the unidentified drilling company might have consciously or unconsciously taken extra care with the research site, since it was being watched. He also noted that other aspects of the drilling process can cause pollution, such as poor well construction, surface spills of chemicals, and wastewater.
Jackson and his colleagues at Duke have done numerous studies over the last few years that looked at whether gas drilling is contaminating nearby drinking water, with mixed results. None of them have found chemical contamination but they did find evidence that natural gas escaped from some wells near the surface and polluted drinking water in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Scott Anderson, a drilling expert with the Environment Defense Fund, said the results sound very interesting.
"Very few people think that fracking at significant depths routinely leads to water contamination. But the jury is still out on what the odds are that this might happen in special situations," Anderson said.
One finding surprised the researchers: Seismic monitoring determined one hydraulic fracture traveled 1,800 feet out from the well bore; most traveled just a few hundred feet. That's significant because some environmental groups have questioned whether the fractures could go all the way to the surface.
The researchers believe that fracture may have hit naturally occurring faults, and that's something both industry and regulators don't want.
"We would like to be able to predict those areas" with natural faults and avoid them, Hammack said.
Jackson said the 1,800-foot fracture was very interesting, but also noted it is still a mile from the surface.
The DOE team will start to publish full results of the tests over the next few months, said Hammack, who called the large amount of field data from the study "the real deal."
"People probably will be looking at the data for years to come," he said.
Even though it's rather hot outside, you should probably not put your iPhone into the freezer.
Our pre-caffeine roundup is a collection of the hottest, strangest, and most amusing stories of the morning.
A 3-D-printed rocket part passed a major NASA test.
Need to get a bit closer? Panasonic's got you covered with its latest super-zoom camera. The FZ70's massive lens provides a 60x optical zoom ? the 35mm equivalent of a 1200mm lens.
If you love the HTC One but find that it's a wee bit too big, consider the HTC One Mini. It combines many of the One's best features in a considerably smaller package.
Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple, Google, and Facebook sent a letter pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government's national security-related requests for user data.
Security experts are stress-testing anti-theft measures designed to render stolen smartphones inoperable.
Apple's pushing out a software update for many MacBook Air models to fix some Wi-Fi connectivity issues.
Rumor is that Motorola's highly anticipated Moto X smartphone will launch on Aug. 26.
A monthly comic series based on the storyline introduced in "Halo 4" will hit shelves soon.
Honda built a ride-on lawn mower capable of reaching speeds of up to 130 mph. Unfortunately, the lawnmower is merely a one-off project and won't become available to consumers anytime soon.
You can now get a free year of Xbox Live Gold with the purchase of Office 265.
Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.
Author: Casie Fuchs | Total views: 115 Comments: 0 Word Count: 1085 Date:
If you possess a company, you need to continue to consider promotion. If folks do not really hear about your business and products, you won't be very successful. When you need to win new customers and keep current ones, video advertising can help drive sales and create impressive results. Read this post for info on video promotion.
Ask your visitors to make their own videos. You can for instance organize a contest and ask customers to film themselves while they use your products. Reward the best videos with an interesting award and use the submitted videos as promotional material for your social media marketing effort and for the website.
If you choose to engage a video marketing professional to create a video for your business, check out their portfolio first. You must employ a professional who can produce some quality videos, address a specific market and persuade customers to purchase a product. Don't waste your money and time on the professional who doesn't have a good portfolio.
Try using others in your videos. This may give people the notion that you are not full of hot air. Even though it might be a little hard to convince somebody that the individuals in your video are really fans of you and your products, it comes across better than constantly doing videos only.
Do your best to create a video that conveys a professional image. This means you should avoid utilizing the effects available on programs like Windows Movie Maker and other basic applications. Maintain your editing simple by simply cutting or dissolving to a black screen instead of using standardized editing effects.
The information of the video is king. When it is not fun to watch and providing excellent advice, why would anyone watch it? You have to sit back and dedicate the majority of the time to coming up with content which people really want to find and view so that your video becomes popular.
People love competition, which explains why holding a video contest is such a superb marketing method. Ask viewers to generate their own videos and then have everyone vote on them. This will help drive viewers to your site and energize them giving them a chance to win something.
Explore Google Search Stories. This tool enables one to show your audience different things on Google such as results for a particular search query, graphics and maps. This may be a great way to record your on-line presence, show your audience your featured blog posts or create a guide to assist clients as they order your products.
The initial thing you have to do is only get your own videos out there. Start making some and see what gets people's eyes. You must uncover what topic you know the most about and figure out a solution to make it fascinating. People need to be entertained.
When using videos to market your company, make sure to include a link to your site. If someone views your video and is interested in your business, more information will soon be just one click away. These hyperlinks can be added either in the video description, or in a hovering caption added to your video. However, you do it, be sure the link is easily visible and always kept up to date.
If you're new to video promotion, don't worry too much about the equipment you happen to be using. You don't need a professional television or movie camera to do video advertising. A simple camera will operate just fine, so long as it could deliver great quality digital videos. A web cam is never a great idea for video advertising.
Among the finest pieces of guidance about video advertising is to keep it real. Make a script, rehearse this, and then shoot your video. That's all there is to it. You'll end up looking over produced and imitation if you need to do more than that. Real is trustworthy and dependable.
Watch the numbers available for the video, whether it be your server stats or on Youtube.com. This will help you compare each video you make so it is possible to tell which are successful and which ought to have been left on the cutting room floor. This is actually the only way to keep building your campaigns skyward.
Use videos for marketing your sites or social networking. A YouTube user could be directed to Facebook, by way of example. Promote you websites wherever your videos are hosted so people can find you. If you link your social media marketing to your videos, traffic will improve to both.
Try cutting your longer videos into smaller sections. Many video marketers don't consider the crowd's attention span, so they make videos that are too long. Most of the people don't view a 10-minute video about just one product. Try breaking a very long video like that into multiple pieces which can be released once each day.
It's difficult to hold people's focus for a lengthy period of time. Three minutes is a perfect cap length for maintaining viewer interest and ensuring the coverage of the appropriate advice. You can go for as long as 5 minutes, but anything over that is truly overkill. A terrific motto to follow would be to keep things short and sweet.
To show viewers that you're serious about your video marketing campaign make videos frequently to share with others. These videos might be informational or conversational. Your viewers will appreciate knowing that they can be determined by your for producing videos in a timely manner. Attempt to produce at least a weekly video for your audience.
Do not fret about perfection. You don't need high quality equipment for video promotion. The tools on your computer should be more than adequate for the job. In Addition, smart phones have built-in cameras, so if you own this kind of telephone, you can use its camera for your videos. During your videos remain professional and provide related content that your customers might want to see.
Because you're now knowledgeable on how to utilise video marketing, make use of the hints. Video is a different and extremely popular way to promote a business, so learn as much as possible about this. When you do, you'll find great success.
Successfully Market Your Videos Online With These Tips. More Video & voice recoder infomation here.Read more about this click here
Related to: Videos marketing - Videos marketing nbsptips
1: Article Marketing Strategy: Putting Together a "Class Schedule" For Your Article Topics
Businesses go to so much trouble when there is one sure-fire, simple, very inexpensive way to attract new clients to a business: Teach a free class. That is what article marketing is like. Your articles are just like free classes. You teach your target readers something helpful in your article. Your resource box then says, "If you enjoyed this article you can visit my website and apply what you have learned."
2: Simple Article Writing: 5 Steps For Beginners Who Are Learning To Write Articles (Try This!)
When you look at an article, you may say, "That article looks great, but I have no idea how I would produce something that good." In this article I am going to help you break your article creation process down into "blocks"--smaller bits of information that when assembled together will form a top quality article submission.
3: Why You Need To Build Multiple Streams of Income For Yourself
Being an entrepreneur and earning multiple streams of income is a dream that many have, but in reality it does take some initial hard work to achieve this. Earning multiple streams of income is the wave of the future, and here are some tips and advice for you when you are looking for ways in which to do this for yourself.
4: Understanding Online Business Success
Starting a home based business to earn income online takes a significant amount of time and energy upfront to get things going. Not seeing results immediately can be discouraging and cause people to give up too early. In this article, we look at the process of starting a home based business and working through the frustrations to be there when the sales come flowing in.
5: Back Link Building - 6 Methods You Can Use To Rank Your Blog Posts
Panda and Penquin Google has changed the game with back link building. Here are the backlink strategies I use to get quality backlinks.
Eric Pang ousts Andrew D?Souza in first round clash at Canada Open 2013 ? Badminton news
Netherlands? experienced badminton player, Eric Pang, started his campaign with a positive note as he easily overpowered Andrew D?Souza, a local player, in Men?s Singles first round of Yonex Canada Open 2013 in Richmond, on Wednesday, July 17.
The incredible Pang, who is the second seeded shuttler in Men?s Singles category, played flawless badminton and easily stamped his supremacy on court by crushing Andrew in just 25 minutes.
The higher ranked, Pang, was in complete command on court as he did not let his opponent to dictate the terms. He controlled the pressure well and easily won the match in straight sets with a superb 21-14 and 21-14 total on the board.
On the contrary, Andrew failed to make his home crowd happy as he could not cope up with the impressive speed of his rival and eventually crashed out without clinching any set in this first round clash.
In the first game, Andrew showed aggression in the starting rallies but he failed to cope up with the speed of his opponent who started to play attacking badminton.
Pang was comfortable in dictating the pace of rallies and he did not face any trouble in grabbing an early lead in the first set.
The Dutch was quick in his court coverage and his powerful and perfectly angled smashes earned him a comfortable lead until the one-minute break.
After the interval, Andrew tried to get close on the board by increasing his speed but he could not break the flow of his challenger and remained struggling.
Meanwhile, Pang continued playing with variations in his shots and he remained successful in winning the opening game in a dominating fashion with a huge 21-14 score on the board.
In the second game, Andrew showed a little improvement in the opening rallies when he played well at net but again lost his control enabling his rival to set up a reasonable lead until the break.
In the second part, Pang sailed smoothly by playing attacking and positive badminton. He dominated the game in all areas of the court and eventually grabbed the second set with a controlled margin of 21-14.
