It has come to this: Music legend Elton John is using music legend Whitney Houston as a cautionary tale for addiction. In an interview with "E! News," the 65-year-old told David Burtka that his proudest accomplishment in life was not his six Grammy Awards, but getting sober in 1990.

"I would not be the person I am today [if I hadn't]. I wouldn't have [son] Zachary, I wouldn't have [husband] David [Furnish]. I wouldn't have anything. I'd probably be dead," he says in the on-camera interview.

Elton continues: "I didn't want to end up like Whitney Houston, and I could have so easily ended up like Whitney Houston. It's a miracle I didn't. Because I'm sure I did as much cocaine as she ever did."

His failure to respond to three letters sent to the White House was because there was no "political value" and not worthy of a few minutes of his time.

They spoke out as teenager Shawn Tyson began a life sentence after being found guilty of the murder of James Cooper and James Kouzaris last April.

The 17 year old, who shot the men as they begged for their lives, will die in prison.

His conviction of first degree murder carries an mandatory life sentence without the chance of parole.

The powerfully built teen even looked bored as emotional DVD presentations about the dead men prepared by their grieving parents were shown in court.
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Tyson, who has the word 'Savage' tattooed across his chest didn't show a flicker of emotion, slumping in his seat as he was forced to watch a montage of photos showing the victims from early childhood to young men.

Two close friends of the dead men who had attended the eight day trial in Sarasota, Florida. had also delivered highly emotional impact statements to the court prior to the sentencing.

Paul Davies and Joe Hallett spoke of the "living hell" they and others who knew the men had suffered since the murders.

During the eight day trial they had been shown graphic crime scene and autopsy photos shown in court.

Later speaking after Tyson was jailed Davies and Hallett lashed out at Mr Obama saying the deaths of their friends was "not worthy of ten minutes of his time."

Davies said:"We would like to publicly express our dissatisfaction at the lack of any public or private message of support or condolence from any American governing body or indeed, President Obama himself.

"Mr Kouzaris has written to President Obama on three separate occasions and is yet to even receive the courtesy of a reply.

"It would perhaps appear that Mr Obama sees no political value in facilitating such a request or that the lives of two British

For students who haven't yet declared a major, they might want to consider learning how to fly unmanned predator drones.

A growing number of schools now offer courses and programs around building and flying drones, The Daily reported in a recent article.

Jeb Bailey, 28, told The Daily he has taken every drone-related course at Northwestern Michigan College. It's no wonder why, when drone pilots can make $50,000 to $120,000 per year, according to Tom Kenville, founder of Unmanned Applications Institute International. Bailey said the idea of flying unmanned drones for a year in Afghanistan to pay off student loan debt sounded pretty attractive.

Bailey originally took classes on manned flight training, but said he was swayed towards studying drones after learning about how much more he could make contracting in a war zone. "In an airlines career path," he said, "you really don't expect to make a whole lot until you’ve been in the industry 20 years."

It's a field that's growing too. The pilotless aircraft industry is expected to create more than 23,000 U.S. jobs over the next 15 years, according to the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. A spokesperson for the group told The Daily that 150 colleges are now offering courses.

Northwestern Michigan's Al Laursen told Business Insider the college is expanding their program. Laursen said once drones are given increased access to fly over American airspace for domestic law enforcement, "job prospects will be tremendous."

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. and the University of North Dakota are currently the only schools offering four-year degrees for prospective drone pilots.

The New York Times recently reported that Sinclair Community College in Ohio now offers certificates on flying unmanned drones. The school made the decision to develop a program based on projections that the job market would grow domestically.

After Apple introduced the iPhone's touchscreen technology in 2007, it was only natural that fans would start speculating as to whether it would ever be incorporated into the company's massively popular MacBooks. But with characteristic conviction, Steve Jobs' put at end to those rumors in 2010 when, at an unveiling for the OS X Lion, he declared that "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical."

For the Lenovo Yoga's sake, let's hope Jobs was wrong about that. And also because a new concept video, posted on YouTube earlier this week by French architect Olivier Terrisse, shows how awesome a 'MacBook Touch' could be, combining the MacBook's sharp display with a flip-and-fold design.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look we can be looking forward to a MacBook Touch anytime soon. But if the latest rumors are true, Apple fans should have enough to get excited about over the next year: In addition to the 4G iPhone 5, which a number of sources have said will be released in October 2012, the company is also rumored to be developing a mini 7.5-inch version of the iPad as well as an Apple TV, which could be here in time for the holidays.

Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, one of the top free agents this summer, joined the "Dan Patrick Show" this afternoon and made some comments that made ripples around the league.

"I'm not coming back to the Suns if there isn't improvement," Nash told Patrick.

Nash explained he's expecting the Suns to try to make those improvements, but that he's looking forward to becoming a free agent and deciding where to continue his career.

The hypothetical of LeBron James asking Nash to join up in Miami for one last push at a championship was brought up.

"I would listen," Nash said. "He's phenomenal. I love what they're doing there. A lot of people don't like them because they put all that talent there. But they're professional, they play hard, they play together. Their coaching staff has done a great job, so I have a tremendous amount of respect for them.

"I would definitely listen."

It shouldn't surprise anyone the 38-year-old point guard without a world championship might be enticed by the idea of joining a contender that has what many consider a relative hole at the point guard slot.

Keeping the Heat in the conversation could be used as leverage in negotiations with other teams. But joining the Heat would mean that Nash would be leaving millions of dollars on the table.

The Heat won't have any salary-cap space next summer, so Nash would have to settle for the mid-level exception if he wanted to join the club.

Prom is supposed to be a fairy tale evening, and some teenage girls (and boys) spend their entire senior year dreaming about it. It really would be an unforgettable night if you were turned away at the door for wearing an unacceptable dress.

Related: Best Prom Styles for Under $100

The Wall Street Journal reports that high schools across the country are tightening their rules about what constitutes overly provocative prom clothing in response to more and more girls pushing the envelope with micro-minis, cut outs, and plunging necklines such as the ones seen in our slideshow.

Trend watchers attribute the upsurge in revealing gowns to television shows such as "Dancing with the Stars" and Hollywood stars' sexy red carpet looks.

"It seems kind of petty," Cindi Lee, an Algebra teacher at Southmore High School outside Oklahoma City, told the Journal, "but we really do want them to understand we are holding them to a high standard." Administrators at the school have put together a twelve-page power-point presentation with close-cropped images to show students exactly what the rules are. "Words don't mean much to them," says Lee. Other schools are using posters and illustrated handouts.

Typical prom dress fails include gowns that are shorter than three inches above the knee, have low backs, are sheer, or have thigh-bearing slits.

Chaperones will be on the lookout for sneaky teens trying to skirt the regulations. Ginger Lawrence an assistant principal in Lee County High School in Leesburg, Georgia, plans to bring a ruler and ask girls to measure themselves if their hemline appears to be cut too high above the knee. Sunnyvale High School, which is located outside of Dallas, Texas, enforces a dress code that clearly states that fabric inserts may not be sewn or pinned on a gown-since girls are known to rip them out once they make it into the dance.

A team of five to seven inspectors from the FLA visited three different Foxconn factories -- two in Shenzhen, one in Chengdu -- and spent up to five days at each conducting hundreds of interviews with workers and managers in an attempt to understand what labor problems existed at the manufacturing facilities of China's largest employer.

According to the FLA's 13 page report, the non-profit "observed at least 50 issues related to the FLA Code and Chinese labor law, including in the following areas: health and safety, worker integration and communication, and wages and working hours." (See the full report below.)

Here's an overview of the violations and discontents the FLA uncovered at the Foxconn factories:

Overtime pay policies can shortchange workers.
From the FLA report:

The assessors discovered that unscheduled overtime was only paid in 30-minute increments. This means, for example, that 29 minutes of overtime work results in no pay and 58 minutes results in only one unit of overtime pay.

Workers are being paid on time and more than the legal minimums -- but workers say it's not enough "to cover their basic needs."

This is the true story of a quest -- the quest for a song, first, and then for the woman who wrote it.

The song appears in the closing credits of "Mirror Mirror," the first of this year's two big-screen adaptations of the Snow White fairy tale. Its director, Tarsem Singh, first heard the song in the early 1970s, when he was a boy growing up in India's Punjab province.

The song was called "I Believe," and it was sung -- in English -- by a woman who might best be described as the Madonna of Iran at that time. She went by one name, Googoosh, and sported a pixie haircut presumably inspired by Mia Farrow. "As kids, we used to dance to it," Singh told The Huffington Post. "We loved it."

Three decades later, Singh played the song for his niece, who was staying with him in Montreal while he shot his 2011 film, "Immortals." "She's this clubbing girl and she loved it," he said. "Every morning when I woke up, she'd be playing it in her shower. I'd hear it in the next room. It would be Googoosh going, 'I believe, I believe, I believe in love! Love!'"

Clearly, this was a song with broad appeal -- and a special resonance for young people. So when Singh read the script for "Mirror Mirror" and decided that his film simply had to end with a musical number, it didn't take long to settle on one, he recalled: "Suddenly, I went, 'It's perfect; the movie ends with Snow White singing, 'I believe in love!'

"And then the fun started."
*****

Singh's decision set off a chain of events that spanned a year and drew in dozens of people, from studio executives to a private investigator. At the end of the trail was a woman nobody could find.

The reason for the search was simple: To include "I Believe" in "Mirror Mirror," the producers needed to secure the rights. But they had no idea who even owned those rights. "Tarsem wanted to have that song," said Bob Bowen, senior vice president of music at Relativity, which produced the film. "And then we had to figure out … how do we get it cleared? How do we license it? Who do we get to record it? And all the other production logistics that go with that."

"I just told them, 'We need this song; we need this song,'" Singh recalled. "And they couldn't get the rights. They kept saying they contacted Googoosh's people but … basically the rights belong to the Iranian government. And I said, 'That just sounds like something I don't want to believe.' I was a bit heartbroken."

Before giving up altogether, a production assistant at Relativity made a call to Koo Abuali, a former musician who had done some low-budget soundtrack work in the past and was looking for a big break. Abuali had recently moved from Los Angeles to Montreal -- where "Mirror Mirror" was being shot -- in pursuit of a love interest and, with any luck, a job on the film.

Abuali remembered getting the call on June 2, 2011: "He says, 'Um, I have a little task for you. But I honestly don't think that you're going to be able to do this.' And I said, 'If it's an opportunity, hit me with it!'"

Working with little more than the song's title and the knowledge that a woman named Googoosh had once performed it, Abuali launched a frenzied research effort. "I knew that I had a very tiny window to get in to meet with this director," she said. "And I knew that it would be an opportunity that would change my professional life."

Right away, Abuali had a stroke of luck. She tracked down Googoosh's lawyer and discovered that he was an old acquaintance from Los Angeles. But this success was followed by four days of round-the-clock frustration. She contacted the Iranian consulate, the Cannes Film Festival (where Googoosh had once performed the song) and practically everyone in the Iranian singer's circle, including her assistant, two songwriters who had worked with her in the '70s, her doctor -- and even her ex-husband, Mahmoud Ghorbani. "It was like one piece after another after another that was all adding up, but they were all leading nowhere," Abuali said.

In the end, the World Wide Web gave her the break she needed. Her Iranian friends had advised her to google transliterations of the song's English lyrics "I believe, I believe, I believe in love." Sure enough, a search for "Vabeli, vabeli, vabeli" led her to an article in Portuguese that -- when entered into Google Translate -- unlocked the mystery. The article revealed that Googoosh's "I Believe" was a cover of a song titled "Love," which had first appeared in a film called "Taking Off." It was directed by Milos Forman, the Oscar-winning director of "Amadeus" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and had won the Cannes Grand Prix in 1971.

Better yet, the woman who performed "Love" in the movie was also the songwriter. Her name was Nina Hart; she was 20 years old in 1971 and an American. How hard could it be to find her?

The Spanish royal (and we do mean royal -- she possesses 46 aristocratic titles, more titles recognized by an existing government than any other noble in the world) celebrates her 86th birthday today, and honestly, she's kind of our hero.

Here's your Duchess of Alba primer: Her full name is Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva. (Fine, we'll 'fess up: we copied and pasted that.) The only child of the Duke of Alba, she plunged into two marriages before marrying again last year, getting controversially hitched to commoner Alfonso Diez, who's 25 years her junior. (FYI, he's formally renounced any claim to her wealth.)

Duchess Cayetana is something of a force of nature: she's had seven children, and her fortune is estimated between $800 million to $4.7 billion, including a host of splendid Spanish real estate, paintings by Goya and Velazquez, a first-edition copy of "El Quixote" and letters written by Christopher Columbus. In her spare time, she even hangs with hunks like Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas.

And finally, we think the duchess has brilliantly eccentric style, and we're not alone; she appeared on Vanity Fair's International Best-Dressed List in 2009. Her penchant for mixing kooky prints and bright colors with her favorite lace tights means she's always a sartorial surprise at events.

Isn't it the worst when you just can't find a pair of jeans that fit right? Well, according to a new survey that's exactly what men and women of Mexico are going through -- all the time.

Women's Wear Daily reports shoppers in Mexico have been complaining of sizing issues with clothing for years, generally stating the clothes are never big or long enough for the population. This problem also has Mexican retailers losing out on an estimated $4 billion dollars because of the high rate of returned goods from their customers.

But all that's about to change thanks to a group of retailers who surveyed the average weight and height of Mexican men and women across 14 cities and several regions. According to the survey:

Average Mexican female ages 18 to 25 is 1.60 meters, or 5 feet 2 inches, tall and weighs 62.9 kilograms, or 138 pounds. Men of the same age range are 1.67 meters, or 5 feet 5 inches, tall, with an average weight of 77.30 kilograms, or 170 pounds.

So what does all of that information mean? It means the Mexican body is different from the body that American, Spanish and European manufacturers design for, and thus requires the creation of the much needed "Mexican molde," or a pattern designed for Mexican people. This will hopefully help both the consumer and the clothing industry, said Carlota de la Vega, director of Fashion Group International in Mexico:

“[Manufacturers] will see how different a Mexican woman’s body is compared to a Spanish or Argentine one. Buyers will have a better idea of what sizes to bring to the market... Many stores carry sizes that don’t fit Mexicans. Some brands’ pants are often too long, with waists in European or American sizes that can be too small for this market. Now, manufacturers and retailers can have more certainty about the right size for their target segment."