Unprecedented Latin American opposition to U.S. sanctions on communist Cuba left President Barack Obama isolated at the Summit of the Americas on Sunday and illustrated Washington's waning influence in the region.
In contrast to the rock-star status he enjoyed at the 2009 summit in Trinidad and Tobago shortly after taking office, Obama has had a bruising time at the two-day meeting in Colombia of some 30 heads of state from across the Americas.
Eleven Secret Service agents and five military personnel were caught in an embarrassing prostitution scandal, Brazil and others have bashed Obama over U.S. monetary policy, and he has been on the defensive over calls to legalize drugs.
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Thanks to the U.S. and Canadian line on Cuba, the heads of state were unable to produce a final declaration as the summit fizzled out on Sunday.
"There was no declaration because there was no consensus," said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who hosted the summit.
"That is not a failure, on the contrary," he said, trying to spin the outcome and frank exchange of different views as a sign of strength.
At a press conference with Santos, Obama responded to a question about Cuba by saying that while his administration has eased travel by Cuban Americans to Cuba, the Cuban government had not taken steps toward democracy and "has not yet observed basic human rights."
The prostitution saga, above all, was a major blow to the prestige of Obama's Secret Service bodyguards and turned into the unexpected talk of the town in the historic city of Cartagena.
Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.
Dear Non-Instagramers,
Sorry that you didn’t get bought out for $1 billion last week. That’s got to be a bummer. Kevin Systrom just made enough money to buy a boat big enough to make Larry Ellison jealous and you’re still living in a studio apartment.
Instagram is a one-off. A fluke. An anecdote that many entrepreneurs will mistake for data. Please don’t be one of them.
This happens about every half a decade. The first mover in a space gets taken out in record time with a ridiculous valuation and the founders look like epic geniuses. Do you remember YouTube? Sure you do. But what about Revver, Metacafe, Guba and Veoh? I didn’t think so.
I know you’re smart and could probably program Instagram yourself in less than a week. Because let’s face it, how hard could it be? It’s just a few filters put onto the iPhone’s camera with some sharing features skinned to appeal to hipsters. There’s just not that much technology involved. Instagram’s competitive advantage comes from being first.
First is important. It’s important in defining functionality, setting expectations and capturing mindshare. It’s important to corporate buyers. Now that Facebook has already made its acquisition it’s unlikely that your consumer tech product, if it’s in any way close to Instagram, will also be bought. It’s a classic winner-take-all scenario. Google doesn’t know what to do with the products it has. Yahoo just purged another 2,000 people. News Corp? Barry Diller? AOL? Please.
And that’s assuming that there even is a market for your consumer technology startup’s product or service. Let’s suppose that you do get Instagram-level breakout and collect 30 million users. That’s great, but only if you (or your potential acquirers) see a viable path to monetize those users. Users aren’t customers. The people who are pissed that Facebook now owns Instagram ultimately have one major concern: that Facebook will find a creepy way to make money off the service.
That’s the thing about consumer technology: it’s easy to rip off, hard to sell to strategic acquirers and monetization is often a mystery.
The Miami Heat finally came to Madison Square Garden, a sea of orange surrounding them in what looked like a playoff game.
Maybe that's all it took to bring out their best on the road.
LeBron James had 29 points and 10 rebounds, Dwyane Wade added 28 points and nine boards, and the Heat overcame Carmelo Anthony's 42 points to beat the New York Knicks 93-85 on Sunday to clinch the Southeast Division title.
Originally scheduled to be here in November, the Heat's lone regular-season game in New York came with the compressed regular season coming to a close — and with a chance they'll be back again soon.
"This is obviously a lot of our favorite places to play, but I think it came at a good time for us," Wade said. "We were struggling, as in to play a complete game on the road, and what better place to come in and focus then here, where this team has been playing well and can embarrass you if you don't play your game. So understanding that this could obviously be a first-round matchup as well, I thought today we came in, we didn't play amazing, but played good enough to win the game. We did a lot of good things, so it was a good time for it."
Chris Bosh finished with 16 points and 14 rebounds for the Heat, who pulled away in the fourth quarter of a possible playoff preview. Miami is second in the Eastern Conference and the Knicks came into the game tied for seventh, although they fell back behind Philadelphia after the loss.
Anthony had only two baskets in the fourth quarter, perhaps tired from playing 43 minutes and with James switching over to defend him after Anthony had overwhelmed Shane Battier. New York had its nine-game home winning streak snapped.
Anthony had the Knicks hoping he could pull out another game against a power team after scoring a season-high 43 last Sunday in overtime against Chicago. His tip-in gave New York a two-point lead with 9½ minutes left, but by the time he had his other field goal on a 3-pointer with 1:28 remaining, Miami had opened an 11-point cushion.
"It was all a blur. I don't even know what happened. It just happened so fast. They made some tough shots down the stretch the last couple of minutes of the game, the last six minutes of the game," Anthony said. "We couldn't make shots. We had some good looks. Couldn't make them. Didn't make them."
A century-old tradition, the Full Crew Farallones Race has never been for the faint of heart: Winds averaging 10 to 20 knots and churning 14-foot Pacific Ocean swells are among the rough conditions typically braved by yachts and their crews during the daylong regatta, a spring favorite of skilled sailors.
But on Saturday, powerful waves and a disastrous series of events brought rare tragedy to the august race and the San Francisco Bay area's large sailing community.
One crew member died and four others remained missing at sea Sunday after two strong waves swept them from their boat near the rocky Farallon Islands, the halfway point of the 54-mile race that began at daybreak in San Francisco and had 49 entrants.
It was the first known fatality in the 143-year history of the San Francisco Yacht Club, which managed the race for the Offshore Yacht Racing Association and where the yacht involved in the accident, the 38-foot Low Speed Chase, was based, club director Ed Lynch said.
"The race community is a very tight-knit group of people, and obviously this tragedy has reached far and wide around the world," Lynch said. "It's an event that will give everybody pause."
Low Speed Chase's owner and captain, 41-year-old James Bradford of Chicago, was among the three survivors whom the U.S. Coast Guard, assisted by National Guard helicopters, pulled from one of the islands about 300 feet from their damaged vessel, Lynch said.
Bradford and another crew member were briefly treated at a hospital, while the third survivor was admitted overnight with a broken leg and contusions, he said.
The seven men and one woman on board ranged in age from their 20s to their 40s, according to Lynch. He said the San Mateo County Coroner's Office has identified the crew member whose dead body was pulled from the water as Marc Kasanin, 46, of Belvedere, Calif.
The crew members who are still missing are: Alan Cahill, of Tiburon, Calif.; Jordan Fromm, of San Rafael, Calif.; Elmer Morrissey, who is from Ireland; and Alexis Busch, of Larkspur, Calif., who was the only woman aboard the Low Speed Chase, Lynch said.
Lynch said the yacht club, which is located just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in Belvedere, has 1,400 members and is a place where "lawyers, carpenters and doctors can all have a beer together and talk about their love of sailing." But Saturday's race was likely to attract the most dedicated recreational sailors, he said.
UFC middleweight Brian Stann is a fighter, a Marine, and recently, a commentator for Fox. He's used to wearing many hats, so it's no surprise that during his UFC on Fuel 2 win over Alessio Sakara, he was both fighter and referee.
Stann knocked Sakara down with a bevy of knees in the first round. While in Sakara's guard, Stann knocked his opponent out with short elbows. When he saw Sakara was clearly out, he pulled back, waving to referee Marc Goddard that Sakara was knocked out.
Though MMA rules indicate Stann would not have been wrong to continue the bout until Goddard stepped in, he didn't want to inflict any more damage on Sakara.
Immediately after the bout, UFC president Dana White tweeted, "Brian Stann is one of the classiest people on Earth!" Light heavyweight champ Jon Jones, a training partner of Stann's, called the win "very classy" and "good for the sport."
Stann is already known as one of MMA's good guys. He started fighting after a decorated career with the Marines. He founded Hire Heroes, a not-for-profit whose aim is to help veterans transition to civilian jobs. Just before he was scheduled to leave his Atlanta home to train for the Sakara fight in New Mexico, his brother-in-law died. Instead of leaving his grieving wife, Stann trained at home and communicated with his coaches through videos.
As Ben Fowlkes from MMA Fighting wrote, he's such a good guy, you almost want to hate him. Except, he's also the kind of good guy who will stop a fight when he sees his opponent has been knocked out.
Julian Cardona is a photojournalist who works in the "murder capital of the world" -- Juarez, Mexico.
He takes pictures of bodies and survivors, migrants and countrymen, violence and vigils.
The 51-year-old photographer puts his life on the line for such photography because he wants the world to know of a patch of earth that many American journalists -- even those in Mexico, too -- fear to tread and often avoid.
That's because the violence by Mexican cartels and other criminals who control swaths of the borderlands have secured a reputation for ferocious violence and carnage, including to those who dare to chronicle the death toll.
To capture the human suffering and endurance, often in the powerful imagery of black-and-white photographs, Cardona doesn't venture out alone anymore. He partners with other photographers -- who had been competitors under less dark times -- because they believe there's greater safety in numbers.
A woman walks past grafitti-covered houses in an abandoned neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez.
A woman walks past grafitti-covered houses in an abandoned neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez.
"When you work as a local journalist, it's more frequent that you (are) facing more risks," he said in an interview at California State University, Northridge, where he spoke to students about cartel violence and where his photos are on display this month.
Cardona has observed how the Mexican side of the border has been a landscape of change, beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s to the massive movement of Mexicans to the United States and elsewhere.
Many parts of Juarez are now a "ghost town," he says.
Last year, Juarez recorded 1,933 violent deaths, according to the Chihuahua state attorney's office. That figure is considered exorbitant, especially when compared with the 209 homicides in New York City last year, even though that U.S. city's population is six times greater than Juarez's.
Even so, that figure represented a 38% decline in violent deaths from the year before, when the city counted 3,117 killings. The number of violent deaths was 2,643 in 2009 and 1,607 in 2008. A mere 300 killings were reported in 2007.
Juarez also is known for its high "femicide" rate, the unsolved murders of hundreds of girls and women.
"During my childhood, Juarez was a very calm place, very secure place," Cardona told CNN.
"It's changed to be very insecure and has become for four years the most violent city on the earth," he added.
James Cameron has shored up his position as king of the worldwide box office.
Cameron's 1997 blockbuster "Titanic" sailed beyond the $2 billion mark in lifetime ticket sales, thanks to a 3-D re-release of the film that was timed to the centennial of the ship's sinking.
Only one other movie has topped $2 billion, and it's also Cameron's. His 2009 sci-fi smash "Avatar" earned $2.8 billion worldwide.
The "Titanic" reissue took in about $100 million this weekend – $11.6 million domestically and a whopping $88.2 million in 69 overseas markets. That included a $58 million debut in China and put the re-release total worldwide at $190.8 million.
Added to the film's $1.84 billion haul in its original release, "Titanic" now stands at $2.03 billion worldwide.
Just because a job seems glamorous, requires a lot of education, is stressful or dangerous, it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily be earning the big bucks by pursing a career in one of these fields. Some jobs seem like they should pay a lot more than they actually do. If you're the type to be more motivated by the paycheck than by the work itself, these are a few career choices that you might want to steer clear of.
Emergency Medical Technician
You trust these professionals with your life. They're the people who step in to help those who are sick, injured or in danger, at times even placing themselves in precarious situations in the process. However, you might be surprised to learn that emergency medical technicians (or EMTs) aren't earning the big bucks. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the average income for this occupation is only about $27,000 per year. Considering that this position requires workers to obtain post-secondary education, be on call, work shift work and deal with a huge amount of stress, this wage seems incredibly low.
Event Coordinator
Planning a big event takes a lot of work. Event coordinators take the stress out of event planning for others, thereby taking on all the stresses of organizing vendors, dealing with the hiccups, and ensuring that guests enjoy the event. Ensuring that every wedding, party or conference runs smoothly takes a lot of skill on the part of event planners or coordinators. They need to be organized, professional and able to juggle multiple tasks all at once. How much does this stressful position pay? Only about $36,000 per year.
Probation Officer
Dealing with those who are on probation or parole may not seem like a particularly glamorous position, but there's no doubt it's a stressful one. This job can be particularly rewarding, especially in the fact that you're helping to keep reformed criminals engaged and on track by helping to support their rehabilitation, assisting them with finding jobs and homes once they're released. On the other side of the coin, people in this field also have to deal with a great deal of disappointment and stress, since many former cons have a tendency to reoffend. CNN Money reports that this challenging job comes with an annual salary of about $38,400.
Family Therapist
Seeing how important family wellness is, it's surprising to find that those who are responsible for ensuring our family relationships function properly are only be paid about $45,000 per year. Therapists typically require quite a bit of education in order to practice, so this position comes with a fairly low rate of pay considering that some therapists might be repaying student loans. Therapists also have a tendency to experience burnout, since they are often responsible for seeing a number of clients each day, while helping these families to sort through some of the most stressful of situations.
It's official - after seven years as a couple, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are engaged.
Pitt's manager confirmed the news to The Associated Press in an email Friday.
Cynthia Pett-Dante said that there isn't a wedding date "at this time." She also said that the engagement "is a promise for the future."
Earlier Friday, jeweler Robert Procop told the Hollywood Reporter he designed an engagement ring for the Oscar-winning actress.
"I can confirm that, yes, Robert Procop did indeed design an engagement ring for Angelina Jolie, designed in collaboration with Brad Pitt," a rep for Procop said.
"Brad had a specific vision for this ring, which he realized over a yearlong collaboration. He wanted every aspect of it to be perfect, so I was able to locate a diamond of the finest quality and cut it to an exact custom size and shape to suite Angelina's hand," the statement continued. "Brad was always heavily involved, overseeing every aspect of the creative design evolution. The side diamonds are specially cut to encircle her finger. Each diamond is of the highest gem quality."
Jolie was photographed with a ring on her engagement finger Wednesday night while attending a private viewing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Chinese Galleries, THR notes.
The actress collaborated with Procop last year on her "Style of Jolie" jewelry line, which benefited charity.
Pitt, 48, and Jolie, 36, have been together since 2005, and have three adopted children and three biological children. Pett-Dante also said that "their kids are very happy."
Earlier this year, Pitt told CBS News' "Sunday Morning" that the couple has been "getting a lot of pressure from the kids" to get married.
"It means something to them," he said during the interview, adding, "We will [wed] someday, we will. 'That's a great idea! Get mommy a ring!' Okay, I will, I will."
Five guitars belonging to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been stolen from a Southern California soundstage where the band has been rehearsing for an upcoming tour.
Culver City Police Sgt. Dan Sukal says the theft at The Culver Studios was reported Thursday.
On its website, the band offered a "no questions asked" $7,500 reward for information leading to the return of the instruments.
The stolen guitars include Petty's blond 1967 12-string Rickenbacker and his Gibson SGTVJunior, Mike Campbell's blue Dusenberg, Ron Blair's Fender Broadcaster and Scott Thurston's 1967 Epiphone Sheridan.
The band is known for a string of hit singles such as "American Girl", "Don't Do Me Like That," and "Breakdown." Their tour kicks off on April 18 in Broomfield, Colo.
The Culver Studios is a sprawling complex of 16 soundstages west of downtown Los Angeles.
