6 ways to tweet yourself out of a job

Hate your job? Want to leave without giving two weeks notice? Thanks to Twitter, it’s never been easier to get fired, says Rob Lammie at Mental Floss

Step 1: Drunk tweet
As any Spring Break partier knows, drinking impairs your judgment. It seems to have also impaired the judgment of Major League pitcher-turned-sports-radio-host Mike Bacsik, who put on quite a show during a San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks NBA game in April 2010. While watching the game, Bacsik bragged that he was “About 12 deep and some shots.” He proceeded to unleash a string of insults aimed at NBA commissioner David Stern, accused the refs of fixing the game, and even threatened to blow up the NBA’s offices. But the one that really got people riled up came after the Mavericks lost the game, when Bacsik tweeted: 

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@MikeBacsik: “Congrats to all the dirty mexicans in San Antonio.”

After sobering up, Bacsik deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology. But it was too little, too late. Numerous people complained to his radio station, which first suspended Bacsik and later fired him. After his dismissal, he told ESPN Dallas, “When you tweet like that, it’s not a playful, harmless thing… I’m very sorry and will try my best for my actions to speak louder than my tweets.”

Step 2: Break the law (or just anger your governor)
Twitter has become a great tool for politicians to connect to the voting public. Former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, for one, has really embraced the technology as a way to share his opinions and views. For example, in December 2009, he sent out a tweet saying:

 @HaleyBarbour: “Glad the Legislature recognizes our dire fiscal situation. Look forward to hearing their ideas on how to trim expenses.”

Jennifer Carter, one of his Twitter followers who worked for the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMC), read this message and offered up a suggestion on how Governor Barbour could personally save the taxpayers money:

“Schedule regular medical exams like everyone else instead of paying UMC employees overtime to do it when clinics are usually closed.” 

This “Oh, snap!” moment referred to an incident that had occurred three years earlier, when the governor requested the medical center open on a Saturday, when they were normally closed, and bring in a staff of 15-20 people who were paid overtime to administer his annual check-up. This happened before Carter worked for UMC and she was simply repeating what she had been told by other employees. 

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The governor’s office tracked down Carter and made a formal complaint to UMC, saying Carter had violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a privacy law that states no employee of a medical facility can reveal any information about a person’s “protected health information.” Some argued that Carter didn’t violate HIPAA, since she didn’t actually give out any information about the health of the governor. However, others believe that simply saying the governor had even visited a doctor is a violation. 

Semantics aside, UMC administrators said it was a violation, so they suspended Carter for three days without pay and strongly suggested she resign to avoid further disciplinary action, which she did.

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Step 3: Have an NSFW lifestyle
St. Louis-based blogger “The Beautiful Kind” had been writing online about her polyamorous sex life for years. Knowing that not everyone would agree with her chosen lifestyle, she was always very careful about maintaining her anonymity, especially when it came to the workplace. So when she signed up for Twitter, she wanted to be anonymous there as well. She thought that, thanks to the similarities between the two, it was like signing up for an online message board — you supplied your real name to the website privately, but could choose to be known publicly by your username only. But when she logged in for the first time and saw that, not only did it show her username (@TBK365), but also her real name on her profile, she immediately went back and removed it. 

Thinking she was now safely anonymous, she used Twitter to promote her blog and to discuss sexually explicit topics with her followers. However, when her boss at the non-profit group where she worked was told by upper management to do a Google search of all employees, TBK’s Twitter account information — with her real name still associated — came up on the Twitter tracking site topsy.com.

The next day, TBK was called into her boss’ office and fired on the spot. Afterwards, her former boss sent her a letter saying, “While I know you are a good worker and an intelligent person, I hope you try to understand that our employees are held to a different standard. When it comes to private matters, such as one’s sexual explorations and preferences, our employees must keep their affairs private.” Because Missouri is an at-will employment state, meaning employers can fire someone for just about any reason, TBK was SOL.

Step 4: Question company policy
When California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) traded in their standard white shirts for black ones, employee Tim Chantarangsu wasn’t happy with the change. So he tweeted @calpizzakitchen his opinion:

@traphik: “black button ups are the lamest s**t ever!!!”

He didn’t expect anyone to notice or care, but the next day he received a direct message from corporate asking what restaurant he worked for. He knew better than to respond, but they tracked him down anyway and he was fired. They not only referenced his tweet about the shirts, but also an earlier one where he had said he was getting ready to work at “Calipornia Skeetza Kitchen.” 

Little did they know that Chantarangsu is kind of a big deal on another social website, YouTube. Under the name TimothyDeLaGhetto2, Chantarangsu has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, accounting for over 10,500,000 views of his videos at the time. Of course he made a YouTube video telling his Twitter story and it has been viewed well more than 100,000 times. Shortly after the incident, he asked his followers to bombard CPK’s Twitter account with RTs (re-tweets) of his offending message, which they were more than happy to oblige.

Step 5: Make a celebrity look bad
During his five years on the job, Jon Barrett-Ingels had served a lot of celebrities as a waiter at Barney Greengrass, an upscale restaurant in Beverly Hills. One day, Jane Adams, star of the HBO series Hung, came in and had lunch to the tune of $ 13.44. Unfortunately, when the bill came, Adams realized she had left her wallet in the car. Ingels knew who she was, so he told her she could run out and grab it and come back. The actress left, but didn’t return. Instead, someone from her agency called the next day and paid the bill. However, they didn’t leave a tip. Ingels had recently signed up for Twitter and so, his sixth tweet to his 40 followers said:

@PapaBarrett: Jane Adams, star of HBO series “Hung” skipped out on a $ 13.44 check. Her agent called and payed the following day. NO TIP!!!” 

Over the next few weeks, Ingels started using Twitter to send out a few harmless observations about celebrities that came in to eat — mainly what they ordered or what they looked like that day. Then, out of the blue, Jane Adams came back to the restaurant. According to Ingels’ blog, she was clearly upset and begrudgingly slapped $ 3 on the bar for Ingels as a tip. Surprised, Ingels told the actress she really didn’t have to do that, but her gesture was appreciated. She allegedly replied with, “My friend read about it on Twitter!” before storming off. Adams complained about the tweet to management, so someone from Barney’s corporate started following Ingels on Twitter to see what he was up to. After reading his celebrity tweets, it didn’t take long before they gave him the boot.

Step 6: Don’t get hired in the first place
If you’ve followed steps 1 – 5 and you still have a job, here’s the ultimate way to make sure Twitter will keep you from gainful employment.

When recent college grad Skye Riley heard back from Cisco, the computer networking giant, about her job application, one of her first instincts was to tweet about it. Unfortunately, this is what she tweeted:

@theconnor: Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

The unfortunate part? An employee of Cisco, Tim Levad, came across her post while doing a Twitter search for Cisco. He replied to her by saying:

@timmylevad: Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

Riley’s story was the tweet heard round the world. It became a hot topic on tech blogs for weeks afterwards, with writers calling it the “Cisco Fatty” incident. She later claimed that the tweet was taken out of context — that part of her message was referring to a well-paid internship she had turned down — but it appears the damage had already been done. While only she and Cisco know what really happened, according to her online resume, she has never worked for the company.

 — Rob Lammie

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“Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik, husband divorcing

NEW YORK (Reuters) – “The Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik and her husband are divorcing after nine years of marriage, she said in a statement on her Facebook page.

Bialik, who starred in the 1990s sitcom “Blossom,” and Michael Stone have two sons together.

“Divorce is terribly sad, painful and incomprehensible for children,” Bialik, 36, said in the statement. “It is not something we have decided lightly.”

Bialik, a proponent of “attachment parenting” who authored a book on the subject that was published in September, said it “played no role” in the couple’s divorce.

Attachment parenting advocates the nurturing of strong bonds between parents and children, which can include extended breast-feeding and parents and children sleeping in the same bed until the children are as old as 7. A controversial Time magazine cover on the subject in May drew strong reactions across the United States.

“The main priority for us now is to make the transition to two loving homes as smooth and painless as possible,” Bialik wrote in the statement, which was posted to her Facebook page on Wednesday. “Our sons deserve parents committed to their growth and health and that’s what we are focusing on.”

“We will be OK,” the statement concludes.

Bialik is a former child star who appeared in the 1980s television series “Webster” and “The Facts of Life” before landing the title role in the coming-of-age television show “Blossom,” which ran from 1991 to 1995. The show was about a smart teenage girl whose parents have divorced and is learning about life.

The actress attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she obtained a doctorate in neuroscience.

She met Michael Stone, a fellow graduate student, in calculus class, according to a description of her wedding she previously posted online.

In her most recent role on CBS comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” Bialik plays Amy Farrah Fowler, a neuroscientist who dates one of the two main stars of the show, the socially inept but brilliant physicist Sheldon Cooper.

(Reporting By Chris Francescani; Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Bill Trott)

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Four new cases of SARS-like virus found in Saudi, Qatar

LONDON (Reuters) – A new virus from the same family as SARS which sparked a global alert in September has now killed two people in Saudi Arabia, and total cases there and in Qatar have reached six, the World Health Organisation said.

The U.N. health agency issued an international alert in late September saying a virus previously unknown in humans had infected a Qatari man who had recently been in Saudi Arabia, where another man with the same virus had died.

On Friday it said in an outbreak update that it had registered four more cases and one of the new patients had died.

“The additional cases have been identified as part of the enhanced surveillance in Saudi Arabia (3 cases, including 1 death) and Qatar (1 case),” the WHO said.

The new virus is known as a coronavirus and shares some of the symptoms of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China in 2002 and killed around a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

Among the symptoms in the confirmed cases are fever, coughing and breathing difficulties.

Of the six laboratory-confirmed cases reported to WHO, four cases, including the two deaths, are from Saudi Arabia and two cases are from Qatar.

Britain’s Health Protection Agency, which helped to identify the new virus in September, said the newly reported case from Qatar was initially treated in October in Qatar but then transferred to Germany, and has now been discharged.

Coronaviruses are typically spread like other respiratory infections, such as flu, travelling in airborne droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

The WHO said investigations were being conducted into the likely source of the infection, the method of exposure, and the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

“Close contacts of the recently confirmed cases are being identified and followed-up,” it said.

It added that so far, only the two most recently confirmed cases in Saudi Arabia were epidemiologically linked – they were from the same family, living in the same household.

“Preliminary investigations indicate that these two cases presented with similar symptoms of illness. One died and the other recovered,” the WHO’s statement said.

Two other members of the same family also suffered similar symptoms of illness, and one died and the other is recovering. But the WHO said laboratory test results on the fatality were still pending, and the person who is recovering had tested negative for the new coronavirus.

The virus has no formal name, but scientists at the British and Dutch laboratories where it was identified refer to it as “London1_novel CoV 2012″.

The WHO urged all its member states to continue surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections.

“Until more information is available, it is prudent to consider that the virus is likely more widely distributed than just the two countries which have identified cases,” it said.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

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Is Ben Bernanke Unleashing Inflation?

Conservative economists are paying attention to the man behind the curtain and not liking what they see. At a meeting in a Manhattan hotel on Nov. 20, the so-called Shadow Open Market Committee criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for an ultra-easy monetary policy that will, in their opinion, lead ultimately to dangerously higher inflation.

“We aren’t in Kansas anymore,” said Columbia University economist Charles Calomiris, referring to the mind-bending changes in the Fed’s monetary policy under Bernanke’s chairmanship. That’s not the same as calling Bernanke the new Wizard of Oz, but it’s close.

Marvin Goodfriend, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, said the Federal Reserve “appears to be walking away” from a commitment it made last January to keep the inflation rate at or near 2 percent. In September, when it announced a new round of bond buying to bring down unemployment, the Fed made no mention of the 2 percent target, merely saying it would pursue its growth target “in a context of price stability.”

“This is a trap,” Goodfriend warned. If the Fed waits to tighten monetary policy until inflation becomes a concern, it will be too late, he said: High inflation will become embedded in the economy and it will take years of punitively high rates to stamp it out.

Jeffrey Lacker, the hawkish president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, was the Shadow Open Market Committee’s invited keynote speaker. He shared the committee members’ concerns about letting inflation drift much above the 2 percent target in the name of growth, even for a short while.

“At the very least, the precedent set by an opportunistic attempt to raise inflation temporarily is likely to cloud our credibility for decades to come,” Lacker said.

The Shadow Open Market Committee was formed in 1973 to evaluate the policy choices of the Federal Open Market Committee, the arm of the Fed that sets monetary policy. One of its co-founders, Carnegie Mellon economist Allan Meltzer, is still active in the organization and attended the symposium.

Mickey Levy, chief economist for Bank of America and an SOMC member, said that the Fed “has neutralized the bond vigilantes” by keeping rates low. In other words, even if bond traders are worried that inflation will heat up, they don’t dare bet that way by driving interest rates higher, because the Fed will swat them away by pushing rates back down. “The adage ‘Don’t fight the Fed’? It’s in full force,” Levy said.

The Shadow Open Market Committee meeting wrapped up just before Bernanke spoke a few blocks away at a meeting of the Economic Club of New York. Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, who attended the SOMC symposium, was given the privilege of asking Bernanke questions at the Economic Club luncheon. He did not choose to ask the chairman whether the Fed was walking away from its 2 percent inflation target.

Right after the luncheon, though, Bloomberg TV’s Mark Crumpton asked Feldstein, who was President Ronald Reagan’s chief economic adviser, if he was concerned that the Fed hadn’t been talking about the 2 percent target lately. “Absolutely,” Feldstein said. “It’s very important for the Fed to reaffirm those goals.”

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Egypt reformist warns of turmoil from Morsi decree

CAIRO (AP) — Prominent Egyptian democracy advocate Mohammed ElBaradei warned Saturday of increasing turmoil that could potentially lead to the military stepping in unless the Islamist president rescinds his new, near absolute powers, as the country’s long fragmented opposition sought to unite and rally new protests.

Egypt‘s liberal and secular forces — long divided, weakened and uncertain amid the rise of Islamist parties to power — are seeking to rally themselves in response to the decrees issued this week by President Mohammed Morsi. The president granted himself sweeping powers to “protect the revolution” and made himself immune to judicial oversight.

The judiciary, which was the main target of Morsi’s edicts, pushed back Saturday. The country’s highest body of judges, the Supreme Judical Council, called his decrees an “unprecedented assault.” Courts in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria announced a work suspension until the decrees are lifted.

Outside the high court building in Cairo, several hundred demonstrators rallied against Morsi, chanting, “Leave! Leave!” echoing the slogan used against former leader Hosni Mubarak in last year’s uprising that ousted him. Police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of young men who were shooting flares outside the court.

The edicts issued Wednesday have galvanized anger brewing against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, from which he hails, ever since he took office in June as Egypt’s first freely elected president. Critics accuse the Brotherhood — which has dominated elections the past year — and other Islamists of monopolizing power and doing little to bring real reform or address Egypt’s mounting economic and security woes.

Oppositon groups have called for new nationwide rallies Tuesday — and the Muslim Brotherhood has called for rallies supporting Morsi the same day, setting the stage for new violence.

Morsi supporters counter that the edicts were necessary to prevent the courts, which already dissolved the elected lower house of parliament, from further holding up moves to stability by disbanding the assembly writing the new constitution, as judges were considering doing. Like parliament was, the assembly is dominated by Islamists. Morsi accuses Mubarak loyalists in the judiciary of seeking to thwart the revolution’s goals and barred the judiciary from disbanding the constitutional assembly or parliament’s upper house.

In an interview with a handful of journalists, including The Associated Press, Nobel Peace laureate ElBaradei raised alarm over the impact of Morsi’s rulings, saying he had become “a new pharaoh.”

“There is a good deal of anger, chaos, confusion. Violence is spreading to many places and state authority is starting to erode slowly,” he said. “We hope that we can manage to do a smooth transition without plunging the country into a cycle of violence. But I don’t see this happening without Mr. Morsi rescinding all of this.”

Speaking of Egypt’s powerful military, ElBaradei said, “I am sure they are as worried as everyone else. You cannot exclude that the army will intervene to restore law and order” if the situation gets out of hand.

But anti-Morsi factions are chronically divided, with revolutionary youth activists, new liberal political parties that have struggled to build a public base and figures from the Mubarak era, all of whom distrust each other. The judiciary is also an uncomfortable cause for some to back, since it includes many Mubarak appointees who even Morsi opponents criticize as too tied to the old regime.

Opponents say the edicts gave Morsi near dictatorial powers, neutering the judiciary when he already holds both executive and legislative powers. One of his most controversial edicts gave him the right to take any steps to stop “threats to the revolution,” vague wording that activists say harkens back to Mubarak-era emergency laws.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in nationwide protests on Friday, sparking clashes between anti-and pro-Morsi crowds in several cities that left more than 200 people wounded.

On Saturday, new clashed broke out in the southern city of Assiut. Morsi opponents and members of the Muslim Brotherhood swung sticks and threw stones at each other outside the offices of the Brotherhood‘s political party, leaving at least seven injured.

ElBaradei and a six other prominent liberal leaders have announced the formation of a National Salvation Front aimed at rallying all non-Islamist groups together to force Morsi to rescind his edicts.

The National Salvation Front leadership includes several who ran against Morsi in this year’s presidential race — Hamdeen Sabahi, who finished a close third, former foreign minister Amr Moussa and moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh. ElBaradei says the group is also pushing for the creation of a new constitutional assembly and a unity government.

ElBaradei said it would be a long process to persuade Morsi that he “cannot get away with murder.”

“There is no middle ground, no dialogue before he rescinds this declaration. There is no room for dialogue until then.”

The grouping seems to represent a newly assertive political foray by ElBaradei, the former chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. ElBaradei returned to Egypt in the year before Mubarak’s fall, speaking out against his rule, and was influential with many of the youth groups that launched the anti-Mubarak revolution.

But since Mubarak’s fall, he has been criticized by some as too Westernized, elite and Hamlet-ish, reluctant to fully assert himself as an opposition leader.

The Brotherhood‘s Freedom and Justice political party, once headed by Morsi, said Saturday in a statement that the president’s decision protects the revolution against former regime figures who have tried to erode elected institutions and were threatening to dissolve the constitutional assembly.

The Brotherhood warned in another statement that there were forces trying to overthrow the elected president in order to return to power. It said Morsi has a mandate to lead, having defeated one of Mubarak’s former prime ministers this summer in a closely contested election.

Morsi’s edicts also removed Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, the prosecutor general first appointed by Mubarak, who many Egyptians accused of not prosecuting former regime figures strongly enough.

Speaking to a gathering of judges cheering support for him at the high court building in Cairo, Mahmoud warned of a “vicious campaign” against state institutions. He also said judicial authorities are looking into the legality of the decision to remove him — setting up a Catch-22 of legitimacy, since under Morsi’s decree, the courts cannot overturn any of his decisions.

“I thank you for your support of judicial independence,” he told the judges.

“Morsi will have to reverse his decision to avoid the anger of the people,” said Ahmed Badrawy, a labor ministry employee protesting at the courthouse. “We do not want to have an Iranian system here,” he added, referring to fears that hardcore Islamists may try to turn Egypt into a theocracy.

Several hundred protesters remained in Cairo’s Tahrir Square Saturday, where a number of tents have been erected in a sit-in following nearly a week of clashes with riot police.

____

Brian Rohan contributed to this report from Cairo.

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Fired colleague of UBS rogue trader Adoboli opens betting site

LONDON (Reuters) – A former senior trader at UBS, sacked for failing to prevent colleague Kweku Adoboli from perpetrating the biggest fraud in British history, has set up a gambling website.

In a decision likely to be seized upon by critics who say traders have often made casino-style bets, John Hughes started his gambling firm even though his website said his old job had “removed all sense of optimism from his character”.

Adoboli, his former subordinate now serving seven years in jail for running up losses of $ 2.3 billion, argued during his trial that his own behavior was the result of a risky trading culture encouraged by senior colleagues, and his lawyers alleged that Hughes had played a major role in “off-book” trading.

Hughes admitted he had known of Adoboli’s scheme to hide his giant losses and that he had booked several fictitious trades himself, but denied knowledge of some of Adoboli’s biggest multi-billion dollar trades.

Hughes said he had chosen to call his new gambling website ‘BetsofMates’, a play on the expression “Best of Mates”.

That may grate with Adoboli who complained that his colleagues, including Hughes, had “sold me down the river” after a meeting at which he said it was decided he alone would carry the can for the huge losses.

Hughes and the others said they had no memory of such a meeting.

“We’re not a standard bookie,” Hughes said of his new website, which enables users to play against each other in leagues, with each player placing bets of between two and 200 pounds.

“We facilitate competition. The emphasis is a lot more on competition than yield enhancement,” he told Reuters on Thursday.

The former senior trader on the Exchange Traded Funds desk at UBS in London said Adoboli’s conviction was “just incredibly sad”. He declined to comment further.

Despite a large salary and bonus, Adoboli was himself an avid gambler and lost 123,000 pounds ($ 200,000) on spread-betting in the year before his arrest.

One prosecutor accused him of being addicted to gambling to which Adoboli countered that spread-betting was common among City traders “like a taxi driver driving his own taxi home”.

Hughes’ profile on his new firm’s website says that “seven years in the City (had) removed all sense of optimism from his character, and made him absurdly superstitious.”

He told Reuters such feelings had arisen “sitting there watching the markets for seven years and watching different news hit the tapes and obviously the last seven years haven’t been the easiest in the financial markets.”

Britain’s Gambling Commission granted a license to his pool betting company ‘Bets of Mates Limited’, which is registered to an East London address, in September 2012, two months before Adoboli was convicted.

(Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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Bullied, Institutionalized for Tourettes

From the age of 7, Frank Bonifas has endured the most severe form of Tourette syndrome, and it started long before the medical community even had a name for the neurological disorder.

Doctors convinced his parents that he could control his tics and outbursts, which had him grunting, jerking and swearing with impunity. They blamed his mother for coddling him and, in 1968, as a young teen, they sent him to a psychiatric hospital for 18 months.

Bonifas, now 58 and living in Coldwater, Ohio, experienced assaults by school bullies and was forced to take high-dose medications that made him so listless one year, he lost two months of school.

Even in hospital wards, he was tortured by staff members who thought his outbursts were deliberate. He even had to fight with Social Security to get disability payments because Tourette syndrome was not listed in the medical journals.

“I resented all psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers,” he said. “They had no idea what was wrong with me and blamed me, my mom, dad and sister for my problems.”

Now, in a self-published memoir, “Fu-Fu-Fu Frank,” he writes about his wrenching childhood and the determination he had to overcome the odds of living with a misunderstood disorder.

Bonifas prefaced his Thanksgiving day telephone interview with ABCNews.com in anticipation of his uncontrollable use of the “F word,” punctuated with grunts and screams.

“I am not a violent person,” he said. “I am a loving person who just has Tourette’s.”

Despite severe physical handicaps, Bonifas was able to write the book because of Marilyn Kanney, a former nurse and friend of his late mother who has loved and supported him since he was in high school. He calls her “a second mother.”

“She took my thoughts and put them into sentences and wrote them into paragraphs and chapters,” he said. “They were all my words, but she allowed me to make it a reality … It took us 15 years to finish it.”

Bonifas decided to go public with his story after friends encouraged him to write. His first goal was to educate others about Tourette syndrome. But the second was to be financially independent and get off disability assistance and Medicaid.

The turning point in his life was in 1973, when a husband-wife psychiatric team, Drs. Arthur and Elaine Shapiro of New York Hospital, gave his condition a name.

At 18, Bonifas was one of the first people in the United States to be diagnosed with Tourette syndrome.

“I taught my doctor everything he knows about Tourette,” said Bonifas. “Dr. Shapiro said to me at the time, ‘Frank, to your credit, you haven’t blown your brains out by now.

“I put my trust in doctors and nurses for the first time in my life,” he said.

According to the Tourette Syndrome Foundation, the disorder is defined by multiple motor and vocal tics lasting for more than one year. The verbal tics can include grunting, throat clearing, shouting and barking.

It was named for a French neuropsychiatrist, Gilles de la Tourette, who assessed the disorder in the late 1800s. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that it was widely recognized in the U.S., where it was thought to be exceptionally rare.

In 1980, the condition was broadened to include milder cases of tics. Fewer than 10 percent of all patients swear or use socially inappropriate words, which makes Bonifas’s condition so socially isolating.

The first symptoms, usually before the age of 18, are involuntary movements of the face, arms, limbs or trunk, such as kicking or stomping. They are frequent, repetitive and rapid. The patient cannot control these movements and they can involve the whole body.

ADD and OCD Can Accompany Tourette Syndrome

According to Dr. Jonathan Mink, chief of pediatric neurology at Rochester University, who sits on the board of the Tourette association, the disorder is still poorly understood and likely has a genetic link.

Many patients, like Bonifas, also have symptoms associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

“The majority of kids, even those bad enough to seek treatment, are likely to have their tics diminish or go away,” said Mink.

Habit reversal therapy — teaching a person with Tourette to hold his or her breath, for example, instead of saying the repeated word, can sometimes help. Antidepressants are used to treat associated anxiety.

Today, several medications have helped Bonifas manage his symptoms, but his early years were spent in torment, in and out of mental institutions, hospitals and experimental programs.

In the introduction to his memoir, doctors attest to the “exorcisms” that Bonifas underwent to rid him of his “demons.” He claims he was exploited and abused, even sexually, by many who were entrusted to care for him.

A devote Catholic and former altar boy, Bonifas once considered entering the seminary. Strangely, his first outburst of profanity occurred in the seventh grade when looking at a church spire.

The thought — “The Blessed Virgin Is a F***er” — just burst into his mind. He was convinced he would burn in hell.

But Bonifas had no control over that or other obsessive-compulsive habits, such as dressing, washing and brushing his teeth in a particular sequence.

His behavior in school was problematic, too. Teachers saw his outbursts as an attention-seeking device. He was “barking, snorting, sniffing, hissing and more.”

By high school, he was badly bullied. Seniors pulled down his pants, taunting: “Now we’ll see if he is a dog or a human being.”

Another time, he was pushed into a large garbage can and rolled down the steps to the first floor.

After being sent to a local hospital ward for treatment, he got “special care” more than a half dozen times. Orderlies confined Bonifas to a locked steel cell with a pillow and a pad. After that, he developed lifelong claustrophobia.

In exercise classes in a swimming pool, he claimed the leader seemed to enjoy dunking his head underwater until his lungs “nearly burst.”

But eventually, Bonifas found New York Hospital, where modern treatments and an educated and understanding medical team, gave him hope. He was the 35th patient Dr. Shapiro had ever treated.

His roommate was Dr. Orrin Palmer, a Maryland doctor who overcame Tourette and now practices psychiatry.

“Frank and I went through hell on these protocols,” Palmer wrote in one of the forwards in the book.

Doctors experimented with an array of high-dose medicines that caused side effects, such as insomnia, motor restlessness, mood swings and even Parkinson’s symptoms.

“I had to sign papers that I was a guinea pig,” said Bonifas. “If the medicine made me incompetent or I lost my mind or was comatose or died, they were not responsible.”

His response to his doctor’s orders was, “Just tell my small town that I am not the devil, not doing this on purpose and that I have a mind.”

After five months, his mother brought him home and things started to get better. Were it not for her, “they would have institutionalized me for life,” he said.

Today, Bonifas works as a part-time mail clerk at a local bank. He said life is still “incredibly difficult.”

But since the publishing his book, he said, “Many people have a better understanding of what I go through on a daily basis, and I have been treated much better.”

He takes a low dose of haldol, ativan, cogentin and many natural vitamins. Bonifas also has taken up yoga with a trainer.

Bonifas cares for his 88-year-old father who lives upstairs. His beloved mother died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2004.

“I just wish she were alive to read it, but my faith tells me that she is in Heaven and is proud of everything I’m trying to accomplish,” he said.

More recently, cultural attitudes toward those with Tourette syndrome have begun to change, according to Bonifas.

“Most people who have become familiar with it are more understanding,” he said. “However, many are not aware of how serious the disease is, still feel that anyone afflicted with it should be able to control all of its symptoms.”

Much still needs to be done, according to Bonifas.

“Parents and teachers can be more supportive and understanding of people who are different,” he said. “Children learn at a very early age how to treat others, and there are too many bullies today as a result of the prejudices of all who teach them.”

Bonifas volunteers in schools and organizations to help change attitudes.

With all the hurdles he has overcome, the dark shadow of growing up in a world ignorant of his needs still haunts Bonifas.

“I have tried to put my past behind me, but every day is challenging and difficult,” he said. “I’m working on it.”

“I think that all people should accept those who are different or handicapped,” he said. “They should have to spend one day in their shoes, and see how it feels.

His faith and the encouragement he has received from readers of his memoir keep him going.

“It just comes down to this: There is you and God,” he said. “I have a lot of faith and a lot of determination.”

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US begins ‘Black Friday’ sales

23 November 2012 Last updated at 10:34 ET

US retailers have begun their “Black Friday” sales, reopening stores after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Black Friday is usually the busiest shopping day of the year, as the Thanksgiving weekend marks the start of the holiday shopping season.

A survey estimated that 147 million people would go shopping between Friday and Sunday, despite more shoppers going online.

With the US economy fragile, many shops began their sales on Thursday night.

Retailer Target opened its doors at 9pm local time, three hours earlier than last year. Sears opened at 8pm. When department store Macy’s opened its flagship in New York at midnight, 11,000 shoppers arrived.

The National Retail Federation forecast a 4.1% increase in retail sales during the November-December holiday period this year, less than the 5.6% jump recorded last year.

And the 147 million people forecast for this year is down from 152 million on the Thanksgiving weekend last year, the NRF said.

Continue reading the main story

This year I wasn’t about to kill people”

End Quote Elizabeth Garcia

More than 50% of consumers will do some browsing during the weekend, according to Kevin Sterneckert, vice president of retail research at Gartner.

“They will buy things because they looked at them in the store. They will touch and feel what they are interested in and then buy it online on Monday, either from the same retailer or a different online retailer.”

Bryan Everett, an executive at Target, told the New York Times that the make-up of customers had changed this year.

“Usually it’s just a parent with a child, or mom and dad, or just a single guest in the store,” he said. “This year we were seeing four- to five-person families.”

Online shopping

Bricks-and-mortar stores can make up to 40% of their annual revenue during the two-month holiday shopping season, but they are coming under increasing pressure from online retailers such as Amazon.

A survey by Forrester Research suggested online shopping is set to jump 15% to $ 68.4bn this year.

And according to IBM, online sales for Thanksgiving were up 18% on Thursday, compared with a year earlier, showing that shoppers are turning to the web and beginning buying earlier, rather than waiting for the physical stores to open.

Still, many shoppers left behind the traditional Thanksgiving dinner to camp out in search of bargains. Jackie Berg arrived on Wednesday to a makeshift camp outside a Best Buy store in Michigan.

“We’ll miss the actual being there with family, but we’ll have the rest of the weekend for that,” she said.

In Orlando, at another Best Buy store, people had camped out for days.

Gabriel Esteves, 33, has been queuing since Monday and stayed in line despite his brother and sister going home to spend Thanksgiving with their families.

“They told me to take a break and go to the house, but today’s the worst day to leave the line. People come and cut in,” said Mr Esteves, who is a self-employed car audio installer and wanted to buy a 50-inch television.

In the past, the huge numbers of people chasing a bargain and the small paces meant that tempers have occasionally flared.

Elizabeth Garcia, from New York, went shopping at about 3:30am at Toys R Us in Times Square. Last year, Ms Garcia almost got into a fight over a Tinker Bell sofa. “This year I wasn’t about to kill people,” she said.

A coalition of current and former Wal-Mart staff seeking better wages, benefits and working conditions have staged months of protests outside stores.

Americans spend about $ 875m buying turkeys for Thanksgiving and 43 million were estimated to be travelling for the holiday this year.

BBC News – Business

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Beijing’s S. China Sea rivals protest passport map

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China has enraged several neighbors with a few dashes on a map, printed in its newly revised passports that show it staking its claim on the entire South China Sea and even Taiwan.

Inside the passports, an outline of China printed in the upper left corner includes Taiwan and the sea, hemmed in by the dashes. The change highlights China’s longstanding claim on the South China Sea in its entirety, though parts of the waters also are claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia.

China’s official maps have long included Taiwan and the South China Sea as Chinese territory, but the act of including them in its passports could be seen as a provocation since it would require other nations to tacitly endorse those claims by affixing their official seals to the documents.

Ruling party and opposition lawmakers alike condemned the map in Taiwan, a self-governed island that split from China after a civil war in 1949. They said it could harm the warming ties the historic rivals have enjoyed since Ma Ying-jeou became president 4 1/2 years ago.

“This is total ignorance of reality and only provokes disputes,” said Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the Cabinet-level body responsible for ties with Beijing. The council said the government cannot accept the map.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario told reporters in Manila that he sent a note to the Chinese Embassy that his country “strongly protests” the image. He said China’s claims include an area that is “clearly part of the Philippines’ territory and maritime domain.”

The Vietnamese government said it had also sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi, demanding that Beijing remove the “erroneous content” printed in the passport.

In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said the new passport was issued based on international standards. China began issuing new versions of its passports to include electronic chips on May 15, though criticism cropped up only this week.

“The design of this type of passports is not directed against any particular country,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily media briefing Friday. “We hope the relevant countries can calmly treat it with rationality and restraint so that the normal visits by the Chinese and foreigners will not be unnecessarily interfered with.”

It’s unclear whether China’s South China Sea neighbors will respond in any way beyond protesting to Beijing. China, in a territorial dispute with India, once stapled visas into passports to avoid stamping them.

“Vietnam reserves the right to carry out necessary measures suitable to Vietnamese law, international law and practices toward such passports,” Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Luong Thanh Nghi said.

Taiwan does not recognize China’s passports in any case; Chinese visitors to the island have special travel documents.

China maintains it has ancient claims to all of the South China Sea, despite much of it being within the exclusive economic zones of Southeast Asian neighbors. The islands and waters are potentially rich in oil and gas.

There are concerns that the disputes could escalate into violence. China and the Philippines had a tense maritime standoff at a shoal west of the main Philippine island of Luzon early this year.

The United States, which has said it takes no sides in the territorial spats but that it considers ensuring safe maritime traffic in the waters to be in its national interest, has backed a call for a “code of conduct” to prevent clashes in the disputed territories. But it remains unclear if and when China will sit down with rival claimants to draft such a legally binding nonaggression pact.

The Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam are scheduled to meet Dec. 12 to discuss claims in the South China Sea and the role of China.

___

Associated Press writers Oliver Teves in Manila, Philippines, Chris Brummitt in Hanoi, Vietnam, and researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Asia News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is Good, But No iPad Killer [REVIEW]

Unboxing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Apple Now Owns the iMessage Name]

Amazon expands its tablet sights with the bigger, more powerful Kindle Fire HD 8.9. Can it compete against Apple‘s iPad?

If there’s one company that deserves credit for reigniting the iPad competitor market, it’s Amazon. Despite some bugs and an overall blah design, its 7-inch Kindle Fire was the first Android tablet that made sense to consumers who gobbled it up to help the Fire grab 50% of the Android tablet market in just 6 months.

[More from Mashable: 9 Black Friday Deals For iPhone Owners]

That tablet essentially opened the flood gates for a new set of ever-more-powerful 7-inchers from, notably, Barnes & Noble and Google. All three companies have already updated their 7-inch offerings to more powerful components and higher-resolutions screens. They’re all still running Android, though Amazon and Barnes & Noble choose to hide the Google OS behind smarter and much more consumer-friendly interfaces.

All this led Apple to finally enter the mid-sized tablet space with the iPad Mini. It’s easily the best-looking tablet of the bunch, but also $ 120 more expensive than its nearest competitor.

The more interesting development, though, is Amazon‘s (and Barnes & Noble‘s) decision to go toe-to-toe with Apple’s full-size iPad and launch the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (in 4G LTE and WiFi-only). The move is akin to a middle weight boxer putting on the pounds to take on the Heavyweight world champion. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is slightly smaller (the iPad is 9.7-inches), lighter (567g vs. 625g), cheaper ($ 369 for 32 GB model vs. $ 599 for the iPad 4th Gen — Amazon subsidizes with sleep-state ads, that I do not mind) and overall somewhat less powerful. In order to win the battle, the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD better be pretty nimble on its feet, while able to throw that all important knockout punch.

Short version of this story: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 does some serious damage, but the iPad 4th Gen gets the decision and retains the tablet leader title.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is by no means a failure. In many ways, it’s as good as the smaller Kindle Fire HD, but throughout my tests I noticed odd bugs and glitches (which should all be fixable by software) and a somewhat disturbing lack of power that’s especially obvious when you put the Fire HD 8.9 next to the iPad 4th Gen

What It Is

If you’ve never seen an iPad and someone handed you the Kindle Fire HD .9, you’d likely say its jet-black, soft-to-the-touch plastic body felt good in your hands and was more than effective at all the core tasks (reading, game playing, e-mail, web browsing).

Design-wise, the 8.9 device looks exactly like the 7-inch model, complete with the too-hard to find volume and power buttons. There are no other physical buttons on this device, but Amazon chooses to hide the few it has by making them the exact same color as the chassis and flush with the body. Every time I use the tablet I do the “where’s the damn button” dance, rotating the Kindle Fire HD round and round until I feel the buttons (since I can barely see them).

I have applauded Barnes & Noble for putting the physical “N” home button right on the face of their Nook HD. Bravo for having the guts to do this. Amazon apparently looks at Apple’s iPad home button and thinks to have anything similar would be seen as “copying” the Cupertino hardware giant, when instead they should realize that it works, consumers like it and tablets without it are at a distinct disadvantage.

Amazon’s interface has you make do with a virtual, slide-out home button that is always available. Problem is, I found times when it wasn’t available. When I played Spider-Man and Asphalt 7, the tiny little left-had bar would disappear and I couldn’t exit the game unless I hit the sleep/power button.

The rest of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9′s body is solid and unremarkable (if you read my Kindle fire HD 7 review, then you know exactly what to expect.). Like the iPad 4th Gen, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 has a front-facing 720p-capable camera. It’s useful for capturing video, snapping 1 Megapixel images and, probably most important, Skype video chats. Skype has built a fairly sharp-looing Kindle Fire app, though the design doesn’t fully fit the larger 8.9-inch screen. Skype just updated its Android app for better tablet viewing and hopefully, we’ll see this update hit the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 as well.

The iPad also has an HD rear-facing camera. The Kindle fire HD 8.9 does not (Barnes & Noble leave out cameras altogether)

Not Packing a Punch

As a large-screen high-resolution tablet (though iPad’s 2048×1536 retina display beats it), the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 offers plenty of attractive screen real estate for web browsing, book and magazine reading and games. But the results can be mixed. Silk, Amazon‘s custom web browser, was occasionally less than responsive and games, though, they ran well, never looked half as good as they do on the considerably more expensive iPad 4.

Granted, you can’t always find the same high-quality immersive action games on both Android and iOS, but Asphalt 7 Heat is a notable exception and it throws the performance differences between the two tablets into stark contrast. Game play is equally responsive on both platforms: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9’s accelerometer reads my moves just as well as the iPad.

The graphics on the Kindle Fire HD, however, are reduced to blobs and blocks (palm trees without distinct leaves, buildings without discernible windows) . The iPad’s quad-core graphics simply overmatch the Kindle Fire. I have never, for example, seen an iPad draw the game as I was playing, as I did when I tried out The Amazing Spider-Man.

Additionally, I experienced more than my share of crashes with games and even magazine apps like Vanity Fair.

The Good

Not everyone, however, will compare the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 to the iPad. Some will see the $ 299 entry-level price point (for the 16 GB model) and appreciate the power, flexibility and utility of this device. Like all Fire’s before it, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 makes it easy to consume mass quantities of content. Nearly every menu option: Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, Newsstand, puts you just one click away from shopping for fresh content. If you have an Amazon account (and who doesn’t) your desired book, music or movie is just a click away. Plus, you can still easily store any of it locally, and worry about running out of storage space, or in the cloud, and never worry about space or accessibility—you can get to that purchased Kindle content from any Kindle app or registered Amazon device.

Watching movies on the tablet is a pleasure. I streamed a couple through Amazon Prime; they looked good on the 1920 x 1200 screen and the Dolby Stereo speakers produced sharp, loud, almost room-filling sound—an impressive feat not even the iPad can match.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 also includes a mini-HDMI-out port, which prompted me to connect the tablet to my 47-inch LED HDTV so we could watch Disney’s Brave. Yes, I had to get up and tap on the Kindle screen each time I wanted to pause and restart the move, but otherwise, I was pretty impressed with how the Kindle handled the task.

Obviously I yearn for an Apple Airplay-like feature on Android tablets (rumor has it one is coming), but this is the next, best thing.

There isn’t a lot to say about the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch interface that I did not say in the Kindle Fire HD 7 review. I will note, however, that the increased real estate makes the trademark task carousel seem almost too big. Icons for everything from your recently played Spider-Man game to magazine apps, books and Web sites all sit side-by-side-by side. Some, like book covers, look gorgeous.

Others like a broken web-page link look stupid. Worse yet, none of them have labels, which can occasionally make it hard to identify which app or task you’re looking at. I’m just not sure this interface metaphor is sustainable.

Personally I prefer either the clean consistent look of iOS, or the uber-user friendly, family-oriented Nook HD profile-based one. Amazon may want to take a hard look at those and start over.

Staying Connected

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is also Amazon’s first cellular-based tablet. That fact puts it even more squarely in competition with the iPad (which obviously has always had 3G models and now offers blazing fast 4G LTE ones as well on all major carriers).

Amazon’s mobile broadband plans are a little more conservative, with just the AT&T 4G LTE option (the 32 GB 4G model that I tested lists for $ 499, which is still $ 224 less than a comparable iPad 4th Gen).

In my experience, the connectivity is superfast and fairly ubiquitous. Amazon‘s $ 49 (a year) flat fee plan is attractive, but with a cap of 250MB per month of data, it’s unlikely it will satisfy the most data-hungry users. If you do need more data, users can also get 3GB and 5GB data plans directly from AT&T on the device.

At press time, Amazon had not enabled streaming video over LTE. Having it sounds nice, but even with the most generous data plans, streaming video would eat it up faster than you can say, “I’m streaming Back to the Future in HD over 4G LTE on my Kindle fire HD!”

The reality for most users is that WiFi is plentiful and you’ll be hard pressed to find a spot where you can’t connect for free or a small one-off fee. It’s the reason Barnes & Noble’s line of HD Nooks do not include a cellular option.

Review continues after FreeTime Gallery

FreeTime

Kindle HD FreeTime Start

Click here to view this gallery.

Perhaps the best new addition to the Kindle Fire family is not a piece of hardware or new component, but the new FreeTime app. Amazon put a lot of loving care into this parental control interface, but almost mucks the whole thing up by hiding the tool under an app that you have to scroll down to (or search) to find. By contrast profiles and age and content controls are baked into the Barnes & Noble Nook HD in a way that makes them impossible to ignore.

Even so, once you do access FreeTime, I think you’ll be pleased with the level of control it gives you. I added test profiles for my two children and then hand-picked every app and piece of content they could access. I was also able to block broadband mobile and even set time limits for access to content and overall screen viewing time (on a per profile basis). The set-up is a bit wonky and it bizarrely switches between landscape and profile screens, but I still applaud the effort. It would make sense for Amazon to move FreeTime into a device set-up screen. If the user has no additional family members or kids using the device, they can easily skip it.

To Buy or Not to Buy

Amazon’s expansive content and shopping ecosystem has always been a strong draw and it’s just as good in this large screen tablet as it was in the very first Kindle Fire. Still, you have to compare it with the equally strong iOS ecosystem, which is no slouch in the content shopping department. Apple doesn’t connect you as seamlessly to physical products, but there’s nothing difficult about shopping on Amazon.com via your iPad. It’s also notable that tablet competitor Barnes & Noble has added movie and TV viewing, rental and purchase.

Ultimately, all of these tablets are offering more and more of the same content options, apps, and features. The decision will likely come down to price, app selection, interface and overall ease of use. The Amazon Kindle fire HD 8.9 scores well on all of these, but does not always lead.

For the price, it’s a great value, but I want Amazon to focus on hardware and interface design for the next big update. Then, they may get my full endorsement.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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