Eastern NC tornadoes damage homes, injure a dozen

MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. (AP) — Residents, meteorologists and emergency officials in eastern North Carolina were surveying the damage Saturday from multiple tornadoes that damaged more than 200 homes the previous day and sent more than a dozen people to the emergency room.

Meteorologists said Saturday that tornadoes with winds of more than 111 mph touched down in Pitt and Beaufort counties on Friday, and they were continuing to investigate storm damage.


Elsewhere, Texas, Oklahoma and other states in the Plains and Midwest were bracing for severe storms expected to start Saturday and continue overnight. There, the main threat will be large hail and damaging wind gusts.

In North Carolina, Beaufort County Emergency Management Director John Pack said 16 people were taken to the emergency room when the storms passed through around 7:25 p.m. Friday.

Pack said 200 homes were either heavily damaged or destroyed. Pictures on news websites showed residents salvaging items from crushed mobile homes, along with snapped trees and a mangled utility pole in eastern North Carolina.

"You can track the tornado by the damage." Pack said. "It left a lot damage behind in its approximately five to 10 minutes on the ground."
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A man goes throws a pile of clothing Saturday, April …
A man goes throws a pile of clothing Saturday, April 26, 2014, from the debris after a tornado touch …

Pack said the storm appeared to be about 300 yards wide and was on the ground for 10 miles. He said the line of damage started in the west-northwest portion of the county and traveled to the northeast.

At one point, Pack said, 8,000 people were without power, but most had been restored by Saturday.

Pack also said two major farming operations in the county sustained damages, but he didn't have further details.

In Halifax County, Antonio Richardson said the roof was blown off his home on Friday afternoon. He said he and a friend took shelter under his mobile home.

"It peeled back my roof, just like you would a banana," Richardson told WRAL-TV in Raleigh.

Looming, creeping landslide splits home in Wyoming

JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A slow-motion disaster is unfolding in the Wyoming resort town of Jackson as a creeping landslide that split a hillside home in half inches toward more houses and businesses below.
The ground beneath the 100-foot hillside has been giving way an inch at a time since the movement was discovered on April 4.Assistant Town Administrator Roxanne Robinson said by Friday, the rate of movement was doubling every day.Officials say the hillside is unlikely to suddenly collapse like the March 22 landslide in Oso, Wash., that killed 39 people. But the threat is real and authorities are enforcing an evacuation order in hopes of avoiding injuries.

The area has been graded for roads and businesses in recent years, possibly weakening the hillside and setting the stage for the landslide.

Styllish And Elegant Frocks Designs

Frocks have been integrated into eastern clothing to a great extent. No function or party is considered completed unless frocks are used as dresses. Asian frocks are very popular world wide for their diversity
and culture. Hundreds of frocks designs are available according to every occasion. Bridal frocks are heavy and full of work. Party frocks have usually light work. Zari, kora dabka, motifs,  stones and embroidery are used. These works make the look of frocks beautiful and attractive. Most commonly design used for frock is Anarkali style. Other styles are also popular including Air line, Umbrella etc. Dress designers keep bringing in new styles of frocks with time. Following are some beautiful and attractive frock designs. You can follow these designs to create a stylish dress for yourself.

Learn the secret codes to shopping success

NEW YORK, April 16 (Reuters) - As superstore pricing mysteries go, it's not the equivalent of "The Da Vinci Code," but there's still something deliciously elusive about the so-called "Costco Code" that has set the tongues of shopping mavens wagging for the past several months.
At least the plot line is direct enough: If you can interpret what the various sequences of digits and asterisks mean on Costco Wholesale Club price signs, you're on your way to scoring serious bargains.

Here's how it works, according to Costco shoppers spreading the word online: If a price at Costco ends in .99, you're paying full price. But if it ends in, say, a .97, it represents a deal with a special price decided by the manager. And if you happen to see an asterisk in the upper right corner of the sign, then the item is on its way out of the store-and probably at the lowest price you're going to see.

"That asterisk, that's the holy grail," says Kyle James, who runs the shopping blog Rather-Be-Shopping.com (http://www.rather-be-shopping.com/). He has shopped at Costco for 20 years now, and the Redding, California resident has studied the matter of the Costco Code well. By his count, he and his wife have saved at least $300 using the Costco Code over the last seven months.

For the record, he doesn't claim to have discovered it; he says there's been Internet chatter about Costco and its pricing system going back about five years before he took up the topic on his blog.

So is the Costco Code really so much of a pricing potboiler as it seems? No one would know as well as Costco's Richard Galanti, who's the company's executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Indeed he confirms that the codes do exist, though "It's more for efficiency, for the employees," Galanti says. "It's not any sort of secret agent stuff. But you see it on a blog and people think it's a secret. It's just a way of moving some merchandise, to help the fork lift operators and the stocking clerks."

Galanti says that "when a price ends in a '7,' usually it's a buyer designated markdown." And as for those asterisks, "That's what we call a pending delete. Sometimes an item's not selling well and we want to move it out, or it could be the end of the season. Let's say we've got three TV models and the latest and greatest comes out; we might want to bring the newest one in."

But Galanti cautions against reading too much into the price codes, as Costco's margins are low enough (in the 10-11 percent range) that a shopper might have more advantage buying a newer item at the ".99" full price. "The question is, do you want something at the end of its season or at the beginning of a new season?" he asks.

Retail experts say that such pricing codes and systems are common. At his website, James lists price tag codes that he's found for retailers under the juicy heading "Retailer's Big Secret: Crack the Price Tag Code."

Paula Rosenblum, managing partner of RSR Research, a retail technology research and advisory firm says Home Depot indicator is a green tag, while at Office Depot, anything with a price other than 00, 50 or 99 is a markdown.

As for why, chalk it up to something not quite as old as the human desire to crack secret codes, though it does predate computers and the digital age.

"It all goes back to the retail method of accounting, and it's a very old story," Rosenblum says. "Before the days of price scanners, and when there was no technology in the store at all, a seven at the end of a price let associates know where they were with the item. If they couldn't move it in three weeks, it was gone."

Still, she can't help throwing in an observation for consumers who choose to make note of the code, and where asterisks are most likely to appear: "Costco's non-food items don't always move fast enough, so those might be good items to add to the treasure hunt."

Much of James' information from comes from chatting up employees (many of whom have requested anonymity). At Target , for example, he says that the discounting system on clearance items, as told to him by a sales associate, goes like this: "They mark something down every 10 to 15 days. And the upper right hand corner of the clearance tag, which is red and white, has the numbers 15, 30, 50, 75 or 90 on it. And that number indicates the percentage off the original price."

Target would not confirm it uses such a mechanism. "It is not possible to determine the final markdown or timing of the price change from the item's current price," Target spokesman Evan Lapiska said.

But Lewis says his key advice for fellow shoppers on the hunt for price tag secrets is this: "Talk to the employees on the floor. I've found they're pretty open about it."

In a cloning first, scientists create stem cells from adults

 NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists have moved a step closer to the goal of creating stem cells perfectly matched to a patient's DNA in order to treat diseases, they announced on Thursday, creating patient-specific cell lines out of the skin cells of two adult men.

The advance, described online in the journal Cell Stem Cell, is the first time researchers have achieved "therapeutic cloning" of adults. Technically called somatic-cell nuclear transfer, therapeutic cloning means producing embryonic cells genetically identical to a donor, usually for the purpose of using those cells to treat disease.


But nuclear transfer is also the first step in reproductive cloning, or producing a genetic duplicate of someone - a technique that has sparked controversy since the 1997 announcement that it was used to create Dolly, the clone of a ewe. In 2005, the United Nations called on countries to ban it, and the United States prohibits the use of federal funds for either reproductive or therapeutic cloning.

The new study was funded by a foundation and the South Korean government.

If confirmed by other labs, it could prove significant because many illnesses that might one day be treated with stem cells, such as heart failure and vision loss, primarily affect adults. Patient-specific stem cells would have to be created from older cells, not infant or fetal ones. That now looks possible, though far from easy: Out of 39 tries, the scientists created stem cells only once for each donor.

Outside experts had different views of the study, which was led by Young Gie Chung of the Research Institute for Stem Cell Research at CHA Health Systems in Los Angeles.

Stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute called it "an incremental advance" and "not earth-shattering."

Reproductive biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University, who developed the technique the CHA team adapted, was more positive. "The advance here is showing that (nuclear transfer) looks like it will work with people of all ages," he said in an interview.

A year ago, Mitalipov led the team that used nuclear transfer of fetal and infant DNA to produce stem cells, the first time that had been accomplished in humans of any age.

ELECTRIC JOLT

In therapeutic cloning, scientists use a zap of electricity to fuse a grown cell, usually a skin cell, with an ovum whose own DNA has been removed. The egg divides and multiplies, and within five or six days it develops into an embryo shaped like a hollow sphere.

The interior cells are "pluripotent" stem cells, which have the potential to develop into any kind of human cell.

If the embryo were implanted in a uterus, it could develop into a clone of the DNA donor, which is how Dolly was created. "Without regulations in place, such embryos could also be used for human reproductive cloning, although this would be unsafe and grossly unethical," said Dr Robert Lanza, chief scientist of Massachusetts-based biotech Advanced Cell Technology and a co-author of the new study.

The goal is to grow these embryonic stem cells in lab dishes and coax them to turn into specialized cells for therapeutic use against an illness the DNA donor has, such as Parkinson's disease, heart disease, multiple sclerosis or type-1 diabetes. Because the cells are genetically identical to the donor's, they would not be rejected by the immune system.

Despite more than 15 years of trying, scientists' single success at producing human stem cells through this cloning technique came a year ago. Mitalipov's team at Oregon had fused fetal and infant cells with donated eggs whose DNA had been removed and got them to develop into about 150-cell embryos.

One key to Mitalipov's success was letting the engineered eggs rest for 30 minutes before zapping them to start dividing.

Chung and his colleagues waited two hours before triggering the egg to start dividing, which Lanza believes was a key to their success: "It gives you time for the massive amount of genetic reprogramming required" to turn back the calendar on adult DNA so that it can direct the development of an embryo, he said in an interview.

It worked: They generated two healthy embryos, one from each adult donor, aged 35 and 75.

If each stem-cell line has to be created from scratch for each patient, the low success and expected high costs means that "only a few wealthy old men could do it," said Lanza. A big barrier to producing patient-specific stem-cell lines for tens of millions of people this way is that few women want to donate eggs, a sometimes painful process.

But it may not be necessary to make a unique cell line for each patient. Many people have genetically similar immune systems, Lanza said, so just "100 human embryonic stem cell lines would generate a complete match for over half the (U.S.) population," he said.

Captain not at helm of capsized Korean ferry

Jindo (South Korea) (AFP) - The captain was not at the helm of the South Korean ferry that capsized two days ago, investigators said Friday, as anger spread over stalled rescue efforts for hundreds of missing passengers trapped by the submerged vessel.
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More than 48 hours after the 6,825-tonne Sewol suddenly listed and then sank, a small of army of more than 500 exhausted divers -- battling powerful currents in almost zero visibility -- have yet to obtain any access to the ferry's interior.

The confirmed death toll rose overnight to 25, but the focus of concern remained the 271 people still unaccounted for -- hundreds of them children on a high school outing to the southern resort island of Jeju.

The newly recovered bodies were all floating in the water, coastguard officials said, as the dive teams worked in shifts to find a way inside the submerged vessel in the increasingly slim hope of finding survivors trapped in air pockets.

Unable to secure an entry point for now, they bored holes in the keel -- a small section of which was still visible above the water -- for oxygen lines.

"Two divers are currently injecting oxygen into the ship," a coastguard official told AFP.
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South Korea ferry accident
Graphic on the South Korean ferry accident, including details of the final course of the ship (AFP P …

The weather conditions were extremely challenging, with rain, fog and strong sea swells

Of the 452 people on board the Sewol when it capsized Wednesday morning, 179 were rescued, but no new survivors have been found since Wednesday.

Three giant, floating cranes had arrived at the disaster site, but coastguard officials said they could not begin lifting the multi-layered ferry until they were sure there were no survivors inside.

Among the relatives of the missing, especially parents of the 352 students who were on board , there was growing resentment over what they see as the inadequacy of the rescue response.

- 'The government lied' -
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South Korean divers prepare to go the location where …
South Korean divers prepare to go the location where a ferry capsized two days ago, at a harbor in J …

In an appeal broadcast live on television Friday morning, a self-appointed spokesman for the relatives accused the authorities of indifference and deception.

"The government lied yesterday," he said, speaking at a podium in a gymnasium on Jindo island where hundreds of blanket-wrapped relatives have been sleeping on the floor since the tragedy unfolded.

Disputing the official figures of hundreds of divers, vessels and aircraft being deployed, he said he and other relatives had visited the rescue site and seen only a dozen ships and helicopters.

"Everyone, is this the reality of South Korea? We plead once more, please save our children," he said.

The initial public backlash has centred on the captain, Lee Joon-Seok, and his 28 crew, most of whom survived the disaster.
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Students at Danwon High School hold a vigil for the …
Students at Danwon High School hold a vigil for the missing passengers of a South Korean capsized fe …

State prosecutors said preliminary investigations showed the third officer was at the helm of the ferry.

"The captain was not in command when the accident took place," prosecutor Park Jae-Eok told a press briefing.

The captain was "in the back" he added, without elaborating.

The captain apologised Thursday to the victims and their relatives, but offered no clear explanation for what caused the Sewol to capsize.

"I feel really sorry for the passengers, victims and families," Lee said. "I feel ashamed."
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Coast Guard and Navy divers search for the missing …
Coast Guard and Navy divers search for the missing passengers from a capsized ferry at sea some 20 k …

Tracking data from the Maritime Ministry showed that the ferry made a sharp turn just before sending its first distress signal.

Some experts believe such a tight turn could have dislodged the heavy cargo manifest -- including more than 150 vehicles -- and destabilised the vessel, causing it to list heavily and then capsize.

But others suggested the turn might have been caused by a collision with a rock or other submerged object.

"Whether or not they took a drastic turnaround ... is under investigation," prosecutor Park said, adding that they were also looking at the possibility of steering or other mechanical failure.

As well the cause of the disaster, investigators will be looking at why passengers were ordered to stay in their cabins and seats for up to 40 minutes after the ferry ran into trouble.

- 'I believe they are alive' -

Furious relatives believe many more people would have escaped if they had reached evacuation points before the ship listed sharply and water started flooding in.

Lee Yong-Gi, whose son Lee Ho-Jin was among the missing students, said he and other parents felt bitterly let down by the rescue operation.

"It's been two days but no one has been brought out alive," Lee told AFP.

"I firmly believe that the kids are alive. We need to rescue them as soon as possible. But officials are dragging their feet," he said.

Newspaper editorials were equally scathing with the Dong-A Ilbo daily calling the rescue response "ludicrous".

"We have the world's finest shipbuilding industry in the 21st century, but our mindset is in the 19th century," the newspaper said.

In a tense meeting with parents in the Jindo gymnasium on Thursday, President Park Geun-Hye was repeatedly interrupted by angry shouts from the crowd.

"What are you doing when people are dying? Time is running out!" one woman screamed.

School Apologizes for Sending the Wrong Message About Bullying

A Nebraska school is facing criticism for what many are calling an ill-intentioned effort to deal with bullying. Fifth-grade students at Zeman Elementary School in Lincoln were recently given pamphlets containing what may be considered tone-deaf advice, shaming the victim and sending the wrong message to bullies.

More on Yahoo: Bullying Injuries in Schools Dip, but
Still ProblematicThe pamphlet, which was posted to sites such as Reddit and Jezebel, features nine "rules" for students dealing with bullies.  One rule states: "Do not tell on bullies.""The number one reason bullies hate their victims, is because the victims tell on them," the flyer reasons. "Telling makes the bully want to retaliate. Tell an adult only when a real injury or crime (theft of something valuable) has occurred. Would we keep our friends if we tattled on them?"This goes against most antibullying advice, which encourages young people to get a trusted adult involved in the situation before it escalates.More on Yahoo Shine: Parents Slap Daughter's Cyberbullies With Rare Lawsuit

Other rules in the Zeman Elementary guide included "Learn to laugh at yourself," "Do not verbally defend yourself," and "Treat the person who is being mean as if they are trying to help you."

After the pamphlet was sent home with kids, numerous parents complained to the school.  Some parents claimed that the tips weren't so much advice as they were ways to keep the school from having to discipline students.

Not long after the backlash, school officials at Zeman Elementary went on Facebook to issue an apology. (The school itself does not have an official Facebook page, so the post was sent via the Lincoln Public Schools, or LPS, page.) "Our educators at Zeman Elementary School work hard to provide accurate and appropriate lessons and education for our students in how to handle bullying situations," reads the statement. "The flyer was sent home with good intentions, unfortunately, it contained advice that did not accurately reflect LPS best practices regarding response to bullying incidents. We encourage all students and parents to continue to communicate with our staff if you have any questions or concerns about bullying situations."

But according to the LPS communications director, Mary Kay Roth, the flyers weren't supposed to be sent home with kids at all.  In a statement to the Lincoln Journal-Star, Roth referred to the flyer being distributed as a "staff issue" and added that "we're taking care of the staffing error."

Still, not everyone is buying the apology. "Whoever wrote this or was in charge of passing it out should step down or be fired immediately. You're pretty much saying you don't care about bullying and you're not going to deal with it unless the child incurs serious bodily harm," one outraged parent wrote on Facebook.

Another commenter wondered how the fallout would affect the students. "What have the students who were given bad information been told? Have they all been instructed that this was bad information and been given good information? Or is that being left to the parents?"

According to the student services director, Russ Uhing, who spoke with the Journal-Star, the school's fifth-graders are learning about bullying prevention in class, and the advice they're getting is "very different" from the "rules" they were initially given. Meanwhile, the school's Facebook apology included some more reasonable tools for dealing with bullying via a PDF link to a different flyer. Those updated tips, aimed at parents and kids alike, included “Do not minimize or make excuses for bullying behaviors,” “Promote a strong sense of self and confidence in your child,” and “Teach your child to take action when they see others being bullied.” Those tips are bound to be more helpful to kids than rules such as “Do not verbally defend yourself.”

Are we facing another housing bubble?

In a housing or real estate bubble, home prices inflate because of overly optimistic speculation that they'll keep rising. When people can't afford to keep up, the bubble bursts. Demand for homes decreases, while supply goes up and home prices drastically drop.Today, certain markets across America are seeing home prices go up so quickly that people are starting to worry about another bubble. So where do we stand?From 2000 to 2006, home prices were skyrocketing. Why? It was fueled by overly-optimistic speculation on real estate, careless lending standards and very low mortgage rates. At the height of the bubble, homes were overvalued by 39%.

Also see: Shark Tank Secrets of Success -- Building an Untouchable Career

Built on that shaky foundation, when prices cooled millions of people defaulted on their mortgages and the bubble didn’t just burst, it exploded, creating the biggest real estate and credit crisis in modern history.

Fast-forward to the present day, and we’re still in recovery mode. With tighter lending standards it’s harder to buy a home, but in the past two years certain markets have seen prices rise rapidly again, leading some to wonder if history will soon repeat itself.

One area that’s heating up is California — the most overvalued market in the nation. Prices there have increased about 17% year-over-year, with Orange County being the hottest metro area. The increases in California are more generally due in part to investors taking up the tight supply and tech millionaires willing to pay premium prices. The other overvalued metros, like Honolulu, Austin and Miami, are also dealing with high demand and tight supply.

911 calls capture chaos after truck-on-bus crash

ORLAND, Calif. (AP) — With shrieks in the background, a shocked passenger struggled to recount to an emergency dispatcher how a FedEx tractor-trailer smashed into a tour bus carrying high school students. In other 911 calls released Thursday, other witnesses described explosions after the fiery wreck that left 10 people dead.
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The California Highway Patrol released the recordings as investigators returned to the scene about 100 miles north of Sacramento to reconstruct aspects of the crash.

Dozens of injured students escaped through windows before the bus exploded into towering flames just before 6 p.m. April 10.

One student who escaped held back sobs in describing on a 911 call how the FedEx truck barreled across the median of Interstate 5 and smashed into the bus.

A dispatcher assured the student that medical help was coming and told the student to "go as far away as you can safely get" when he learned that the bus was still engulfed in flames.

Later, the dispatcher asked, "What did the bus hit?" and the student started to explain that the truck smashed into its left side. The dispatcher tried to refocus the student: "Just with one or two words, tell me what the bus hit."

"The bus hit a FedEx truck," the student replied. "The FedEx truck came into us."
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File - In this April 10, 2014, file photo, massive …
File - In this April 10, 2014, file photo, massive flames engulf a tractor-trailer and a tour bus ju …

"Was it head on?"

"Yes, head on."

It was not clear whether the student was a boy or girl. None of the 911 callers were identified.

Other calls came from witnesses and nearby residents.

"A bus just exploded," said one woman.

"It just exploded," said one man. "Whatever's on the freeway is on fire."
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In This Photo Provided By The University Of La Verne, …
In This Photo Provided By The University Of La Verne, Trish Arzola, the mother of Arthur "Tury& …

The bus was carrying 44 high school students from the Los Angeles area for a visit to Humboldt State University on California's far north coast. Many stood to be the first in their family to attend college.

Five students and three adult chaperones died, along with the truck and bus drivers.

As the CHP released the recordings, the agency's investigators were reconstructing how the bus driver might have reacted to the sight of the big rig, which burst out of vegetation on the freeway's median into oncoming traffic, sideswiping a car before hitting the bus.

The CHP briefly closed the stretch of Interstate 5 where the crash happened and drove the same model Serta 2014 bus northbound at about 70 mph. The driver braked so investigators could gauge how its speed would have dropped.

On the southbound side, a driver in the same model 2007 Volvo truck released the accelerator, in a similar effort to understand how its speed might have changed.

Video cameras on both vehicles recorded what each driver could have seen before the crash.

The reconstruction did not include any collision. Investigators will use what they learned to calculate how fast each vehicle was traveling before the wreck.

The truck's data recorder was destroyed in the explosion and fire, but investigators said they may be able to recover some data about its speed and maneuvering by other forensic analysis.

Investigators are working through a 3-inch-thick stack of records including the truck's maintenance history and its driver's recent shifts, CHP Capt. Todd Morrison said. The FedEx driver had no prior moving violations, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

It is too early to say whether mechanical failure or driver error caused the truck to careen out of control, Morrison said. That determination by the CHP, and by a parallel investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, will take months.

The driver of the car struck first by the truck told investigators the truck was in flames before the crash, but Morrison said the CHP has found no evidence to corroborate that account. NTSB investigators also found no physical evidence of a pre-impact fire or other witnesses relating the same story.

Glenn County Coroner Larry Jones said all but two victims have been identified. He said that initially, his office was looking for one student believed to be among the dead, but it turned out the student had never boarded the bus in the first place.

App Claims It Can Help Couples Conceive Girls

From artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization, there's no shortage of ways that technology is helping couples who want to have children. But a new iPhone and Android app called StorkDiet/Girl claims that it can people have a baby girl for a fee of just $9.99.

Alain Hanash, who created the app, used data from a study conducted by two British universities that tracked the eating habits of 740 women who were pregnant for the first time. The study found that 56 percent of the women who followed a low-sodium, low-calcium diet had baby girls. The app, following that approach, tailors a nine-week diet for women who are hoping to get pregnant with a girl.  “It is a natural and scientific based guide that includes a specific maternal diet and conception timing program," according to the app's description.

More on Yahoo Shine: 7 crazy myths for predicting your baby's gender But Dr. Gilbert Webb, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, is wary of putting too much stock in at-home methods of gender selection. “It may offer some slight edge but not a whole lot,” Webb tells Yahoo Shine.  He warns prospective parents not to think that this app – or anything else – is 100 percent guaranteed. Although the creators of StorkDiet claim that they have an 81 percent success rate, the evidence is inconclusive, according to some medical experts.

More on Yahoo: Couple keeps baby's gender under wraps A Maastricht University study had participants eat plenty of spinach, tofu, and nuts like almonds and cashews, while strictly avoiding high-sodium foods like olives, cured meats, and potatoes in order to produce female offspring. The study boasted a 77 percent success rate in producing girls, but once that number was broken down to account for women who didn’t follow the diet closely enough or who didn’t follow the strategic rules for when to have sex, the data began to fall apart.

Dr. Webb adds that there’s nothing wrong with hoping for a baby of a particular sex, but he cautions against being too attached to one or the other. “If someone is realistic about these techniques, and says 'we'd prefer a girl, but we'd be OK with a boy,' that’s fine. But if they have a strong feeling and latch on to these things with strong wording, they can become neurotic,” he says

When ‘Liking’ a Brand Online Voids the Right to Sue

Might downloading a 50-cent coupon for Cheerios cost you legal rights?

General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, “join” it in online communities like Facebook, enter a company-sponsored sweepstakes or contest or interact with it in a variety of other ways.Instead,
anyone who has received anything that could be construed as a benefit and who then has a dispute with the company over its products will have to use informal negotiation via email or go through arbitration to seek relief, according to the new terms posted on its site.In language added on Tuesday after The New York Times contacted it about the changes, General Mills seemed to go even further, suggesting that buying its products would bind consumers to those terms.“We’ve updated our Privacy Policy,” the company wrote in a thin, gray bar across the top of its home page. “Please note we also have new Legal Terms which require all disputes related to the purchase or use of any General Mills product or service to be resolved through binding arbitration.”

The change in legal terms, which occurred shortly after a judge refused to dismiss a case brought against the company by consumers in California, made General Mills one of the first, if not the first, major food companies to seek to impose what legal experts call “forced arbitration” on consumers.

“Although this is the first case I’ve seen of a food company moving in this direction, others will follow — why wouldn’t you?” said Julia Duncan, director of federal programs and an arbitration expert at the American Association for Justice, a trade group representing plaintiff trial lawyers. “It’s essentially trying to protect the company from all accountability, even when it lies, or say, an employee deliberately adds broken glass to a product.”

General Mills declined to make anyone available for an interview about the changes. “While it rarely happens, arbitration is an efficient way to resolve disputes — and many companies take a similar approach,” the company said in a statement. “We even cover the cost of arbitration in most cases. So this is just a policy update, and we’ve tried to communicate it in a clear and visible way.”

A growing number of companies have adopted similar policies over the years, especially after a 2011 Supreme Court decision, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, that paved the way for businesses to bar consumers claiming fraud from joining together in a single arbitration. The decision allowed companies to forbid class-action lawsuits with the use of a standard-form contract requiring that disputes be resolved through the informal mechanism of one-on-one arbitration.

Credit card and mobile phone companies have included such limitations on consumers in their contracts, and in 2008, the magazine Mother Jones published an article about a Whataburger fast-food restaurant that hung a sign on its door warning customers that simply by entering the premises, they agreed to settle disputes through arbitration.

Companies have continued to push for expanded protection against litigation, but legal experts said that a food company trying to limit its customers’ ability to litigate against it raised the stakes in a new way.

What if a child allergic to peanuts ate a product that contained trace amounts of nuts but mistakenly did not include that information on its packaging? Food recalls for mislabeling, including failures to identify nuts in products, are not uncommon.

“When you’re talking about food, you’re also talking about things that can kill people,” said Scott L. Nelson, a lawyer at Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group. “There is a huge difference in the stakes, between the benefit you’re getting from this supposed contract you’re entering into by, say, using the company’s website to download a coupon, and the rights they’re saying you’re giving up. That makes this agreement a lot broader than others out there.”

Big food companies are concerned about the growing number of consumers filing class-action lawsuits against them over labeling, ingredients and claims of health threats. Almost every major gathering of industry executives has at least one session on fighting litigation.

Last year, General Mills paid $8.5 million to settle lawsuits over positive health claims made on the packaging of its Yoplait Yoplus yogurt, saying it did not agree with the plaintiff’s accusations but wanted to end the litigation. In December 2012, it agreed to settle another suit by taking the word “strawberry” off the packaging label for Strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups, which did not contain strawberries.

General Mills amended its legal terms after a judge in California on March 26 ruled against its motion to dismiss a case brought by two mothers who contended that the company deceptively marketed its Nature Valley products as “natural” when they contained processed and genetically engineered ingredients.

“The front of the Nature Valley products’ packaging prominently displays the term ‘100% Natural’ that could lead a reasonable consumer to believe the products contain only natural ingredients,” wrote the district judge, William H. Orrick.

He wrote that the packaging claim “appears to be false” because the products contain processed ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and maltodextrin.

Arbitration experts said courts would probably require General Mills to prove that a customer was aware of its new policy before issuing decisions denying legal action against the company.

The policy is so broadly written, lawyers say, that it is likely to raise interesting legal questions.

For instance, on Tuesday an order was placed through the company’s online store for a Cheerios bowl, before General Mills posted the notice about the change to its legal terms on its home page.

At no point did the order system suggest changes had been made to the legal terms governing the buyer. It offered a link to the company’s privacy policy, and two opt-out boxes for receiving promotional materials through email.

Whether a court would rule that, under the new policy, the buyer of the bowl could not sue General Mills was unclear, since the General Mills home page now included a message about the changes it had made to its legal terms.

“A transaction has taken place that, according to General Mills, includes an agreement to submit to informal negotiation or arbitration in the event of a dispute,” Mr. Nelson said.

He said he did not think a court would agree to enforce the policy if a consumer merely visited a General Mills website, “but we really don’t know.”

“You can bet,” he said, “there will be some subpoenas for computer hard drives in the future.”

Young designers experiment with exuberant homes the size of parking spots

Imagine an urban parking garage, emptied of its cars and filled instead with dozens of parking-spot-size homes.

It’s the vision of a group of more than 80 students, alumni and educators from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. They have been experimenting with these car-sized homes, called SCADpads, that could be plunked into any parking garage and instantly provide housing in overpriced downtown areas of major cities. The units are prototypes for urban housing, but students will live in them first to test out the concept.
“We’re targeting decks built in the middle of the 20th century, located in the heart of a city,” says Christian Sottile, dean of the school of building arts at SCAD. “Many of these were built as fallout shelters and will basically be there until the end of time.”

For its experiment, the folks at SCAD built their beta SCADpad neighborhood in the college’s midtown Atlanta parking garage, with incredible views of the city’s sprawling skyline. They took over the fourth floor of the garage, using eight parking spaces to create the three pads. The pads reflect the design aesthetics of the college’s three campuses: SCADpad North America for its Savannah campus, SCADpad Europe reflecting the campus in Lacoste, France, and SCADpad Asia reflecting its Hong Kong campus. Each pad takes up two parking spaces—one for the unit itself and the other for an outdoor garden area—and then there’s space for the community garden and a workbench.Of course, it is no ordinary workbench. It features a 3D printer, capable of printing almost anything a SCADpad resident could want, from dishes to wallpaper to furniture. Residents design their products without keyboard or mouse and instead use their hands in front of an interactive camera to manipulate the computer screen—think of Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.”

“A big part of what we have here is the ability to custom-adjust,” says Victor Ermoli, dean of the school of design at SCAD. “If you need a cooking pan, you go to the bench outside and print that. Whatever your needs are, you can meet them.”

That kind of flexibility is necessary, because inside the pads, “every cubic inch of this space counts,” Ermoli says. The units are only 8 feet wide and 16 feet long, so a grown man standing in one can nearly touch the walls and ceilings when his arms are spread out. There’s room enough for a bed, a sitting area, a bathroom with toilet and sink, and a small kitchen that hides its appliances, like the refrigerator and freezer, inside its cabinet drawers.

These walls do talk

There’s also a long list of technological features. The whole unit is controlled by a tablet—there are no light switches —and the power can be turned off completely by blowing on what Ermoli calls a digital candle, which looks like a glowing triangle near the door of the unit.

The walls can be changed out with new 3D-printed designs, and some walls make certain noises, such as tweeting birds, when touched. With the touch of a button, the windows can be frosted over for privacy, and the bathroom mirrors can remind you to wash your hands. A daylight harvesting system captures light coming in the sides of the garage and channels it over fiber optic cables to the garden, Sottile says.

And because the units are the size of cars, they could theoretically be taken on the road and travel with their owner to a new city, where a different parking garage could be its home, Sottile says.

Students living in the units will test the concept out while the college considers questions of scalability. As it stands now, the cost of a basic unit would be around $40,000 and can be produced in two months, Sottile says. The cost to rent them would be about 40 percent below the median rent price in a city.

Crafts Retailer Michaels Confirms 2.6 Million Credit Cards Compromised by Security Breach

Michaels Stores, the biggest U.S. arts and crafts retailer, on Thursday confirmed that there was a security breach at certain systems that process payment cards at its U.S. stores and that of its unit, Aaron Brothers.

The company said in January that it was working with federal law enforcement officials to investigate a possible data breach.

Michaels Stores said the breach, which took place
between May 8, 2013, and Jan. 27, 2014, may have affected about 2.6 million cards, or about 7 percent of payment cards used at its stores during the period.The company said about 400,000 cards were potentially impacted at its Aaron Brothers unit by the breach, which occurred between June 26, 2013, and Feb. 27, 2014.There was no evidence that data such as customers’ names or personal identification numbers were at risk, Michaels Stores said in a statement.This is the second known data breach since 2011 at Michaels.Michaels, whose major investors are Blackstone Group LP and Bain Capital LP, said cyber-security firms it hired found that malware not encountered previously had been used in the latest attack.

The company said it was working with law enforcement authorities, banks, and payment processors, and that the malware no longer presents a threat.

Michaels, which resubmitted its IPO documents late last month following a restructuring, is the latest U.S. retailer whose systems have been breached.

Last year, the No. 3 U.S. retailer Target suffered a massive security breach that resulted in the theft of some 70 million customer records.

Reuters reported in January that smaller breaches on at least three other well-known U.S. retailers took place and were conducted using similar techniques as the one used on Target.

U.S. retailers are planning to form an industry group for collecting and sharing intelligence in a bid to prevent future attacks.

Michaels, which owns several private brands such as Recollections, Artist’s Loft, and Loops & Threads, competes with Hooby Lobby Stores, Jo-Ann Stores, and Wal-Mart Stores.

NYC building explosion leaves 3 dead, 60 injured

A massive explosion followed by a fire at a pair of apartment buildings in upper Manhattan on Wednesday has left three people dead and at least 60 injured, officials say.

The extent of all injuries wasn't immediately known, but earlier in the day fire officials said seven people were in serious condition, including two with life-threatening injuries.

Rescuers are currently combing through bricks by hand in an effort to locate other possible victims. More than a dozen people are reportedly unaccounted for.

“There are a number of people missing,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference. “I emphasize that those who are missing could well be safe in another location and just not contacted yet or reachable yet.”

The FDNY said it received a call shortly after 9:30 a.m. reporting a large explosion in the five-story apartment building on Park Avenue near 116th Street in East Harlem.

The blast shattered windows and crumbled walls up to several blocks away from the explosion. Residents in the neighborhood told reporters they feared the earthshaking boom was a terrorist attack. One man was so worried, he told CNN, that he rushed out of his home wearing nothing but his underwear.

"This is a tragedy of the worst kind," de Blasio said. "There was no indication in time to save people."

Based on preliminary information, the mayor said, “The only indication of danger came about 15 minutes earlier when a gas leak was reported to Con Edison. Con Ed dispatched a team to respond. The explosion occurred before that team could arrive."

Style Repeater Sofia Vergara Wears Her Personal Wardrobe on 'Modern Family'

Who needs a costume designer? Sofia Vergara certainly doesn’t!

The 41-year-old actress, who plays Gloria on "Modern Family," has taken her sassy character's style into her own hands and has been regularly plucking pieces from her personal wardrobe to outfit Gloria.
On Thursday, the cast of the Emmy-winning ABC sitcom hit Bondi Beach in Australia to film scenes for an upcoming episode. Vergara, aka Gloria, poured her curves into a neon Agent Provocateur Mazzy monokini and looked sizzling hot as she pranced around in the sand with co-star Ty Burrell. She paired her on-screen ensemble with a purple, pleated beach skirt. The swimsuit, which features sexy bandage-style cutouts and lime green, tangerine, and pink paneling, is none other than Vergara's.

Vergara stepped out in a nearly identical ensemble one year ago during an off-screen vacation to Greece with her fiancé Nick Loeb. At the time, she teamed her $450 swimsuit with a green pleated beach skirt.

This isn't the first time the Emmy-nominated actress has hunted through her closet for Gloria's clothes, either. During Season 4 when Gloria was pregnant with her second child, Vergara snatched sexy blouses from her Sofia by Sofia Vergara for Kmart line for Gloria to wear.

Vergara told Yahoo in an interview in 2012 that she's been styling her character for years.

"Most of the ideas for Gloria’s style are my ideas. I kind of created the way that Gloria dressed," the Latin bombshell dished. "Gloria's been wearing all these shirts and dresses from Kmart. The outfit I wore on last night’s episode is a [rose-printed] shirt from the collection. The bigger the belly gets … the more of these blouses I’ve been using on her because they stretch."

The Fall 2012 Kmart collection green dress and rose-printed blouse are definitely situated at a more affordable price point than her bathing suit. Most of the items in Vergara's collection, which she launched in 2011, cost less than $50.

While the show can certainly afford to pay for Gloria's wardrobe, perhaps giving Vegara's Kmart clothing line free product placement was part of her negotiations with ABC following a lawsuit in 2012. She and her co-stars fought for a salary increase from $65,000 an episode to $170,000 and won. Today, Vergara is television's highest paid actress and rakes in a sizable $30 million per year.

Regardless of whether the show would spring for Vergara's wardrobe purchases, one thing is for sure: She knows what fits and makes sure Gloria has access to her favorite looks.

High-Paying Careers That Require Little Schooling

An associate's degree could pave the way to a high-earning career in as little as two years.
If you think you need to spend years in school to land a high-paying job, you might be in for a surprise. In as little as two years, you could prepare to pursue a career paying an impressive salary of $45,000 a year or
more.
In fact, an associate's degree might help you out-earn people who have spent the time and money to earn a bachelor's degree.

During her research, Diane Melville, author of "The Community College Advantage," was surprised to discover the high-earning potential of certain associate's degrees. "Some of the careers you can prepare for with associate's degrees start out at $60K or $70K," she says.

Interested in learning more? Then check out the list of careers below, which were chosen based on their median annual salaries and education requirements, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In addition, career experts offer their insights into these high-paying careers that you could pursue with as little as two years of schooling.

Tips for Sparkling Eyes

Eyes are the most prominent feature of your face. It needs some special care for getting sparkling and beautiful eyes.

Take a chilled mixture of cucumber and potato juice and dip wads of cotton in it. Keep this on your eyelids for 20 minutes and gently wash it off. Apply a little baby oil.

Apply a thin coat of castor oil every night. It will cool your eyes and strengthens lashes.

Get rid off dark circles by messaging a few drops of coconut oil around
the eyes.

Grate and tie potato in a cloth and place the cloth over your eyes for about 15 minutes. It will reduce puffiness of your eyes.

Add a small pinch of salt in  water and wash for sparkling eyes.

Take equal quantity og tomato juice and lemon juice, mix them well and apply around the eyes for 30 minutes. Wash it off with cold and hot water alternatively.

Make a paste of sandal wood and nutmeg. Apply the paste around the eyes before sleeping and wash it off in the morning.

Take cucumber juice. Mix a little rose water in it and apply around the eyes and wash it after 30 minutes.

What Have I Done? Baby Boomers Reveal Their Deepest Financial Regrets

Over 50, underfunded, and ill-prepared for retirement. Unfortunately, that’s an all-too-common scenario for the Baby Boomer generation – those born between 1946 and 1964 -- many of whom are still smarting from

the economic downturn and are now looking back at their earlier financial choices with regret.
Should they have bought that house at the height of the housing bubble? Should they have taken out that student loan? Should they have pursued a higher-paying career field?
But doubts like these are just part of the new reality for today’s Boomers, says Stan Hinden, author of “How to Retire Happy and a widely published columnist on retirement issues.I think Boomers are somewhat disappointed in the way things have turned out in recent years he says and I think they have a right to feel that something unfair has taken place. You can’t any longer buy a CD or invest in a money market fund and get any kind of respectable return, because interest rates are so low and have been so low and will continue to be so low that people have lost some years of investment potential and income. People can hope that that the situation improves but I don’t think it will very quickly, and people have a right to be disappointed in that.”
But all isn’t lost, Hinden says. Boomers looking to salvage a financial future from this mess will need to adjust their plans, possibly pushing back their retirement date by a few years, and start saving aggressively to make up for lost interest income.Once people are aware of their situation they’re going to have to find ways to cope as they can,” Hinden explains. “I don’t think there’s any immediate help coming, except maybe for housing, but the interest rate problem is very real. Hopefully by being active and alert and careful in their spending, people will, when they set up their retirement budgets, leave themselves as much leeway as possible, figuring that the amount of growth in their assets going forward is going to be pretty small.”
We reached out to the Baby Boomers in our Yahoo! Contributor Network community to hear about their own personal financial regrets. Several of their stories are below.
Why Didn’t I Save for Retirement?
I entered into adulthood and even had a family without ever hearing terms such as ‘401(k)’ and had no idea how to plan for my future financially. Worse yet is that I am college educated but still had no financial knowledge. I did not know which way to turn to find out anything about financially preparing for later life, so I didn't.As some Baby Boomers settle into an enjoyable retirement, I am one of the other Baby Boomers. There is no retirement for me, not even a burial plan. For Baby Boomers like myself who followed that popular song of the mid-1960s, ‘Let's Live for Today’ by the Grass Roots, what a mistake it may have been to let the title be a motto, only living for ‘today.’ I learned all too late that if you do not take the necessary steps to learn about financial planning as early as possible, it can be a disaster that will undoubtedly be regretted. -- Donna Hicks
I Squandered My Intellectual Capital
“In 1989, my husband and I became parents. In my typical, all-or-nothing fashion, I embraced motherhood with gusto. My husband became the breadwinner while I cared for our children at home. By 2001, we had six children. For all those years, I did nothing to maintain my contact with the business world. I took no classes to update my programming skills or to maintain my other technical skills. I enjoyed nursing babies, teaching preschoolers to read, sewing clothes for the family, and even canning all summer long. I was living my ‘Little House on the Prairie’ dream. I gave no thought to what I would do after the children were grown.
When our youngest child entered school, I had to build a new resume from scratch. I earned a master's degree in library science, hoping to land a position as an academic librarian at one of the many colleges in my city. I would have been better off if I had invested some time and money in continuing to take actuarial exams after I left the workforce or in pursuing an MBA in the evenings while I worked in Chicago. Instead, I waited too long to earn a low-value degree in a declining job market.” -- Kimberly Schimmel
I Should Never Have Taken That Early Withdrawal From My Pension Fund
As is common for so many women, I was trapped in an abusive relationship. Abusive types tend to control significant others by restricting how much they can earn and save. I was no exception. By the time I left, I only had what I could carry. Adding to the drama, I was finishing a degree program with college bills attached. Consequently, I chose the only option I could fathom at the time, which was early withdrawal of the public pension I had earned as a teacher.
To say I regret this decision is an understatement. Withdrawing funds from a pension is a taxable event, which results in reducing the payout amount significantly. Yes, withdrawing the funds helped me jump over my financial hurdle at the time. Nevertheless, considering the reduced amount I received and the loss of those retirement funds compared with what I had to do to replace them, it was a financial setback. Twenty-five years later, I still kick myself.” -- Rebecca Black
Credit Card Debt Nearly Ruined My Retirement
For over a year recently, I lived off an unemployment check and my credit cards. I maxed them out trying to maintain my standard of living, started paying the minimum payments, and eventually could not afford to pay them at all. Creditors were calling daily and my good credit rating took a nosedive. All I wanted to do was ignore the situation and hope it would go away, but I eventually had to face the fact that I had brought this on myself with my careless money management. I knew I had to do something, but curbing my spending and following a budget was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
Today I consider myself lucky because I did eventually find another job. Although it was not a high paying one, at least it was an income and I was able to start digging my way out of the financial pit I had created. By sticking to a budget, I have managed to pay off over half of my credit card debt. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting a little brighter now, but I regret that the money I thought I would be putting away in my 50s to enjoy my golden years is now going toward making sure that I have enough to survive them. “ -- Karlene Trudell
We Should Have Never Sold Our Dream Home
Fifteen years ago, I was offered a job of a lifetime. It required uprooting our newly started family and moving from Seattle to Cleveland. As hard as it was to make the decision to accept the job, the harder choice came later. My husband and I had saved for years and had designed and built our dream house. We were enjoying an up economy and our home's value skyrocketed.
With the power of hindsight, do I regret the decisions of youth? Absolutely. I wish we would have recognized the uncertainty of a long-distance move and opted to become landlords and renters. It would have given us time to determine if our new city was a keeper, and it would have given us a beloved landing place when we decided to return. If we had listened to our hearts and understood the difference of the Seattle vs. Cleveland markets we would have retained our equity, and our retirement accounts.” -- Kelly Tweeddale
Health, Money and First Impressions
Being 59 years old and not having a steady paycheck for over two years, I wish back in my young, accounting executive days I had paid more attention to my health than making money. Now, I can't make money because of my health. Currently, I'm managing my health, but money is tight. As far as first impressions go, that cane I walk with doesn't affect my mind and that accounting work I'm so good at isn't done with my feet. I think these are the first impressions that really should matter the most. “ -- Larry Gross
I Regret Our Fixer-Upper House PurchaseMy Baby Boomer husband and I, the quintessential tightwads, spent the first half of our marriage, through four kids, in a mobile home. We bought our first house in 2000 for $54,000. It was old, damaged and one step from getting condemned. Arguably, that's why it was a good deal. We both regret cutting ourselves too short on this home purchase.
And funny, what was ostensibly a ‘cheap’ house, hasn't been that inexpensive. For all the headaches, we still have a $650 a month house payment. We've barely touched the principal, the first 13 years of payments going primarily to interest. We have just paid off our other debt and can now think about refinancing. But I'm tempted to skip it, sell and get a nice little apartment with all the conveniences I don't have now. This ‘investment’ hasn't proved to be all it was cracked up to be. -- Marilisa Sachteleben
It Seemed Like the Rise of the Stock Market Was Never Going to End
I was keeping almost all my assets in stocks. Then the crash came and I had no plan to implement limits for my losses. My 401(k) lost 75 percent of its value. Then the market tanked and I had no safe haven for my hard earned money. Added to these financial disasters, the value of our home plummeted, denying refinancing to try and save on our mortgage.
My biggest mistake was not being more conservative and saving for emergencies. The tenet that you should have at least six months of emergency funds was sorely inaccurate. The latest economic downturn lasted longer for most of us. I needed a stable vehicle in tandem with my stock investments.

Morgan Freeman mistaken for Mandela in India billboard gaffe

New Delhi (AFP) - An Indian owner of a billboard dedicated to Nelson Mandela was red-faced on Thursday after the discovery that a photo of actor Morgan Freeman was used instead of one of the

anti-apartheid hero.
The billboard was erected on the side of a road in the southern city of Coimbatore as part of memorials across India and the world to Mandela, who died on December 5.
But Freeman's face loomed large in the billboard over small images of rights icons Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.We should be proud that we were part of an era when they lived," read the Tamil-language condolence message on the board.
Cloth merchant Chandrashekhar, who paid for the board in a private capacity as a mark of respect to the former South African leader, said it was a mistake by the designer.
"We will replace it with the correct picture of Mandela," the merchant, who uses one name, told AFP by telephone from the state capital Chennai, adding that he did not know how the gaffe occurred.
Morgan Freeman played Mandela in the 2009 film "Invictus".
A photo of the billboard was being Tweeted on Thursday.
India declared five days of national mourning for Mandela, who was hailed as a "true Gandhian" and a "great friend" by the country's leaders.

Guy Creates Video Game to Help Him Pop the Question

It’s the stuff that gamer dreams are made of. Boy meets girl.Girl loves to play video games as much as he does. They become friends, sharing their passion for gaming and stories of childhoods spent with joysticks in

hand. Boy eventually gets girl. Two and a half years later, he pops the question, gamer style, by designing a video game to propose to his girlfriend and catching her tear-jerking reaction on video.
The most challenging part of building the game was keeping it a secret Robert Fink, 24, a 3D artist from Portland, Oregon, tells Yahoo Shine, adding that he had been telling his girlfriend, Angel White, 24, that he was working late at the office, to cover for the fact that he was actually at a friend’s house designing the game. All told, the project took five months to create from start to finish. When it came time to execute on the plan, Fink, who works at SuperGenius, an art and animation support studio for video game developers that's based in Oregon City, Oregon, asked White if she would come in to test a retro-style game the company was developing.To cleverly capture the proposal on video, Fink set up the game and two cameras in the company conference room: one camera to record the actual game, and one to record White’s reaction. In the game, dubbed Knight Man, a dashing white knight attempts to save a princess by completing a series of challenges. Each successful challenge helps him build a golden ring that, in turn, unlocks the castle, where the princess is frozen in a crystal. (You can play the game here.)Meet Nico Jackson, Pippa Middleton’s (Maybe) Fiancé According to White, the golden ring tipped her off to the fact that this game might be something special. When I saw that the collectible ‘artifact’ pieces were starting to form a circle, it became apparent something amazing was about to happen. I was internally freaking out White tells Yahoo Shine, noting that, because Fink was behind her while she was playing, she didn’t notice anything unusual about his behavior.He played it cool the entire time, but he told me after the fact that he was internally freaking out, too! Once White freed the princess, a message popped up on the screen, saying Princess, I have searched far and wide and braved many dangers searching for my one and only. I believe with all my heart that I have found you. Angel White, would you do me the honor of sharing your life with me?” Fink then got down on one knee and presented White with an engagement ring, a moonstone set in oxidized silver, and the pair celebrated with 25 friends and family who were waiting outside the conference room. “I was absolutely exploding with emotion,” says White of the proposal. My mind was racing with thoughts like, 'I'm getting engaged!' 'Oh, my God, Robert is such a badass for putting this game together,' and 'I am the luckiest girl on the planet. This Wedding Proposal Brought to You by Aaron Paul
And while White did rescue the princess, she didn’t do as well in the game as she could have: At the end of the video, a heart partially filled with pixels is shown with the message, ‘You could do better.’ Says Fink, “I didn’t mean that she could do better by finding a more awesome guy. But if you collect all the pieces to the heart, it reads, '100% getting lucky tonight.'” Game over.