Pitino focused on upcoming season

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Rick Pitino has been through the gauntlet before.

After three decades of pacing the sidelines the Louisville Cardinals coach has developed some pretty thick skin. He'll need it following the most tumultuous offseason of his career.

Pitino's admission this summer of a sexual encounter six years ago with a woman charged with trying to extort millions from him made national headlines and provided plenty of fodder for opposing fans.

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AP Photo/Ed ReinkeRick Pitino, who admitted to a sexual encounter six years ago with a woman charged with trying to extort him, says he's ready for what the upcoming season will bring.

The only men's coach to lead three different schools to the Final Four knows life will be difficult when the Cardinals play away from Freedom Hall, not that he is concerned about it.

"When I coached at Kentucky, I was Darth Vader in every arena," Pitino said. "They hung me in effigy in Starkville [Miss]. So do you think I'm going to face anything I haven't faced before? When you coach at Kentucky, you're hated by everybody."

Maybe, but this season could provide a challenge unlike any he's faced before.

The cheers had barely died down following Louisville's remarkable 2008-09 season when the problems began. Three weeks after the Cardinals fell to Michigan State in the regional finals of the NCAA tournament, the married father of five said he was the victim of an extortion attempt by the wife of the team's equipment manager and was working with federal authorities.

The scandal played out much of the summer, leading to Pitino's admission that he had a sexual encounter with Karen Cunagin Sypher at a Louisville restaurant in 2003. He issued a public apology in August and university president James Ramsey and athletic director Tom Jurich pledged their support to the coach who resurrected the program after Denny Crum's retirement in 2001.

The tawdry facts around the case -- Cunagin Sypher claimed Pitino gave her money for an abortion, the coach said it was for health insurance, she later married Louisville's equipment manager Tim Sypher -- fueled talk that Pitino may step down.

Instead, Pitino said the thought of resigning after eight seasons "never crossed" his mind. He only spoke with his players about his situation once, telling them he had no intention of leaving.

"He told us that he wasn't going nowhere and that he was going to be our coach and we don't have anything to worry about," said senior guard Edgar Sosa.

The case remains in limbo as U.S. District Judge John Kuhn weighs a motion by prosecutors seeking a mental evaluation for Cunagin Sypher. Kuhn said the case is "complex" and it's unknown when -- or even if -- it could reach trial.

Pitino stressed he's trying to focus on leading the Cardinals to another Big East championship.

It won't be easy. Louisville lost forwards Terrence Williams and Earl Clark to the NBA and it could take awhile for new leaders to emerge.

And Pitino isn't the only member of the team to run into offseason trouble. Guard Jerry Smith and forward Terrence Jennings were arrested earlier this month following an altercation with police outside a southern Indiana restaurant. They pleaded guilty on Monday to a misdemeanor charge of resisting law enforcement and were sentenced to one year of probation, 40 hours of community service and $500 in fines.

Pitino chose not to suspend either player, saying that would be allowing them to get off easy. Instead he is handling the matter internally, joking that the punishment the players are enduring would be considered illegal in some prisons.

The atmosphere in opposing gyms might not be much friendlier, a prospect the players have grown accustomed to during their careers. Sosa said Pitino's off-the-court problems are none of his business, and he's not worried about it affecting the team when they're on the floor.

"At the end of the day we've got to go there and win the game," Sosa said. "What you have going on personally you know, when you go to these away games doesn't really matter because it's all going to go down on the court. People are going to do things and say things when we're on the road but that's just going to bring us closer and make us want to pull out that win even more."

Asked if he's concerned about his players acting out in his defense if they think a fan crosses the line, Pitino shook his head.

"If they want to protect their coach, go out and kick [butt]," he said.

Steve Phillips Girlfriend Picture Update

Steve Phillips photos girlfriend Brooke Hundley and his wife Marni Phillips images are among the most sought after searches in the cyber world.

ESPN analyst Steve Phillips star has burnt all his fingers, allowing his girlfriend to go home and terrorize his wife and children. Who is on leave from his post and his wife has already started the procedure for filing for divorce from Steve.

And as the sunrise Wednesday also was no longer a secret to American baseball fans. History by Steve Phillips with Brooke Hundley differs from other major media reported case of 2009 – the son of complaints of harassment on Facebook . Phillips, charges of telephone harassment Marni Phillips wife with a phone call cast Craigslist.

According to lalate.com, from Steve Phillips and Brooke Hundley case history is unlike any other media reported the main issues this year. Apparently there have been allegations of harassment Phillips Hundley’s son on Facebook .

But that’s not all, as was also alleged telephone harassment Marni wife Brooke Phillips. And since several photos of Brooke have appeared on the Internet, people have been asking why she deceived Phillips.

Wesson family massacre victims speak out for the first time

In 2004, Marcus Wesson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of nine of his female family victims; in addition he was sentenced to 102 years in prison sexual abuse of daughters and nieces. Wesson molested, abused and controlled the female members of his family, impregnated some of them, and then murdered nine of his children.

Today on Dr. Phil the victims of the family spoke out. Kiani, Gypsy, Serafino, and their mother, Elizabeth spoke out for the first time. They spoke out about their terrible history with a man who was an abusive head of the family. They spoke about their relationship since their father has been in jail, and the emotional turmoil left behind. One of the women said that they had two children by their father and never realized that was wrong.

Dr. Phil helped them to understand that they have a lot of work to do, and that they are not to blame for what happened. And that now is the time to work on those issues. Tomorrow Dr. Phil will speak to the men in the family and try to help them deal with what has happened to them.

Dr. Phil compared the stories of Jaycee Dugard from California and Elizabeth Smart from Salt Lake City as other people held captive and abused against their will. The Wesson family has had some time to deal with their situation since Marcus Wesson has been in jail for over five years, and Jaycee Dugard is just now beginning her journey of recovery.

By Their Father's Hand, The True Story of the Wesson Family Massacre book description:

Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California-the home of an imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces, and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home, and police officers responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered.

By Their Father's Hand is a chilling true story of incest, abuse, madness, and murder, and one family's terrible and ultimately fatal ordeal at the hands of a powerful, manipulative man-a cultist who envisioned vengeful gods and vampires, and totally controlled those closest to him before their world came to a brutal and bloody halt.

Lil Wayne Heading to Jail for Gun Rap

Lil Wayne's heading to the big house.

The "Hot Revolver" rapper struck a deal with Manhattan prosecutors and pleaded guilty today to attempted weapons possession in exchange for a one-year prison sentence, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office confirmed to E! News.

The 27-year-old Grammy winner, aka Dwayne Carter III, appeared before Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Charles Solomon and copped to a felony count of attempted criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. Hizzoner allowed the New Orleans MC to remain free on his current $30,000 bond but ordered him to surrender his passport.

No comment yet from Team Wayne. (Maybe he can ring up incarcerated pal T.I. and ask for some pointers?)

Still, Weezy should consider himself lucky, given he could have gotten a much longer sentence if convicted on the original, more serious gun charges.

Lil Wayne got into this mess on July 22, 2007 when police searched his tour bus following a concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City and found a loaded .40-caliber pistol. He was initially booked on one count of criminal weapons possession and one count of criminal possession of a loaded weapon, charges carrying a minimum of three and a half years and a maximum of 15.

The Grammy winner's plea bargain came a day after a hearing on DNA evidence in the case in which his attorney, Stacey Richman, argued that investigators' profiling technique wasn't widely accepted in the scientific community and that the gun in question didn't belong to her client but someone else on the bus.

Lil Wayne's trial was set to kick off Jan. 20. Solomon has now scheduled the next hearing for Dec. 15, at which point the case will be adjourned until February for sentencing.

Windows 7 review: like Vista, but good

The first thing you'll notice about Windows 7 is that it looks like Vista. It also works like Vista, in the sense that it has the same plumbing underneath, except for a very welcome graphics upgrade to DX11. However, it works much better than Vista, and most of Vista's annoyances have either been removed, or (mostly) can be changed so the system works the way you like. It takes personalisation to extremes.

Microsoft has analysed the data from millions of user computing sessions to find out exactly what people do with their computers, then attacked the "pain points" to make Windows 7 quicker and smoother. (About 15m people used the Windows 7 beta.)

The most obvious difference is that Windows 7 doesn't keep annoying you with prompts — though it's also true that the latest version of Vista is much less annoying than the original. In fact, you can set the degree of annoyance on a sliding scale, though reducing it increases the risk of security breaches. However, Windows 7 is vastly more secure than XP and, in any case, the threat landscape has changed since XP was trashed by worms such as Blaster and Slammer. Today, the more important security changes are in the Internet Explorer 8 browser which, uniquely, defends against cross-site scripting.

Another obvious difference is that Windows 7 uses fewer resources.

Where Vista really needed 2GB of memory, Windows 7 will run quite happily in 1GB on a slow dual-core Intel processor, though I'd still recommend 2GB or, for preference, 4GB with the speedy 64-bit version of Windows 7.

The reduced footprint and some optimisation means Windows 7 sleeps and wakes up faster (though it's still not in the same class as Mac OS X).

And laptop batteries should last longer. I've been running Windows 7 on an Asus UL30 laptop with a claimed battery life of around 11 hours with Vista: it now does more than 12 hours.

Any PC that currently runs Vista will be better at running Windows 7 – a first for Microsoft – and it should also run on most PCs that will run XP SP2. (Search YouTube and you will find users showing off by loading it on unsuitable systems, including antiques with Pentium III chips.) The catch is that upgrading a PC running Windows XP requires a clean installation of Windows 7: you can't do an in-place upgrade. This has been a source of complaints, because it means reinstalling all your applications as well.

However, we've known for a dozen years that a clean installation of Windows usually works better, and geeks have generally recommended it.

Indeed, people used to reinstall Windows 95, 98 or Me just to clean up their systems, so it's silly to get hysterical about it now.

The Windows 7 interface has a few noticeable changes. First, the Vista sidebar has gone, but you can still use the clock and other gadgets, and you can position them wherever you like. Second, the QuickLaunch area and the TaskBar have been replaced by a sort of combo-pack.

Instead of putting applications in the QuickLaunch area, you can now right-click and pin them to the new-style Taskbar, alongside running applications.

As in Vista, hovering over a Taskbar icon shows one or more mini-previews, depending on how many windows you're using, except now they're interactive. Hovering over a mini-preview shows it full size on the desktop, while right-clicking provides a Jump List of options.

It makes it dramatically easier to see what you are doing. However, if you an inveterate Alt-Tabber, that shows the same mini-previews. And if you liked Vista's Flip 3D feature, that's still an option.

Incidentally, you can now move TaskBar icons around to change the order, like browser tabs. As I always try to keep XP TaskBar items in the same order, I find this useful. It's a small point, but Windows 7 has lots of small points, and they add up.

There are a few party tricks that Windows 7 users can show their friends, such as Aero Snaps, Aero Peek, and Aero Shake. Aero Snaps lets you put two applications side by side for easy comparison and copy-and-paste. Aero Peek makes open windows temporarily transparent so you can see what's on your desktop. Aero Shake means that if you shake a window, all the other windows will disappear. All are both useful and fun.

The My Documents section has been reorganised under one heading, Libraries. This includes Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos, with Windows 7 sorting things into these "shell folders". Each of these has two subfolders, such as My Music and Public Music. This makes it easier to keep stuff you want to share away from stuff you want to keep to yourself.

Sharing is an important part of Windows 7. It has a HomeGroup feature that makes it very easy to set up a home network and share things. It only works with Windows 7 machines, which I expect will sell a few Family Packs of Windows 7 (three copies of Home Premium for £149.99).

Right click a photo, for example, select Share, and this gives you four options: Nobody; HomeGroup (Read), HomeGroup (Read/Write), and Specific People. "Plays to" lets you display a video, for example, on a different PC.

Support for the consumer electronics industry's DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard should help Windows 7 PCs work with other devices, though I've yet to see an example.

There are also some "location awareness" features where Windows 7 figures out where you are — on a home network or an office network, for example — and selects the appropriate printer. There's a section of the control panel, Location and Other Sensors, where sensors can be installed and controlled. One example is "adaptive brightness": if your PC has a light sensor, Windows 7 will adjust the screen brightness to match.

Multi-touch is also supported, if you have the hardware to take advantage of it. There is an emerging flood of laptops with multi-touch pads and new all-in-ones with multi-touch screens, but it remains to be seen whether these will be successful.

When it comes to Windows applications, the very old ones have been dramatically improved. Paint and WordPad now have "ribbon interfaces" like Office 2007, and both the Calculator and command shell (PowerShell) are much more powerful than before. Technically, several standard applications have also been removed from the operating system, though I expect most PC manufacturers will install them.

What Microsoft has done is decouple the Windows Live Essentials suite of applications — Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, etc --from the operating system. It means the Live programs can be updated from the web every six or nine months, or whatever, instead of on a three-year operating system development cycle. It also reduces the attack area for anti-trust complaints.

But one thing that's missing from Windows 7 is the Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus program, formerly codenamed Morro. You get Windows Defender and an improved firewall, but Microsoft appears to be too scared of the European Commission to do what would be best for users and include anti-virus software as well. As it is, specialist anti-virus companies install trial versions on new PCs, and pay PC manufacturers very handsomely for the distribution. If Microsoft did the right thing and defended users for nothing, it would upset the financial applecart.

All round, then, Windows 7 is generally good, and some Windows fans reckon it's better than Apple's Mac OS X. It's certainly easier to use than Mac OS X if you are already familiar with the Windows way of doing things. Also, Windows 7 – released to companies on August 6 – has so far proved to be a lot less buggy than Apple's Snow Leopard, which has even lost users' data.

If you dig into Windows 7 then you will, of course, find numerous relics from the past, going right back through Windows 95 to DOS.

There are lots of inconsistencies that still need cleaning up.

However, Microsoft's business depends on running millions of programs that stretch back decades, supporting vast numbers of peripherals, and providing a platform for thousands of competing manufacturers who make everything from handhelds and tablet PCs to racks of data-centre mainframes. That's just the baggage Windows carries.

But with luck you will not see too many of these relics, and on the surface, Windows 7 is impressively smooth.

I'm a full-time Windows XP user who didn't upgrade to Vista on my two main PCs, but I can't see a good reason for sticking with XP now that it looks doomed. I've bought a cut-price Amazon Windows 7 Pro upgrade for my desktop, and I'm planning to buy a new Windows 7 laptop to replace my very old ThinkPad X31.

Windows 7 is a long way from being perfect, and it's not an essential upgrade if you're happy with XP. But nor is there a real reason to avoid it. Windows 7 is simply the best version of Windows you can get.

Dancing with the Stars Michael Jackson Tribute Begins Latest Jackson Honors

Dancing With the Stars' Michael Jackson tribute was even more anticipated than the
The Dancing With the Stars Michael Jackson tribute had ballroom dancing performances to Jackson's famed hits, after being hyped for weeks. Dancing With the Stars is a good place for a Michael Jackson tribute, since it is a dancing show, and Jackson defined dancing in the 70's and 80's. But the Dancing With the Stars Michael Jackson tribute was only a warmup act for the Jackson tribute to come in theaters.

It likely wasn't a coincidence that the Dancing With the Stars Michael Jackson tribute show came eight days beforeThis Is It, the documentary of Jackson's final rehearsals, is released in theaters. This Is It could be the biggest "final" tribute to Jackson yet, leaving Dancing With the Stars to just get the ball rolling.

On Dancing With the Stars, contestants paid tribute toMichael Jackson by dancing to "I Want You Back" "Man In The Mirror" and of course, "Thriller." LaToya Jackson was there as well to represent the family, as she is already doing coverage of the show for Access Hollywood.

For all the spectacle around this Dancing With the Stars tribute, it isn't even the first homage to a dead celebrity this season. Patrick Swayze, who participated on the show years ago, was honored weeks ago for his dancing prowess. Naturally, the Michael Jackson tribute was a bit bigger and gaudier.

But in the midst of the Dancing With the Stars Michael Jackson show, they actually had to vote someone out and get on with their season. After all of the tributes, Natalie Coughlin was voted off the show, which surprised some of the judges who gave her high scores most of the way. But Coughlin and dance partner Alec Mazo are gone, while Aaron Carter once again narrowly avoided elimination.

After the Michael Jackson tribute, Dancing With the Stars likely won't spend any more results shows paying homage to dead celebrities - at least not ones who died this summer. The show will go back to work with its nine remaining couples next week.

Kanye West NOT Dead - No Kanye West Car Accident

Did Kanye West die in a car accident? No. Kayne West is not dead; West was not in a car accident as Twitter mania asks Tuesday evening.

The 32 year old West today is the latest round of fake celebrity deaths. As widely reported on LALATE, fake celebrity deaths are most often of music celebrities, by virtue of a repeating fake storyline of crashes (plane, train, or car), with the fake storebreaking in the evenings, and generally Sunday afternoons.

This evening’s West false reports hits not different than ones for Miley Cyrusand Lil Wayne in recent months - except it launches midweek. In the first half of 2009, fake celebrity deathsusually hit around 3 pm PST on Sundays, seen potentially as a slow period for press to refute the rumors as false have rarely if ever be a victim of the trend.

The nature of the deaths have unchanged. Crashes, accidents, cars, planes - it’s all the same over and over again. By summer 2009 there was a repeat of the bizarre foreign hotel story. That fake foreign hotel trend (grew ill from bad hotel food, sudden hotel collapse for unknown reasons, etc) has fallen off in recent months too.

Nevertheless Kanye is not dead. Kanye is alive. Miley Cyrus is alive. And Lil Wayne is doing fine.