iPhone 4S purchase, Order tracking, iPhone 4S giveaway, Samsung Galaxy S 2, Jawbone JAMBOX giveaway [From the Forums]

Paul McCartney Marries For Third Time

Former Beatle wed American heiress Nancy Shevell in London.
By Gil Kaufman


Sir Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevell leave the Marylebone Registry Office after their civil ceremony marriage on Sunday in London
Photo: Danny Martindale/Getty Images

Former Beatle Paul McCartney married for the third time on Sunday, taking his vows at the iconic Old Marylebone Town Hall in London where he wed first wife Linda Eastman in 1969. McCartney, 69, tied the knot with American trucking company heiress Nancy Shevell, 51.

Unlike his lavish 2002 wedding to former model Heather Mills, which ended in a bitter divorce in 2008, Sunday's affair was a quiet one, attended by close friends and family, including former bandmate Ringo Starr and wife Barbara Bach, ex-Beatle George Harrison's widow, Olivia, Shevell's son, Arlen, and her second cousin, "View" host Barbara Walters. Shevell wore a dress designed by McCartney's daughter Stella, and the "Maybe I'm Amazed" singer slipped a five-carat square-cut Neil Lane diamond ring on her finger during the brief ceremony.

All You Need Is Love: Wish Paul Well On Facebook

According to a report in the Huffington Post, McCartney "appeared proud, content and eager" to share his joyful day with the crowd that had gathered and "raised his bride's hand in triumph" as they walked down the steps of the town hall after the civil ceremony. "I feel absolutely wonderful," McCartney told fans as he arrived at his London home after the wedding.

Stella McCartney also helped whip up a three-course vegetarian feast served to guests at the reception at McCartney's home in the St. John's Wood neighborhood on what would have been late Beatle John Lennon's 71st birthday. Veteran TV presenter Walters is credited with introducing the couple four years ago at a party in the Hamptons in New York. Shevell was married to attorney Bruce Blakeman for 20 years before meeting McCartney.

Related Artists

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1672219/paul-mccartney-wedding.jhtml

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Liposuction 'health' boost just to doctors' wallets? - In Your Face ...

Liposuction ?health? boost just to doctors? wallets?

October 10th, 2011, 6:00 am ? Post a Comment ? posted by MARILYN KALFUS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A new study that suggests liposuction might carry a health bonus has led to a?lot of headlines and sparked some?hope, but?plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow of Newport Beach says he doesn?t buy it.
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The study, conducted by a Kansas plastic surgeon,?published in a journal and presented at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons conference, showed for the first time that liposuction patients with high triglyceride levels ? a type of fat in the blood ? saw a significant reduction in those levels after their fat was sucked out in a liposuction procedure. White blood cell counts dropped, as well.

High triglyceride levels and elevated white blood cell counts are associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes.

But Dubrow, a board-certified plastic surgeon, said in an interview:

?This liposuction study doesn?t carry much weight ? no pun intended ? for me. The effects of liposuction on obese individuals has long been studied and it seems clear that it offers little to no benefit unless accompanied by changes in diet and exercise.

?Triglycerides alone,without and associated change in lipid profiles ( the ?good? HDL and ?bad? LDL), offer no health benefits regarding insulin resistance, metabolic syndromes and cardiovascular risk factors. The fact this study found a reduction in triglycerides is at best interesting and at least irrelevant.

?In this economy it?s nice for plastic surgeons to suggest that liposuction may be a healthy idea, but in my opinion only the plastic surgeon?s wallet receives any ?health? benefits.?

Are patients who might have seen news reports about the study asking him about it? His response:

?Yes, the wives are hoping I will tell them it?s true so they can convince their husbands it?s a good idea health-wise, but sadly, no.?

What does he tell them?

?I?m telling them if they want liposuction for a shape change it?s absolutely great. If they want a health change, to exercise and eat right.?

Does he think the study will prompt people who might be on the fence to go ahead and have liposuction, anyway?

?It shouldn?t and we should inform them honestly about that.?

Liposuction is among the most popular types of cosmetic plastic surgery. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, based in Garden Grove, estimates that 289,000 liposuction procedures were performed last year in the United States.

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Latest from this blog:
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What?s happening to the?comments?

The Register is switching to Facebook-linked comments over the next few days.?Below is a memo explaining why?and a FAQ on?how it will work:

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Source: http://inyourface.ocregister.com/2011/10/10/liposuction-health-boost-just-to-doctors-wallets/43573/

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Home Improvement Loans ? Online Loan Firm

Home Improvement Loans

Homeowner Loans ? UK Secured Loans

Home Improvement Loans can provide the funding and flexibility you need to increase the value of your greatest asset, your home. If you currently own your home, either outright or with a mortgage payment, you may be able to receive a secured home owner loan.

There are two primary types of home improvement loans ? secured loans and unsecured loans. Secured loans are those in which your home or property acts as collateral for the loan, whereas an unsecured loan has nothing but your credit record to back the loan. Because your property will act as a backup for the loan, there is less risk to the lender that you will repay the loan. Because of the decreased risk the lenders are able to offer much better terms, such as lower interest rates, longer repayment periods, and larger loan amounts.

If you have poor or below average credit, secured home improvement loans can still be an option unlike unsecured loans.

Because the lender has the equity in your house to back you, you are still generally able to retain a secured loan.

How to Find the Best Home Improvement Loan Rates

There are numerous lending companies that offer secured home improvement loans and there are a few tips that can lead to finding the best loan. The number one thing you can do to find the best rate is be sure to compare rates from as many companies as possible. Most of this can be done online, but there are still two ways to go about this.

One way, is to go to the websites of each of the major lenders and fill out an application. The only downside to this is that the process can be very time consuming. You are required to fill out a detailed application on each lender?s site over and over again.

Each company will then get back to you with several quotes for different terms so you will be contacted over and over again by lenders.

On the other hand, there is a much easier alternative that few know about. You can use what is called a loan broker. A loan broker works with all the top lenders and provides the same quotes that you would receive from them individually. They will search through hundreds of different lenders and loan products to find you the best loan. Here?s the best part, you only need to enter you information once and only one company will contact you with the results. The amount of time and hassle saved is immeasurable.

So what do these loan brokers cost. Well, most cost absolutely nothing. A good service will be 100% free because they receive their earnings from the lenders not you. Also, be sure that the loan broker you use offers no obligation quotes so that you are not locked in to using them.

Home improvement can be a fun and exciting process, if you can find the funding to carry it out. It?s worth the time doing your research to find the best loan at the best rate. Doing so can save you thousands over the life of the loan.

Related Home Loan Tips Articles

Source: http://www.onlineloanfirm.com/home-improvement-loans/

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Special report: China's debt pileup raises risk of hard landing (Reuters)

CHENGDU/WUHAN, China (Reuters) ? When China announced a nearly $600 billion package to ward off the 2008 global financial crisis, city planners across the country happily embarked on a frenzy of infrastructure projects, some of them of arguable need.

Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province, answered the call for stimulus action with a bold plan for a railway hub modeled after Waterloo railway station in London.

Except London's Waterloo was not ambitious enough.

"I was shocked when I finally got to visit Waterloo. It was so small," said Chen Jun, a director at Chengdu Communications Investment Group, which built the new Chinese terminal. "I realized we would probably need a station a few times bigger to meet the demands of our city."

In a manner typical of many infrastructure projects in China, Chengdu more than doubled the size of its planned transport hub, borrowed 3 billion yuan ($473 million) from a state bank to finance it, then set out on a blistering construction timeline that saw the finishing touches put on the project two years later.

But instead of getting the accolades they expected for helping to stimulate the economy, Chengdu Communications and many of China's 10,000 local government financing vehicles (LGFV) have now come under a harsh spotlight for the grim side-effects of the construction binge.

China's local governments have piled up a mountain of bad debt, some of it to finance bridges to nowhere and other white elephant projects, which now threatens to constrict growth at a time when the global economy is sputtering. It is adding to other systemic risks in China, including a sharp downturn in the property market and a rapid rise in problematic loans.

Local governments had amassed 10.7 trillion yuan in debt at the end of 2010. The government expects 2.5 to 3 trillion yuan of that will turn sour, while Standard and Chartered reckons as much as 8 to 9 trillion yuan will not be repaid -- or about $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

In other words, the potential debt defaults could be even larger than the $700 billion U.S. bail-out programme during the 2008 crisis.

Reuters reported in mid-year the government was working on a relief plan for local governments, including allowing them to tap the municipal bond market for the first time as an alternative to bank loans, which are becoming harder to get.

The risks of default are rising. Nearly 85 percent of the local government finance vehicle loans in northeast Liaoning province, for instance, missed debt service payments in 2010, an audit report posted on the Liaoning Daily website said.

But in visits and interviews at city-run vehicles around China, officials appeared unworried. They say they were only following Beijing's directives to keep growth on track, and the central government would surely step in to bail them out.

Perhaps their complacency is justified. Beijing, which holds more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, certainly has the resources to rescue them, and has done so in the past -- it set up asset management companies to help China's top banks clean up mountains of bad loans in the late 1990s.

But China is also vulnerable to a global downturn, and would need every piece of its economy performing well to avoid a serious slump. The infrastructure boom insulated the economy from a collapse in exports in 2008. Beijing has less firepower now. Inflation is uncomfortably high, and dumping more money into the economy would only make things worse.

Barclays Capital has predicted a global recession would trigger a "hard landing" in China, with gross domestic product sinking well below the 8 percent mark seen as the minimum for assuring enough job creation to keep up with urban migration.

A severe economic slump would depress land sales, a vital source of funding for local governments, and make their debt load even more precarious.

BUBBLE-SOME PROPERTY

In Chengdu, Chen leans back on a sofa in his office, smiles and readily concedes Chengdu will have big problems covering the bills for its version of the Waterloo train station.

"We're still unable to reflect on our accounts the problems that may arise from our investments into Chengdu's railroads," Chen said. "What happens next is that we may face some trouble repaying our loans when many of them come due."

Chengdu Communications had liabilities of 18.9 billion yuan at the end of 2010 against current assets valued at 11.7 billion yuan.

Chen is not unduly concerned. He thinks he has a solution, one local governments across China have also grasped: Real estate. Chen, the chairman of six other state companies in the city, intends to build huge residential and commercial projects around stations such as Waterloo -- with borrowed money, of course.

The problem with that idea is that Beijing has been taking increasingly urgent steps to halt a speculative property boom and has told state banks to cut lending. Domestic investment -- much of it in property and infrastructure development -- accounted for 70 percent of China's gross domestic product last year, a far bigger share than in developed economies.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the proportion of China's total debt to gross domestic product was 159 percent at the end of 2008, before it began the massive stimulus programme that has racked up piles of local government debt.

Local governments have long had to tap other sources of income to supplement their meager share of the country's taxes. Beijing controls the bulk of tax revenues to prevent local officials from spending wastefully, and as a way of redistributing wealth between poor and rich provinces.

So they raise money by selling or taxing property or borrowing money. They are barred from borrowing directly from banks as government entities, however, hence the proliferation of their financing vehicles.

Local officials have a strong interest in keeping property prices high, since it is a key source of revenue. China Real Estate Information Corp., a Shanghai-based property information and consulting firm, estimates 40 percent of local government revenue came from land sales last year. Land also is often used as collateral backing the loans to their financing vehicles.

So throughout China, a building boom financed with massive bank borrowing is being securitized by land prices that local governments fervently hope will stay high, even as Beijing tries to tamp them down.

"The underlying problem here is that local governments have a lot of expenditure mandates for infrastructure, for social services, and they don't have enough regular revenue to cover it," says economist Arthur Kroeber.

BRIDGE FINANCING

Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, is known as one of China's "four ovens", cities where summertime temperatures can soar to 40 degrees Celsius. Its strategic location at the intersection of the Yangtze and Han rivers has made it a major transportation hub and in the past three years the city has been feverishly building bridges, railways and expressways.

Wuhan Urban Construction Investment and Development Co., the vehicle set up to finance much of this infrastructure, had taken out 68.5 billion yuan in bank loans as of September 2010, a sum far in excess of its operating cash flow of 148 million yuan.

Perhaps for that reason, city officials found a novel if unpopular way to pay for the three new bridges they have built across the Yangtze, adding to the seven already spanning the world's third-longest river after the Amazon and Nile.

Besides the usual bridge tolls, Wuhan requires residents with cars to cross them at least 18 days a month, at 16 yuan a round trip.

The city of 9.8 million is expanding its subway system by adding another 215 km of track by 2017, with financing coming from big state-owned banks. Like other cities, Wuhan is counting on land sales to secure the loans. Its land authority says land prices for high-end residential property have more than doubled since 2004 to 11,635 yuan per square meter today, despite a proliferation of housing developments.

For that reason, investment bank Credit Suisse called Wuhan one of China's "top 10 cities to avoid", warning in a report this year it would take eight years to sell off its existing housing stock, let alone the tens of thousands under construction.

Wuhan Urban Construction Investment and Development is the largest government financing vehicle in the city, employing 16,000 workers and sitting atop total assets of 120 billion yuan.

Despite its debt woes, Shen Zhizhong, a deputy director at the vehicle's media office, argued his firm should not be blamed for the profusion of red ink.

"What we do is all decided by the government. We don't have any project that belongs to us," Shen said, adding it was "unscientific" to ask his company how Wuhan plans to pay off its debt. "We are like a sportsman, not a coach or a referee. How can you ask a sportsman something only known by a coach or a referee?"

After building the roads, railways and bridges that China said were so desperately needed just a few years ago, the financing vehicles now resent being made scapegoats for the mounting risk in the financial system.

NO WORRIES

Chengdu and Wuhan officials insist their own books are fine; the problem lies elsewhere.

Zeng Mingyou, head of Chengdu's economic planning department, said despite a mounting debt load the city was controlling expenses and managing risks.

"What is important is that we have risk control measures in place," said "Compared to other cities, Chengdu has very good controls in place."

The Chengdu government began reining in its financing vehicles about three years ago after it discovered highways were being built across farmland where there was no traffic, Zeng said.

He also said the city had stopped using land as collateral for infrastructure loans. "We can't be taking all our land and using it to back up loans," Zeng said. "At some point we'll run out of land. This is why the focus now is on sustainable development."

In Wuhan, Xie Zuohuai, deputy director of the media office at the Wuhan branch of China's bank regulator, said his city, too, was exemplary when it comes to managing its debt.

"Wuhan is a model city in implementing Beijing's rules of regulating local government debt," he said in between lighting up cigarettes and stubbing them out in an overflowing ashtray. "I'm confident the central government will successfully manage risks," Xie added, echoing a widespread perception that Beijing will come to their rescue if need be.

Any wave of defaults big enough to destabilise major banks or crimp the government's finances could have consequences not only for China's economy, but for global growth and financial markets as well.

That risk appears to be pretty low for now, given the strength of bank balance sheets. The banking system has a bad loan coverage ratio at the end of 2010 of 218 percent to cover any losses, up from 80 percent at the end of 2008 and 155 percent at the end of 2009.

Despite that strengthened treasure chest, bank executives in Beijing, Wuhan and Chengdu say they have stopped lending to local governments entirely, unless their projects have some guarantee of profitability or are too big and costly to scrap.

"Right now, most banks have cut off new loans to local government financing firms," said a senior executive at a medium-sized bank in Beijing, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak on the matter.

The cities and financing vehicles themselves say credit is harder to come by.

"What the banks want to see now is a clear revenue stream," said Chen at Chengdu Communications. "Loans for big projects like highways and railroads are now harder to get."

For that reason, Chengdu Communications has become one the city's biggest operators of petrol stations, and Chen says he has so far faced no problems trying to get a bank to finance new ones.

SHADOW BANKING

Local officials need to keep their economies humming because they largely earn their Communist Party stripes with projects that boost employment and growth. With the loan spigots being turned off to rein in bubbly property prices, they face the prospect of housing projects grinding to a halt.

Enter the "shadow bankers". These are the underground lenders and trust companies who extend credit to people and companies that may not qualify for loans otherwise. They then slice and dice those loans into investment packages, akin to what American banks did with sub-prime mortgages for much of the past decade.

Credit Suisse last week described the burgeoning growth of informal lending as a "time bomb" that posed a bigger risk to the Chinese economy than even the local government debt pileup.

Credit Suisse estimated the size of China's informal lending at up to 4 trillion yuan, equivalent to around 8 percent of above-board bank lending. Interest rates on these loans runs as high as 70 percent and they are expanding at an annual rate of about 50 percent.

The shadow bankers have lent 208 billion yuan to real estate developers so far this year, nearly as much as formal bank lending of 211 billion yuan. The risks, analysts say, is that even healthy developers become vulnerable to a liquidity crisis, given the short tenor and high rates of these loans.

Formal banks have transferred some risky loans off their balance sheets to the shadow banking industry. As a result, Fitch Ratings has warned, lending has not slowed down as much as official data suggests -- and as Beijing would like.

Official banks have also been restructuring and reclassifying loans to dress up their books, analysts said. For example, they now get to classify local government borrowings as corporate loans, which allows them to set aside less in provisions and thus add to their quarterly earnings. According to Chinese media reports, banks plan to reclassify 2.8 trillion yuan worth of loans.

"Banks have to admit to some NPLs (non-performing loans), but they don't want to admit it because regulators are allowing them to restructure these loans," said Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago who has written a book on China's financial system.

"This is unlike the late 1990s when the government forced the banks to admit to a huge amount of non-performing loans. This time round, the strategy is just to not admit to NPLs."

Such an arrangement appears to suit everyone. Beijing wants to keep the financial system from becoming destabilised, especially given the financial sector crises in the West. And local officials are keen to keep growth strong in the run-up to a critical Communist Party Congress next fall, when Party chief and President Hu Jintao is expected to hand power to younger leaders headed by the anointed next leader, Xi Jinping.

Whether they will also hand over a looming financial crisis to him as well remains to be seen.

(Additional reporting by Koh Gui Qing; editing by Brian Rhoads and Bill Tarrant)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111010/bs_nm/us_china_debt

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Demi Lovato goes back on tour, year after breakdown (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) ? Teen star Demi Lovato is going back out on the road, a year after entering treatment for bulimia and other emotional problems.

Lovato, 19, will start a 10-city U.S. tour in November to celebrate the success of her latest album "Unbroken" and its debut single "Skyscraper", her spokesman said on Friday.

Lovato, the former star of Disney Channel's "Sonny with a Chance", suffered an emotional breakdown in November 2010 when she pulled out of a concert tour with the Jonas Brothers and entered a three month treatment program.

She has since spoken openly about her 10 year battle with eating disorders and said she started cutting herself at the age of 11.

Lovato has since quit the TV series that made her one of Disney Channel's biggest international teen stars, saying she wanted to focus on her music career.

Lovato has performed recently in New York and Los Angeles to promote the September release of "Unbroken". The new mini-tour will start in Detroit on November 16 and end in Chicago on December 3.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111007/people_nm/us_demilovato

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Nuclear site finds 'minor' leak

Radioactive material has leaked at the site of the former Dounreay nuclear power station in Caithness, it has been confirmed.

Radioactive liquid effluent is understood to have leaked inside a treatment facility.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) said the leak was minor and did not get outside the plant.

Sepa has launched an investigation. Dounreay is currently undergoing a ?2.6bn decommissioning process.

Dounreay Site Restoration Limited (DSRL) said that nobody was put at risk by the incident.

Dounreay was constructed in the 1950s as an experimental nuclear power complex, but has not generated electricity since 1994.

Radioactive liquid effluent occurs when a reactor and its equipment are cleaned.

The treatment plant at Dounreay removes some radioactivity from the waste liquid as part of the process.

A section of the treatment plant has been shut down for investigations.

DSRL is in the process of dealing with 100 tonnes of breeder reactor material.

The fuel is being stored securely while the dismantling of the site continues.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15222259

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Steve Jobs told us what we needed before we knew

FILE - In this Jan. 15, 2008, file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air after giving the keynote address at the Apple MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. Apple on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 said Jobs has died. He was 56. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

FILE - In this Jan. 15, 2008, file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air after giving the keynote address at the Apple MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. Apple on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 said Jobs has died. He was 56. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 1990, file photo, Steve Jobs, president and CEO of NeXT Computer Inc., shows off his company's new NeXTstation after an introduction to the public in San Francisco. Apple on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 said Jobs has died. He was 56. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 2, 1997, file photo, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, speaks during the Seybold publishing conference in San Francisco, in front of a poster of artist Pablo Picasso from Apple's latest advertising campaign. Apple on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 said Jobs has died. He was 56. (AP Photo/Thor Swift, File)

(AP) ? Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it. He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use them.

Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it.

"To some people, this is like Elvis Presley or John Lennon. It's a change in our times. It's the end of an era," said Scott Robbins, 34, a barber and an Apple fan. "It's like the end of the innovators."

Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause. He died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a statement from family members who were present. He was 56.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple's board said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

President Barack Obama said in a statement that Jobs "exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity."

"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators ? brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world and talented enough to do it," he said.

Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January ? his third since his health problems began ? and resigned in August. Jobs became Apple's chairman and handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

Outside Apple's Cupertino headquarters, three flags ? an American flag, a California state flag and an Apple flag ? were flying at half-staff late Wednesday.

"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor." Cook wrote in an email to Apple's employees. "Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

The news Apple fans and shareholders had been dreading came the day after Apple unveiled its latest iPhone, a device that got a lukewarm reception. Perhaps, there would have been more excitement had Jobs been well enough to show it off with his trademark theatrics.

Jobs started Apple with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the company. During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable technology company in the world with a market value of $351 billion. Almost all that wealth has been created since Jobs' return.

Cultivating Apple's countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, Jobs rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.

He helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.

For transformation of American industry, he has few rivals. He has long been linked to his personal computer-age contemporary, Bill Gates, and has drawn comparisons to other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney. Jobs died as Walt Disney Co.'s largest shareholder, a by-product of his decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.

Perhaps most influentially, Jobs in 2001 launched the iPod, which offered "1,000 songs in your pocket." Over the next 10 years, its white earphones and thumb-dial control seemed to become more ubiquitous than the wristwatch.

In 2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, joined a year later by Apple's App Store, where developers could sell iPhone "apps" which made the phone a device not just for making calls but also for managing money, editing photos, playing games and social networking. And in 2010, Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch computer that took off even though market analysts said no one really needed one.

By 2011, Apple had become the second-largest company of any kind in the United States by market value. In August, it briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company.

Under Jobs, the company cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for each of its new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his customers wanted, and where demand didn't exist, he leveraged a cult-like following to create it.

When he spoke at Apple presentations, almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black mock turtleneck, legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He often boasted about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda ? "one more thing" ? before introducing its latest ambitious idea.

In later years, Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues about his health. Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of pancreatic cancer ? an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He underwent surgery and said he had been cured. In 2009, following weight loss he initially attributed to a hormonal imbalance, he abruptly took a six-month leave. During that time, he received a liver transplant that became public two months after it was performed.

He went on another medical leave in January 2011, this time for an unspecified duration. He never went back and resigned as CEO in August, though he stayed on as chairman. Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, he didn't reference his illness in his resignation letter.

Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Simpson, then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson, who became a novelist.

Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs of Los Altos, California, a working-class couple who nurtured his early interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA's Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after six months.

"All of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it," he said at a Stanford University commencement address in 2005. "I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out."

When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club ? a group of computer hobbyists ? with Steve Wozniak, a high school friend who was a few years older.

Wozniak's homemade computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. According to Wozniak, Jobs suggested the name after visiting an "apple orchard" that Wozniak said was actually a commune.

Their first creation was the Apple I ? essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.

The Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age 25.

During a 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that allowed people to control computers with the click of a mouse, not typed commands. He returned to Apple and ordered his engineering team to copy what he had seen.

It foreshadowed a propensity to take other people's concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful products. Under Jobs, Apple didn't invent computers, digital music players or smartphones ? it reinvented them for people who didn't want to learn computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of keeping their gadgets working.

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," Jobs said in an interview for the 1996 PBS series "Triumph of the Nerds."

The engineers responded with two computers. The pricier Lisa ? the same name as his daughter ? launched to a cool reception in 1983. The less-expensive Macintosh, named for an employee's favorite apple, exploded onto the scene in 1984.

The Mac was heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George Orwell's "1984" and captured Apple's iconoclastic style. In the ad, expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen, which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the arrival of the Mac.

There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi, John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part because few programs had been written for it.

With Apple's stock price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the board and left Apple within months.

"What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating," Jobs said in his Stanford speech. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

He got into two other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.

Pixar, ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless money pit. Then in 1995 came "Toy Story," the first computer-animated full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal with Disney for Pixar's next two films, "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story 2." Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock in a deal that got him a seat on Disney's board and 138 million shares of stock that accounted for most of his fortune. Forbes magazine estimated Jobs was worth $7 billion in a survey last month.

With Next, Jobs came up with a cube-shaped computer. He was said to be obsessive about the tiniest details, insisting on design perfection even for the machine's guts. The machine cost a pricey $6,500 to $10,000, and he never managed to spark much demand for it.

Ultimately, he shifted the focus to software ? a move that paid off later when Apple bought Next for its operating system technology, the basis for the software still used in Mac computers.

By 1996, when Apple bought Next, Apple was in dire financial straits. It had lost more than $800 million in a year, dragged its heels in licensing Mac software for other computers and surrendered most of its market share to PCs that ran Windows.

Larry Ellison, Jobs' close friend and fellow Silicon Valley billionaire and the CEO of Oracle Corp., publicly contemplated buying Apple in early 1997 and ousting its leadership. The idea fizzled, but Jobs stepped in as interim chief later that year.

He slashed unprofitable projects, narrowed the company's focus and presided over a new marketing push to set the Mac apart from Windows, starting with a campaign encouraging computer users to "Think different."

Apple's first new product under his direction, the brightly colored, plastic iMac, launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first year. Apple returned to profitability that year. Jobs dropped the "interim" from his title in 2000.

He changed his style, too, said Tim Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for Creative Strategies.

"In the early days, he was in charge of every detail. The only way you could say it is, he was kind of a control freak," he said. In his second stint, "he clearly was much more mellow and more mature."

In the decade that followed, Jobs kept Apple profitable while pushing out an impressive roster of new products.

Apple's popularity exploded in the 2000s. The iPod, smaller and sleeker with each generation, introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget.

The arrival of the iTunes music store in 2003 gave people a convenient way to buy music legally online, song by song. For the music industry, it was a mixed blessing. The industry got a way to reach Internet-savvy people who, in the age of Napster, were growing accustomed to downloading music free. But online sales also hastened the demise of CDs and established Apple as a gatekeeper, resulting in battles between Jobs and music executives over pricing and other issues.

Jobs' command over gadget lovers and pop culture swelled to the point that, on the eve of the iPhone's launch in 2007, faithful followers slept on sidewalks outside posh Apple stores for the chance to buy one. Three years later, at the iPad's debut, the lines snaked around blocks and out through parking lots, even though people had the option to order one in advance.

The decade was not without its glitches. In the mid-2000s, Apple was swept up in a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into stock options backdating, a practice that artificially raised the value of options grants. But Jobs and Apple emerged unscathed after two former executives took the fall and eventually settled with the SEC.

Jobs' personal ethos ? a natural food lover who embraced Buddhism and New Age philosophy ? was closely linked to the public persona he shaped for Apple. Apple itself became a statement against the commoditization of technology ? a cynical view, to be sure, from a company whose computers can cost three or more times as much as those of its rivals.

For technology lovers, buying Apple products has meant gaining entrance to an exclusive club. At the top was a complicated and contradictory figure who was endlessly fascinating ? even to his detractors, of which Jobs had many. Jobs was a hero to techno-geeks and a villain to partners he bullied and to workers whose projects he unceremoniously killed or claimed as his own.

Unauthorized biographer Alan Deutschman described him as "deeply moody and maddeningly erratic." In his personal life, Jobs denied for two years that he was the father of Lisa, the baby born to his longtime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978.

Few seemed immune to Jobs' charisma and will. He could adeptly convince those in his presence of just about anything ? even if they disagreed again when he left the room and his magic wore off.

"He always has an aura around his persona," said Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for more than 20 years as a Creative Strategies analyst. "When you talk to him, you know you're really talking to a brilliant mind."

But Bajarin also remembers Jobs lashing out with profanity at an employee who interrupted their meeting. Jobs, the perfectionist, demanded greatness from everyone at Apple.

Jobs valued his privacy, but some details of his romantic and family life have been uncovered. In the early 1980s, Jobs dated the folk singer Joan Baez, according to Deutschman.

In 1989, Jobs spoke at Stanford's graduate business school and met his wife, Laurene Powell, who was then a student. When she became pregnant, Jobs at first refused to marry her. It was a near-repeat of what had happened more than a decade earlier with then-girlfriend Brennan, Deutschman said, but eventually Jobs relented.

Jobs started looking for his biological family in his teens, according to an interview he gave to The New York Times in 1997. He found his biological sister when he was 27. They became friends, and through her Jobs met his biological mother. Few details of those relationships have been made public.

But the extent of Apple secrecy didn't become clear until Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with ? and "cured" of ? a rare form of operable pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. The company had sat on the news of his diagnosis for nine months while Jobs tried trumping the disease with a special diet, Fortune magazine reported in 2008.

In the years after his cancer was revealed, rumors about Jobs' health would spark runs on Apple stock as investors worried the company, with no clear succession plan, would fall apart without him. Apple did little to ease those concerns. It kept the state of Jobs' health a secret for as long as it could, then disclosed vague details when, in early 2009, it became clear he was again ill.

Jobs took a half-year medical leave of absence starting in January 2009, during which he had a liver transplant. Apple did not disclose the procedure at the time; two months later, The Wall Street Journal reported the fact and a doctor at the transplant hospital confirmed it.

In January 2011, Jobs announced another medical leave, his third, with no set duration. He returned to the spotlight briefly in March to personally unveil a second-generation iPad and again in June, when he showed off Apple's iCloud music synching service. At both events, he looked frail in his signature jeans and mock turtleneck.

Less than three months later, Jobs resigned as CEO. In a letter addressed to Apple's board and the "Apple community" Jobs said he "always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come."

In 2005, following the bout with cancer, Jobs delivered Stanford University's commencement speech.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," he said. "Because almost everything ? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure ? these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

Jobs is survived by his biological mother; his sister Mona Simpson; Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Brennan; wife Laurene, and their three children, Erin, Reed and Eve.

___

AP Technology Writers Michael Liedtke and Rachel Metz in San Francisco and AP Writer Brooke Donald in Cupertino contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2011-10-06-US-Obit-Jobs/id-deccd5c32e124aa9b51d57d236c95342

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