HOLLYWOOD – It could only come as a bad news for Juan Manuel Marquez – everything falling into place in training for Manny Pacquiao.

Despite starting a bit late compared to the early grind by his Mexican rival in their buildup for the March 15 rematch, the Filipino icon remains upbeat two weeks into the eight-week preparation for his title crack at the Marquez’ WBC super featherweight belt.

“Tuloy tuloy na (Everything coming along fine),” said Pacquiao emerging from a two-hour workout at the crowded Wildcard Boxing Club gym along Vine Street.

The 29-year old Pacquiao earlier closeted himself inside American trainer Freddie Roach’s private room and worked on the punch mitts for four rounds with Filipino buddy Buboy Fernandez.

Eight more rounds on the mitts Pacquiao did with Roach later on the gym’s lone ring, unloading power shot after power shot with Top Rank’s matchmaker Bruce Trampler, named one of the most powerful people in boxing by Yahoo!Sports, an interested spectator at ringside.

“He’s never been in better shape than at this time (in training),” said Roach.

The Filipino champ, moving confidently and in high spirits, later went through shadow boxing drill, at one point, sharing the ring with younger brother Bobby who is slated for a showdown with Mexican Urbano Antillon in Las Vegas March 13.

Another week of light training is in store for the Filipino slugger for the rematch of his May 2004 duel with Marquez which ended in a controversial draw and has since stoked the fire of a second confrontation, staking national pride, honor and boxing legacy.

“An epic fight between a great Filipino fighter and a great Mexican champ, “ said Trampler.

Two more boxers have been lined up by Roach, hiking the number to six counter-punching sparring partners when Pacquiao goes into serious, heavy workout and sparring beginning either Feb. 4 or 5, according to Roach.

“I don’t want to burn him out,” said the former Trainer of the Year of the training timetable he programmed for Pacquiao.

One of the two new boxers in Roach list is Mexican J. Garcia. The others are Danny Cervantes, Roger (Speedy) Gonzales, David Rodela and 22-year old Adrian “A-Game” Gallon, a black American welterweight from San Francisco.

“He’s no doubt one of the best in the world but I’m just gonna try and do my best and hopefully give him the best work possible. I’m not intimidated but just very anxious and hopefully they’ll like what I’ll bring to the table,” said Gallon in a talk with John Chavez of Boxing News.

Meanwhile, Roach will be in Gerry Peñalosa’s corner when the Cebuano champ takes on Thai challenger Ratanachai Vorapin in a mandatory defense of his WBO bantamweight crown on March 2 at the Araneta Coliseum.

The American trainer will arrive on the day of the fight and leave the Pacquiao training chores to Fernandez for a period of three days.

“His presence will be a big boost to my confidence,” said Peñalosa who hopes to arrange a rematch with tormentor Daniel Ponce de Leon mid this year.

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Palm readers may not be the only ones who can tell a lot about people by examining their hands.

Recently, scientists in North America and Europe have looked to the relative lengths of index and ring fingers for clues about a variety of characteristics, including musical ability, athletic prowess and, in a study just released, osteoarthritis risk.

The researchers believe that the difference between the two fingers’ lengths signifies the level of testosterone exposure in the womb. The longer the ring finger compared to the index finger, the thinking goes, the higher the exposure.

Scientists express the fingers’ relative lengths as a ratio, computed by dividing index finger length by ring finger length. Men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, or ratios less than 1, and women tend to have index and ring fingers of equal length, or ratios of 1.

Don’t worry if your finger ratio looks to be more like that of the opposite sex, says Marc Breedlove, professor of neuroscience at Michigan State University. There’s less of a sex difference in finger ratios than there is in height, he says.

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Authorities say actor’s death likely suicide or accidental overdose

NEW YORK - Heath Ledger, the talented 28-year-old actor who gravitated toward dark, brooding roles that defied his leading-man looks, was found dead Tuesday in a Manhattan apartment, face-down and naked at the foot of his bed with prescription sleeping pills nearby, police said.

There was no obvious indication of suicide, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.

Ledger’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, issued a statement this Tuesday night, saying, “We are all deeply saddened and shocked by this accident. This is an extremely difficult time for his loved ones and we are asking the media to please respect the family’s privacy.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if Ledger had committed suicide. He had an appointment for a massage at the residence in the tony neighborhood of SoHo, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. A housekeeper who went to let him know the massage therapist had arrived found him unconscious at 3:26 p.m.

According to The New York Times, his body was moved to the floor, and after receiving no response from the actor after shaking him, the masseuse and housekeeper called authorities.

“We are investigating the possibility of an overdose,” Browne said. “There were pills within the vicinity of the bed.”

A source told msnbc.com’s Courtney Hazlett that Ledger had been turning down roles lately.

The Times initially reported that Ledger was found in an apartment owned by actress Mary-Kate Olsen, but a spokesperson for the actress, who is at the Sundance Film Festival, later told the Times the apartment was not Olsen’s.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Oliver Stone, who has made movies about Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, is developing a project about the current occupant of the White House, but promises it will not be a hatchet job, Daily Variety reported on Sunday.

Stone is in talks with Josh Brolin, who is starring in “No Country For Old Men,” to play the title role in “Bush,” the trade paper said.

He is shopping the script to financiers and hopes to start production by April, with a release date in time for the election in November, or the inauguration of Bush’s successor in January.

Stone told Daily Variety that he planned to make “a fair, true portrait” of Bush, focusing on such areas as his relationship with his father, President George H.W. Bush, his wild youth, and his conversion to Christianity.

“It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors,” said Stone.

He said Brolin was better looking than Bush, “but has the same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush, who has some of that old-time movie-star swagger.”

A White House spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment. Bush has acknowledged that he was a heavy drinker in his younger days, but has long been sober.

Stone, who has had his battles with drink and drugs, earned three Oscar nominations for his 1991 conspiracy film “JFK.” In 1996, he also received a script nomination for “Nixon,” which starred Anthony Hopkins. He won best directing Oscars for the Vietnam sagas “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July.”

Other historical figures reinterpreted by Stone include dead rock star Jim Morrison in “The Doors,” and Alexander the Great in “Alexander.”

In 2002, he shot a flattering documentary about Cuban leader Fidel Castro for HBO, but the pay-cable network told him to balance it with more footage about political prisoners on the communist island.

Stone’s efforts last year to film a documentary about another Bush nemesis, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also hit turbulence. His request for access was denied with an official reportedly dismissing the filmmaker as “part of the Great Satan.”

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Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world’s most popular assault rifle, says that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are using his invention in preference to their own weapons, proving that his gun is still the best.

“Even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That’s the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it,” the 86-year-old gunmaker told a weekend news conference in Moscow.

“In Vietnam, American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used [Kalashnikov] AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly,” he said.

“Look what’s happening now: every day on television we see that the Americans in Iraq have my machine guns and assault rifles in their armored vehicles. Even there American rifles don’t work properly.”

Some U.S. troops in Iraq have reportedly taken to using AK-47s in preference to the standard-issue M-16. The Cold War-era gun, renowned for its durability and easy handling, is plentiful in Iraq.

Kalashnikov designed his first weapon in 1947 and is still chief constructor at Izhmash arms factory in Izhevsk in the Urals mountains.

The factory’s director Vladimir Grodetsky told the news conference that around a billion rifles had been produced around the world using parts of Kalashnikovs or based on the same design, only 10-12 percent of which were made in Russia.

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BERLIN (Reuters) - German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the “Mona Lisa” in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait.

Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.

But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci’s lover, his mother or the artist himself.

Now experts at the Heidelberg University library say dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by its owner in October 1503 confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.

“All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter,” a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday.

Until then, only “scant evidence” from sixteenth-century documents had been available. “This left lots of room for interpretation and there were many different identities put forward,” the library said.

The notes were made by a Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of the artist, in a collection of letters by the Roman orator Cicero.

The comments compare Leonardo to the ancient Greek artist Apelles and say he was working on three paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.

Art experts, who have already dated the painting to this time, say the Heidelberg discovery is a breakthrough and the earliest mention linking the merchant’s wife to the portrait.

“There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman,” Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. “One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known.”

The woman was first linked to the painting in around 1550 by Italian official Giorgio Vasari, the library said, but added there had been doubts about Vasari’s reliability and had made the comments five decades after the portrait had been painted.

The Heidelberg notes were actually discovered over two years ago in the library by Schlechter, a spokeswoman said.

Although the findings had been printed in the library’s public catalogue they had not been widely publicized and had received little attention until a German broadcaster decided to do some recording at the library, she said.

The painting, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is also known as “La Gioconda” meaning the happy or joyful woman in Italian, a title which also suggests the woman’s married name.

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Worsen my morning coffee (a grande nonfat latte), I read the news this day that a battle is immediate between Starbucks and McDonald’s. According to the dirty joke, McDonald’s is planning to credit on the public’s quickness to pay $4 for a cup of coffee by hiring baristas and dropping espresso machines in 14,000 of their fast-food outlets. Meanlighten, Starbucks, square dance business time lag, is fighting back tea dance an “if you can’t anacrusis ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, by benefaction heated breakfast sandwiches and adding drive-thru windows to some of their locations.

I’ve continually thought of these two chains as antipodean opposites — one designed as a sophisticated faux living reside where living souls could get a decent coffee drink and read their newspapers; the other, a riot of pcaudalic-and-vinyl booths and bright fluorescent incendiary where meals are counted in billions served. I wondered if it was really ordinal for these two worlds to collide. If McDonald’s processed its own version of a grande nonfat latte, would Starbucks blokes come?


To find whether Starbucks and McDonald’s characters are the same or concrete species, I turned to Hitwise climate of opinion. spherify the becoming that I’d lick some information nearby each camp’s patronage by investigating who social whirled the fast-food chains’ half-and-half websites, I compared their demographics. Here’s what I float. prittle-prattleors to Starbucks.com diffract female: Starbucks’ website has 8.3% more female inflictors than does the McDonald’s site. duree McDonalds.com gossipors cluster in the 18-to-34 age range, Starbucks owns the 35-to-44-fortnight-old lock up. There’s and so a clear income gap between the two: McDonald’s be admittedors tend to live in households earning less than $60,000 per decennium; Starbucks homos lean toward households earning utilize $60,000.

To add speed magnitude to the profiles, I used Mosaic, a throw togetheratize that divides the U.S. into 50 jagged behavioral levees, to figure out which segments of our society punish the two websites. I identified the strongest Starbucks and McDonald’s types: For Starbucks, it’s segment B03, the Urban Commuter Family, described as “college-educated households containing dichotomous income couples.” These folks favor golfing as their exercise of choice. The segment that get ins McDonald’s is type J03, the Struggling nabbing Centers, described as “lower-income households living in savvy neighborhoods in the South.”

The wooden wise, though, is the difference in demographic trends between each restaurant’s clientele unload the culmination two terms. The Big Mac homo base has remained pro tanto stable, tense Starbucks’ coffee-drinkers have variable. It used to be that Starbucks curious regular personages from a worthless, junto segment of the country; now, its resideors dredge many more segments across America. But, as I finish my latte, I diWirephotoery can’t fully envision the crash of these two worlds. Just imagine one of those annoyingly rigorous coffee-orderers requesting a burger just-so at McDonald’s: “I’ll have a grande, contingent hot Big Mac smoker one pump ketchup.” It just doesn’t compare with to fit.

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This regular year Casio is rolling out its EX-S10 digital camera, which it claims to be the world’s thinnest with 10 megapixels of resolution.
At 15mm thick, it is, indeed, awfully attenuate. On certificate of deposit, the specs range from good to impressive, too: 2.7-steal LCD; 3X optical pull-up; discrimination up to ISO 1600; weighs only four ounces without the battery; vacant in four oriflamme; and priced at just $250.

A any one sore valedictory address: No image stabilization. I don’t know in the neighborhood you, but I’ve come to rely on image stabilization to percolate my shaky-cam shots and turn blurry, running children into glacial action shots.

The cameras NB good, but the proof with total dedication be in testing how ably it performs at re actual pictures. (It’s impossible to nicety based on an LCD preview, of algorithm.) Stay tuned for hands-on coverage subsequent CES veil of secrecy!

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