The games that were the most fun to play and the hardest to put down in 2011. In-Game's Todd kenreck reports.
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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/in-game/45770563/
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December 19, 2011
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Matt Postmus (Senior; Kalamazoo, Michigan) and Will McClain (Senior; Miller, South Dakota) were all repeat selections after earning the honor in 2010.? Postmus missed much of this season with an injury and earned all-GPAC honors during his career while playing linebacker for the Defenders.? McClain played defensive back for the Defenders and earned Capital One/CoSIDA Academic NAIA All-American Second-Team honors.? McClain is majoring in biology.
Ben Dixon (Senior; Kingman, Kansas) and Sam Du Mez (Senior; Brookfield, Wisconsin) earned the honor for the first time this season.? Dixon is an education major and played linebacker for the Defenders this season.? Du Mez is an engineering major and leaves the Defender football program as the career leader in catches, receiving yardage and receiving touchdowns.
Jordan Huisman (Junior; Orange City, Iowa), Alex Hein (Junior; Brewster, Minnesota) and Jonathan Luetchens (Junior; Murdock, Nebraska) all earned the honor for the first time as well.? Huisman started at center for the Defenders this season and is a business administration major.? Hein was on special teams and was a defensive back for the Defenders and majors in education.? Luetchens, along with McClain earned Capital One/CoSIDA Academic NAIA All-American Second-Team honors.? Luetchens also earned honorable mention from the GPAC this season and is majoring in agriculture: biotechnology.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced 244 football student-athletes have been named 2011 Daktronics-NAIA Scholar-Athletes.
Student-athletes are nominated by their institution's head coach and must maintain a minimum grade point average of 3.5 on a 4.0 scale and must have achieved a junior academic status in order qualify for the honor.
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Source: http://www.dordt.edu/cgi-bin/news/get_news.pl?id=5384
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FILE - In this Aug. 23, 2008 file photo, Japan's Yu Darvish pitches against USA in their bronze medal baseball game at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing. USA won 8-4. Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
FILE - In this Aug. 23, 2008 file photo, Japan's Yu Darvish pitches against USA in their bronze medal baseball game at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing. USA won 8-4. Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
FILE - In this Sept. 5, 2007 file photo, Nippon Ham Fighters starter Yu Darvish pitches against the Orix Buffaloes in Osaka, western Japan. Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, File) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, FRANCE, HONG KONG, JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA
FILE - In this file photo taken on May 21, 2010, Nippon Ham Fighters starter Yu Darvish pitches against the Yokohama BayStars during their baseball game in Sapporo, northern Japan. Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. The 25-year-old right-hander, considered the best pitcher in the Japanese professional leagues, wrote on his blog that he had decided to use the posting system, which allows MLB teams to bid for the negotiating rights to Japanese players who have yet to become free agents. (AP Photo/Kyodo News) JAPAN OUT MANDATORY FOR COMMERCIAL USE ONLY IN NORTH AMERICA
FILE - In this Aug. 13, 2008 file photo, Japan's pitcher Yu Darvish delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against Cuba at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 6, 2011 file photo, Nippon Ham Fighters pitcher Yu Darvish smiles at a press conference in Sapporo, northern Japan, after a new contract signing that makes him the highest-paid player in Japanese professional baseball. Darvish ended months of speculation Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 by saying he intends to make a move to Major League Baseball. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, File) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, FRANCE, HONG KONG, JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA
NEW YORK (AP) ? After losing a pair of aces in the last two years, the Texas Rangers are going global to land a new one.
Winner of consecutive AL pennants, Texas also won the Yu Darvish sweepstakes Monday night with a record bid of $51.7 million. Now, the Rangers get 30 days to negotiate a contract with Darvish that would put Japan's best pitcher at the top of their rotation.
"Obviously, it's a very exciting night for our organization, our fans and our community," general manager Jon Daniels said on a conference call.
Major League Baseball announced that the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan's Pacific League accepted the highest bid for Darvish. That sealed offer was submitted under the posting system by the Rangers.
"Our ownership went the extra mile on this one," Daniels said, declining to reveal specifics.
A person familiar with the details said the winning bid by Texas was $51.7 million ? more than the $51.1 million posting fee the Boston Red Sox paid for Daisuke Matsuzaka in 2006. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the figure was not made public.
Yahoo Sports and The New York Times reported the amount first.
Darvish is considered the best pitcher in the Japanese professional leagues and several of baseball's biggest spenders were thought to be interested in him.
If the Rangers can close the deal, the 25-year-old right-hander would join a rotation that already includes five starters: Colby Lewis, Derek Holland, Matt Harrison, Alexi Ogando and former closer Neftali Feliz, moved out of the bullpen when the club signed free-agent reliever Joe Nathan this offseason.
"If we're able to sign him (Darvish), then we'll have a very good problem on our hands," Daniels said.
It's a dynamic endeavor for the Rangers, buoyed by a lucrative television contract and back-to-back AL championships under a new ownership group led by Chuck Greenberg and his partner, Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan. But the team is still chasing its first World Series title ? and Texas knows all too well that nothing is done until it is done.
Despite a serious effort, the Rangers were unable to re-sign star pitcher Cliff Lee following the 2010 season. They made it back to the World Series anyway and were within one strike of winning it all ? twice ? before the St. Louis Cardinals rallied to take the trophy.
Then the Rangers lost their latest ace, C.J. Wilson, when the left-hander agreed to a $77.5 million, five-year contract with the AL West rival Los Angeles Angels this month.
"Our commitment of our ownership is to put the best team out there. The last couple of years we just haven't been able to close it out," Daniels said.
Bidding for the posting fee closed last Wednesday, and the Ham Fighters had until 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday to accept. The fee will be paid only if a contract agreement is reached with Darvish's agents, Arn Tellem and Don Nomura.
If no deal is finalized, Darvish returns to the Fighters for another season.
Two months ago, the Rangers let a championship slip away. They don't want the same thing to happen with Darvish.
In a statement released before the conference call, the Rangers said they were "pleased and excited" to win the rights to negotiate with Darvish.
"Our organization has scouted Mr. Darvish for the last several years and has been very impressed with his abilities and accomplishments. We believe he would be a great addition to the Texas Rangers pitching staff," the team said. "We look forward to beginning the next step of this process in the very near future."
Darvish, the son of an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, went 18-6 with a 1.44 ERA last season. He had 276 strikeouts to lead the Pacific League.
The Fighters gave him approval to negotiate with a major league club through the posting system. Matsuzaka and Ichiro Suzuki went to the majors under the same system.
Darvish pitched in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was a member of the Japanese national team that won the 2009 World Baseball Classic.
The 6-foot-5 Darvish has superb control and throws seven effective pitches. It's expected he would make a front-line major league starter, though the MLB track record of Japanese aces is shaky.
"Darvish is the No. 1 pitcher in Japan, but we want him to become the ace of the world," Nippon Ham team representative Toshimasa Shimada said this month.
Darvish turned pro in 2005 at 18. His professional career got off to a rocky start when he was caught smoking in a pachinko parlor on an off day during his first spring training, despite not being old enough to legally smoke nor to gamble at the time.
In 2007, Darvish won the Eiji Sawamura Award presented to the top pitcher in Japanese professional baseball after posting a 15-5 record with a 1.82 ERA and a league-leading 210 strikeouts.
The Red Sox signed Matsuzaka in 2006 to a six-year, $52 million contract, taking the total package ? including the posting fee ? to more than $100 million.
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Associated Press Writer Terry Wallace in Dallas and AP Sports Writer Jim Armstrong in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON ? The Senate passed legislation Saturday extending a Social Security payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for just two months, handing President Barack Obama a partial victory while setting the stage for another fight in February.
It also brought a peaceful end to a year-long battle over spending by passing a $1 trillion-plus catchall budget bill that wraps together the day-to-day budgets for 10 Cabinet departments and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House passed the measure Friday, and the White House has signaled that Obama will sign it.
The renewal of the 2-percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax for 160 million workers and unemployment benefits averaging about $300 a week for the additional millions of people who have been out of work for six months or more is a modest step forward for Obama's year-end jobs agenda.
As a condition for GOP support of the payroll tax measure, Obama has to accept a provision that forces him to decide within 60 days whether to approve or reject a proposed a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline that promises thousands of jobs.
Obama didn't reference the pipeline issue in a brief appearance at the White House after the vote. He welcomed the Senate's passage of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance extension and said it would be "inexcusable" for Congress not to extend them for the rest of 2012 when lawmakers return from their holiday break.
The budget bill, passed 67-32, heads to the White House for Obama's signature; the payroll tax measure won a 89-10 tally that send it back to the House ? where many Republicans only reluctantly support it ? for a vote early next week.
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, would not predict whether the House would accept the Senate payroll tax measure, saying GOP leaders would have to discuss it with the rank and file. But Democrats assume Senate Republicans would not have allowed the short-term measure to advance without a signal from Boehner that the House would go along.
Democratic and GOP leaders opted for the short-term extension of the payroll tax and jobless benefits measure after failing to agree on big enough spending cuts to pay for a full-year renewal. The measure also provides a 60-day reprieve from a scheduled 27 percent cut in the fees paid to doctors who treat Medicare patients.
The $33 billion cost of the measure would be covered by raising fees on new mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The fees, drawn from a Treasury Department housing finance market reform plan, would effectively raise the interest rate on home loans guaranteed by the mortgage giants and the Federal Housing Administration by one-tenth of a percentage point.
The idea is to open up the market to private companies currently priced out by the implicit subsidies of Fannie and Freddie.
The White House says the fee would increase the monthly cost of a typical $220,000 mortgage by almost $15 a month. Over 30 years, the fees would increase the total cost of such a mortgage by more than $5,000.
In contrast, a worker making a $100,000 salary would reap a tax cut of about $330 through the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut. A worker with a typical $50,000 salary would get just a $165 tax cut.
Officials said that in private talks, the two sides had hoped to reach agreement on the full one-year extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits that Obama had made the centerpiece of the jobs program he submitted to Congress last fall.
Those efforts failed when the two sides could not agree on enough offsetting cuts to blunt the measure's impact on the debt.
The failure tees up the issue again for early next year, but it won't get any easier to agree on spending cuts.
Neither House Speaker Boehner nor his aides participated in the negotiations, although McConnell said he was optimistic about the measure's chances for final approval. The payroll tax cut is unpopular in GOP ranks and another vote in two months could present a headache for GOP leaders.
On the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, the legislation requires the president to grant a permit unless he makes a determination that it is "not in the national interest." One senior administration official said the president would almost certainly refuse to grant a permit. The official was not authorized to speak publicly.
The White House on Friday backed away from Obama's earlier threat to veto any bill that linked the payroll tax cut extension with a Republican demand for a speedy decision on the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline. Obama said on Dec. 7 that "any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut I will reject. So everybody should be on notice."
The president recently announced he was postponing a decision on the much-studied pipeline until after the 2012 election. Environmentalists oppose the project, but several unions support it. The legislation puts the president in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between customary political allies.
The State Department, in an analysis released this summer, said the pipeline project would create up to 6,000 jobs during construction, while developer TransCanada put the total at 20,000 in direct employment.
The pipeline would carry oil from western Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refineries, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.
The spending bill locks in spending cuts that conservative Republicans won from the White House and Democrats earlier in the year.
Republicans also won their fight to block new federal regulations for light bulb energy efficiency, coal dust in mines and clean water permits for construction of timber roads.
The White House turned back GOP attempts to block limits on greenhouse gases, mountaintop removal mining and hazardous emissions from utility plants, industrial boilers and cement kilns.
___
Associated Press writers David Espo, Alan Fram, Donna Cassata and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
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TEHRAN, Iran ? Iran's state TV broadcast video of a young man Sunday it claimed was a CIA spy who sought to infiltrate Iran's secret services.
The TV identified the man, apparently in his late 20s, as Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an American-Iranian who received special training and served at U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan before heading to Iran for his alleged intelligence mission.
"Their (US intelligence) plan was to initially burn some valuable information, to give it free so that (Iran's) Intelligence Ministry would see the good things and then would contact me," said in a part of the confession that was broadcast.
The voice of an unnamed announcer on the video said U.S. intelligence was certain that Iran's secret services would not ignore the data. Therefore, they provided a mix of correct and false information to mislead Iran's intelligence but tempt it at the same time.
"Iran's intelligence apparatus overcame the thirst and detected the deception, identified the intelligence corridors (Hekmati's alleged link to U,.S. intelligence) ... and contained the infiltration mission," it said.
The TV showed a card with writing in English identifying the bearer as an "army contractor." It also showed several photos of the man identified as Hekmati, some of them in military uniform, together with U.S. army officers.
There was no immediate comment from Washington.
The broadcast said Hekmati was born in Arizona in the U.S. but was of Iranian descent.
In a statement released Saturday, Iran's Intelligence Ministry said its agents identified Hekmati at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Bagram is the main base for American and other international forces outside Kabul.
In the video broadcast on several Iranian TV channels Sunday, Hekmati was shown saying he entered the U.S. Army after finishing high school in 2001 and received military and intelligence training.
Before beginning his mission to Iran, Hekmati said he served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for two years. He said his key responsibility was to identify Iraqi politicians sympathetic to Americans.
His story could not be independently verified.
Iran periodically announces the capture or execution of alleged U.S. or Israeli spies, and often no further information is released.
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Samsung Mobile, in its response to U.S. Sen. Al Franken over the Carrier IQ saga, says that it's sold some 25 million cell phones preloaded with Carrier IQ software, which it's been using since 2007. Many of these phones are non-Android feature phones, and Samsung repeats the response we've already heard from HTC in that it's not a customer of Carrier IQ, therefore it doesn't see the data collected.
Interestingly, Samsung also echoes HTC by saying some of its phones also may contain components of Carrier IQ and therefore may trigger the various CIQ detector apps available, but that the software is "dormant." Unlike HTC, however, Samsung did not say whether it was working to remove these dormant components. Says Samsung:
"Because the CIQ agent and other required CIQ software components are not installed, however, these vestigial elements do not and will not function on these devices, and therefore, the devices do not transmit (and never have transmitted) any user data using any CIQ software functionality."
Samsung did not say which phones contain the dormant CIQ code.
Following are the Android smartphones Samsung says contain Carrier IQ:
More: Samsung's response (pdf)
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/F9G0rg5Df0A/story01.htm
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