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YouTube Rewind 2012: The top videos of the year


With the end of the year (and the world) right around the corner, it's time for YouTube's annual rewind, which features the most-watched videos of the year.
And we've been watching a lot of videos, according to a Google blog post. 4 billion hours of video a month, to be exact, a habit that helped to fuel Korean pop star Psy's viral horse dance to a ridiculous 971 million views. Compare that with last year's winner, Rebecca Black's "Friday," which had less than 200 million views at the same time last year.
"This year, Korean Pop music transcended boundaries and took the world by storm," the company wrote in a blog post. "Cover songs, parodies, and "do-it-yourself" music videos from all genres entertained us in countries near and far.
And you participated in conversations at a global scale, uploading videos to share ideas on everything from nonprofit campaigns, to political satire, to new and surprising voices and talents. Plus, all over the world, you tuned in for the most up-to-date news footage of presidential elections, natural disasters and more."
Here are this year's top 10 winners:

                                                                                  1. PSY - GANGNAM STYLE


                                           2. Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover)





3. KONY 2012



4. "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen - Feat. Justin Bieber, Selena, Ashley Tisdale & MORE!

Instagram takes back policy change, says users' photos won't appear in ads


SAN FRANCISCO –  Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service now owned by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove language from its new terms of service suggesting that users' photos could appear in advertisements.
The language in question had appeared in updated policies announced Monday and scheduled to take effect Jan. 16. After an outcry on social media and privacy rights blogs, the company clarified that it has no plans to put users' photos in ads.
That said, Instagram maintains that it was created to become a business and would like to experiment with various forms of advertisements to make money. Instagram doesn't currently run any ads. As of now, the free service has no way to make money and brings in no revenue to Facebook.
"Our main goal is to avoid things likes advertising banners you see in other apps that would hurt the Instagram user experience," Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
What had riled users and privacy advocates was Instagram's new assertion that it may now receive payments from businesses to use its members' photos, user name and other data "in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation" to them.
Instagram didn't offer many details at the time. Its blog post on Monday made no mention of ads or other commercial activities, though it offered links to the new privacy policy and terms of service. Those documents spell out what the service could do, but say little about actual plans.

Police find no evidence Connecticut gunman was on medication


While Newtown buried two more young victims Tuesday in the shooting massacre, authorities said they found no evidence the gunman who killed 27 people was being medicated for mental illness.
Investigators searching the Connecticut home gunman Adam Lanza shared with his mother, Nancy Lanza, seized cellphones, computers and computer games, but found nothing at the residence to indicate he was taking medication, Hearst Connecticut Newspapers reported. 
Authorities armed with search warrants are still working to obtain the 20-year-old man's medical records, according to the report. Lanza's parents told friends and divorce mediators that their son had Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, but it was unclear if he had ever been formally diagnosed.
Lanza opened fire Friday morning inside the Sandy Hook elementary school, killing 20 young children and six adults. He shot and killed his 52-year-old mother inside her home before driving to the nearby school. Nancy Lanza was shot four times in the head, likely as she slept, authorities said Tuesday.   

Tau Ceti's planets nearest around single, Sun-like star


Artists' conception of Tau Ceti solar systemAn artist's impression shows the five-planet system; from there, our Sun appears in the constellation Bootes

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The nearest single Sun-like star to the Earth hosts five planets - one of which is in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist, astronomers say.
Tau Ceti's planetary quintet - reported in an online paper that will appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics - was found in existing planet-hunting data.
The study's refined methods of sifting through data should help find even more far-flung worlds.
The star now joins Alpha Centauri as a nearby star known to host planets.
In both those cases, the planets were found not by spying them through a telescope but rather by measuring the subtle effects they have on their host stars' light.

Exoplanets

Artist's impression of an exoplanet
  • An exoplanet is a planet that exists outside our Solar System
  • Most are giant planets believed to resemble Jupiter or Neptune
  • The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, orbiting a pulsar
  • A few years later, the planet 51 Pegasi B was found orbiting a star similar to the Sun
  • Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been found since
In the gravitational dance of a planet around a star, the planet does most of the moving. But the star too is tugged slightly to and fro as the planet orbits, and these subtle movements of the star show up as subtle shifts in the colour of the star's light we see from Earth.

UBS fined $1.5bn for Libor rigging


UBS is the second major bank to be fined for manipulating the Libor interest rate

Big Banking

Swiss banking giant UBS has agreed to pay $1.5bn (£940m) to US, UK and Swiss regulators for attempting to manipulate the Libor inter-bank lending rate.
It becomes the second major bank to be fined over Libor after Barclays was ordered to pay $450m to UK and US authorities in the summer.
Regulators worldwide are investigating a number of banks for rigging Libor.
Libor tracks the average rate at which the major international banks based in London lend money to each other.
The bank also admitted to manipulating Euribor and Tibor - the equivalent interest rates set by lenders in the eurozone and in Tokyo.
It is the second-largest set of fines imposed on a bank to date, after the $1.9bn that HSBC agreed to pay US authorities earlier this month to settle allegations of money-laundering.

North Korea holds little sway in South Korea's election


(CNN) -- Security issues concerning North Korea have not become a major issue for South Korean voters, even after the controversial rocket launch that drew international condemnation last week.
The most pressing issues for South Koreans at the polls on Wednesday, are similar to the ones that dominated U.S. voterswhen they cast their ballots in November -- the economy.
Polls showed that North-South relations ranked fifth in the most salient issues to the Korean public, falling far behind job creation, economic issues and education. Less than 10% prioritized relations with Pyongyang, according to polls by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
"Threat perception overall toward North Korea has somewhat waned," said Jong Kun Choi, an associate professor of political sciences and international studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.
After the announcement of North Korea's missile launch, about half of the respondents in a poll said they expected the rocket to have no effect in the election. "The best reading of the data suggests that the launch will not have a strong impact on the election," according to the Asan Institute's report.

Shipping looks to clean up its act


Singapore (CNN) -- At nearly the length of four football pitches, the container ship Eugen Maersk takes some stopping when traveling at full speed -- around 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) before it can come to a complete halt.
It can also burn through 250 tons of highly polluting bunker fuel each day when at sea, but while berthed in Singapore last month the ship was trying its best to keep a low profile, at least in terms of its impact on the environment.
The 397-meter long vessel was running on a low-sulfur fuel while in port, something its owners say reduces toxic sulfur dioxide emissions by 85%.
Financially, the shipping industry is in the doldrums, suffering from over capacity and high oil prices. With tough times have come new ideas on how to cut costs and improve the environmental impact of shipping.

Three people charged over man's body dumped outside Frankston Hospital


TWO men and a woman have been charged over the death of a man shot and dumped outside Frankston Hospital.
The 24-year-old Frankston man was found on the corner of Hastings Rd and Clarendon St at  2.45am on Thursday, December 22, 2011.

A 61-year-old man from Hastings, a 29-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman, both from Carrum Downs faced an out-of -sessions overnight.

The men were charged with murder, while the woman was charged with perverting the course of justice.

They have been remanded in custody and will appear at the Melbourne Magistrates' Court today.

The man was discovered after another man, covered in blood, turned up to the hospital claiming that someone had been shot.

The champagne is on ice, the fireworks are exploding overhead and the guests are getting down to some funky sounds -- but isn't your New Year's Eve party a bit, well, last year?
Not everyone spends the last night of December carousing like the dawn will bring a Mayan apocalypse, yet they still manage to have a great evening.Not everyone spends the last night of December carousing like the dawn will bring a Mayan apocalypse, yet they still manage to have a great evening. Read More..

Shooting victim's dad: 'This world is a better place because she has been in it'


(CNN) -- Robbie Parker has a message for the family of the gunman who killed his 6-year-old daughter and 19 of her school mates.
"I can't imagine how hard this experience must be for you, and I want you to know that our family and our love and our support goes out to you as well," Parker said, as he remembered his oldest girl, Emilie Alice.
Emilie died Friday at the hands of a gunman who opened fire at her elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Read More ...
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