Phelps to retire after 2012 Games

No word on whether his teeth will retire as well




The most decorated athlete in Olympic history began a five-day trip to Vancouver by making a little news of his own. Michael Phelps told reporters that the 2012 London Olympics will be his last and that he won't attempt to repeat his eight-gold-medal performance in two years.

"I told myself I will not swim over the age of 30, and I will not swim over the age of 30," he said.

Phelps will be 27 at the London Olympics. He has won 14 gold medals in his career, five more than any other athlete. Though he didn't specifically say how many events he'd do in London, five or six would be the most likely (three relays plus two or three individual events).

Usually you can take athlete promises with a grain of salt — BRETT FAVRE — but Phelps strikes me as the kind of guy who will stay retired. Swimming is a sport for the young and a 31-year-old competing in the Olympics against 19-year-olds doesn't sound like an enviable task, even for the greatest in the history of the sport. Yet, Phelps didn't say he was retiring immediately after London. Could he stick around long enough to lure him back into the pool in 2016?

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Why curling might die

Curlers may be forced to do something athletic




VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Jutting its rounded self from the waters off the west coast of Scotland is Ailsa Craig, an uninhabited 104-acre island that’s home to the only known supply of the granite needed to make a proper curling stone.

It’s called blue hone granite – an intensely hard substance that is uniquely suited to slide smooth and true down a 146-foot long sheet of ice, withstand countless crashes into other stones and prevent even trace amounts of moisture to seep into it. That would cause it to pit and thus move unpredictably.

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In brave move, Obama defies China and meets with Dalai Lama

It's national "Democrats Grow Balls Day" or "Donkey Balls Day" - you're preference

Video: Tiger's apology

He did not, however, apologize to the three women in the world he did NOT sleep with



Watch CBS News Videos Online

Majority Leader Offers Support For Public Option Through Reconciliation

Guess who grew some balls




Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced on Friday afternoon that he would work with other Democrats and the White House to pass a public option through reconciliation if that's the legislative path the party chooses.

"Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition," said Reid aide Rodell Mollineau in a statement provided to the Huffington Post. "That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal. If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes."

This represents a major breakthrough for those Senators and activists who are pushing to get a public option considered via an up or down vote.

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Friends didn't see pilot's passion for IRS feud

The opposite of a real man




AUSTIN, Texas – Joe Stack felt the federal government — especially its tax code — robbed him of his savings and destroyed his career while allowing corrupt executives to walk away with millions.

It's clear from the 3,000-word manifesto posted on a Web site registered in his name that the bitter feud with the Internal Revenue Service was his passion — one so deeply held it apparently drove him to commit suicide Thursday by slamming his single-engine Piper PA-28 into an Austin office building that houses the IRS.

"Nothing changes unless there is a body count," Stack wrote.

It was a passion some of Stack's friends say they never saw.

They knew Stack as a fellow country rocker and band mate who recorded with them in Austin's vibrant music scene. They recalled a quiet father who visited Norway every year to visit a daughter and grandchildren. They never heard Stack talk about politics, about taxes, about the government — the sources of pain Stack claims drove him to his death.

"I read the letter that he wrote. It sounded like his voice but the things he said I had never heard him say," said Pam Parker, an Austin attorney whose husband was one of Stack's band mates.

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Plushenko lashes out, says Lysacek did "material from 20 years ago" and sport is "dying"

We agree with Ivan Drago, er, Plushenko


Plushenko's reaction:

7 Pregnant Athletes

Ooops, we can explain




From Huffington Post:
Kristie Moore is a member of the Canadian curling team at the Vancouver Olympics. While competing in the Olympics is already quite an achievement, Moore is a particularly unusual athlete: she is playing in the Olympics while pregnant. Amazingly, she's not the first Olympian to compete pregnant. Scroll down to see other pregnant competitors -- both at the Olympics and in other sports.

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Wall Street shrugs off Fed move

Is that all you got Fed? Come on, raise the rates some more, we dare you


The attempt by the 11-month risky asset bull run to navigate an inevitable hurdle got off to an inauspicious start on Friday.

Stocks and commodities stumbled in Asian trading and the dollar found favour after traders were caught off guard by the US Federal Reserve’s announcement that it would raise the discount rate it charged banks.

However, a more stoic response from New York traders saw Wall Street reverse early losses and hit a four week high.

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TIGER SPEAKS

Elin and I have started the process of discussing the damage caused by my behavior. As Elin pointed out to me, my real apology to her will not come in the form of words. It will come from my behavior over time.

...

What we say to each other will remain between the two of us. I am also aware of the pain my behavior has caused to those of you in this room. I have let you down. And I have let down my fans.

...

I have let you down personally and professionally.

...

Elin never hit me that night or any other night. There has never been an episode of domestic violence in our marriage. Ever. Elin has shown enormous grace and poise throughout this ordeal. Elin deserves praise, not blame.

...

I convinced myself that normal rules didn't apply.

developing...

Life Expectancy Up, but So Is Poor Health

You can now have a baby, change its diapers and then live long enough for both of you to live until a very old age and have your diapers changed together.

Life expectancy is up, but so is poor health, even though personal health care cost each American $6,219.

That's just a small taste of the 574 pages of data today served up in the CDC's 33rd annual "State of the Nation" report on U.S. health.

What's new?

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Yahoo, Microsoft make search pact official (FAQ)

What's your take of this merger? Let us know....




How did we get here?
Slowly. Microsoft and Yahoo have been talking about various combinations of acquisitions, partnerships, and alliances since 2008, before finally settling on the current deal after their disastrous acquisition talks led to Yahoo's hiring of CEO Carol Bartz. The deal was held up pending regulatory review, since just about any time that two companies in a three-company market propose joining forces, regulators will want to examine the potential aftermath.

What will change on Yahoo's site?
The changes could be very difficult to notice. Microsoft is now providing the back-end technology that generates search results and search ads based on query keywords. But Yahoo will control how those results are presented, meaning it can add all sorts of structured content like statistics for baseball players or movie times at local theaters to search queries.


What will change for Microsoft?
Microsoft will have to give up control of its major search advertisers to Yahoo's sales force in exchange for increasing its market share. Microsoft will also get to pick and choose from among Yahoo's assortment of back-end search technology developed over the years, and a certain number of Yahoo employees will now work for Microsoft.

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The CoOlDiGgY Olympics Daily Rundown

*EVAN LYSACEK WINS GOLD

*Mancuso wins third medal




*Lindsey crashes, loses chance at 2nd gold. Still hot


*Double the fun as USA's Hannah Teter (silver) and Kelly Clark (bronze) take medals in halfpipe

*USA still on top of Medal Count

CoOlDiGgY celebrates Black History Month: Alicia Keys

All that and a music genius, too

Google Gets US Approval to Buy and Sell Energy

Here's "Google Oil's" likely logo...




Google has received federal approval to buy and sell energy on the open market, giving it more options for the way it powers its data centers and opening the door to a potential move into the energy-trading business.

Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved its application Thursday, granting Google "market-based rate authorization," or the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis.

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Andrea Friedman, actress from "Family Guy" sets the record straight

In an e-mail message sent on Thursday to The New York Times, Ms. Friedman wrote:

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is “sarcasm.”

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.

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RELATED: More from Andrea

States face serious pension woes: $1 trillion short

Retirement is overrated anyway


At the core of state budget problems in the US is something that goes beyond the recent recession: poorly managed pension systems for public employees.

That’s the conclusion of an in-depth analysis released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States in Washington. The unfunded liabilities exceed $1 trillion and could force difficult choices upon many states, the nonprofit research group said.

The problem is not a new one, but it has grown worse in the past year. And, on a day when President Obama called for a new commission to propose fixes to the federal budget, it’s a reminder that Congress doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea of making promises without figuring out how to pay for them.

“To a significant degree, the $1 trillion gap reflects states’ own policy choices and lack of discipline,” the Pew Center report concludes.

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Malware crashed systems during Windows security updates

We have long ago left Microsoft because we got the blue screen so much we thought it was our screensaver




Windows systems that crashed during the latest Microsoft security update last week did so because they were infected with a rootkit program that made changes to the operating system kernel, Microsoft said late on Wednesday.

"The restarts are the result of modifications the Alureon rootkit makes to Windows Kernel binaries, which places these systems in an unstable state," Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote in a blog post. "In every investigated incident, we have not found quality issues with security update MS10-015."

The patch addresses a vulnerability in the 32-bit Windows kernel that could allow elevation of privilege that was disclosed last month.

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Photoshop turns 20 Years-old

Photoshop, making Olsen twins pictures like this possible. We thank you




Hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time you had to take your pictures carefully and develop them with even greater care; a lost memory then was truly lost.

But all that started to change 20 years ago on Friday, when the first version of Photoshop was released, and began to usher in the age of digital photograph editing that we depend on more than ever today. Now we can't just imagine a world without Photoshop, we can't imagine the English language without it. How many software packages become verbs?

The Photoshop story began in 1987, when Thomas Knoll programmed a pixel imaging program he called Display. It didn't do much; primarily, it displayed grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. But it also provided a creative foundation for what would soon become one of the most important apps in the world. Knoll and his brother, John, built on Display's functionality by giving it processing capabilities. Adobe licensed the software in 1988, renamed it Photoshop, and shipped the first version on February 19, 1990.

Since then, Photoshop has become a phenomenon, its capabilities becoming synonymous with graphic design the world over. Many of the features that even casual users take for granted now weren't in the earliest incarnations: layers, without which any large-scale task would seem impossible today, weren't introduced until version 3.0; the healing brush, which essentially made wrinkles, pimples, and moles a thing of the past, bowed in version 7.0. Adobe estimates that there are more than 10 million users of Photoshop worldwide.

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