NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) - Alex Ovechkin almost has it all but not quite. A multi-millionaire with a mountain of individual awards, his feats on the ice leave no doubt about his greatness as a hockey player.

The rewards and plaudits for his achievements have been flowing for years and the Russian already has the keys to the United States capital, Washington DC, an honour he received in 2008 when he won the first of his two National Hockey League MVP awards.

He is a five-time NHL All-Star and three-time winner of the NHL's goalscoring title, including this season, and sporting success just seems to follow him everywhere.

His mother won two Olympic gold medals in basketball for the Soviet Union and he is engaged to marry professional tennis player, Maria Kirilenko, who won a bronze medal in doubles at the London Olympics last year.

But for all his personal achievements, there are two glaring omissions from Ovechkin's CV. Unlike his mother and his fiancee, the 27-year-old has never won an Olympic gold medal, nor the Stanley Cup, hockey's holy grail.

For now, the Olympics will have to wait, at least until next year when Sochi hosts the Winter Games. The NHL is still negotiating with the IOC about whether it will let its players compete. Ovechkin insists he is going anyway.

BUMPY ROAD

Winning the Stanley Cup is a more pressing matter. Ovechkin's Washington Capitals are through to the playoffs for the sixth season in a row but the road ahead is littered with bumps and already looking treacherous.

After winning their first two games in the Eastern Conference quarter-final with the New York Rangers, the series is suddenly tied at 2-2.

The Rangers won Wednesday's fourth game 4-3 at Madison Square Garden.

New York led 1-0 at the end of the first period then 2-0 in the second. The Caps tied the game at 2-2 when Mathieu Perreault and Troy Brouwer both scored in the second.

But the Rangers regained control in the third with Dan Giradi's power-play goal in the first minute then Derek Stepan's insurance goal shortly after.

Karl Alzer pulled Washington to within a goal but the Caps ran out of time and luck, leaving Ovechkin still with a chance but no closer yet to accomplishing at least one of his missing goals.

"I think I really have to play better," said Ovechkin, a lethal sniper who scored 32 goals in the shortened regular season, but was not among the scorers on Wednesday.

"They just put the puck in our net and made it a physical game. We knew it was going to be like that."

Ovechkin's team mate, goaltender Braden Holtby, said the Caps still had a great chance to win and advance to the semi-finals.

"It's a three-game series now," said Holtby, who made 30 saves. "And we still have home ice advantage." (Editing by Ian Ransom)

Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said about two thousand rallied Saturday night.

Protesters are angry over the proposed decrees by Israel's new finance minister Yair Lapid who started his job several weeks ago.

Lapid ran in January's election on a ticket vowing to help the middle class. The proposed budget hits that demographic deep in their pockets with raised taxes and slashed benefits. Some voters feel betrayed as it appears contrary to a central part of Lapid's popular campaign. Lapid has said the measures are vital for a healthy economy and cuts are across the board. Parliament discusses the budget next week.

In 2011, hundreds of thousands protested across Israel over the high cost of living.

Curiosity's handlers sent no commands to the rover for most of April, because Mars was on the opposite side of the sun from Earth at the time. But this planetary alignment, known as a , is now over, and the mission team is planning to drill into a Red Planet rock soon and then send Curiosity off on an epic, miles-long trek to the base of a huge and mysterious mountain.

"A couple of weeks to move to the site and drill, and then the experiments themselves can take also a couple of weeks that's about the time scale we're looking at," said Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "And then we'd hopefully get going." []

He stressed, however, that this timeframe could shift depending on how the drilling operation goes, and what Curiosity discovers.

Curiosity healthy after 'spring break'

Thewasn't idle during conjunction. It continued monitoring Martian weather and radiation and perfomed some relatively simple science work using commands sent up in advance, Vasavada said.

"That all went fine it kind of executed flawlessly a long set of preplanned activities," he told SPACE.com. "We had never planned 30 days at once [before], so that was a relief."

But things have picked up since mission controllers got back in touch with Curiosity late last week. They've already uploaded a minor software update to the rover, which emerged from conjunction in fine health, Vasavada said.

Curiosity continues to operate on its backup, or B-side, computer, which it switched to after a (or A-side) in late February.

The rover team has still not fully figured out what happened to the A-side, but engineers have made significant troubleshooting progress. For example, Curiosity would have been OK if an issue during conjunction had forced the rover to swap back over to the A-side computer, Vasavada said.

Drilling another hole

Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater last August, kicking off a two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have .

The rover team has already checked off this primary goal, announcing in March that a spot dubbed Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago. Scientists reached this conclusion after studying Curiosity's analyses of material pulled from a 2.5-inch-deep (6.4 centimeters) hole the rover drilled into a Red Planet outcrop. []

Now that conjunction's over, the mission team wants to drill another hole in a nearby rock, to confirm and perhaps extend the exciting results gleaned from the .

"Probably in the next week or two, we will slightly move the rover to a new location, which the science team is actively choosing right now," Vasavada said. "Primarily, it will be to duplicate the results from the first hole, because they were so exciting and, in some cases, unexpected that the people who run the experiments just want to make sure it's really correct before writing all the papers up."

"Slightly move" likely means a few meters or so, he said, adding that the second drilling activity might target intriguing mineral veins or concretions that the team avoided the first time around, not wanting to complicate the drill's maiden operation.

Off to Mount Sharp

Once the drilling and subsequent analyses are complete, the team plans to start the long trek to , the mysterious 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from Gale Crater's center.

Mount Sharp's foothills, which lie about 5 miles (8 km) away from Yellowknife Bay, were identified as Curiosity's main destination before the rover's November 2011 launch.

Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs that the mountain's base was exposed to liquid water long ago, and the team wants Curiosity to read the Red Planet's environmental history like a book as it climbs up Mount Sharp's lower reaches.

Curiosity has taken plenty of time to check out interesting rocks and riverbeds near its landing site thus far, putting just 2,300 feet (700 meters) on its odometer to date. But the long trip to Mount Sharp will force a shift in the rover team's mindset, requiring them to ignore some intriguing features in the interest of making tracks.

Mission scientists are already starting to plan Curiosity's route to Mount Sharp, a process that involves identifying high-priority science targets along the way. Still, there's no way the team will be able to look at everything that draws their interest.

"One of our engineers said it's like putting your family in the car to go to Disneyland," Vasavada said. "Along the way, there's the biggest ball of twine, and a little dinosaur museum and all this stuff. But you have to tell your kids, 'We can't do everything, or we'll never get to Disneyland.'"

Follow Mike Wall on Twitterand.Follow us , or . Originally published on

Police officials say that the Saturday blast heavily damaged the house of Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri in al-Shurqat, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

Police said that al-Jubouri's son and nephew were among the dead, but the officer himself was not home at the time.

A hospital official confirmed the casualties. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to media.

Violence has ebbed in Iraq, but insurgent attacks are still frequent.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Korean President Park Geun-hye said on Thursday her country is facing down North Korea's threats "resolutely but calmly" and called on Pyongyang to end the cycle of tension and short-lived stability on the Korean peninsula.

In her address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Park said South Korea's stable financial markets and strong economic fundamentals showed Seoul was unbowed by 10 weeks of nuclear war threats from North Korea.

"The Korean government is reacting resolutely but calmly. We are maintaining the highest level of readiness," she said in English to loud applause in a packed U.S. Capitol.

"You may rest assured: No North Korean provocation will succeed," Park said. She echoed lines from her show of solidarity with President Barack Obama at the White House a day earlier, when Obama said Pyongyang had failed to rattle their alliance of 60 years and gained nothing from saber-rattling.

The 61-year-old daughter of a former Cold War military dictator presented a vision of the future in which South Korea and its U.S. ally would deal firmly with North Korea while working for a more stable long-term peace.

"That future, I know, feels distant today," she said.

South Korea will never tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea and would react "decisively" to provocations from the isolated, impoverished state that has conducted three nuclear tests since 2006, Park said.

"At the same time, I will not link humanitarian aid provided to the North Korean people, such as infants and young children, to the political situation," she said, in a reference to persistent malnutrition in the country of 25 million people.

She held out the possibility of aid and economic cooperation to build up trust with Pyongyang, the core North Korea policy of her successful campaign last year to become the first female leader of South Korea.

"But as we say in Korea, 'It takes two hands to clap,'" said Park.

To gain the economic benefits of re-engagement with South Korea, North Korea "must walk the path to become a responsible member of the community of nations," she said.

After it conducted a nuclear test in mid-February that drew swift U.N. Security Council sanctions, North Korea ramped up tensions in its neighborhood with near-daily threats to attack South Korea, the United States and U.S. military bases in Japan.

Pyongyang caused further alarm last month when it closed a jointly run industrial zone in North Korea, sending most South Korean workers from the zone, virtually stopping all operations at the last remaining symbol of North-South cooperation.

Early this week, however, U.S. officials said North Korea has taken two Musudan missiles off launch-ready status and moved them from the country's east coast, after weeks of concern that Pyongyang had been poised for a test-launch.

There has also been a lull in bellicose rhetoric from North Korean state media, although Park said on Tuesday it was impossible to fathom Pyongyang's intentions.

(Reporting by Paul Eckert; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

When most people think of PC manufacturer HP and "tablets," they probably think of a Windows 8 device. Either that, or the ill-fated TouchPad, an iPad-sized webOS gadget which sold so poorly that HP had to dump them all in a $99 fire sale just a few months in.

If you decided to wait for the price of its latest tablet to go down to $99, though, you wouldn't be saving that much. That's because HP is undercutting Google's $199 Nexus 7 with Like the Nexus 7, it runs Google's open-sourceand for the price, you get slightly lower specs, including just 8 GB of storage.

Why a 7-inch Android tablet?

While it didn't exactly help stave off the Kindle, Barnes and Noble's 7-inch Nook Color e-reader was extremely popular for awhile, as a cheap color tablet which could be easily modified to run normal Android. Then last year'sfrom Google sold millions.

Thatsold in the same time, but pretty soon even Apple had gotten in on the act with its iPad Mini tablet. And with tablets cutting into traditional PC sales, it was perhaps inevitable that someone at HP would try to make something like this.

What do you get for the money?

A 7-inch tablet "with stainless steel accents and a soft-touch back," which comes in red and silver (although the availability of different colors "may vary by region"). It has a dual-core 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, and a microSD slot for expandable memory. The 7-inch screen has a 1024x600 resolution, and it has a VGA webcam and a 3 megapixel rear-facing shooter. It also has Beats Audio technology built in.

How does it compare to other small tablets?

Compared to the Nexus 7, you lose out on the powerful Tegra 3 processor, which is capable of running "Tegra HD exclusive" games. The Slate 7 also runs a slightly less recent version of "Jelly Bean" Android, has half the storage space (of the $199 Nexus 7 model), and has a much fuzzier screen and webcam. The Nexus 7 also has a $299 32 GB version with HSPA+ wireless Internet, although it lacks the microSD slot and rear-facing camera.

Compared to theyou'll mostly be missing Apple's sleek industrial design and high-performance processor, plus the hundreds of thousands of iPad-exclusive games and apps. Of course, it also costs about twice as much.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is preparing to ask Congress soon for more authority to shift funds to cope with automatic spending cuts, confronting lawmakers with another exception to the "sequester" just days after they gave a break to the flying public and the airline industry.

The request may be sent to the House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee as early as next week, a House Republican aide said on Wednesday.

The Pentagon won increased budget flexibility in March, but officials have told members of Congress they believe it was insufficient to cover shortfalls in training and operations.

The Defense Department move would follow closely the fix last week to ease airline flight delays caused by the temporary furloughs of air-traffic controllers by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The cuts, known as "sequestration," were originally hatched by Washington in 2011 as a way to force the White House and Congress to find an alternative budget deal rather than have spending cuts kick in automatically.

But policymakers failed to reach such a deal earlier this year and the cuts - totaling $109 billion for the current fiscal year - took effect on March 1.

Defense spending has taken the single biggest hit from the automatic cuts, with a $46 billion reduction through the September 30 end of the fiscal year.

One House aide said the request would cite a shortfall in war-fighting because of higher than expected costs of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials paved the way for the move in testimony to congressional committees over the past few weeks in which they expressed worries about the sequester's impact on military readiness, particularly with tensions rising in Syria and Korea.

"With the events in the world today, with Korea, Syria, Iran, the continued fight in Afghanistan ... the discussion on readiness could not come at a more critical time," General John Campbell, Army vice chief of staff, told a U.S. Senate panel on April 17.

"The reality is that if sequestration continues as it is ... we risk becoming a hollow force," he added.

Members of Congress from states with a heavy military presence have been urging a shift of funds since the sequester took effect and might be hard-pressed to vote against it.

An April 18 bipartisan letter from Virginia senators and representatives urged Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to move quickly to prevent furloughs and loss of pay for "thousands of Virginians."

'REPROGRAMMING'

The Defense Department is preparing the request to shift funds, said Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon spokeswoman, but has not "yet specified the timing or the amount" it wants to transfer, or "reprogram" in budget jargon.

Congress last week approved a similar request from the Justice Department to shift $313 million within its budget to avoid furloughing some 60,000 employees.

Robbins said it was not yet clear whether the Pentagon would submit several different reprogramming requests or one large omnibus-style request, but the budget shifts would be sought "soon."

The Pentagon was one of several government agencies that won some budget flexibility in a stop-gap government funding measure passed in late March.

That allowed more than $10 billion that was locked up in other accounts to be shifted to the Pentagon's operations and maintenance account, which funds training exercises and military readiness.

While that has helped, it did not make up for the deep budget cuts brought on by the sequester. The Army alone is facing about a $13 billion shortfall in training, operations and Afghanistan war costs, Army Secretary John McHugh and Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno told lawmakers last week.

(Editing by Fred Barbash and Peter Cooney)

In the latest business year that ended on March 31, the creator of Super Mario sold 3.45 million of its successor to the hit Wii machine. It initially forecast sales of 5.5 million but later lowered that to 4 million.

Nintendo, which began by making playing cards in the late 19th century, is counting on the Wii U, its first console in 16 years to come with a dedicated Super Mario game title, to revive its fortunes as sales of the six year-old Wii slacken.

The Japanese gaming company forecast sales of its handheld 3DS console to rise nearly 30 percent to 18 million.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

Unable to ignore the travelers' anger, Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation Friday to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to withdraw the furloughs. The vote underscored a shift by Democrats who had insisted on erasing all of this year's $85 billion in across-the-board budget cuts, not just the most publicly painful ones, for fear of losing leverage to restore money for Head Start and other programs with less lobbying clout and popular support.

With President Barack Obama's promised signature, the measure will erase one of the most stinging and publicly visible consequences of the budget-wide cuts known as the sequester.

Friday's House approval was 361-41 and followed the previous evening's passage by the Senate, which didn't even bother with a roll call. Lawmakers then streamed toward the exits and airports for a weeklong spring recess.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama would sign the bill, but Carney complained that the measure left the rest of the sequester intact.

"This is a Band-Aid solution. It does not solve the bigger problem," he said. Using the same Band-Aid comparison, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., said that "the sequester needs triple bypass surgery."

The FAA and Transportation Department did not respond to repeated questions about when the controllers' furloughs would end. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who helped craft the measure, was told by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Friday that the agency is "doing everything they can to get things back on track as quickly as possible," said Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley.

In the week since the furloughs began, news accounts have prominently featured nightmarish tales of delayed flights and stranded air passengers. Republicans have used the situation to accuse the Obama administration of purposely forcing the controllers to take unpaid days off to dial up public pressure on Congress to roll back the sequester.

"The president has an obligation to implement these cuts in a way that respects the American people, rather than using them for political leverage," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a written statement.

"Unfortunately for this administration, the term 'sequester' has become synonymous with fear," Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., said during the debate.

Halting the furloughs was the latest example of lawmakers easing parts of the sequester that became too painful.

They previously used a separate, wide-ranging spending bill to provide more money for meat and poultry inspectors. Attorney General Eric Holder cited extra funds in that same bill as the reason the Justice Department would be able to avoid furloughs. Transportation Security Administration employees also have gotten relief.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats backed by many fiscal experts say the sequester law gives agencies little maneuverability, requiring them to spread cuts evenly among most budget accounts. The Federal Aviation Administration was achieving about a third of its required $637 million in cuts by furloughing nearly all its workers including the 15,000 air traffic controllers one day every two weeks.

Obama and his Democratic allies want to roll back the entire sequester, with the White House proposing a substitute mix of spending cuts and tax increases that Republicans have rejected. The GOP has proposed replacing the across-the-board spending cuts with others, many of them aimed at programs Democrats defend.

That has left many Democrats reluctant to ease across-the-board cuts for individual programs that cause a public outcry because they worry that would relieve pressure on Republicans to undo the entire sequester.

"While there is a little bit of leverage and pressure, let's broaden it to the sequester as a whole," Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., told reporters before voting against the bill.

Said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: "How can we sit there and say, 'Four million Meals on Wheels for seniors gone? But that's not important.Over 70,000 children off Head Start.But that's not important.' What is important is for Republicans to hold a hard line" on budget cuts.

Even so, the complaints about flying delays became too intense, and in the end only 29 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted against the measure Friday in the House. The FAA said there had been at least 863 flights delayed on Wednesday attributed to the furloughs, with hundreds of others daily since the furloughs began last Sunday.

The bill would let the FAA use up to $253 million from an airport improvement program and other accounts to halt the furloughs through the Sept. 30 end of the government's fiscal year. The money can be used for other FAA operations, too, including keeping open small airport towers around the country that the agency said it would shut to satisfy the spending cuts.

But Democrats were bitter Friday that cuts in many federal programs remain. Besides the Head Start pre-school program, they complained about ongoing cuts for health research, feeding programs for poor women, children and the elderly and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and about furloughs of civilian Pentagon workers.

"Let's get a big deal. Let's deal with all the adverse consequences of the sequester," said No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer, whose Maryland district has many civil servants and who voted no.

Congressional approval was hailed by groups representing the airline industry and the union representing controllers.

"The winners here are the customers who will be spared from lengthy and needless delays," said Nicholas E. Calio, president of Airlines for America, representing major carriers.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the week of problems showed that a "fully staffed air traffic control workforce is necessary for our national airspace system to operate at full capacity."

___

Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Joan Lowy and Nedra Pickler contributed to this report.

We have two children. One is away at college and the other starting high school. When I talk to my husband about wanting to do things, he says I should have done them when I was younger. But I married him before I was even an adult!

Is it wrong to want to go out and do things I never got to do when I was a teenager? It makes me question whether or not I want to be married to him anymore. I still love him, but I have changed.

Jake insists we don't need counseling and I just need to get over it and accept that this is my life. What if I don't want to regret what I have never had a chance to do? -- WANTS MORE OUT WEST

DEAR WANTS MORE: I'm sorry, but you can't relive your lost teenage years.

I wish you had been more specific about what it is you want to do. If it's go out and have some fun, perhaps some of your girlfriends would like to go with you. Instead of sitting home, you and Jake could socialize with other couples. If you're into sports, why not join a women's sports team? If you're not, how about a book club? You don't have to sit around and vegetate.

You also didn't mention whether you completed high school. If you didn't receive a diploma, you would be well-served to work on earning your GED, which could widen your horizons and opportunities considerably.

DEAR ABBY: I have two daughters, 11 and 14. They fight over many things, but what gets to me is the way they fight over what television shows to watch.

My younger daughter has nightmares if she watches even mildly dramatic cop/lawyer-type shows. However, my older daughter loves them.

At home, I'd have one kid watch TV in one room and the other in the other room. However, when they're at the sitter's house, which has only one TV, they call me at work and fight over the phone over who watches what. They both accuse me of favoring the other.

How do I deal with this fairly without upsetting them? And how do I keep my younger daughter from having nightmares? -- DOING MY BEST IN KENTUCKY

DEAR DOING: Because your younger daughter has nightmares after viewing shows that create anxiety, she shouldn't be forced to do it. When they are at their sitter's, they should alternate days when each has control of the remote control. When your older girl has it, the younger one should be encouraged to read a book of her choosing and/or listen to music. When the younger one gets to do the choosing, the older one should do the same.

DEAR ABBY: Christmas and birthday gifts I will never use have accumulated around my house. I'd like to have a yard sale, but many of the items came from close friends and family. I feel guilty getting rid of them because the people who gave them to me obviously meant well. Would selling them be wrong?

One gift was from my mother. I live at home, so she will notice if I stick it in the garage sale. I can't let this extra stuff sit around. It's taking up space and I need the money for a very expensive college. But I'm afraid of people finding out that I don't want their presents. What should I do? -- DOWNSIZING IN NEW YORK

DEAR DOWNSIZING: Selling the items would not be wrong. Once a gift is given, it is yours to do with as you please. If you offer them for sale online, it will be less obvious and cause fewer hurt feelings.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Write Dear Abby ator P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.

For everything you need to know about wedding planning, order "How to Have a Lovely Wedding." Send your name and mailing address, plus check or money order for $7 (U.S. funds) to: Dear Abby, Wedding Booklet, P.O. Box 447, Mount Morris, IL 61054-0447. (Shipping and handling are included in the price.)