LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Necessary Roughness" operates in a very new world when it returns for its third season on Wednesday.

"We didn't blow up the premise," executive producer Craig Shapiro said of the changes on-set of the USA drama in Atlanta. "We just moved it a little sideways. It's a logical evolution. That's what we're calling it."

Pulled off the football field, the series now revolves around a behemoth talent agency, which opens up Long Island therapist Dr. Dani's (Callie Thorne) range of clientele beyond football players.

The changes are fueled by a desire to expand its audience. Ratings for the series fell during its second season. About 2 million viewers tuned into its second season finale versus the 4 million viewers who tuned in the previous season. USA asked the producers to explore new horizons for the series.

"I think we felt like we had a core audience that likes our whole sort of world of 'Necessary Roughness,' but there is what I call 'the samplers,' who it wasn't shiny enough for them," executive producer and the director of the episode shooting the week we were on-set, Kevin Dowling, explained.

"Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings," he continued. "'How do you make it shiny but still keep the basic core of it?' So, we said, "Uber agency.'"

To give the show more sheen, USA approved of building a new set. The set for V3, the show's new "uber agency," is inspired by "a little Google, a little CAA, a little Apple - the Cupertino Headquarters," described Shapiro.

At two stories and 35,000 square feet, seven episodes in there are still rooms that the production has yet to use. "It's been spectacular," Dowling said.

"To get that in a third year of a series is a great vote of confidence," he continued. "Normally, you don't build huge, big, very expensive sets if you don't expect, as Jeff Wachtel said, "I didn't order a third season, I ordered what I hope will be a third, fourth, fifth, sixth season."

Of course, there's some extra shine generated by the presence of John Stamos, who plays the talent agency's charismatic founder, Connor McClane. In fact, the role was written for the still youthful looking "Full House" star.

"It began to evolve that 'OK, someone's got to run this joint, who's it going to be?' And, immediately, we said, "OK, I don't know if we're going to get him, but it's John Stamos,'" Shapiro said.

Stamos, who only knew that the show revolved around sports (he's not a sports fan) and that "Rescue Me's" Thorne (whom he is a fan of) starred, gave the show a look after being approached for the role.

"It was one of those roles that I thought, 'I've got to start playing adult characters with power,'" Stamos said. "I think you get caught up in Peter Pan syndrome. You're fifty years old; you've got to start playing some adult characters. When this came around, it seemed like a perfect fit."

While "Buffy" and "Alias" alum David Anders plays bad cop to his good cop, Stamos warns against sizing up his character too early.

"The way the character turned out is this interesting, duplicitous guy who you think one side's good and one side's bad, but you don't know," the actor said.

Though Matt Blucas (and his character's on-again-off-again relationship with Dr. Dani) is out - he's now on ABC's upcoming series, "Killer Women" - Mehcad Brooks and Scott Cohen return.

They'll be joined by guest stars Autumn Reeser, Raphael Sbarge, Ioan Gruffudd and New York Giants player Justin Tuck.

"Necessary Roughness" debuts its 10-episode third season on Wednesday at 10/9c on USA.

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Top producer Ivory Coast will offer a temporary refund on mid-crop cocoa in a bid to stimulate purchasing that has been hampered by small bean size, the country's marketing board, the CCC, announced in a statement posted on its website.

Ivory Coast forward sold the bulk of the anticipated 2012/13 crop in order to fix a minimum guaranteed price for farmers as part of sweeping reforms that ended a decade of sector liberalisation.

However, exporters and local processors have complained that the price set for cocoa harvested during the April-September mid-crop failed to reflect the lower value of the smaller, lower quality beans.

"A refund on quality varying from 58 CFA to 130 CFA francs per kg is granted on all cocoa purchases with a bean count from 116 to 140 beans per 100 grammes," the CCC said in the statement.

The refund will apply to beans purchased during a roughly 40-day period from June 17 through July 31, the CCC said, adding that it would not affect the price paid to farmers which was fixed at 700 CFA francs/kg for the mid-crop.

The CCC set a maximum bean count - the measure of bean size - of 120 beans per 100g for beans exported during the mid-crop, though companies with local processing facilities can buy up to a bean count of 140 beans/100g.

But the CCC said both exporters and grinders had been reluctant to purchase cocoa above a bean count of 115 beans/100g.

While traders and analysts are predicting above-average output from the mid-crop, dry weather in the early months of this year has seen higher levels of undersized beans than in previous seasons.

Exporters said the CCC's decision to offer a refund was a step in the right direction but cautioned that it was probably not enough to pull Ivory Coast out of its current buying slump.

"I agree with what the CCC has done, but it's a drop in the ocean since we're not allowed to export over 120 (beans/100g)," said the director of a San Pedro-based export and processing company.

"Some grinders might buy up to 125 to mix in with the rest, but this isn't going to change my buying policy," he said.

For the study, researchers looked at weather patterns in 2007, whencovering the Arctic Ocean hit one of its lowest summer extents since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s.

In fall and winter, when sea ice would normally insulate the ocean from frigid Arctic air temperatures, the small ice pack meant lots of heat could escape from the ocean into the atmosphere, the study found. The heating changed , said lead study author Elizabeth Cassano, a climate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo. The results were published May 21 in the International Journal of Climatology.

"What we saw, particularly in the fall and winter, was a decrease in [atmospheric] pressure over the areas of open water," Cassano told LiveScience. Areas of high and low pressure drive weather, with low pressure producing stormier weather and high pressure leading to clear, calm days, Cassano said. The group's computer model generally agreed with weather records from the latter half of 2007, according to the study.

While thehad a significant effect into the winter, there was little change in weather patterns in early 2007, before the ice pack shrank, the study found. However, Cassano points out that the climate model doesn't include a major high-pressure system that was in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and played a role in the big ice melt. Its absence could affect the modeling results.

The researchers now plan to examine how the feedback between sea ice and the atmosphere alters weather in the United State and other regions, Cassano said. "There's an open question of how these changes that we see in the Arctic influence the weather that we see here in the mid-latitudes," she said.

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WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - Some U.S. religious leaders are cutting ties with the Boy Scouts of America, saying they will no longer permit local troops to meet at their churches in reaction to the group's decision to allow openly gay youth members.

The swift withdrawal of support by some conservative churches in states such as Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky comes after the May 23 vote by the group to end the century-old ban, effective January 1.

Ernest Easley, senior pastor of Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia, said his church will no longer sponsor the troop it has backed since 1945 due to the new policy.

"It is extremely sad," Easley said. "I'd never dreamed that I'd be standing in front of a group preaching on Sunday, encouraging parents to pull kids out of Boy Scouts of America."

The Boy Scouts has deep ties to churches all over the country, with about 70 percent of the group's more than 100,000 units chartered by faith-based organizations.

Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, said they expect a resolution against the policy to be issued by attendees at the group's annual meeting in Houston next month.

"Baptists have stayed where they should and scouts have left us," said Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee and a former scout. "We believe there is an objective right and an objective wrong."

Not all religious organizations reacted against the new policy. The Mormon Church, the largest sponsor of scouting troops nationwide, with about 430,000 youth members, expressed support for permitting gay scouts. The United Methodist Church, the second-largest sponsor, also plans to continue its role in scouting.

The Boy Scouts left its prohibition on openly gay adult leaders in place.

"We made a decision we would not discriminate against any children," said Wade Griffith, pastor at Liberty Crossings United Methodist Church near Birmingham, Alabama, which sponsors a troop with nearly 50 scouts.

"Any time the gospel is used to hurt the most vulnerable people, like children, or if they are used in a moral battle, it is wrong," Griffith said. "Whether they are gay or straight, the children are going to lose in this."

SEARCH FOR NEW SPONSORS

Boy Scouts of America cannot yet quantify the impact of the amended policy, said spokesman Deron Smith. He said the organization will work with troops to find new sponsors in cases where current supporters choose not to renew their charters.

The chairman of the national scouting committee for the Catholic Church, the third-largest sponsor of scouting troops, encouraged church members to avoid rushing to judgment.

"My hope is that we deal with the challenge in the spirit of Christian charity toward all," Edward Martin, chairman of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, said in an open letter this week.

Some churches that backed the end of the ban may pick up charters dropped by critics of the policy, said Ross Murray, a spokesman for the gay rights group GLAAD.

"The denominations that sponsor the vast, vast majority of scouting groups are either neutral to positive on ending the ban on gay scouts," Murray said.

In addition to troops chartered by faith-based organizations, 22 percent of Boy Scout units are supported by civic organizations and nearly 8 percent are affiliated with educational organizations.

(Additional reporting by Verna Gates in Birmingham, Alabama; Editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler)

He was best known as a co-founder of Viennese Actionism, an avant-garde movement that caused outrage with its graphic images of paint-daubed, naked bodies, blood and violence.

Like other participants in the movement - including Guenter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler - Muehl served a short prison sentence in the 1960s for violating decency laws.

His art later became respectable enough to feature in mainstream art gallery shows.

Muehl founded the Friedrichshof Commune outside Vienna in the 1970s, which attracted 600 residents at its height and was considered by some to be an authoritarian sect.

Muehl was sentenced to seven years in prison for the rape and abuse of minors living there.

An apology from Muehl to the victims was read out at the opening of an exhibition of his work in Vienna's Leopold Museum in 2010.

Muehl moved to Portugal on his release from jail in 1997, and he lived there until his death.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; editing by Mike Collett-White)

Chevron has signed an agreement with YPF to invest up to $1.5 billion in the Vaca Muerta shale megafield, located in Argentina's southern region of Patagonia.

Late last year an Argentinean judge ordered a freeze on up to $19 billion worth of assets held by Chevron in Argentina as part of an environmental lawsuit by Ecuadorean villagers who say the company is responsible for contamination.

That roadblock to the Chevron/Vaca Muerta deal was lifted on Tuesday.

"The high court overturned the freeze," Argentina's Judicial Information Center, ICJ, said in a statement.

Chevron was not immediately available for comment.

The company, which denies the environmental charges and has accused the Ecuadorean courts of fraud, said last month that a final YPF/Chevron agreement should be signed in July, once outstanding trade and tax issues were hammered out.

Chevron's president for Latin American and African operations, Ali Moshiri, said then that Argentina has the world's second-largest reservoir of unconventional oil after the United States.

YPF, which was renationalized last year as Argentina battles to reverse a long decline in natural gas and oil output, aims to drill 132 oil wells at the Vaca Muerta shale formation this year.

(Reporting by Walter Bianchi; Editing by Richard Pullin)

The eggs belong to Torvosaurus, a T. rex-like predator that stalked the late Jurassic some 150 million years ago. Torvosaurus grew to be around 30 feet (9 meters) long, but the fragmented embryos discovered in Portugal were probably only about 6 inches (15 centimeters) in length.

"This is shedding some light on the early stages of the development of these types of dinosaurs," said Ricardo Arajo, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at Southern Methodist University in Texas. []

A surprising find

The crushed clutch of eggs was found in 2005 by amateur fossil-hunter and fossil cast-maker Art Walen, who was on an annual vacation to the fossil-rich Lourinh Formation in western Portugal.

"He just stumbled across some eggshells, and he traced the eggshells up the cliffs and he found there were not only isolated eggshells, there was also an entire nest up there," Arajo told LiveScience.

Paleontologists from the Museu da Lourinh excavated the nest, which researchers first assumed belonged to a . Even in the field, however, the paleontologists began to think they might have something very different on their hands. The eggs' surfaces were ornamented with a strange, almost honeycomb-like pattern that was quite distinct from anything the researchers had ever seen, Arajo said.

Once the specimen was excavated and brought to the museum for preparation, the researchers got another surprise: There were embryo bones mixed in with the crushed eggs.

Such a find is "extremely rare," Arajo said. "There's probably a handful of situations like this in the world."

Dinosaur development

The bones enabled the researchers to link the nest back to a specific species of dinosaur. Torvosaurus was a theropod, a group that includes bothand modern birds. The specimens are the earliest theropod embryos ever found.

They're also the most primitive, Arajo said. Torvosaurus is on an early branch of the dinosaur family tree, making them "basal theropods," or very early examples of the group. So while(including some found recently in China) date back to earlier eras, Arajo said, the new discoveries are the most primitive in terms of dinosaur evolutionary relationships.

The find reveals some secrets of egg evolution. Modern bird eggs are made up of three layers, Arajo said, and most dinosaur eggs have two layers. The Torvosaurus eggs are so primitive that they have just one layer.

"This is the first evidence for a one-layered eggshell for theropod dinosaurs ever found," Arajo said.

The exceptionally preserved shells are marked by a series of wide, interconnected pores. Pores allow the eggs to "breathe," and their size depends on whether the eggs are exposed to moisture or dry air. The size and shape of the Torvosaurus egg pores suggest they were buried in a moist environment for incubation, Arajo said.

He and his colleagues report the findings today (May 30) in the journal .

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 adds that the drill, taking place on a large military training field and not some underground hack-a-thon bunker, "will be the first time a PLA exercise has focused on combat forces including digitalized units, special operations forces, army aviation and electronic counter forces." The terms "digitalized unit" and "electronic counter forces" don't make it at all clear what China's military has planned, but then again, no country is ever going to reveal its full cyberwarfare capabilities in detail — and it's not like it's the first time the Chinese have tested the military reaches of their digital warfare capabilities. Indeed, the U.S. was game to play along on more than one occasion. Last year it was reported that the U.S. and China had secretly engaged in at least two cyber war games in 2011, "designed to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the two superpowers if either felt they were being targeted," as . "In the first, both sides had to describe what they would do if they were attacked by a sophisticated computer virus, such as . In the second, they had to describe their reaction if the attack was known to have been launched from the other side." The first went better than the second, apparently, but neither appears to have taken place on a training base in Mongolia, as this new test will be when it's conducted by two army corps and eight military academies in "late June." Obama and Xi are set to meet at an estate in California on June 7-8. Cybersecurity is on the list of talking points, the White House confirmed Tuesday as National Security Advisor Tom Donilon visited Beijing ahead of the summit. Defense Secretary's Chuck Hagel is visiting Southeast Asia this week, and , too.

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News of China's "digitalized" drill comes on the heels of  thatfor nearly 40 of the U.S.'s most valuable weapons programs and 30 defense technologies — a move that could "weaken the U.S. military advantage in a future conflict." That article followed a Pentagon report earlier this month claiming thatto attacks on U.S. computer systems, which followed the cybersecurity firm Mandiant's report in February alleging thaton U.S. companies and infrastructure, and a 2012 assertion from national security veteran Richard Clarke that . Now, it appears, the secret training is out in the open.

On June 9, 2008, at least 60 dolphins stranded along the coast of Cornwall, England, in what was by far the largest common dolphin mortality ever seen in British waters. For hours, rescuers tried to lead them back to sea often unsuccessfully, as some of the animals were panicked and others just milled about in tight circles, resistant to saving. The forensic investigation that followed involved 24 experts from five countries and multiple government agencies.

Now , and the most probable cause was naval exercises.

For several days before the strandings, the British Royal Navy ran a large, multinational event (which included the U.S. Navy and involved active sonar and other disruptive activities) off the Cornish coast. That event, the investigators concluded, was closely correlated in space and time with the dolphins entering Falmouth Bay and eventually coming ashore. All other possible causes disease, algal blooms, malnourishment were eliminated. []

The implication of naval exercises in a mass stranding will come as no surprise to those who have followed this issue in the United States. Nor will the Royal Navy's perfunctory denials in media accounts, which seem awfully similar to what we have heard over the years from the U.S. Navy.

In the case of mass strandings, what Navy officials always seem to demand after the fact is some definitive, minute-by-minute record of the victims' movements before beaching, as though it were possible toand dolphin in the sea. Until biologists can provide that infeasible level of proof, the U.S. Navy refuses responsibility. But really, the Cornwall case is simple: a gun was fired, there were bodies, and no one else was in the room.

It's long past time for navies on both sides of the Atlantic to stop denying the obvious and do something meaningful to reduce harm, like putting especially vulnerable habitat off-limits to dangerous training. Unfortunately, in the United States, that may be something we have to fight for.

The reason is thatwould permit the U.S. Navy to harm marine mammals more than 30 million times over the next five years. This gargantuan number encompasses more than 5 million instances of temporary hearing loss a significant impact for species like whales and dolphins that depend on hearing for their survival. And, it includes more than 10,000 cases of permanent injury and nearly 350 deaths from underwater explosions, vessel collisions and sonar exercises. Of course these are the U.S. Navy's estimates; the reality could be even worse.

In Southern California, which sees the lion's share of U.S. Navy training on the West Coast, biologists are concerned that the U.S. Navy's range has becomefor deep-diving beaked whales, a family of marine mammal species that is acutely vulnerable to high-powered naval sonar. And, new research on the same range shows that U.S. Navy sonarover vast distances. That's a big problem since Southern California represents a globally important foraging area for that endangered species.

The U.S. Navy, still in denial mode, likes to claim that it has safely operated off California and other places for decades, but just like in Cornwall, that argument is wearing very thin.

Denial has its consequences, however. Neither the latest science nor its own dramatic estimates of harm has moved the U.S. Navy to identify better means of protecting whales and other marine life. Instead, it is proposing the same meager protective measures visually monitoring a narrow strip around its vessels that the scientific community and the courts have repeatedly found inadequate. By contrast, avoiding important habitat is universally acknowledged to be the most effective available measure.

More than 550,000 people have signedcalling for an end to the killing and harassment of marine mammals by U.S. Navy sonar. With the new investigative findings in Britain adding to the pile of evidence of harm, perhaps now the U.S. authorities will do the right thing. Denial is no longer an option.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This article was originally published on .

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's best-known publicist, Max Clifford, pleaded not guilty in a London court on Tuesday to 11 counts of indecent assault against seven girls dating back to the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Often described as a public relations "guru" for his ability to generate and control press coverage, Clifford is a household name in Britain whose celebrity clients have included TV music mogul Simon Cowell and U.S. boxer Muhammad Ali.

The 70-year-old was arrested in December as part of a police investigation into the crimes of Jimmy Savile, a TV star of the 1970s and 80s who was exposed after his death in 2011 as a prolific predatory child sex abuser, causing a huge scandal.

Clifford's case is unconnected to Savile but is part of the same police operation because the allegations against him emerged as a result of the media coverage of Savile's crimes.

"All I know is, up until the Jimmy Savile situation no one said anything about me at all," Clifford told reporters just outside the courtroom.

The hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court was Clifford's first court appearance.

Wearing a blue jacket, white shirt and grey trousers, the white-haired Clifford spoke only to confirm his name and address and to enter his pleas of not guilty.

The 11 counts relate to seven different alleged victims who were aged between 15 and 19 at the time of the offences, which are alleged to have taken place between 1966 and 1985.

Clifford told reporters after the hearing that the allegations against him were untrue and since his arrest he had been "in the dark" as to the identity of the women making the accusations.

"This is a nightmare for myself and my family and it has been since December when I was arrested in a very public way. What I've got to do now is prove that these allegations are totally without foundation as I know them to be," he said.

Judge Howard Riddle granted Clifford conditional bail and sent his case for trial at a higher court, Southwark Crown Court, where his first appearance is scheduled for June 12.

Other celebrities arrested in the Savile probe, codenamed Operation Yewtree, include glam-rock singer Gary Glitter, comedian Freddie Starr and children's TV presenter Rolf Harris, who all deny any wrongdoing and have not been charged.

Clifford is best-known in Britain for selling so-called "kiss-and-tell" stories about the rich and famous to scandal-hungry tabloid newspapers.

In a section entitled "Got a news story?", the website of his company, Max Clifford Associates, promises to negotiate the highest price possible for clients' stories.

"Our unique relationship with newspaper editors and key players in the media has been built and nurtured by Max over many years, ensuring that we as a company can broker your story for the highest possible price whilst retaining ultimate control," the website says.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)