[More from BGR: ]

In an interview with Tango earlier this week, the company told us that it has now hit 120 million registered users and the text-messaging feature is growing 3 to 4 times faster than the mobile video service. Tango is now serving up more than 1 million game sessions per day as it diversifies beyond text and video.

[More from BGR: ]

Following the game revenue explosion that LINE and KakaoTalk enjoyed last winter, all major messaging services are now expected to move aggressively towards adding game, video and music elements to their services. This is why getting preloaded apps into smartphones may turn out to be a crucial advantage. The messaging app vendors are like a pack of raptors trying to take down a Brontosaurus called Facebook.

In the U.S. market, Path, Kik and Viber have now all moved ahead of the Facebook app in the free iPhone download chart. Messaging is clearly becoming the hottest app segment of 2013.

This article was

LONDON (Reuters) - The America's Cup will remain an irresistible lure for the world's top Olympic sailors despite the tragic death of British gold medalist Andrew Simpson on Thursday. Royal Yacht Association (RYA) Olympic manager Stephen Park expressed his devastation at the news that 36-year-old Simpson had died when the huge AC72 multi-hull craft in which he was crewing capsized during an America's Cup trial in San Francisco.

Twitter eyes big business in Brazil's World Cup, Olympics

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - While Brazil struggles to finish its stadiums in time for the 2014 World Cup, Twitter is already working to cash in on what the U.S. company's head of revenue, Adam Bain, sees as a potentially huge business opportunity. Robust consumer spending, growth potential from still-low Internet penetration and fast adoption of smart phones have turned this nation of 194 million people into an attractive market for Twitter and other online giants.

Serena given first serious test in Madrid

MADRID (Reuters) - World number one Serena Williams was given her first serious test at this year's Madrid Open but recovered from a second set mauling to beat Spaniard Anabel Medina Garrigues 6-3 0-6 7-5 in the quarter-finals on Friday. It was only the seventh time in her career Serena had lost a set to love, the last time being in November 2008 against her sister Venus at the season-ending WTA Championships in Qatar.

UCI to appeal against destruction of Puerto evidence

PARIS (Reuters) - The International Cycling Union (UCI) is to appeal against the decision of the judge in Spain's "Operation Puerto" trial to destroy evidence from the case instead of making it available to anti-doping and sports bodies, officials said on Friday. Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, the central figure in the trial that followed a probe into a doping ring in cycling, was given a one-year prison term last month for endangering public health.

British sailing champ dies in America's Cup training off San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - British yacht-racing champion and two-time Olympic medalist Andrew "Bart" Simpson was killed on Thursday when his vessel capsized in San Francisco Bay during training for the America's Cup, his team said. Simpson, 36, who won a gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, was sailing on the Artemis, Sweden's entry in the America's Cup, when the catamaran overturned, according to a statement posted on the Artemis racing website.

Pirelli concerned by Di Resta tire failure

BARCELONA (Reuters) - Pirelli expressed concern on Friday at an alarming tire failure suffered by Force India's Paul Di Resta in Spanish Grand Prix practice. The tread came off the Scot's still inflated left rear tire in second practice but Di Resta was able to bring the car safely to a halt.

Taste of playoffs sweet, but Leafs fans hunger for more

TORONTO (Reuters) - So starved for success that even a taste of playoff action can be savored, the Toronto Maple Leafs and their fans are enjoying a long-awaited return to the postseason but hunger for more. A Mardi Gras-like buzz swept across Toronto with the Maple Leafs in the postseason for the first time since 2004, but the excitement may be short-lived as the team was pushed to the brink of playoff elimination after Wednesday's gut-wrenching 4-3 overtime loss to the Boston Bruins.

Garcia, Woods put star power back on top at Players

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Florida (Reuters) - Sergio Garcia roared into the Players Championship lead with Tiger Woods and Lee Westwood close behind early in the second round as star power returned to the top of the leaderboard on Friday. Garcia, Woods and Westwood led a scoring parade as eagles and birdies flew all around TPC Sawgrass on a steamy day in what is widely regarded as golf's unofficial fifth major.

Olympiakos sink CSKA Moscow to reach Euroleague final

LONDON (Reuters) - Olympiakos Piraeus crushed CSKA Moscow 69-52 in the first of two Euroleague Final Four games at London's O2 Arena on Friday, advancing easily to the final for the second year running. In a rematch of the climax to last year's European season, the defending champions pulled ahead of their Russian opponents in the first quarter and never looked back, leading 40-28 at halftime.

Federer suffers shock Madrid exit to Nishikori

MADRID (Reuters) - Roger Federer's hopes of claiming a second straight Madrid Open title were dashed when the world number two suffered a surprise 6-4 1-6 6-2 third-round defeat to Japanese young gun Kei Nishikori on Thursday. Playing his first tournament since taking a seven-week break following his quarter-final exit at Indian Wells, Federer became the second high-profile casualty at the clay Masters event following Tuesday's shock second-round defeat for world number one Novak Djokovic to unseeded Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov.

Who would care for him while she looked for a new home?

"As far as I'm concerned, he's one of my grandbabies," Phillips said.

Max is now being boarded in a kennel in a Philadelphia suburb thanks to Red Paw, an animal rescue group that has a unique partnership with the southeastern Pennsylvania chapter of the American Red Cross.

While Red Cross workers tend to human victims of residential disasters like fires, floods or building collapses, Red Paw takes care of their animals.

The nearly 2-year-old agency uses a network of volunteers, foster homes and other animal welfare groups to care for pets whose owners are struggling to rebuild their lives. Help includes veterinary care, pet supplies and temporary boarding all free of charge.

"We don't want to see anyone lose their pet because of something completely out of their control," Red Paw founder Jen Leary said.

Leary started the nonprofit after seeing the heartbreak and confusion of too many pet owners during her work as a city firefighter and Red Cross volunteer. Red Paw then teamed up with the local Red Cross about 18 months ago.

Before Red Paw, the Red Cross had no uniform approach to handling displaced animals each case depended on the location of the disaster and the available responders, Red Cross spokesman Dave Schrader said.

Red Paw is now the go-to group whenever Red Cross clients need help with their animals. It's a model that Leary hopes to replicate in other states.

Schrader called Red Paw "invaluable" in helping victims cope with catastrophes.

"Knowing that their pets will be cared for certainly reduces the trauma," he said.

According to Leary, Red Paw responded to 164 disasters last year in Philadelphia and four surrounding counties, helping nearly 300 animals including dogs, cats, birds, turtles, ferrets and a snake. The group relies entirely on donations.

Red Paw volunteer Kat Nania recalled going out one snowy night in January after a fire had destroyed a house in southwest Philadelphia. A cat was missing, and its owner said the feline had just birthed a litter of kittens.

Nania feared the worst when she entered the ruins of the house its ceiling fallen in, broken glass everywhere, the interior staircase more like a hill than steps. But there, hiding behind a mirror, was a still-pregnant Tabitha.

"She was just so frightened, she let me scoop her up and put her in the carrier," Nania said. "When I felt her pregnant belly, I was just like, 'Yes!'"

Tabitha gave birth within a day of the rescue. But she and her kittens need a permanent home now; their owner could no longer care for them and surrendered the animals to Red Paw to put up for adoption.

"The goal is always to reunite people with their pets," Leary said. "But sometimes after losing everything they had, it's hard to do that."

Red Paw aims for reunification within a month, but Leary conceded it can take much longer. The agency was able to reunite 86 families with their pets last year; an additional three dozen animals were surrendered and re-adopted.

Max, the German shepherd-pit bull mix owned by Phillips, remains in the group's care while Phillips looks for a new home. She isn't sure when she'll have one, but she calls constantly to check on her dog.

In Philadelphia, the city's animal control organization will also respond to animals left homeless by disasters, executive director Susan Cosby said. But Red Paw's capacity for crisis response is valuable because it eases the burden on her agency, which deals with more than 32,000 stray and surrendered animals per year.

"They're able to work in a far more specialized way with the animals and families that they're helping," Cosby said, later adding: "We can't do it alone. There's just too much work to be done."

___

Online:

http://www.redpawemergencyreliefteam.org

http://www.acctphilly.org

http://www.redcrossphilly.org

___

Follow Kathy Matheson at www.twitter.com/kmatheson

RELATED:

The secret beer drinking happened April 10,reports, at a Belgian restaurant with 115 beers in the menu. Initially, things didn't go well, because Ryan's favorite beer is Miller Lite, and Brasserie Beck only serves classy brews. (Here, Ryan is absolutely correct: fashionable microbrews taste like mud with a lot of sugar in it.) But McDonough quickly smoothed things over. Scherer reports:

But it turned out McDonough had done his homework in other ways. He knew that Ryan had graduated from Miami University in Ohio the same year as his own wife Kari. Both men hailed from former frontier towns in the upper Midwest, and both had been drawn to Washington as young congressional aides. They were nerds, in the best sense of the word, and they were fierce competitors.

Although the White House chief of staff has access to the best intelligence services in the world, the casual reader can't help but notice that all of this "homework" could be done by gleaning facts from . In fairness, it's probably best to hide knowledge of Ryan's favorite Gchat emoticons, courtesy of the NSA, for the second beer date.

RELATED:

Ryan was pleased that McDonough took such an interest.  "He's a Minnesota Irish Catholic guy, and I’m a Wisconsin Irish Catholic guy," Ryan told Time. "It quickly dawned on me that we can work together." They floated ideas about how to get a budget deal. 

RELATED:

There have been other signs that top Republican officials are more easily impressed than the Obama administration might think. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she really liked how President Obamaat a dinner with female senators. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker appeared to smile awhile playing golf with Obama this week. Perhaps a grand bargain can be reached after all, if enough White House aides memorize enough facts from Republican politicians' official bios.

Detroit defenseman Danny DeKeyser broke his right thumb in the third period of the 5-4 overtime win in Game 2 on Thursday night, and is out for rest of the playoffs.

DeKeyser signed with the Red Wings on March 29, soon after finishing his college career at Western Michigan.

"It was a big loss and it's hard to believe a kid out of college would be a big loss, but he is," Detroit coach Mike Babcock said Friday night after stepping off the team plane.

Babcock has said the Red Wings wouldn't have rallied for a spot in a 22nd straight postseason without DeKeyser.

Now, they have to try to advance without him on the blue line.

Babcock is putting another rookie in the lineup, Brian Lashoff, instead of one of two veterans, Ian White and Carlo Colaiacovo.

"He's smart, knows how to play and competes hard," Babcock said. "He makes a good first pass and he's a good penalty-killer."

Detroit blew a three-goal lead in the third period of Game 2 against the Ducks, who sent the game to an overtime that ended quickly. Gustav Nyquist scored a power-play goal 1:21 in the period.

The seventh-seeded Red Wings hope home ice is an advantage against second-seeded Anaheim that helps them take a 2-1 lead in the first-round series Saturday night in Game 3.

"If you would've been in their building, you would've known how deafening it is," Babcock said. "We expect that to be what it should be like for us in our building in warmups."

The Ducks are simply planning to play as well as they did in their last game at Joe Louis Arena. They beat Detroit 5-2 on Feb. 15 breaking a 2-all tie after two periods before losing two games in the regular-season series at home by a combined score of 7-2.

"We'll draw back on what we did earlier in the season," Anaheim captain Ryan Getzlaf said. "We went into a tough building and played real well. We know we can win there, but we're in the playoffs now and it'll be fun."

Both teams said they learned lessons Thursday night.

Detroit scored two goals in the first 4:20 of the game, went ahead 3-0 just more than a minute into the second period and had another three-goal cushion 20 seconds after the puck dropped in the third.

"We weren't ready to play at the start of the game, and the start of the periods," Getzlaf said. "They scored three goals in the first minute of each period. We've got to be ready to hit the ice and be flying for the next game."

And if the Red Wings get ahead again, they plan to keep the pressure on Anaheim after giving up three goals in a 10-minute span of the third period.

"You can't stop playing," Detroit defenseman Niklas Kronwall said. "We got up 4-1 there in the start of the third, then we just kind of relaxed, sat back and let them come wave after wave."

What if the Red Wings ended up losing in OT and falling behind 0-2 in the Western Conference best-of-seven, first-round series?

"I'd rather not think about that right now," Kronwall said. "We found a way to win, now it's 1-1. We haven't really won anything yet. We have to stay grounded and make sure we focus on the task at hand."

The Ducks, meanwhile, were lamenting the loss that looked like it could've been quite a comeback win.

"We lost an opportunity to put a stranglehold on the series," said Bobby Ryan, who scored the tying goal with 2:22 left in regulation for the Ducks. "And, we let it get away."

___

Follow Larry Lage on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/larrylage

When people start downloading the Home software upon its April 12 release in the U.S., Facebook will become the new hub of their Android smartphones.

Switch on your phone and you'll see friends' photos, overlaid by status updates, links and eventually, advertisements in Facebook's quest to bring in more revenue and restore its stock price to where it stood when the company went public nearly 11 months ago.

About 80 percent of what currently appears within a Facebook user's News Feed will automatically be transferred into the "cover feed" of the Home service. For instance, a sibling's status update might be featured prominently on the phone's home screen when it's unlocked. Swipe a finger and there might be a photo posted by one of your best friends. Want to like what you see? Just tap on the home screen twice. Comments can be posted directly from the home screen, too.

If other friends happen to send you a message, their Facebook photo will pop up as a notification.

Other Facebook features, such as video, will be added to Home in future months. A Home version for Android-powered tablet computers also will be coming later this year.

Once they have had their fill of what Facebook is feeding them on the Home service, users can just swipe a finger on the screen to get to all the standard Android apps to listen to music, watch videos or send email.

At first, Home will only work on some Android devices, including HTC Corp.'s One X and One X Plus and Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2. For now, Home isn't compatible with the Nexus phone designed by Google, a fierce Facebook rival whose pliable Android software is being modified to accommodate the new service.

A phone from HTC that comes pre-loaded with Home will be available starting April 12, with AT&T Inc. as the carrier. The HTC First will sell for $99.99 with a two-year data plan from AT&T.

Home is debuting after several years of speculation that Facebook intended to make its own phone or mobile operating system to drive more traffic to its social network. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the speculation never made sense to him because he believes a company-produced phone might only end up in the hands of 10 million to 20 million people. The Home service gives Facebook a chance to take control of the main screen of every phone running on Android, the leading mobile operating system. In the U.S. alone, about 64 million people will be relying on Android-driven phones this year, estimated the research firm eMarketer.

"Just building a phone isn't enough for Facebook," Zuckerberg said Thursday during Home's unveiling at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

The idea behind the software is to bring Facebook content right to users' home screens, rather than requiring them to check various apps to see what their friends are up to, or to chat. Down the line, Facebook will integrate its existing camera app and other features. Though cameras and calls won't be built into the initial version of Home, Zuckerberg promised the software will be updated at least once a month to add more features and fix bugs.

"Home" comes amid rapid growth in the number of people who access Facebook from phones and tablet computers. Of the social network's 1.06 billion monthly users, 680 million log in using a mobile gadget. As a result, the money Facebook makes from mobile advertising is also growing. Taking over the entire screen of smartphones and, eventually, tablet computers will provide Facebook for a larger canvas for selling mobile ads.

Zuckerberg, already a multibillionaire, didn't dwell on Home's moneymaking potential Thursday. Instead, he depicted the software as a noble attempt to put a higher priority on personal relationships than utilitarian apps.

"Why do we need to go into all the apps in the first place to see what is going on with the people we care about," he asked.

"We think this is the best version of Facebook there is," he said.

That statement implies that using Facebook on Apple's iPhone and other smartphones may become a less enriching experience. Apple Inc., which rigidly controls how apps work on the operating system built for the iPhone and iPad, has ingrained more Facebook features into the most recent versions of its mobile software.

Apple had no immediate comment about Home.

Zuckerberg said users can have an experience on Android phones unavailable on other platforms because Google makes the software available on an open-source basis. That allows phone manufacturers and software developers to adapt it to their needs.

Recognizing that text messaging is one of the most important tasks on a mobile phone, Facebook programmed Home to include a feature called "chat heads." This lets users communicate with their friends directly from their home screens without opening a separate app.

"What Facebook wants is to put itself at the front of the Android user experience for as many Facebook users as possible and make Facebook more elemental to their customers' experience," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.

While the Home service probably makes sense for Facebook, Golvin believes the company is overestimating "the extent to which this is something their users want."

"I'm sure there are people out there whose lives revolve around their social network and for them it makes sense to have it front and center," Golvin said. "But this doesn't describe the majority of consumers."

Google Inc. is among the companies hoping that Golvin is correct. The Internet search leader gives away its Android software for free, in the hope that it will steer phone users to ads sold by Google. With Home, Facebook will be muscling its way in between Android users and Google, creating an opportunity for Facebook to seize the advertising advantage.

This is not the first time a big Internet company has co-opted Android: Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablets run a version of Android that strips out all Google services, replacing them with Amazon's equivalents. Google responded by releasing its own tablet to compete against the Kindle Fire last year.

The mobile advertising market is growing quickly, thanks in large part to Facebook and Twitter, which also entered the space in 2012. EMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.

Facebook, meanwhile, is expected to reel in $1.53 billion in worldwide mobile ad revenue this year according to eMarketer, up from $470.7 million last year.

Facebook's stock rose 82 cents, or 3.1 percent, to close Thursday at $27.07. That's 29 percent below its initial public offering price of $38. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor's 500 index has surged by 20 percent since Facebook's rocky debut.

___

Barbara Ortutay reported from New York. AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson contributed to this story from New York.

The shy, skinny antelope was born on March 6 to mother Layla and father Woody, and the family can now be seen in the zoo's gerenuk exhibit.

"Blossom has just begun venturing out into her yard and thoroughly enjoys it as she runs and jumps to the delight of her first visitors," zoo officials said in a statement. "Between bursts of speed, though, she likes to catch her breath in a cubby hole between some rocks. Blossom is also Layla's first calf and she is proving to be a very attentive mother, frequently making sure to clean and check on Blossom."

The word "gerenuk" appropriately means "giraffe-necked" in the Somali language. These long-necked creatures, which are native to eastern Africa, can weigh between 60 to 100 pounds (27 to 45 kilograms) and stand about 3.5 feet (1 meter) tall on four legs. But their uniquely designed hips and pelvises also allow theseto stand up vertically on their two hind legs to reach leaves and twigs in trees.

Blossom is the first gerenuk born at the Denver Zoo. Her parents were paired through the Species Survival Plan of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The organization acts like a matchmaker, recommending which animals should mate to ensure that captive populations ofremain healthy and genetically diverse.

There are thought to be about 95,000 gerenuks in the wild and the species is listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These antelopes are world-class hiders, which means they can endure some pressures of hunting in their native home, but they are also threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, according to the IUCN.

Follow us ,& . Original article on

Armstrong's best chance at protecting his personal fortune may rest in convincing a jury the government has already earned plenty from him, regardless of whether he cheated to win the Tour de France and lied to cover it up.

Armstrong is being sued by the Justice Department to recover at least the $40 million the U.S. Postal Service paid to sponsor his team, claiming Armstrong was ''unjustly enriched'' by using steroids and other drugs to win the Tour de France seven times.

Armstrong's legal team says the benefits the Postal Service reaped from putting its name on Armstrong's jersey was worth far more than that. The Postal Service commissioned four studies that said the contract was worth more than $100 million in worldwide exposure for the agency at a time it was trying to boost its brand.

Armstrong could still settle the case before going to trial, which likely would not start until 2014. Previous settlement talks broke down earlier this year.

If it goes to trial, experts say the government will likely have an easy time proving Armstrong committed fraud by violating his contract. But proving financial damages could be far more difficult and the stakes are huge because the False Claims Act allows the government to seek triple damages.

''They are going to have to get creative,'' said Dallas attorney Matthew Orwig, a former federal prosecutor who has handled lawsuits filed under the same statute the government is using to pursue Armstrong. ''They've got to know they've got a squishy case on damages.''

Paul Scott, an attorney for Floyd Landis, the former Armstrong teammate who brought the whistle-blower lawsuit and would get a cut of any damages awarded, dismissed the argument that the Postal Service wasn't damaged.

''It was all a fraud,'' Scott said. ''U.S. Postal would not have paid a dime if they had known the truth.''

The False Claims Act dates to the Civil War, when the government went after unscrupulous contractors who were providing substandard items to Union troops. Since then, the government has used the law to recover billions of dollars in health care and defense contractor fraud, natural disaster recovery and reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Armstrong was sued first by Landis, who admits participating with Armstrong in the team doping program. The Justice Department announced in February it would join the case and filed its formal complaint April 23.

Landis and the government allege Armstrong, Postal Service cycling team director Johan Bruyneel and the team ownership company, Tailwind Sports Inc., committed fraud by engaging in a doping program that was against the rules in the sport of cycling.

The team contract with the Postal Service required riders to follow cycling rules. The government claims that by using steroids, blood boosters and other illegal performance-enhancing drugs and measures to win, Armstrong and team officials committed fraud while simultaneously assuring Postal Service officials they weren't cheating.

Armstrong has publicly admitted doping. Bruyneel has challenged the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's report on the team doping program and is awaiting an arbitration hearing separate from the lawsuit.

Ben Vernia, a Washington attorney who specializes in federal whistle-blower lawsuits, said Armstrong's case is unusual because it deals with a government agency that paid for publicity instead of something more tangible like an airplane part or specific service that wasn't delivered.

''Engine parts are easy to quantify,'' Vernia said. ''In this case, did (Postal Service) get the benefit of the bargain?''

Armstrong's lawyers insist the Postal Service cashed in at a rate far greater than it paid out.

The agency was the lead sponsor for Armstrong's team from 1998-2004, a span that included six of Armstrong's seven Tour de France victories that have now been stripped away. About $18 million of that went to Armstrong, who at one point had an estimated personal fortune of about $100 million but has seen his endorsement deals vanish since a 2012 USADA report exposed the team doping program.

From 2001 to 2004, the USPS paid for annual reviews of its investment. According to the studies by the FCB and Campbell Eward marketing firms, the Postal Service's contract with Armstrong's team was worth close to $140 million in exposure in the U.S. and overseas from 2001-2004.

The studies evaluated Postal Service market penetration in newspaper, broadcast, internet and magazine stories about Armstrong and his team. It also measured advertising by other sponsors such as Nike and Suburu that included Armstrong and the Postal Service team name, and even gossip-page coverage of his romance with rocker Sheryl Crow.

The 2004 report by Campbell Ewald also included notations about the potentially negative publicity of television coverage in New York City markets that noted drug allegations by Armstrong's critics.

''The U.S. Postal Service benefited tremendously from its sponsorship of the cycling team,'' Armstrong attorney Elliot Peters said when the government filed its complaint. ''Its own studies repeatedly and conclusively prove this.The USPS was never the victim of fraud.Lance Armstrong rode his heart out for the USPS team, and gave the brand tremendous exposure during the sponsorship years.''

A 2003 government audit criticized the sponsorship deal and said the government could only show less than $1 million in revenue over a four-year period as a result of the sponsorship.That report said tracking media exposure can be distracting compared with studying actual sales results.Postal Service officials disagreed at the time with that conclusion and argued that media exposure, not just direct sales, was considered an important part of the sponsorship.

Landis' attorney argues the benefit of exposure is implied in any sponsorship deal. That's why companies enter sponsorship deals with teams or athletes, Scott said.

Scott also suggested the Postal Service's reputation has been damaged since the revelations of Armstrong's cheating.

The agency will ''forever be tied to the largest doping scandal in the history of sports,'' Scott said.

Orwig, the former prosecutor, questioned whether Landis or the Postal Service will be able to prove future damages based on an association with an athlete that expired almost a decade ago.

''That's speculative at best,'' Orwig said. ''It will be appealing in a lot of ways, but it won't be legally solid.''

In a post titled "Stopping the Game of Clones", Jeffrey Bleich - himself a devotee of the HBO series - compared the rampant piracy of online thieves to the plotting and machinations of the noble houses in the show.

"Unfortunately, nearly as epic and devious as the drama is its unprecedented theft by online viewers around the world," he wrote on his official Facebook page.

"As the ambassador here in Australia, it was especially troubling to find out that Australian fans were some of the worst offenders with among the highest piracy rates of 'Game of Thrones' in the world".

TorrentFreak, a file-sharing news website, estimated that Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV series in 2012, with one episode notching 4.28 million pirated downloads, equal to the number of broadcast viewers for that episode, Bleich said.

When the second season began, Australian fans had to wait a week before being able to access new episodes by legitimate means, but the wait has come down to a few hours for the third season.

Neil Gane, managing director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), said that surveys had found that unsurprisingly, most of the illegal downloaders said they did it because it was free.

Game of Thrones season 2 is priced at $38.99 in the Apple iTunes store in the United States and A$33.99 ($35.05) in the Australian store.

"The number of unauthorized downloads is staggering," he told Reuters in an email.

Based on the books by George R. R. Martin, the show follows a vast cast of characters fighting for control of the throne in the fictional world of Westeros.

"If the 4 million people who watched Game of Thrones legally had been illegal downloaders - the show would be off the air and there would never have been a season 3," Bleich said. ($1 = 0.9697 Australian dollars)

(Reporting By Thuy Ong; Editing by Elaine Lies and Robert Birsel)

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle police call it one of the boldest attempted drug thefts they have seen: A woman impersonating a nurse, apparently addicted to painkillers, crept through the hospital rooms of patients and tried to steal medication from their IV machines.

"It's pretty unusual, pretty brazen," Seattle police spokeswoman Renee Witt said on Wednesday. "It really shows how desperate this woman is and how powerful addiction can be."

Police are looking for the woman who, dressed in a shirt that resembled scrubs and wearing clogs on her feet, entered a man's room at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle on April 13 and began fiddling with his pain medication IV machine.

The patient did not recognize the woman and when he asked what she was doing, she promptly left, police said.

When the man's real nurse came into the room, she noticed his IV line had been cut and pain medication was dripping on the floor. The machine had pry marks, where the intruder apparently had tried to access pain medication, police said.

Shortly afterward, the same woman was spotted on another floor of the hospital peering into patient rooms, Witt said. She told a staff member she was there to check the IV machines.

The woman went into a room and again tinkered with a patient's IV machine, police said. As she left, a relative of the occupant noticed blood dripping on the floor and saw that lines to the patient's IV machine had been cut.

Witt said neither patient suffered any injuries, and the only thing stolen was about 2 feet of tubing from the patient-controlled medication machines and possibly some pain medication from the tubes.

Police said the woman appeared confident both in talking to hospital staff and in walking into patients' rooms. They released images of the woman on Wednesday and asked for the public's help in identifying her.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis, Cynthia Johnston and Peter Cooney)