"Fleet Street" will be broadcast on U.S. cable channel Starz and will follow the competitive landscape of tabloid publications in 1970s London, Starz said in a statement on Wednesday.

"It was the dawn of the celebrity era, in all its gruesome detail - a revolution that changed pop culture, and the relationship between the press and politicians, royals, and stars," Morgan said in a statement.

The series "will chronicle the rise of tabloid journalism, the sexual revolution and class warfare, all seen through the eyes of an American journalist," the statement added.

"Fleet Street" is currently in development and does not have a release date. It will consist of eight to 13 hour-long episodes.

Morgan, 48, rose to fame as the youngest national newspaper editor in 1994 when he was appointed to lead Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World tabloid.

He became editor of the Daily Mirror in 1995 but was fired in 2004 after the newspaper published false photographs of Iraqi prisoners apparently being abused by British soldiers.

Morgan moved into television, gaining fame as a judge on Simon Cowell's competition shows "Britain's Got Talent" and its U.S. version "America's Got Talent."

In 2011, Morgan took over from veteran host Larry King and launched the CNN talk show "Piers Morgan Live."

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

The horses were on their way to a rendering plant in Quebec on Monday evening when the incident occurred on Interstate 81 near the town of Lisle, about 55 miles south of Syracuse, police said.

Driver Clarence Phelps, 56, told police he noticed flames coming from the passenger side of the vehicle. He pulled over and tried unsuccessfully to extinguish the fire which, police said, may have been caused by a fuel tank malfunction.

Police were still investigating, but said on Tuesday no laws regarding the transportation of animals appeared to have been broken.

Each year, roughly 130,000 horses are estimated to be shipped out of the United States to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. Horse slaughter was banned in the U.S. in 2006, but an effort is underway to resume the practice in U.S. meat-packing companies.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Gunna Dickson)

For decades, Harryhausen was Hollywoods premiere stop motion effects artist, building models that would seemingly interact with actors on screen in films ranging from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad through his final film, 1981s .

In recent years, most of Harryhausens animation techniques have been supplanted by computer-generated imagery (CGI). But even animators who create their effects entirely on computers today use techniques pioneered by Harryhausen and his tiny physical models.

Film blogger , What Ray Harryhausen did was simply magic. He brought inanimate objects to life on screen, and he gave them character and personality that often dwarfed the so-so actors who were up against them. It is no hyperbole to say that the mind (and hands) of Harryhausen shaped the geek revolution that has swept pop culture in the last few decades.

Beginning his career during the golden age of science fiction, Harryhausen counted many of the genre's towering figures among his contemporaries. For example, Harryhausen joined the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Societyin the 1930s. Bradbury would go on to write some of science fiction and fantasys seminal novels, including "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles."

Along the way, Harryhausen created the effects for some of the most beloved genre films in history, including titles such as Jason and the Argonauts.

And with a backlash to what many consider an over-reliance on digital effects, its likely that Harryhausen may appeal to new generations of fans.

"@JennyMcCarthy you're ugly! Police weren't at my house old lady! Shut the f*** up!" Bynes wrote on Thursday after McCarthy (who appeared on one episode of Bynes' series "What I Like About You") and others on Twitter claimed that authorities got involved with Bynes after she posted the racy photos.

Another 140-characters-or-less dig followed from Bynes, "@jennymccarthy I need help? What are u talking about? Aren't u 50 years old? I'm 27, u look 80 compared to me! Why are you talking about me?"

Their exchange continued on Thursday morning with an eventual make up.

"@AmandaBynes sorry girl. Looking out for ya," McCarthy wrote.

"@JennyMcCarthy thanks! I'm sorry I offended you! You're beautiful! I was lying! I'll delete our tweets!" Bynes wrote.

The spat started after the 24-year-old retired actress posted two photos online where she is seen in a bathroom mirror with her arm and hair covering her breasts. Below the waste, she's sporting black underwear and tattered black stockings.

On Wednesday night, McCarthy got involved in the situation.

"Police are at @AmandaBynes house. I hope they get her help. Enough of this circus. She needs help," McCarthy claimed in a Tweet.

A rep from The New York Police Department said there was no 911 call and they did not go to Amanda's residence.

On Wednesday, Bynes spoke with In Touch, where she slammed her critics and claimed to be sober.

"I have no clue [why people say I'm insane]. Every time I've heard it, it came from an ugly person's mouth, so I don't care," she told the mag. "The only ones lying about me having a mental illness are people I don't talk to."

According to the actress, her behavior is not a result of drugs or alcohol.

"I don't drink. I'm allergic to alcohol... I don't smoke pot. I smoke tobacco," she told the mag.

Copyright 2013 by . All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Author Michael Lewis did not defame a money manager in his best-selling 2010 book "The Big Short," according to a federal judge in Manhattan.

In a lawsuit filed in 2011, Wing Chau, a manager of collateralized debt obligations, and his firm Harding Advisory LLC, accused Lewis of including a series of defamatory statements in a chapter revolving around a 2007 dinner in Las Vegas that included Chau and hedge fund manager Steven Eisman.

The book, which spent six weeks atop The New York Times' list of hardcover nonfiction bestsellers, looks at the housing and credit bubble during the 2000s that lead to the 2007 financial crisis.

Chau also named Eisman and the book's publisher W.W. Norton & Co as defendants, over what he called "accusations of grave professional misconduct, incompetence, and irresponsibility."

But U.S. District Judge George Daniels said the statements were "non-actionable expressions of opinion," not "assertions of fact that may properly serve as a basis for libel claims."

"A careful review of Chapter 6 of The Big Short indicates that the challenged statements are incapable of being reasonably susceptible to any defamatory meaning," Daniels wrote in a ruling on Friday.

Moreover, Daniels said "many of the allegedly defamatory statements about the plaintiffs are completely or substantially true."

"We respectfully disagree with the court's decision and intend to appeal," said Steven Molo, a lawyer for Chau.

W.W. Norton and a lawyer representing the firm and Lewis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

David Schulz, a lawyer for Eisman, declined to comment.

The case is Chau et al v. Lewis et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-01333.

(Reporting by Bernard Vaughan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he nears the end of a dozen years as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller finds himself defending the agency over its handling of two high-profile cases. It is a familiar spot for the low-key ex-Marine.

At the request of President Barack Obama, Mueller stayed on for two years beyond the job's 10-year term to help stabilize law enforcement's fight against domestic and international threats to U.S. security. Recent events - the bombing at the Boston Marathon and ricin-laced letters sent to Obama and a U.S. senator - have left Mueller dealing with suggestions that agency missteps may have added to the damage.

Mueller, 68, who is scheduled to leave office in early September, has endured many congressional attacks against his agency's performance. While he is not universally praised on Capitol Hill, he has won enough bipartisan support to be considered a success.

Tellingly, it was a target of the 2001 anthrax letters - Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont - who told Mueller at a 2008 hearing that he seriously doubted the findings of the FBI's long and complicated anthrax investigation. But three years later, Leahy as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman helped Mueller win a two-year extension of his term.

The FBI chief gets far milder treatment than some other prominent members of the 0bama administration, such as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. She came under heavy fire from Republicans for remarks she made after the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi in which four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

In Washington, where making enemies is easy, Mueller wins high scores from members of Congress for his competence, even as he guided a vast expansion of FBI powers since the hijacked plane attacks of September 11, 2001.

"I believe he is well liked, even though I find fault with a lot of his policies, or how he does things," Senator Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "I think he's well intentioned ... it's kind of difficult for me to criticize him even when there is a screw-up," Grassley added.

This month, the FBI has faced fresh assaults over its failure to spot the potential danger from Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, after Russia asked the bureau to investigate him two years ago. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a police shootout and his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has been charged in the bombings that killed three people and injured more than 200.

Two senior Republican lawmakers complained Tamerlan Tsarnaev was yet another in a series of cases in which a person investigated by the agency had later taken part in attacks.

Soon after the Boston bombings, the FBI accused an Elvis impersonator of sending letters containing ricin to Obama and other officials, only to quickly drop the charges for a lack of evidence.

Mueller and his leadership team have briefed members of Congress about the cases, but further inquiries are likely.

"I think he is ready to go home. He has had 12 years," said Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. He praised Mueller, who was first nominated to the job by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

"He has had some major issues to confront, including 9/11, then Russian and China threats, cyber threats," he said.

Some lawmakers say that despite the Boston blasts, the FBI thwarted other plots in recent years, including one to bomb New York's subway system. They also note that there was an arrest within days of the Boston bombing.

"I thought they (the FBI) did fabulous in getting to the bottom of the Boston bombing, but as great as that was, it was embarrassing to bring in a guy who had nothing to do with the ricin mailings," said Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who serves on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the FBI.

Mueller's office did not comment, although Mueller has praised the work of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for the arrest of the Boston bombing suspect.

LOW PROFILE?

Some think Mueller's secret to success has been keeping a low profile in a town where many people are constantly angling to get attention. Mueller, while doing a lot of closed-door briefings for leaders, does not talk much to the media.

"I think he has been successful because he hasn't been a press hog," Grassley said.

Mueller, a former Justice Department official, was nominated for the top FBI job in 2001 and took office days before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

When Obama asked Mueller to stay on, some Senate Republicans initially balked. One, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, came around after Mueller met with him to discuss the bureau's handling of a Kentucky case.

Mueller fielded heavy criticism from his earliest days in office.

After the 9/11 attacks, politicians from both parties questioned how the FBI had missed several warning signs of the hijackings, such as a memo from a Phoenix agent about Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons.

The anthrax case led to criticism because the bureau focused for so long on the wrong man, a mistake that ultimately cost the government millions of dollars in settling a lawsuit.

The FBI finally concluded that Army scientist Bruce Ivans was responsible for the anthrax attacks, but he killed himself before charges were brought.

In 2008, Leahy, then the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Mueller he did not believe the FBI finding that Ivans was solely responsible. Leahy said he thought others had to be involved.

Mueller reorganized the FBI to expand its analytical capability and improve its intelligence collection. He also beefed up its bioterrorism capabilities.

He has been praised for resisting some parts of the expansion of domestic surveillance under Bush.

Grassley said Mueller had not always been as responsive as possible to the senator's letters or "as protective of whistleblowers as he should be."

But he said there should not be another extension as director for Mueller, no matter how well liked he may be.

The purpose of the law limiting the director's term "is to make sure we don't get into this J. Edgar Hoover syndrome, that one guy is so indispensable," Grassley said, referring to the former FBI director of almost four decades. "We don't want to get caught in that syndrome again."

(Reporting By Susan Cornwell; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Peter Cooney)

BOSTON (Reuters) - Writer Dan Baum, a self-described Jewish liberal Democrat and a gun enthusiast since childhood, strapped a revolver to his side in 2009 and set off on an 18-month, 15,000 mileexploration of the U.S. firearms culture.

His book, "Gun Guys: A Road Trip," was released this month amid a gun-control debate rekindled by the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Baum, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, says it was a challenge to write for two polarized audiences: liberals and fiercely protective gun lovers.

He spoke to Reuters about America's gun culture, semi-automatic weapons and what he learned about himself from writing the book.

Q: Are you a gun guy, or were you acting?

A: I'm a gun guy, and I live in a world of anti-gun people. Being a liberal Democrat, my whole social world is among people who dislike guns and dislike gun people.

Q: What should gun-control advocates know about America's gun culture?

A: Guns are cool; they're fun; they're mechanically gorgeous; they last forever.

But the really deep stuff is - we have a lot of freedom in this country to own guns. Our gun laws bespeak a trust in the people. And for the gun guys, this is really what America is about.

The ones who mostly buy guns are straight, white, middle-aged men, rural, who have not finished college, and that is a demographic that has seen their world collapse in all kinds of ways. The NRA (National Rifle Association) comes along and whispers in their ear, "Yeah, you're pissed, you know why? Because the liberals want to take away your guns."

Gun guys derive tremendous pride from being able to manage these incredibly dangerous devices safely, and then along come these pointy-headed urban liberals who have never had any guns, and they want to tell you that you can't be trusted with this device. It is unimaginably offensive.

I'm not asking you to like these people. But I'm asking you to listen to them. They are not just testosterone-poisoned death freaks.

Q: And what can the 100 million U.S. gun owners do to lower the temperature?

A: Gun guys have to get serious about locking up their guns. Most of the bad (stuff) that happens with guns in the United States happens with guns that some law-abiding gun owner left unattended.

The problem is, gun guys do not see themselves as responsible for gun violence. Gun guys have to accept, I have to accept, that my guns affect you.

Q: You quote a prediction that President Obama would push for gun control if re-elected.

A: I lost a $100 bet with a guy. I said there's no way that the Democrats are going to make another serious run at gun control. I think they're going to pay big time. Until the gun-control push after Sandy Hook, we had a chance of taking the House (of Representatives) ... Now we have no chance.

Q: Is it wrong to focus on controlling semi-automatic rifles, particularly the AR-15.?

A: It's ignorant. The gun-control world is trying to pass off the AR-15 as some kind of bizarre outlier of the gun world, when in fact it's all anybody wants to shoot.

Q: What did you learn about yourself through this book?.

A: I am no less a Democrat, I am no less an Obama supporter. But I really understand the conservative lament that we are becoming a nation of weak, disrespected, over-managed individuals.

Q: You depicted conversations and scenes at which you were not present. How did you come about your story-telling style.?

A: I ask a lot of questions. If I can go see the place where it happened I do that. I try to talk to as many people who were there as I can. It takes time to get that out of people. I'm writing about ordinary people and I try very hard to portray them the way they want to be portrayed.

Q: You've also written about the drug wars. How does the gun-control effort compare?

A: The gun issue, like the drug issue, is used to avoid talking about all kinds of stuff that's much more central. We have gone out of our way to avoid having any sense of collective care. If we have people wigging out and killing people, maybe it's because we have created a society where everybody is extremely alienated and extremely stressed. And it's getting more so, because the one percent are getting an increased amount of wealth, leaving less for the rest of us.

(Editing by Patricia Reaney and Paul Simao)

RELATED:

The two most damning falsehoods of the Boston frenzy— and —left many real-time enablers regretful, including many powerful Twitter users. Perhaps the most proactive among them is Wired's Mat Honan, whose admittedly offending tweet is pictured above at right and who istoday, even offering a specific solution:  

So here’s one way it could work using Twitter’s metadata. Twitter could add a function, similar to a retweet or favorite, that let you edit and correct a tweet after it had been posted. Those tweets then show up in a timeline as having been corrected–again, they could be flagged like favorites or retweets. Click on a tweet marked as edited, and it uses  (the same system that lets tweets embed images, videos, and text) to show the original.

Honan also suggests that Twitter give the original author the option of notifying everyone who retweeted the offending tweeter's misinformation of the correction, which they could then choose to republish at the top of their timelines, if they so chose. He's  to call on Twitter to build in corrective functionality, but developers who actually know how to build Twitter say it's both technically and practically impossible. "No, I can't imagine that they'd implement that in the foreseeable future," Blaine Cook, a former lead developer at Twitter, told us this afternoon. Twitter doesn't have "anything to share on this" mountain of dev work, a company spokesperson told The Wire, but it would be an uphill—and perhaps unnecessarily complex—climb. Here's how:

RELATED:

Just think of all the places a tweet will go: Your feed, your followers' feeds, then—if it's retweeted—to their followers feeds. And then there are all the apps and clients that serve all these functions on top of that. Going through each feed and inbox to change that data attached to each message would be a "dicey prospect," says Evan Prodromou, founder of Status.Net, an opensourced social service. "Keeping modified tweets in sync—across all the clients running in the world—would be incredibly difficult and expensive compared to just pushing out a live stream, which is already difficult and expensive," said Alex Payne, a former Twitter engineer who worked at the company from 2007 to 2010.  

RELATED:

To add this functionality, Twitter would essentially have to upend itself. "Introducing editing would make Twitter's architecture far more complicated, particularly when you consider that a user posting a tweet results in a cascade of activity across different internal systems," Payne says. Twitter works as quickly as it does because the platform runs on multiple parallel servers, a developer here at The Atlantic, Chris Barna, explained: "The system that handles the request creates a list of 'tasks' that are independent of each other that can then be handled by many servers," he said. These independent requests, however, assume that a tweet won't change depending on the server or the order of the request. "Modifications to tweets would increase the difficulty of maintaining search, advertising, and other features of the service," added Payne. 

RELATED:

In addition, to update any given stream, Twitter relies on a lot of caching. Adding an Edit button—unlike, say, the Delete button—would add multiple layers of complexity to that data load. The system would have to look and see if any tweets have been updated... and then go back again to look and see if any retweets had been updated. Dalton Caldwell, the CEO of App.Net, explained it in terms of editing a YouTube video: "When I upload a video to YouTube it goes out and its permanently there. If I edit a video, what actually happens is a brand new upload, and YouTube just updates its pointers," he told us. That's not only a tricky maneuver, but it could complicate things to the point of not working. "Caching relies on systems to be as simple as possible so that caches aren't invalidated too frequently," Barna said. 

RELATED:

Beyond the technical headaches, adding an Edit button would change the way we interact with Twitter. It's a lot of woulda-coulda, really. Right now, tweets are static; we treat them as such. "The widespread conception of Twitter is based on ephemeral, one-time communications," said Payne, the former Twitter engineer. We assume something we retweeted will never change. With an update or editing function, we would be subscribing to all of Twitter's maleable new realities. What if we don't want to do that? That question would linger in our minds every time we RT something. Plus, it would be a pain to see if your RT was still legit. The old "RTs don't equal endorsements" adage, well, that would be upended, too.

From an interface standpoint, Twitter would have two options: It could delete any edited tweet from our timelines, but then a user might wonder where that tweet went—or might not even notice. Alternatively, Twitter could give users a way to retweet a corrected tweet, if they wanted to. (Honan suggests the second option.) Building out that interface is a project in and of itself, but it's also a different version of Twitter than the quick moving network that we know today. 

Initially, a new Twitter Edit button would probably take a lot of explaining to Twitter's 200 million-plus users. "How would you explain what an addendum tweet is?" wondered Caldwell, who thought Honan's solution, although complicated, makes the most sense. People could get used to editable Twitter, if designed well. But truly modified tweets would change the ethos of a social network from what's happening right now to, well, to some sort of constantly updating blog post you can check in on, and that's kind of not the point.

Considering all the work and resources it would take for Twitter to build a Twitter that you can edit, there's not a lot of payoff. Seriously: How often does this kind of mass mistake happen where it really, truly matters? How many average users affect average people with a tweet they can't just delete? In the hunt for the Boston bombing suspects, an average family already grieving over their missing son had his name connected with a deadly bombing—by above average Twitter users, to the rest of the world. That's not the norm. "Does building the UI and the infrastructure to allow editing tweets pay off for Twitter? I think probably not," said Status.Net's Prodromou. Indeed, to Twitter, it would probably save a lot of time, money, and energy if we all just tweeted with a lot more care. 

I was in Chile's Atacama Desert this March for the(Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), a collection of 66 radio antennas mounted at an altitude of 16,500 feet (5,000 meters) on the Chajnantor Plateau.

I don't know what was more thrilling seeing the spectacular observatory, or experiencing its otherworldly surroundings.

Theis so dry that some parts of it haven't received rain for hundreds of years. Certain spots are orange and red, evoking the terrain of Mars more than Earth. Yet other areas experience enough rainfall to support a surprising amount of scrub vegetation and even cacti.

And on the horizon, pointed volcanoes and snowcapped Andes mountains tower over the scene. Many of the volcanoes are active, with smoke seeping ominously from the tops of some. A byproduct of this volcanism is the salt that's littered throughout the desert, coating many ground surfaces with a white sheen.

All these factors combine to create a landscape unlike any place I've ever seen.

Clara Moskowitz visited Chile on a trip paid for by the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory.Follow Clara on and . Follow us,or.Original article on .