Missoni executive among those aboard small plane missing off Venezuelan coast

ROME — The search resumed Saturday for a small plane that has disappeared off the Venezuelan coast with six people aboard, including Vittorio Missoni, a top executive in Italy's Missoni fashion house, officials said.

Missoni, 58, is the director general of the iconic brand and the eldest son of the company's founder. Flying with him on Friday's flight from Venezuela's Los Roques resort archipelago to Caracas, was Missoni's wife, Maurizia Castiglioni, two Italian friends of the couple, and a crew of two Venezuelans.

Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper reported that family patriarch Ottavio Missoni, 91, and his wife, Rosita, were at their home in Italy, along with their daughter, Angela, the chief fashion designer and sister of Vittorio Missoni, waiting for information about the search. Italian news reports said the third Missoni sibling, Luca, had flown to Venezuela.

EPA

Vittorio Missoni

"We have no other news" beyond that the plane went missing, Paolo Marchetti, a Missoni official told reporters as he left company headquarters in the northern Italian town of Sumirago on Saturday afternoon.

Missoni, with its trademark zigzag and other geometric patterns in sweaters, scarves and other knitwear, is one of Italy's most famous fashion brands abroad. Vittorio Missoni played a key role in marketing the Missoni family creations in Asia, especially in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, and he took on the title of general director of marketing of Missoni SpA. He also is responsible for the company's products in the United States and France.

His elderly parents still play an active role in the family.

On Friday, Venezuela's Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said the plane was declared missing hours after taking off from Los Roques, a string of islands, cays and islets that is popular for scuba diving, white beaches and coral reefs, where the Missonis and their friends were on vacation.

Revero said the plane had been expected at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Caracas but never arrived.

A first day of searching on Friday yielded nothing.

As the search resumed Saturday, the Italian news agency ANSA, reporting from Rome, said a specialized ocean-searching naval vessel was being deployed.

The Missoni brand is scheduled to display its latest menswear creations on the Milan runways in fashion show later this month.

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Needle reaches the inner groove for Spec’s

In the end, even the almighty Adele and Taylor Swift could not hold back the inevitable.

Spec’s, one of the last great record stores, will close its flagship location in Coral Gables on U.S.1, thus joining once-favored chains like Virgin, Tower and Peaches, locally and abroad, that have withered from Internet shopping.

With the closing, sometime in January after the merchandise is liquidated, 64 years of history becomes memory for countless people who discovered a love of music in the home Martin “Mike” Spector built in 1948 when U.S.1 was but a two-lane road.

The original store, which sold cameras alongside 78-rpm records, was a few blocks south on the highway in South Miami and is now an Einstein’s bagel spot. The present location, opened in 1953 in Coral Gables, lived through the bobby sox era, Beatlemania, disco, punk, hip hop/rap, grunge, electronic dance music and all the format changes including 12-inch vinyl, 45-rpm, reel to reel, 8-track, cassette, compact disc and mp3.

After the first music industry recession in the late 1970s, Spec’s still managed to double in size by breaking through the walls of two restaurants in 1980 on its north side. The original room on the south side of the building would house, first, Spec’s’ VHS movie rentals and sales — Saturday Night at Spec’s! — and, later, one of the most expansive collections of classical music in town.

“It’s the soundtrack of our lives,” said store manager Lennie Rohrbacher, who spent 23 years of his life working at Spec’s, from Clearwater to Coral Gables

Music sales

At its peak, the Spec’s chain grew to some 80 stores in Florida and Puerto Rico. In 1993, annual sales exceeded $70 million. Spec’s went public in 1985 and, in 1998, the Spectors sold to Camelot Music Group, which was acquired by Trans World Entertainment Corp.

Trans World, which did not return several telephone messages, shrewdly kept the Spec’s name attached to the flagship store as goodwill even though, technically, it operated under the company’s retail subsidiary, F.Y.E. (For Your Entertainment).

But those are the cold, hard business facts.

Spec’s was “not like another Eckerd’s,” a drug store chain that also slipped into oblivion amid changing times, said Rohrbacher. “This was part of the community, part of my life. It’s not another store going under.”

Indeed, Spec’s was, first and foremost, a community gathering spot to share a love of music. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Spec’s resembled a makeshift camp site where people would sleep overnight in the parking lot to get the best shot at concert tickets in a pre-Internet world. Spec’s, a hop-skip from the University of Miami’s music school, served as its own music education outlet thanks to a knowledgeable sales staff.

Music education

“The proximity to the UM is prime real estate. Not to have it there will really be different. Even if they didn’t have what I was looking for, the staff was knowledgeable and you were sort of tapping into this knowledge base of people who could turn you on to new music. That’s what I’ll miss about it and the community around the store,” said Margot Winick, an employee at the Coral Gables Spec’s in the mid-1980s when she was a freshman at the UM.

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Opening statements to start in Miami terrorism trial of local Muslim clerics

Opening statements are set to begin Friday in the Miami federal trial of an elderly Muslim cleric and his son on charges they funneled tens of thousands of dollars from South Florida to the Pakistani Taliban terrorist organization to carry out violent attacks against U.S. interests overseas.

A jury of 12 people was selected Thursday after they filled out four-page questionnaires in the case of Hafiz Khan, 77, and his 26-year old son, Izhar Khan. The elder Khan was imam at a Miami mosque, and his son held the same post at a mosque in Margate.

Both have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support to terrorism, asserting they were sending financial support to relatives and friends in Pakistan who have struggled for survival -- not to terrorists. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years.

Charges were dismissed last year against another son, Irfan Khan, because of a lack of evidence.

The Pakistani Taliban is linked to al-Qaida and has played roles in several attacks against the U.S., including a December 2009 suicide bombing at a military base in Khost, Afghanistan, that killed seven U.S. citizens, prosecutors said. The group also was connected to the attempt in May 2010 by Faisal Shahzad to detonate a bomb in New York's Times Square.

Central to the prosecution's case against the Khans are more than 1,000 phone calls and other communications intercepted by the FBI from 2008 to 2010. Based in large part on those calls, prosecutors say the Khans wired at least $50,000 to help finance the Pakistani Taliban.

In addition, prosecutors say Hafiz Khan founded a religious school, known as a madrassa, in Pakistan's Swat Valley that was used by the Taliban to train and indoctrinate children in fighting Americans. The madrassa was shut down in 2009 by the Pakistani army.

Court documents also show that the calls contain anti-American rhetoric and strong support for the Taliban, mainly on the part of the older Khan.

In July 2009, for example, the FBI said Khan “cursed the leaders and army of Pakistan, and called for the death of Pakistan's president and for blood to be shed in violent revolution.”

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Why Some Facebook Users Constantly Update Status

Scientists have found what compels people to constantly update their Facebook status. College students who posted more status updates than they normally did felt less lonely over the course of a week, even if no one “Liked” or commented on their posts, researchers found.

“We got the idea to conduct this study during a coffee-break sharing random stories about what friends had posted on Facebook,” psychology researcher Fenne große Deters, of the Universitat Berlin, told LiveScience in an email. “Wondering why posting status updates is so popular, we thought that it would be thrilling to study this new form of communication empirically.”

Deters and her colleague recruited about 100 undergraduates (all Facebook users) at the University of Arizona. All participants filled out initial surveys to measure their levels of loneliness, happiness and depression, and they gave the researchers access to their Facebook profiles by friending a dummy user created for the experiment.

The students were sent an analysis of their average weekly status updates (online wall-memos) and some of the participants were then told to post more statuses than usual over the next seven days. During that week, all completed a short online questionnaire at the end of each day about their mood and level of social connection.

Compared with the group of students who didn’t adjust their social media habits, those who went on a status-writing blitz felt less lonely over the week, the team found. Their happiness and depression levels went unchanged, “suggesting that the effect is specific to experienced loneliness,” the researchers wrote. And a drop in loneliness was linked to an increase in feeling more socially connected, which the researchers believe is the cause behind the positive effects of status updating. [6 Personal Secrets Your Facebook Profile Isn't Keeping]

Interestingly, the team found that loneliness levels did not depend on whether the students’ status updates garnered any comments or “Likes” from Facebook friends. One might assume that a lack of response could be considered a form of rejection, but the act of writing a status update itself might help people feel more connected, the researchers said. When crafting a clever status, Facebook users have a target audience in mind. Simply thinking about their friends (or at least their Facebook friends) can have a “social snacking” effect.

“Similar to a snack temporarily reducing hunger until the next meal, social snacking may help tolerate the lack of ‘real’ social interaction for a certain amount of time,” the researchers wrote in a paper published last month in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Now with over a billion users, Facebook has become the focus of an increasing number of studies trying to uncover the real-life social side effects that can accompany using the social media site.

For example, research presented last year at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) showed how the site offers a dangerous medium for social comparison. People in that study with lots of Facebook friends had lower self-esteem, feeling worse about their place in life and their achievements if they’d just viewed their friends’ status updates, compared with people who hadn’t recently surfed the site. But for people with just a few Facebook friends, viewing status updates wasn’t a problem.

Another study, detailed in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal Nature, found such Facebook friends can influence real-life actions of one another. In that study, one “get out the vote” message sent to 61 million Facebook users on Election Day 2010 led to 340,000 people casting ballots when they otherwise would not have.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Smash Season One Exclusive DVD Clip

The competition to be cast on NBC's Smash was just as cut-throat as the competition to be cast in Bombshell, the musical at the heart of NBC's Smash.

VIDEO - First Trailer: Smash Season Two

For producers, tapping Katharine McPhee to play Karen was a no-brainer once the triple-threat walked into the room. "Kat seems to be the beginning of a youthful star in the making," creator Theresa Rebeck says in ETonline's exclusive sneak peek clip off the upcoming DVD. "She captures that aspect of Marilyn's innocence and beauty and raw sexuality."

PHOTOS - Smash Stars Strip Down

For McPhee, her connection to Karen was immediate and deeply personal. "I could just so relate to this girl. I know what that feels like to just have this drive and this dream and have disappointments and frustration for things not happening as quickly as you want to."

Check out ETonline's exclusive clip off Smash: The Complete First Season, on DVD January 8. Click here to pre-order.

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Feds charge NJ man for offering $5K to 'cannibal cop' to abduct woman

The feds charged a New Jersey man today with offering $5,000 to NYPD "cannibal cop" Gilberto Valle to kidnap and deliver a woman so he could rape and kill her.

Michael Vanhise, 23, of Hamilton, NJ, admitted sending emails in which he and Valle discussed the abduction and Vanhise tried to knock down the price after Valle sent him a photo of the intended victim, court papers allege.

A Manhattan federal court complaint includes the following exchange between the two, which allegedly took place on Feb. 28.

Vanhise: "I definitely want her and how much again, I'm sorry to ask but I don't remember."

'Cannibal cop' Gilberto Valle

Valle: "$5,000 and she is all yours."

Vanhise: "Could we do 4?"

Valle: "I am putting my neck on the line here. If something goes wrong some somehow, I am in deep s--t. $5,000 and and you need to make sure that she is not found. She will definitely make the news."

Vanhise also admitted sending other emails to two other, unidentified people, "about kidnapping, raping and murdering women and children," according to the complaint.

Vanhise allegedly sent those people "photographs of a minor girl known to him" and gave them "the purported address of the child, which was in close proximity to the child's actual home address."

Vanhise made his admissions during an FBI raid on his home on Oct. 26, a day after Valle was arrested for allegedly scheming online to kidnap, rape, torture, cook and eat women.

Valle, 28, is also charged with accessing a law-enforcement database to target his alleged victims.

The 6-year NYPD veteran maintains that he was merely engaging in sexual fantasies and never planned to actually harm anyone.

He's set for trial later this month.

Vanhise is expected to appear in court later today.

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AutoNation stock soars on sales spike

AutoNation, the national chain of dealerships headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, continues to reap the gains from a rebound in auto sales.

In December, sales of new vehicles jumped 15 percent at AutoNation. For the year, sales were up 20 percent. The new stats are better than the industry-wide numbers out this week, which forecast a 13 percent increase in sales of 2011 totals. That would bring 2012’s tally to 14.5 million new vehicles sold.

The numbers are still well below pre-recession peaks of 17 million set in 2005, but still capture the impact of an improving economy in the nation’s auto showrooms. AutoNation owns dealerships across the country, including South Florida’s Maroone chain.

The company’s stock soared 3 percent Friday to $41.88 a share after the release of the December sales numbers.

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New Year is a good time to count your blessings

The new year is a great time to look back and consider how blessed you are. I try to do that every day, but often in my life I am overwhelmed at the enormous blessings the Lord has bestowed on me.

No, I didn’t get a great big financial windfall last year. And I walk with a cane, because of painful arthritis in one of my knees. Still, I am blessed. I can still walk.

A few years ago, I was told by two doctors that I was going blind. But today, I can see without eyeglasses. So, every time I pass a patch of flowering weeds along the road, I say a silent "Thank you," to the Lord for allowing me to see His beautiful handiwork. I even get excited when I see my mango tree heavy with new blossoms, signifying a bumper crop (hopefully) of mangoes this season. And when I see a momma bird caring for her young, it brings a smile to my face.

Yes, I have a lot to be thankful for as I go into this new year. And so do you. This is even more evident in a letter I received a few months ago from local gospel recording artist Pat Jackson. She briefly told her touching story of survival and blessings and wanted to know if I wanted to interview her. I did, and still do. However, Jackson’s email doesn’t seem to work and the number she enclosed in her letter was missing one digit.

Jackson said she is a survivor of thyroid cancer. Her story is so touching for this and any time of the year, that I will share with you what she shared with me in her letter.

Jackson, 50, has been plagued with serious health issues nearly all her life, that included multiple cysts, benign tumors, diverticulitis, ruptured intestines, four major surgeries, during one of which she nearly bled to death, survived six car accidents and a stray bullet that came through her sister’s home.

She never knew her biological mother or father and spent her entire childhood as a foster child. "I was very fortunate and was able to live in the same [foster] home until I became an adult," she said.

"But," she added, "Today, I am cancer-free, even though doctors doubted that I would ever be able to speak or sing again. To God be the glory, for allowing me life and a second chance," she wrote. She has an album titled, Lord, I’m Still Standing.

What’s your "I am thankful for another year" story? Tell me in a few words and I may use them in a future column.

Email them to me at: bea.hines@gmail.com, or write to me at: Bea L. Hines, c/o The Miami Herald, 2000 NW 150th Ave., Suite 1105, Pembroke Pines, FL 33028.

‘Jews of Asia and Africa’

If you want to be in the class, "Jews of Asia and Africa," to be offered at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Jan. 9-April 17, you have until Jan. 9, to register.

The class will be taught by FIU research professors Nathan Katz and Tudor Parfitt, and is open to both degree-seeking FIU students and community members interested in taking the class on a auditing basis.

Community members interested in auditing the class may enroll through the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education at 305-576-4030, ext. 128, or carlaspector@cajemiami.org. The cost is $295. Students seeking credit may enroll in course REL 4312 through FIU.

The 12-week course will look at the Jewish experience beyond Florida, which has been the traditional focus of the museum. The class will also feature guest speakers to include a visiting member of Zimbabwe’s Lemba Jewish community, and will employ different methodologies, from genetic anthropology to participant/observation findings.

For more information, contact Katz at nathan.katz@fiu.edu.

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The Most and Least Influential Social Media Celebs

While he isn’t currently available for promotional work, businesses would have the most success on social media with President Barack Obama endorsing their goods and services, new research shows.

A study by social marketing platform SocialToaster revealed that Obama is considered the most influential celebrity on social media. Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher and Anderson Cooper followed the president on the rankings of social influencers.

On the flip side, the research found that former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was the least influential celebrity on social media, finishing just below Madonna, Kanye West and Sean Hannity.

While celebrities might be influential on social media in some aspects, it’s those closest to us who make the largest impact when it comes to the important issues. Nearly all of the social media users surveyed agreed that a social media post from a close friend or family member was most likely to influence them on important subjects, with politicians and athletes the least likely to influence them.

“While it was no surprise that in this election year Barack Obama would be ranked the most influential person in social media, it was surprising to us that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga would beat Madonna and Kanye West,” said Brian Razzaque, CEO of SocialToaster. “We were also surprised to see that friends had more pull than family when it came to influencing the sharing of social media content.”

Regardless of whom it comes from, there are some posts that will quickly result in an unfollowing, the study discovered. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said a racist post would cause them to immediately unfollow someone on social media. Other types of posts that result in a loss of followers include sexism, pornography, repetitive, overly personal posts and those that use poor grammar.

The researcher was based on surveys of 3,000 SocialToaster Super Fans, which consist of social media experts and professionals, many of whom work with some of the nation’s leading brands. The experts range from those who work in the entertainment industry who represent numerous television shows and movies to those who work in professional sports, including the Baltimore Ravens and the Detroit Pistons.

This story was provided by BusinessNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Chad Brooks on Twitter @cbrooks76 or BusinessNewsDaily @BNDarticles. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Kathy Griffin Reacts Anderson Cooper Crotch Kiss

"If you think this is the part where I'm going to apologize for trying to go down on Anderson Cooper, you are sorely mistaken," Kathy Griffin told David Letterman when asked about her sexual simulation on the journalist during CNN's New Year's Eve coverage in Times Square.

"I tried ladies and gays for you," the comedian declared on Wednesday's Late Show.

When Letterman, 65, asked how Griffin, 52, would feel if the tables were turned and a man tried that on her, she quipped, "If it was Anderson Cooper... I'd unzip so fast. Boom. Pants down."

Check out Griffin's outrageous public display of affection towards Cooper, 45, on New Year's Eve, below:

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