Giants ace Lincecum asks for $21.5 million (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO ? Giants ace Tim Lincecum asked for $21.5 million in salary arbitration Tuesday and was offered $17 million by the club.

The two-time NL Cy Young Award winner's request neared the record amount sought in arbitration. Houston pitcher Roger Clemens asked for $22 million in 2005.

San Francisco's offer was the highest in arbitration history, topping the $14.25 million the New York Yankees proposed for shortstop Derek Jeter in 2001.

"I'm overall optimistic that we'll find common ground without a hearing room," Bobby Evans, Giants vice president of baseball operations, said before seeing Lincecum's filing numbers. "It's a process that begins long before today in terms of conversations about possible deals that work for both sides. That process has continued in a mutual fashion. At this point we haven't reached a conclusion."

Also Tuesday, the Giants and slugger Pablo Sandoval agreed on a three-year contract. The 25-year-old third baseman became an All-Star last season after losing nearly 40 pounds during a rigorous offseason regimen. He batted .315 with 23 home runs and 70 RBIs in 2011.

Lincecum, the winning pitcher in the Game 5 World Series clincher at Texas in 2010, earned $13.1 million last season when he completed a two-year deal worth $23.2 million.

San Francisco's front office would like to lock up the 27-year-old Lincecum and fellow starter Matt Cain with long-term deals. Lincecum seems set on keeping his options open in the near future on a shorter contract.

"We know we'll at least have a one-year deal," Evans said. "I can't really predict where it will end up. In this process your two parties are always filing to try to come to a midpoint. The negotiation is really about the midpoint."

With Lincecum earning a hefty contract, Evans joked, "I usually leave off the final three zeroes because it's easier to calculate."

If the past is any indication, the sides will do their best to reach agreement before spring training and before an arbitration hearing.

In February 2010, Lincecum agreed to a $23 million, two-year contract ahead of the scheduled hearing. He had been set at that time to ask for $13 million.

That last contract was quite a raise for the undersized, hard-throwing pitcher his teammates call "Franchise" and "Freak" after he earned $650,000 in 2009.

"We're looking at different player contracts that give us an idea where we think Tim should be," Evans said. "There is not ever a player that's exactly like the one you have. Ultimately there is only one guy that looks just like him."

Lincecum ? the 10th overall draft pick out of Washington in 2006 ? has been an All-Star in each of the past four seasons. He went 13-14 with a 2.74 ERA last year for his first losing record. The Giants scored no runs while he was in the game in seven of 33 starts, had one run six times and two runs five times, according to STATS LLC.

Also Tuesday, the Giants reached one-year agreements to avoid arbitration with outfielders Melky Cabrera and Nate Schierholtz and reliever Santiago Casilla.

Cabrera agreed to a $6 million deal.

San Francisco, which sold out every game in 2011 but missed the playoffs, will have a payroll of around $130 million.

"Obviously the revenue that has been generated by our ownership and the support of our fans here makes the payroll level we have possible," Evans said. "We don't take that for granted. We know that with that kind of payroll comes responsibility and expectation."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sports/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120118/ap_on_sp_ba_ne/bbn_giants_lincecum

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Michelle Williams Unveils Sexy, Toned Body on GQ Cover (omg!)

The cover of GQ's February issue says it all: "Who knew Michelle Williams had this body?"

In a racy pictorial for the men's magazine, the 31-year-old Golden Globe winner dresses up as Marilyn Monroe, showing off her surprisingly sexy body in a $130 bra and $60 panties by Stella McCartney. It's a bold move for the actress, who first became famous for her role as bad girl Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek.

PHOTOS: Marilyn Monroe wannabes

"I wouldn't say that that would be one of my first qualities as a human being -- being sexy," Williams says. "And I think because my character on Dawson's Creek was sexy...sexualized...sexual...I saw all the negative attention and connotations that can come along with that. And that those things can keep people from seeing you clearly."

"When you play sexy you're kind of playing just for men. That is something you have to police and turn it on its head," she adds. "I mean, sexuality has been a part of my work, obviously...Blue Valentine...but it's never been sexy. It hasn't been beautiful."

PHOTOS: Michelle Williams' sophisticated style

In the GQ interview, Williams also opens up about how her world was turned upside down when ex Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008.

"I really wanted, and I really expected or imagined, that Matilda would have siblings that were close to her age. I wanted that for her. But I couldn't make that happen," Williams explains. "And now that she's 6 that isn't even a possibility anymore. So something that was making me feel impatient, that's been removed. For whatever reason, that's not our luck, or our path."

PHOTOS: Most shocking celeb deaths of all time

"You know, as hard as certain things have been for me, it's been harder thinking about how things will be for her. I have a lot of things that she doesn't, and some of what I have I can give to her -- the memories that I have, the objects that I have, the physical reminders that I have, the stories."

Get more Us! Follow us on Twitter, Friend us on Facebook, Subscribe to Us Weekly

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_michelle_williams_unveils_sexy_toned_body_gq_cover143819543/44205164/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/michelle-williams-unveils-sexy-toned-body-gq-cover-143819543.html

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Priests, farmers, lesbian truckers tweet for Sweden

STOCKHOLM?? Sweden is tweeting to the world, and this week she is Hanna, "just your average lesbian truck driver."

Officials at Sweden's tourism board agreed to hand over control of their @sweden Twitter feed in December to a different Swedish citizen each week.

The project ? billed as "the world's most democratic Twitter account" ? has so far been hugely popular, featuring a female priest, an advertising executive and an organic sheep farmer.

Its 20,000 followers may be small in a social media world where Lady Gaga has almost 20 million, but those behind @sweden say it is one of a kind and has more than doubled its number of followers in just five weeks.

"In this age of Internet and transparency, if you want to be credible, you have to let go of control and empower the people," said Tommy Sollen, VisitSweden's social media manager, who was part of the team that came up with the idea.

Sollen said the project, which will continue indefinitely, is less about boosting tourism and more about creating long-term branding for a nation that is often associated with tall blondes, meatballs and neutrality.

"We want to be seen as progressive, open, credible and truthful," he said.

People from around the world have logged on in the past weeks to follow tweets and discussions that have covered everything from immigration to new and old music, food, alcohol and sobriety, religion and hunting.

"Gosh, I really enjoy being @sweden," writes Hanna. "They'll have to grab the account out of my dying hands."

Sometimes @sweden talks about the weather, a popular topic in the Nordic country of 9 million, but other topics are harder hitting.

Anders Dalenius, the third Swede on the stand, kicked off his week with a photo of himself in the middle of the woods, decked out in bright orange hunting gear.

"Hi all! Im Anders and right now we're hunting moose and wild boar. Join me!" he tweeted, sparking a huge debate over hunting.

This week, an upbeat 32-year-old who drives trucks and drinks too much coffee is tweeting on her breaks.

"Sweden won't be a location as much as a state of mind," Hanna told Reuters by phone before climbing into her 55-foot-long truck on her way to Denmark and the Netherlands.

"I just am doing what I always do, writing about my life. Sometimes I write about politics and social welfare, but not with a true agenda. I mostly just express my own opinions when I see something that bothers me or I find interesting."

Sollen said the guest tweeters have free rein, though they are asked to make clear that their views are their own.

Hasan Ramic, a Swedish immigrant who fled Bosnia in the early 1990s, was openly critical of the country's foreign minister during his week as @sweden.

He describes himself as not trusting homogeneity.

"It strikes me as unnatural," he said.

He would try to represent the more "colorful" side of Sweden -- "the one I know."

Relative to its size, Sweden has been among the top five nations in the European Union in taking in refugees and asylum-seekers, including those fleeing the Balkan wars of the 1990s and Iraq after the U.S. invasion.

Ramic also shared with his followers a link to what he said was Sweden's national dish ? the "kebabpizza" ? calling it "a genius outcome of Swedish immigration policies."

Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46032797/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

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Natural gas price plunge aids families, businesses (AP)

NEW YORK ? The price of natural gas is plummeting at a pace that has caught even the experts off guard.

A 35 percent collapse in the futures price over the past year has been a boon to homeowners who use natural gas for heat and appliances and to manufacturers who power their factories and make chemicals and materials with it.

The country is flush with natural gas as a result of new drilling techniques that have enabled energy companies to tap vast supplies that were out of reach not so long ago. The country's natural gas surplus has been growing even as the country burns record amounts.

This winter's warm weather slowed the growth in demand, however, and created a glut. In the Northeast, December was the fourth warmest in the last 117 years. Winter supplies are 17 percent above their five-year average.

The natural gas futures price fell 13 percent last week, to $2.67 per 1,000 cubic feet. That's the lowest winter-time level in a decade.

"The market has been overwhelmed with gas," says Anthony Yuen, a commodities analyst at Citibank.

He and other analysts expect the price to average near $3 for all of 2012. If the weather stays mild, the price could even dip below $2, a level not seen since 2002.

Cheap natural gas is mainly a good thing for the economy:

? More than half of U.S. households use natural gas for heat, and a quarter of the nation's electricity is made from it. Falling heating and electric costs are offsetting the impact of high gasoline prices and enabling families and small businesses to spend on other things. Residential gas and electric customers are saving roughly $200 a year, according to a study by Navigant Consulting.

? For companies that make plastics, fertilizer and other chemicals derived from natural gas, the falling prices are nothing short of a windfall. The same goes for makers of products from steel to bricks to beer. All use a lot of natural gas to heat their furnaces. U.S. manufacturers are becoming more competitive globally as a result of the country's cheap natural gas, industry officials say.

Some industries aren't cheering, though.

With electricity prices falling, the profits of all electric power producers ? whether they rely on coal, nuclear or wind ? are shrinking.

Companies that drill solely for natural gas are earning less these days, too. That's prompting some to hunt instead for oil, whose price is near $100 a barrel.

Still, drillers aren't reducing natural gas production as much as they would have during previous periods of low prices. They've found ways to produce the fuel at much lower cost so they can be profitable at much lower prices. And, in many cases, natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling, which is so profitable that companies are going after every barrel they can find.

Analysts say in some oil and gas fields, drillers could give the gas away and still be hugely profitable just from selling the oil.

The benefit of falling natural gas prices to homeowners is not as big as a major drop in oil and gasoline prices would provide. The average household's annual gasoline bill is about $4,000, roughly double the average annual gas and electric bill.

Also, the fuel cost is only half of a customer's bill. The rest is transmission and delivery charges, which don't change along with fuel prices. Homeowners are paying $10.18 per 1,000 cubic feet of gas on average, including transmission and delivery charges, according to the Energy Information Administration. Over a year, a customer will burn an average of 75,000 cubic feet, or about $760 worth.

The multi-year drop in natural gas prices caught most industry experts by surprise.

In the middle of the last decade, natural gas looked to be in short supply. Production in the U.S. was slowing, imports from Canada were rising and plans for importing liquefied natural gas from the Middle East and elsewhere were drawn up.

Natural gas futures hit nearly $15 in 2005. Chemical and metals manufacturers were shutting U.S. factories and moving overseas, where gas was abundant and cheaper. Farmers in need of fertilizer were turning to inexpensive imports from Canada, Trinidad and Asia.

But over the next few years, drillers perfected methods first tried in 1981 that now allow them to profitably extract gas trapped in shale formations ? layers of fine-grained rock that in some cases have trapped ancient organic matter that has cooked into oil and natural gas.

Engineers combined the ability to drill horizontally into shale with a technique called hydraulic fracturing. Millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped into wells to break rock and create escape routes for the gas. In doing so they unlocked natural gas deposits deep underground across the East, South and Midwest that are large enough to supply the U.S. for decades.

This eventually turned the shortage into a glut, and reversed the fortunes of some industries.

An ammonia plant owned by CF Industries in Donaldsville, La., that was shuttered by its former owner in 2004 is running again. Steel maker Nucor Corp. is building a factory in Louisiana; Shell Oil Co. is planning a petrochemical plant in Appalachia; and Dow Chemical is building a type of chemical feedstock plant it hasn't built in the U.S. since 1995.

"A whole slice of American industry is benefiting," says Steve Wilson, the CEO of CF Industries, which makes ammonia and other fertilizer ingredients. CF Industries, which is based in Deerfield, Ill., has seen its daily natural gas costs fall from $6 million to $2 million over the past few years. The company is planning to spend more than $1 billion expanding its U.S. plants.

While industrial customers are betting on low prices for years to come, things could change if demand increases sharply because of extreme weather or faster-than-expected economic growth, or if the U.S. begins exporting gas. It's also possible that natural gas drilling could be curtailed by environmental regulations designed to protect drinking water from hydraulic fracturing.

Legislators in New York and New Jersey have banned hydraulic fracturing temporarily, and the Environmental Protection Agency is studying it and may propose national regulations.

The most likely near-term scenario is that prices keep falling, according to Rusty Braziel, an analyst at Bentek Energy.

"This ain't the bottom," he says.

___(equals)

Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/energy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120115/ap_on_bi_ge/us_natural_gas_plunge

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UK: No public funding for new royal yacht

FILE - A June 23, 1997 photo from files showing the Royal Yacht Britannia passing the new Hong Kong Convention Center in Hong Kong Harbor. What do you get for a monarch who has almost everything? Not, apparently, a new yacht, at least not one paid for with taxpayer funds. That was the message Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, as a brief boomlet of support for the idea of providing Queen Elizabeth II with a new royal yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee was quickly deflated by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is estimated that a new yacht would cost at least 60 million pounds ($92 million/72,455,000 euro). Cameron's spokesman Steve Field said it would not be appropriate for public funds to be spent on a new yacht during times of economic hardship. (AP Photo/Pool, File)

FILE - A June 23, 1997 photo from files showing the Royal Yacht Britannia passing the new Hong Kong Convention Center in Hong Kong Harbor. What do you get for a monarch who has almost everything? Not, apparently, a new yacht, at least not one paid for with taxpayer funds. That was the message Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, as a brief boomlet of support for the idea of providing Queen Elizabeth II with a new royal yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee was quickly deflated by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is estimated that a new yacht would cost at least 60 million pounds ($92 million/72,455,000 euro). Cameron's spokesman Steve Field said it would not be appropriate for public funds to be spent on a new yacht during times of economic hardship. (AP Photo/Pool, File)

FILE - A Saturday, Nov. 22, 1997 photo from files provided by the Royal Navy showing the Royal Yacht Britannia sailing into Portsmouth southern England for the last time before she was decommissioned in December1997. What do you get for a monarch who has almost everything? Not, apparently, a new yacht, at least not one paid for with taxpayer funds. That was the message Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, as a brief boomlet of support for the idea of providing Queen Elizabeth II with a new royal yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee was quickly deflated by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is estimated that a new yacht would cost at least 60 million pounds ($92 million/72,455,000 euro). Cameron's spokesman Steve Field said it would not be appropriate for public funds to be spent on a new yacht during times of economic hardship. (AP Photo/Royal Navy, Roger Littler, File)

LONDON (AP) ? What do you get for a monarch who has almost everything? Not, apparently, a new yacht, at least not one paid for with taxpayer funds.

That was the message Monday as a brief boomlet of support for the idea of providing Queen Elizabeth II with a new royal yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee was quickly deflated by Prime Minister David Cameron.

It is estimated that a new yacht would cost at least 60 million pounds ($92 million).

Cameron's spokesman Steve Field said it would not be appropriate for public funds to be spent on a new yacht during times of economic hardship. But he said the government would be supportive of private efforts to provide a new ship for the queen.

He acknowledged that ministers have been approached over plans to raise donations for a privately funded vessel and that the government "would react favorably" to a firm plan.

"There are a number of proposals out there for a privately financed yacht," Field said.

Cameron has been contacted over the proposals and Britain's government could potentially play a role in facilitating the construction of a new royal flagship ? even though no taxpayer money would be used.

"I don't think anyone is suggesting public money should be used for this," Field told reporters Monday. "There is a difficult economic situation, there are scarce public resources, therefore we don't think it would be an appropriate use of public money."

The idea of a new royal yacht was proposed by Education Secretary Michael Gove, who suggested in a leaked letter that the queen should receive a replacement for the Royal Yacht Britannia, which was decommissioned in 1997 after 44 years as a floating royal residence known to have been cherished by the queen.

He said the jubilee offers a "tremendous opportunity to recognize in a very fitting way the queen's highly significant contribution to the life of the nation and the Commonwealth."

Royal watchers who have followed the queen's long career remember that one of the very few times she has shown emotion in public was when she shed a tear at the decommissioning of the Britannia, which is now berthed in Edinburgh as a tourist display.

The ship sprang a leak earlier in January, requiring repair work.

It is not clear if the queen even wants a new yacht. She is in her mid-80s and her husband, Prince Philip, is 90 and was recently found to have heart disease.

Buckingham Palace officials said they would not be commenting on the matter.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2012-01-16-EU-Britain-Royal-Yacht/id-c468508b912647d6bcf3c89985251d80

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ECB aims to restore calm after S&P cuts: Nowotny (Reuters)

VIENNA (Reuters) ? The European Central Bank will do all it can to calm the situation after Standard & Poor's downgraded several euro zone members' debt ratings in the past week, ECB Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said on Sunday.

Calling in particular Italy's two-notch downgrade "very dramatic", he told an Austrian television panel discussion the S&P moves had created a sensitive environment in the euro zone debt crisis.

"For the European Central Bank's part, everything that is within our possibilities will be done to bring about a relaxation (of the situation). We have made additional liquidity available and I think it is very important that overall a certain calming down takes place," he said.

He reiterated that it was also crucial to implement agreed measures such as putting into force a safety net for struggling euro zone members.

Nowotny, also head of the Austrian central bank, said he did not think S&P's one-notch downgrade of his country would have much impact on its borrowing costs because two other ratings agencies had kept its AAA of late. A report by Goldman Sachs he saw on Sunday came to the same conclusion, he added.

"Where the step by Standard & Poor's is in my view really dangerous is on the European level," he said.

"We had a certain relaxation process of late and with this step - a sweeping blow that affects almost all European states - this has been made significantly more difficult."

Nowotny said he had spoken with S&P about the downgrades and believed they reflected the agency's misgivings about how Europe was addressing the debt crisis.

"They have doubts in general about the system we are conducting in Europe, namely that we will advance via (fiscal) consolidation measures with a very restrictive policy of the European Central Bank," he said.

This contrasted with the aggressive intervention by the U.S. central bank, and may explain why Britain still has a top debt rating despite higher debt, Nowotny said. "This is a basic political discussion that has to be conducted," he said.

S&P cut its rating for Austria one notch to AA-plus with a negative outlook as part of the sweeping downgrades.

Nowotny said it was important to avoid slipping into a protracted debt cycle across Europe.

"The danger is that the longer the consolidation is drawn out, the more debt ratios rise, which makes the next consolidation more difficult. What we certainly don't want is a situation that even remotely resembles what we are now seeing in Italy, in Portugal - not to mention Greece - where a country is governed from abroad."

(Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Dale Hudson)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120115/bs_nm/us_ecb_nowotny

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The US didn't shoot Phobos-Grunt down (but could have)

Sometime this weekend, Phobos-Grunt will crash into the Indian Ocean. The Russian space probe was supposed to return a sample from Mars's moon Phobos (hence the name ? grunt means "ground" in Russian). But after its launch on 9?November, the upper stages failed, and it remained stuck in low Earth orbit ? so low that atmospheric drag will destroy it.

It took more than a decade and some $163?million to build Phobos-Grunt, so it its inexplicable failure was understandably frustrating for the Russians. But in a bizarre interview, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency, alluded to foul play: "We don't want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out," he said, in The New York Times's translation. He insinuated that the US was to blame: "The frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us."

The claim that Phobos-Grunt was shot down is absurd. But that's not because it would be hard to do. It's easy ? if you can launch satellites ? to destroy them, and to do so with deniability isn't much harder. Had the US wanted to destroy Phobos-Grunt, it could have. But it's hard to fathom why ? not least of all because doing so would have messed with a couple of scientific missions piggy-backed onto the Russian probe: a Chinese Mars orbiter and an experiment run by the Planetary Society, an American space advocacy group co-founded by Carl Sagan.

More importantly, there is a global taboo on war in space. The US would not have broken it arbitrarily to destroy a scientific probe. No country has ever (so far as is known in the unclassified literature) attacked another's satellite. When China tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of its own satellites in 2007, it provoked an international outcry because it created more than 4000 new bits of debris, increasing by almost half the amount of trackable "space junk". The US broke a de facto moratorium on space weapon testing in 2008, when a missile launched from a navy cruiser destroyed an American satellite, the first such test since 1985 (when an F-15-launched missile was the weapon of choice).

The US has by far the most invested in space. That gives it the most to lose. Military hawks talk about space as the "ultimate high ground." This is silly ? space is high ground, sure enough, and tremendously useful militarily. But spacecraft are (and always will be) fragile, vulnerable things, unlike castles or forts built on normal, non-ultimate high grounds.

Popovkin's speculation is almost certainly incorrect ? and, I suspect, was likely a bit of deliberate nationalist pandering, perhaps not meant to be taken seriously. But there are two reasons it's worrisome. The first is that it's hard to prove he's wrong, so when the next, more militarily useful, spacecraft fails, the accusation can resurface. The other is that Popovkin, and the Soyuzes he controls, are the only way to get American astronauts to the International Space Station.

This article originally appeared in Slate

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