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CHICAGO — Authorities said two gang members were charged with murder Monday in the death of a 15-year-old Chicago honor student who was shot just days after returning from Washington, where she performed during President Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities.

Michael Ward, 18, and Kenneth Williams, 20, were charged with one count of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and aggravated battery with a firearm, Chicago police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton said.

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More on Barack Obama

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will review personnel files of allegedly abusive priests that were recently released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Scott said Monday the special victims bureau is reviewing all the files and comparing them to cases the department has already investigated to see if there are additional victims or if there are cases or crimes they weren’t aware of.

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Feb 11 (Reuters) – Hostess Brands Inc, the bankrupt maker of Twinkies snack cakes, received court permission on Monday to proceed with auctions for several of its brands, including Twinkies and Wonder Bread.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, NY, cleared Hostess to sell off assets related to its Hostess and Dolly Madison Brands.

A hearing to approve the successful bidder is scheduled for March 19.

Private equity firms Apollo Global Management LLC and C. Dean Metropoulos & Co have set a baseline offer of $410 million to buy the company’s snack cake brands including Hostess Twinkies and Dolly Madison, Hostess said last month.

The so-called stalking horse bid by the private equity firms, working together to buy the 82-year-old baker, would serve as the minimum offer for the business, which could still be topped by others.

Hostess was granted permission by a U.S. bankruptcy court judge in November to wind down its business and liquidate its assets after a strike by a baker’s union crippled the company’s operations.

The sale of assets, which range from Twinkies and Wonder Bread to real estate and baking equipment, is being run by Perella Weinberg Partners.

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This is not something that happens every week: an inkjet printer enters to Guinness World Records as it can consistently reach a print speed of 70 pages per minute (ppm), which makes it the world fastest desktop printer apparently (just slightly faster than Memjet). HP is capable of reaching those speed because they use a technology called Page-wide, which reduced the amount of motion that need to happen during the printing process. With Page-wide, HP can print a page in a single pass, while regular Inkjet printers have to perform a classic back and forth motion for each printed line. You can visualize it as being an Inkjet printer as wide as the page itself, so there is no need for motion. Page-wide was introduced in October 2012, and the HP Office Pro X Printer is the first product to use it. If you want to learn more about the HP Page-Wide Technology, read this white paper.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Dell UltraSharp U3014 30-inch Monitor Released, Adobe Lowers Prices In Australia After Government Probe,

Heavy Rain development studio Quantic Dream is notorious for long development times. The studio’s also notorious for critically-loved games with strong cinematic cores, and games that often look very different from the competition. Part of that is game design, but another major piece of the puzzle is the engines driving those games — each game that Quantic Dream makes is built in a unique game engine, which is both very expensive and very time-consuming. The studio’s founder and lead, David Cage, explained as much to us in an interview at DICE 2013.

“Quantic Dream is a very special company in the sense that we do a lot of things that wouldn’t make any sense in any other company. We haven’t done any sequels so far, we work on new IPs each time. And we pretty much develop a new engine each time we develop a new game.”

But Cage doesn’t harbor much love for that last part — the game engine bit. He says that his studio opted out of the current console generation’s game engine of choice (Unreal Engine 3) because, “we work with Sony, [and] we want to create the best technology for the hardware and see how far we can go.” As a result, even Cage’s latest work (Beyond: Two Souls) is crafted in a new engine — the same one used to build the Kara demo we saw last March — intended to show off the PlayStation 3’s late-generation graphical and processing chops. Yes, even with the next PlayStation (codenamed “Orbis“) waiting in the wings, his second-party Sony studio is still showing off the aging PS3’s prowess. Beyond: Two Souls is more than just a showpiece, of course, with Quantic Dream employing actress Ellen Page to motion performance-capture the game’s main character, and the same emphasis on storytelling the studio’s practiced previously. Still, Cage hopes for a future where technology isn’t something he and his studio need be concerned with.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony

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