LOS ANGELES ? Halle Berry's ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry was arrested for investigation of battery Thursday after he and the Oscar-winning actress's current boyfriend got into a fight at her Hollywood Hills home, police said.
Aubry, 37, was booked for investigation of a battery, a misdemeanor, and released on $20,000 bail, according to online jail records. He's scheduled to appear in court Dec. 13.
Aubry came to Berry's house Thanksgiving morning and police responded to a report of an assault, said Los Angeles Police Officer Julie Boyer. Aubry was injured in the altercation and was taken to a hospital where he was treated and released.
Emails sent to Berry's publicist, Meredith O'Sullivan, and Aubry's family law attorney, Gary Fishbein, were not immediately returned.
Berry and Aubry have been involved in a custody dispute involving their 4-year-old daughter, Nahla. The proceedings were sealed because the former couple are not married. Both appeared in the case as recently as Nov. 9, but neither side commented on the outcome of the hearing.
Berry has been dating French actor Olivier Martinez, and he said earlier this year that they are engaged.
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Model Gabriel Aubry has been arrested for battery after a violent fight with actor Olivier Martinez that landed both men in the hospital. Aubry, who is the father of actress Halle Berry’s four-year-old daughter Nahla, attacked his ex-girlfriend’s fiance as he dropped his daughter off at Halle’s place this morning. Sources report that Olivier had ...
Londoners enjoyed not only "the greatest show on earth" this summer, but also free tube WiFi courtesy of Virgin Media. It's due to remain complimentary for what's left of the year, but if you're with EE, you'll be able to continue updating your status from subterranean platforms in 2013. The UK's first 4G provider has struck a deal to hook its customers up to Virgin's underground WiFi infrastructure, although the announcement seems to have gone out a little earlier than planned. EE tweeted the news then swiftly retracted it, but has since replied to Mr. Miles at Pocket-lint confirming the partnership, at least for however long that message stays... yep, it's gone. If you're not on EE, don't get your sad face on just yet, as there are rumors circulating that other carriers will be piggybacking on Virgin's hotspots, too -- they just haven't accidentally announced it yet.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers are likely to approve the next tranche of loans to Greece on Tuesday although the money is unlikely to be disbursed before December and a deal on debt reduction may need further talks.
Officials familiar with preparations for the finance ministers' meeting expect a "political endorsement in principle" on unfreezing loans to Athens, after Greece completed almost all the reforms that were required.
"It is clear that Greece has delivered," the chairman of the euro zone finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, told reporters before the meeting.
"We must still reach an understanding on several details and I would expect that the chances are good that we will come to a final and joint solution this evening. But I'm not entirely certain... about the matter," he said.
Hours before the meeting, set to start at 1600 GMT, views on the outcome were still quite far apart among the individual ministers, but a compromise was possible, officials said.
"I hope, I believe and I want to a find a solution tonight," French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said in Paris.
But Finnish Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen was less optimistic.
"I'm not at all sure that it will happen. More information is needed before a decision can be made, so the situation is very much open," she said after briefing parliament in Helsinki.
Greece got a second financing program from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund in February, but two subsequent parliamentary elections and a deep depression threw its reforms and fiscal consolidation off course.
Lending was frozen in June and to get it going again Greece had to show it was fully committed to a detailed package of economic reforms or "prior actions".
But the euro zone and the IMF also want to be sure that Greek debt, expected to be almost 190 percent of GDP next year, will fall at some point to a more sustainable 120 percent, so that they will not have to keep financing Athens.
The IMF and the euro zone are at odds on whether to shift the original target date for Greece to do that from 2020 to 2022, torn between the need to retain market confidence and allowing the Greek economy some breathing space.
REDUCING THE DEBT
The ministers will also discuss how to reduce debt in a country where the economy is expected to contract for a sixth year running in 2013.
The talks will be based on a debt sustainability analysis prepared by the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
Options include halving the interest on existing, bilateral loans to Greece from the current 150 basis points above financing costs, lengthening their maturities, lowering fees charged by the temporary bailout fund EFSF and a debt buy-back.
Germany has floated an idea that Greece could buy back half of its 60 billion euros in bonds remaining in private hands, offering 25 cents per euro.
Euro zone officials have asked for a legal analysis of a debt buy-back and a more operational description for the Tuesday talks. A senior French official said a decision on the buy-back could even be taken on Tuesday.
"It's possible as soon as tonight, it's an option on the menu," the official said.
German Deputy Finance Minister Steffen Kampeter said that if a deal on cutting Greek debt eluded euro zone finance ministers on Tuesday, work would continue this week.
Once a deal is done, proposals on how to cut Greek debt and provide additional financing can be sent to national parliaments for approval, a step expected to be completed by November 30.
This will give Athens time to complete the few outstanding "prior actions". International lenders will check if the remaining reforms are in place on November 28 and euro zone finance ministers will make a final decision to pay the next tranche to Athens on December 3, according to the schedule seen by Reuters.
Greece and the European Commission would then sign a revised memorandum of understanding on December 4 and Greece would get the money on December 5.
Having missed two tranche payments because of the suspension of the program, Greece should now get a total of 44 billion euros if the next tranche, due in December, is paid out together with the overdue ones.
More than half of that total is cash to recapitalize Greek banks after Greece's debt restructuring hurt their capital base. But some officials said incomplete data on the recapitalization might result in the payout of 31 billion euros, rather than the full 44 billion.
The ministers will also have to decide how to finance two extra years, until 2016, they gave Greece to reach the target of a primary surplus that would allow the country to start cutting its debt pile in a sustainable way.
The troika estimated that such an extension would entail almost 33 billion euros more in financing for Athens, which is politically difficult because of growing opposition to bailouts in many euro zone countries, notably Germany and Finland.
European Central Bank policymaker Joerg Asmussen said on Sunday the euro zone should agree on just two years of funding for Greece and leave further help to be decided later, a view likely to irk the IMF, which wants a permanent solution.
(Additional reporting by Michelle Martin and Madeline Chambers in Berlin, Jussi Rosendahl in Helsinki, Leigh Thomas in Paris; Editing by Robin Pomeroy, Anna Willard and Rex Merrifield)
Contact: Clea Desjardins clea.desjardins@concordia.ca 514-848-2424 x5068 Concordia University
Concordia University researchers propose new method to rid inboxes of unwanted email
Montreal, November 20, 2012 Once upon a time, Spam came in a can and could be easily avoided. Nowadays, spam plagues email inboxes around the world, hawking miracle pills and enticing the gullible with tales of offshore bank accounts containing untold fortunes.
These once text-based email infiltrators have recently turned high-tech, using layers of images to fool automatic filters. Thanks to some sophisticated new cyber-sleuthing, researchers at Concordia University's Institute of Information Systems Engineering are working toward a cure.
PhD candidate Ola Amayri and thesis supervisor, Nizar Bouguila, have conducted a comprehensive study of several spam filters in the process of developing a new and efficient one. They have now proposed a new statistical framework for spam filtering that quickly and efficiently blocks unwanted messages.
"The majority of previous research has focused on the textual content of spam emails, ignoring visual content found in multimedia content, such as images. By considering patterns from text and images simultaneously, we've been able to propose a new method for filtering out spam," says Amayri, who recently published her findings online in a series of international conferences and peer-reviewed journals.
Amayri explains that new spam messages often employ sophisticated tricks, such as deliberately obscuring text, obfuscating words with symbols, and using batches of the same images with different backgrounds and colours that might contain random text from the web. However, until now, the majority of research in the domain of email spam filtering has focused on the automatic extraction and analysis of the textual content of spam emails and has ignored the rich nature of image-based content. When these tricks are used in combination, traditional spam filters are powerless to stop the messages, because they normally focus on either text or images but rarely both.
So how do we stop spam before it sullies our inboxes? "Our new method for spam filtering is able to adapt to the dynamic nature of spam emails and accurately handle spammers' tricks by carefully identifying informative patterns, which are automatically extracted from both text and images content of spam emails," says Amayri.
By conducting extensive experiments on traditional spam filtering methods that were general and limited to patterns found in texts or images, she has developed a much stronger way, based on techniques used in pattern recognition and data mining, to filter out unwanted emails. Although the new method has been tested on English spam emails, Amayri says it can be easily extended to other languages.
While this new spam-detecting approach is still in the development stage, Amayri and Bouguila are currently working on a plug-in for SpamAssassin, the world's most widely used open-source spam filter. Amayri hopes that this plug-in will allow other researchers to perform further tests and make more progress in the field of spam detection.
"Spammers keep adapting their methods so that they can trick the spam filters, says Amayri. "Researchers in this field need to band together to keep adapting our methods too, so that we can keep spam out and focus on those messages that are really important."
###
Partners in research: The completion of this research was made possible thanks to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Related links:
Concordia's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering http://www.ece.concordia.ca/
Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering http://www.ciise.concordia.ca/
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Clea Desjardins clea.desjardins@concordia.ca 514-848-2424 x5068 Concordia University
Concordia University researchers propose new method to rid inboxes of unwanted email
Montreal, November 20, 2012 Once upon a time, Spam came in a can and could be easily avoided. Nowadays, spam plagues email inboxes around the world, hawking miracle pills and enticing the gullible with tales of offshore bank accounts containing untold fortunes.
These once text-based email infiltrators have recently turned high-tech, using layers of images to fool automatic filters. Thanks to some sophisticated new cyber-sleuthing, researchers at Concordia University's Institute of Information Systems Engineering are working toward a cure.
PhD candidate Ola Amayri and thesis supervisor, Nizar Bouguila, have conducted a comprehensive study of several spam filters in the process of developing a new and efficient one. They have now proposed a new statistical framework for spam filtering that quickly and efficiently blocks unwanted messages.
"The majority of previous research has focused on the textual content of spam emails, ignoring visual content found in multimedia content, such as images. By considering patterns from text and images simultaneously, we've been able to propose a new method for filtering out spam," says Amayri, who recently published her findings online in a series of international conferences and peer-reviewed journals.
Amayri explains that new spam messages often employ sophisticated tricks, such as deliberately obscuring text, obfuscating words with symbols, and using batches of the same images with different backgrounds and colours that might contain random text from the web. However, until now, the majority of research in the domain of email spam filtering has focused on the automatic extraction and analysis of the textual content of spam emails and has ignored the rich nature of image-based content. When these tricks are used in combination, traditional spam filters are powerless to stop the messages, because they normally focus on either text or images but rarely both.
So how do we stop spam before it sullies our inboxes? "Our new method for spam filtering is able to adapt to the dynamic nature of spam emails and accurately handle spammers' tricks by carefully identifying informative patterns, which are automatically extracted from both text and images content of spam emails," says Amayri.
By conducting extensive experiments on traditional spam filtering methods that were general and limited to patterns found in texts or images, she has developed a much stronger way, based on techniques used in pattern recognition and data mining, to filter out unwanted emails. Although the new method has been tested on English spam emails, Amayri says it can be easily extended to other languages.
While this new spam-detecting approach is still in the development stage, Amayri and Bouguila are currently working on a plug-in for SpamAssassin, the world's most widely used open-source spam filter. Amayri hopes that this plug-in will allow other researchers to perform further tests and make more progress in the field of spam detection.
"Spammers keep adapting their methods so that they can trick the spam filters, says Amayri. "Researchers in this field need to band together to keep adapting our methods too, so that we can keep spam out and focus on those messages that are really important."
###
Partners in research: The completion of this research was made possible thanks to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Related links:
Concordia's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering http://www.ece.concordia.ca/
Concordia Institute of Information Systems Engineering http://www.ciise.concordia.ca/
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 20-Nov-2012
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