Danny Puff

MILWAUKEE (AP) MILWAUKEE (AP) There's a 15-year-old Florida girl who didn't really know much about Charlie Sheen before this week but does now.

The actor wired $10,000 to Teagan Marti and her family on Thursday for a therapy dog to help in her rehabilitation from injuries sustained when she plummeted 100 feet from a Wisconsin amusement park ride in 2010.

"I think he's a very kind person for helping me and my family and very generous," Teagan Marti said by phone Thursday from her home in Parkland, Fla.

Teagan Marti suffered brain, spine, pelvis and internal injuries in July 2010 when nets and air bags that were supposed to catch riders on a free-fall ride were not raised. She had convinced her family to make the trip from Florida to Extreme World in Wisconsin Dells after seeing the amusement park's Terminal Velocity ride on the Travel Channel.

She was hospitalized in Wisconsin and Florida for three months. She initially had no use of her arms or legs but through physical therapy is able to walk again with a walker.

Teagan Marti's mother, Julie Marti, said they are financially in trouble from the medical bills and her recent divorce. Their house is being foreclosed upon and insurance isn't covering physical therapy anymore, she said. She had no idea how they would pay for the English Golden Retriever puppy.

"I'm in such disbelief," Julie Marti said. "I was crying. ... What a guy. What a guy."

The dog is being trained in Fond du Lac to turn on lights, pick up objects and be the teen's constant companion.

Lucia Wilgus, of Eau Claire, became friends with the Martis after hearing of the accident and has spearheaded fundraising and helped find the dog and arrange training.

She sent a letter this week to Sheen through Sheen's godfather, who is a Wilgus family friend and Benedictine brother in the Benet Lake, Wis. She estimated the training and related costs would be around $6,000.

Sheen said he decided to give more for extra costs. The request had a "personal vibe" since it came through his godfather, and "if there's a need for more I told them to call me," he said.

"I like to pay it forward," Sheen said Thursday in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "People come into your orbit for a reason. You don't always know what that is ahead of time, but if I ignore these requests then I don't have any opportunity to see where these things lead us, or lead me."

He said he doesn't like to publicize most of his donations, but wanted to talk about this one to inspire others to donate.

Teagan Marti gets the dog on her birthday in September but hasn't made up her mind on a name.

"I think they should name the dog Charlie," Sheen joked.

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Follow Carrie Antlfinger at http://twitter.com/@antltoe

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BOSTON (AP) William Watts Biggers, the co-creator of the cartoon "Underdog," the mild-mannered canine shoeshine boy who turned into a caped superhero to rescue his girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred, has died. He was 85.

Family friend Derek Tague says Biggers, who went by "Buck," died unexpectedly at his Plymouth, Mass., home on Sunday.

The native of Avondale Estates, Ga., worked for the New York City advertising firm DFS when he accepted an assignment from the agency's largest client, General Mills, to create television cartoons to promote its breakfast cereals. The most famous was "Underdog," which debuted on NBC in 1964.

The canine superhero, voiced by comic actor Wally Cox, also battled villains including mad scientist Simon Bar Sinister, and a gangster wolf Riff Raff.

Upon hearing the cries of Sweet Polly Purebred, Underdog would rush into a telephone booth and transform into the hero.

He spoke in simple rhymes, his most famous probably "There's no need to fear, Underdog is here."

Biggers also helped create "King Leonardo and His Short Subjects" and "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales."

After General Mills pulled out of the animation business, Biggers became vice president of promotion and creative services at NBC.

The family said Biggers "delighted in the enduring appeal of his 'Underdog' franchise," including the balloon that appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the 2007 live-action film.

Biggers also wrote for publications including TV Guide, Family Circle and Reader's Digest, and wrote several novels, including "The Man Inside" and "Hold Back the Tide."

Biggers' wife of 39 years, Grace, died in 1989. He is survived by his daughter, Victoria Biggers, his son, W. Watts Biggers, Jr., and longtime companion Nancy Purbeck.

Funeral arrangements will be private. A memorial service is planned for a later date.

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SOMERVILLE, N.J. (AP) A former "Melrose Place" actress who was drunk when her SUV plowed into a car and killed a woman was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison, infuriating the victim's relatives, who had hoped for the 10-year maximum.

"What a travesty!" the victim's husband, Fred Seeman, yelled after the sentence was read.

"This is not justice," the victim's 26-year-old son, Ford Seeman, told the judge before he stormed out of the courtroom.

A jury in November convicted Amy Locane-Bovenizer of vehicular homicide in the 2010 death of 60-year-old Helene Seeman in Montgomery Township.

Locane-Bovenizer will be eligible for parole after 2 1/2 years and will be credited the 81 days she has already served. She also had her license suspended for five years and will be on probation for three years after her release. She must pay several thousand dollars in fines.

Locane-Bovenizer, who didn't testify at the trial, appeared in 13 episodes of TV's "Melrose Place" and in movies including "Cry-Baby," ''School Ties" and "Secretary."

Prosecutors say she was driving with a blood-alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit when her SUV slammed into a Mercury Milan driven by Fred Seeman as he was turning into his driveway. Fred Seeman's wife, Helene, was killed, and he was seriously injured.

During the trial, the defense argued that Fred Seeman was making a slow turn, which contributed to the crash. They maintained that it was an accident, not a crime.

The defense also shifted blame to a third motorist who they say distracted the actress by honking at her and chasing her after being rear-ended. They said the chase led Locane-Bovenizer to drive 20 miles over the speed limit on a dark two-lane road.

The judge lowered the maximum sentence citing the hardship on Locane-Bovenizer's two young children. One has a serious medical and mental disability. The defense went into detail about how her sick child was deteriorating physically and psychologically since the actress' incarceration and about how a prolonged sentence would make it worse.

"I'm just glad her little girls will have their mother back soon," Locane-Bovenizer's mother, Helen Locane, said as she walked out of the courtroom.

In an emotionally charged statement, Fred Seeman told the court that the defense contention that his vehicle was turning slowly added "salt on the wound," and he said he was appalled that Locane-Bovenizer took no responsibility for killing his wife.

The actress, in turn, apologized to Seeman's family and said she did take full responsibility.

"I am truly sorry for all of the pain I have caused," she said, struggling to get through her statement, as she looked toward the family that packed one side of the courtroom while her friends and family packed the other. "My own suffering will never go away."

Judge Robert Reed said that he had no sympathy for the actress but that the children should not suffer even more because of her actions.

The Seeman family said after the sentencing that the decision was a "mockery" and only added to the suffering they've endured since the accident.

"What's one more punch in the gut?" Ford Seeman said.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) A judge says Kim Kardashian's divorce case is ready for trial.

Superior Court Judge Stephen Moloney says a trial date should be set and Kardashian's estranged husband, Kris Humphries, has had adequate time to prepare.

Moloney's ruling Friday in Los Angeles came after months of wrangling between lawyers for when a trial can be set to end the former couple's marriage.

Humphries wants an annulment, while Kardashian is seeking a divorce.

His attorney had been seeking additional time to obtain information about Kardashian's reality shows.

A trial will determine whether Humphries can prove his claims that the couple's marriage was based on fraud.

The case will move to another judge to set a trial date, which Moloney says may be in four to six weeks.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) A judge says Kim Kardashian's divorce trial should begin in early May.

Kardashian had been urging the judge to set the trial so her marriage to Kris Humphries can end before July, when her child with Kanye West is due to be born.

Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon set a May 6 trial date on Friday over the objections of an attorney for her estranged husband, an NBA player.

Humphries' lawyer had sought more time to find evidence that might prove claims the marriage should be annulled because it was fraudulent. But two judges determined Friday that he'd had plenty of time to prepare.

Gordon also said Humphries' status as a pro basketball player didn't entitle him to a delay until his playing season ends.

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A meteor explosion over Russia injured hundreds of people today (Feb. 15), just hours before an asteroid about half the size of a football field gave Earth an extremely close shave, catapulting the need to protect our home planet from hazardous space rocks into the spotlight.

The two events raise questions about our preparedness for dangerous encounters with asteroids, and by sheer coincidence one group of scientists has just unveiled plans for a novel system to vaporize asteroids in space that threaten Earth.

"We have to come to grips with discussing these issues in a logical and rational way," UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip M. Lubin said in a statement Thursday (Feb. 14), the day before the Russian meteor explosion.

"We need to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with threats. Duck and cover is not an option," Lubin added. "We can actually do something about it, and it's credible to do something. So let's begin along this path. Let's start small and work our way up. There is no need to break the bank to start."

The hazards of asteroid impacts are starkly clear in Russia, where more than 900 people were injured and hundreds of buildings damaged by the shockwave from the meteor's explosion in the atmosphere, according to press reports. [Russian Meteor Explosion Injures Hundreds (Video)]

Lubin and his colleagues have conceived of a system they call DE-STAR, or Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploration. The concept: harness power from the sun and convert it into a massive phased array of laser beams that can deflect or evaporate asteroids hazardous to Earth.

"This system is not some far-out idea from Star Trek," Gary B. Hughes, a researcher at California Polytechnic State University, said in a statement. "All the components of this system pretty much exist today. Maybe not quite at the scale that we'd need scaling up would be the challenge but the basic elements are all there and ready to go."

The scale the team has in mind is quite astounding ranging from one system the size of a desktop device to one measuring 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter and the capabilities would improve with each expansion.

DE-STAR 2, for example, would be about 330 feet (100 meters) in diameter, or about the size of the International Space Station, and could nudge comets or asteroids out of their orbits, the team said. Such a system would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as it would need to be constructed in orbit from smaller pieces, Hughes said in an email to SPACE.com.

Taking a modular approach, the orbital system would keep getting bigger. The researchers envision DE-STAR 4 to be 100 times as big as DE-STAR 2 and say it would be capable of vaporizing a menacing 1,640-foot-wide (500-m) asteroid within a year by beaming it with 1.4 megatons of energy each day.

Hughes added that today's events the Russian meteor blast and the unprecedented close approach of asteroid 2102 DA14 "should remind us that there are asteroids and comets that cross Earth's orbit which pose a credible risk of impact."

"If we acknowledge the threat of impact, and the potential for severe disturbances to Earth and society, we should be compelled to investigate realistic approaches for mitigating the risk of impact," Hughes said in an email to SPACE.com. "DE-STAR is one such realistic approach, being based on sound concepts and an existing technological base. An orbiting DE-STAR 2 system would allow rapid reaction to smaller threats. A larger system could defuse any threat if detected sufficiently in advance."

The team thinks their ideas could have implications for asteroid mining and deep space travel, too. The DE-STAR systems could be a valuable tool for evaluating an asteroid's composition and figuring out which lucrative, rare elements it might hold, such as lanthanum, which is used in the batteries of hybrid cars. And a gigantic system that the team has imagined, DE-STAR 6, could serve as a massive orbiting power source, allowing interstellar travel without a warp drive.

"The ability to focus energy on a distant target would allow acceleration of interplanetary spacecraft," Hughes said. "Our calculations indicate that a 1,000-kg (2,200-pound) spacecraft could be accelerated to Mars and arrive in 15 days. Continuous acceleration could send a spacecraft to relativistic speeds, a tantalizing prospect for interstellar travel."

The team is currently preparing a manuscript on DE-STAR to submit for peer review.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Russian Meteor Track and Detonation Seen From Space | Video Asteroid 2012 DA14 Earth Flyby of Feb. 15: Complete Coverage 5 Amazing Fireballs Caught on Video Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Alec Baldwin and his new wife Hilaria Thomas Baldwin are expecting their first child together, a representative for the "30 Rock" star said on Tuesday.

Baldwin, 54, married the yoga teacher, who is 26 years his junior, in a July 2012 wedding in New York.

The child is expected in the summer, the spokesman said, but gave no other details.

The award-winning actor most recently played egotistical television executive Jack Donaghy on the NBC comedy "30 Rock," which broadcast its last episode in January.

Baldwin was married to actress Kim Basinger from 1993-2002. The couple has one daughter, Ireland, who was born in 1995.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Todd Eastham)

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LOS ANGELES, Feb 11 (Reuters) - Singer Beyonce says she wants to give her baby daughter a normal childhood with "sprinklers and ... slumber parties."

In a Vogue magazine interview released on Monday she also teased her next, as yet untitled, album saying the music is "a lot more sensual ... empowering" thanks to motherhood.

The Grammy-winning singer, 31, who is married to rapper Jay-Z, took a year off her music career to care for her first child, Blue Ivy Carter, who was born in January 2012.

"At some point it s very important to me that my daughter is able to experience life and run through the sprinklers and have slumber parties and trust and live and do all the things that any child should be able to do ... School visits and lemonade stands and all that stuff. It s very important for me," she told Vogue in an interview for its March issue.

The singer, who is making a comeback with a world tour starting in April, talked about bringing her daughter to work, saying, "She s my road dog. She s my homey, my best friend."

The Vogue interview was conducted in late 2012 before Beyonce's controversial lip-synced performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at President Barack Obama's inauguration in January.

Two weeks later she silenced her critics with a live performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.

On Saturday, her HBO documentary "Life is But A Dream" gets a first airing, giving viewers a glimpse of her life outside the spotlight. An interview with Oprah Winfrey on the OWN cable channel airs the same day.

Beyonce called media gossip last year that she had faked her pregnancy "very odd" and spoke in detail about giving birth for the first time.

"I felt like when I was having contractions. I envisioned my child pushing through a very heavy door. And I imagined this tiny infant doing all the work, so I couldn t think about my own pain...We were talking. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt a communication," she told Vogue.

((The full interview with Beyonce can be seen on Vogue.com at http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/beyonce-knowles-the-queen-b/ ))

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Shumaker)

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Knut, the hand-reared polar bear who captured Germans' hearts before his early death in 2011, returned to his adoring Berlin public on Friday as a life-sized model bearing the animal's real fur.

Knut will stand for a month in the entrance foyer of the city's natural history museum, which has modified its entrance for the anticipated rush of visitors, a museum spokeswoman said.

The museum is keen to stress that Knut has not been stuffed. Rather, a replica of the bear was made, based on Knut's skeleton, in one of his favourite poses, and this was covered with the creature's pelt, in a procedure known as dermoplasty.

The model has expressive eyes and a damp nose, museum director Johannes Vogel said.

"I think people will accept Knut, because this is a very dignified model.. People who knew Knut very well while he was alive recognise their Knut here again."

Knut was the star attraction of Berlin zoo during his four-year life. His mother rejected him as a new-born leaving the fluffy white cub to be reared by a zookeeper. Thousands of visitors queued for hours to watch him frolic in his enclosure, and he inspired a dizzying array of merchandise.

Other German zoos have tried in vain to create celebrity animals. None have ever come close to matching Knut's fame.

The bear died suddenly of an epileptic fit in March 2011.

(Reporting by Reuters television; writing by Alexandra Hudson, editing by Paul Casciato)

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Facebook is getting an unwelcome look at the shady side of the hacking culture that CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrates.

Intruders recently infiltrated the systems running the world's largest online social network but did not steal any sensitive information about Facebook's more than 1 billion users, according to a blog posting Friday by the company's security team.

The unsettling revelation is the latest breach to expose the digital cracks in a society and an economy that is storing an ever-growing volume of personal and business data online.

The news didn't seem to faze investors. Facebook Inc.'s stock dipped 10 cents to $28.22 in Friday's extended trading.

The main building at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters lists its address as 1 Hacker Way. From there, Facebook serves as the gatekeeper for billions of potentially embarrassing photos and messages that get posted each month.

This time, at least, that material didn't get swept up in the digital break-in that Facebook said it discovered last month. The company didn't say why it waited until the afternoon before a holiday weekend to inform its users about the hack.

It was a sophisticated attack that also hit other companies, according to Facebook, which didn't identify the targets.

"As part of our ongoing investigation, we are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future," Facebook wrote on the blog.

Online short-messaging service Twitter acknowledged being hacked earlier this month. In that security breakdown, Twitter warned that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 of the more than 200 million accounts set up on its service.

Late last month, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal two of the three largest U.S. newspapers said they were hit by China-based hackers believed to be interested in monitoring media coverage of topics that the Chinese government deemed important.

Facebook didn't identify a suspected origin of its hacking incident, but provided a few details about how it apparently happened.

The security lapse was traced to a handful of employees who visited a mobile software developer's website that had been compromised, which led to malware being installed on the workers' laptops. The PCs were infected even though they were supposed to be protected by the latest anti-virus software and were equipped with other up-to-date protection.

Facebook linked part of the problem to a security hole in the Java software that triggered a safety alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last month. The government agency advised computer users to disable Java on their machines because of a weakness that could be exploited by hackers.

Oracle Corp., the owner of Java, has since issued a security patch that it says has fixed the problem. In its post, Facebook said it received the Java fix two weeks ago.

Facebook never mentioned the word "hack" in describing the breach. That, no doubt, was by design because hacking is a good thing in Zuckerberg's vernacular.

To most people, hacking conjures images of malevolent behavior by intruders listening to private voicemails and villains crippling websites or breaking into email accounts.

Zuckerberg provided his interpretation of the word in a manifesto titled "The Hacker Way" that he included in the documents that the company filed for its initial public offering of stock last year.

"The word 'hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," Zuckerberg wrote. "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done."

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