LOS ANGELES (AP) — That was no wardrobe malfunction — that was couture.
When Jennifer Lawrence ascended the stairs to accept her SAG Award Sunday night, a bit of skin showed through the skirt of her gown, leading to some speculation that it had ripped.
Dior Couture told The Associated Press that wasn't so.
The design house said Lawrence's gown was designed by Raf Simons "with different levels of tulle and satin." That was what viewers saw on television when she lifted her gown to walk upstairs.
On an annual basis, home prices in the Chicago area rose only 0.8 percent in November, the smallest positive gain recorded among the 20 cities included in the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, released Tuesday.
Nationally, home prices rose 5.5 percent annually for the 20-city composite. Much of that gain can be traced to market improvements in once hard-hit places like Phoenix, where home prices have risen 22.8 percent in 12 months. Other cities recording strong yearly increases included Detroit, up 11.9 percent; Las Vegas, up 10 percent; San Francisco, up 12.7 percent; and Minneapolis, up 11.1 percent.
"Housing is clearly recovering," said David Blitzer, chairman of S&P Dow Jones Indices' index committee. "Prices are rising as are both new and existing home sales."
Most cities saw prices decrease in November from their October levels, which Blitzer tied with the housing market's typical winter weakness.
Nevertheless, Chicago turned in the worst monthly performance among the 20 cities. It was the third consecutive monthly decline for local home prices, which showed signs of strength earlier in 2012.
Condominium values in the Chicago market also fell for the second consecutive month. In November, they were down .9 percent from October but rose 2.7 percent from November 2011.
mepodmolik@tribune.com | Twitter @mepodmolik
CAPTIONS
Warming weather in Chicago
Georgina Salgado, left, and Jacinto Oreja, take advantage of the warming weather on Monday to take their five dogs for a walk on the 63rd Street Beach. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune /January 28, 2013)
3:44 p.m. CST, January 28, 2013
The work week begins with mild weather after the frigid cold and Sunday's wintry mix, with potentially record temperatures and heavy rain with possible flooding Tuesday.
Temperatures will start to climb tonight after peaking in the mid-40s, and by Tuesday they'll hit the mid-60s, according to the weather service. The record high for Jan. 29 in Chicago is 59 degrees set in 1914.
Tuesday will hardly be a day at the beach, though: Heavy rain and thunderstorms are expected starting in the afternoon, and the brewing storm has prompted the weather service to issue a hazardous weather outlook, warning of lightning, fog, downpours and hail.
It has also issued a flood watch from Tuesday morning through Tuesday evening for Cook, Ford, Grundy, Iroquois, Kankakee, Livingston and Will counties in Illinois and Benton, Jasper, Lake, Newton and Porter counties in northwest Indiana.
With frozen ground and predictions of as much as two inches of rain in an area around a line stretching from Pontiac to Gary, the agency warns that a lot of that rain could end up running off into local rivers and streams that can rapidly overflow their banks.
chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking
(Reuters) - Yahoo Inc reported net revenue of $1.22 billion in the fourth quarter, up 4 percent year-on-year, as an increase in search advertising revenue offset weakness in the Web portal's display ad business.
Yahoo shares rose 4.5 percent to $21.22 in after hours trading on Monday.
The company said its fourth-quarter net income was $272.3 million, or 23 cents per share, versus $295.6 million, or 24 cents per share in the year-ago period.
Excluding certain items, Yahoo said it had earnings per share of 32 cents, versus the average analyst expectation of 28 cents according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Yahoo said that search revenue increased 4 percent to $482 million in the fourth quarter, while display advertising revenue fell by 3 percent to $591 million.
Chief Executive Marissa Mayer is moving to revive the company's fortunes after several years of declining revenue. Yahoo's stock has risen roughly 30 percent since she became CEO, reaching its highest levels since 2008.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Tom Brady is not playing in the Super Bowl. Neither is Ben Roethlisberger or either of the Mannings.
This Super Bowl has a pair of fresh faces in Colin Kaepernick and Joe Flacco, one of whom will leave New Orleans as the latest and greatest at football's glamour position.
For each, this is new territory.
Flacco, the only quarterback to win a playoff game in each of his first five NFL seasons, will lead the AFC champion Baltimore Ravens into Sunday's matchup with second-year QB Kaepernick and the NFC winners, the San Francisco 49ers. Not exactly a superstar matchup — yet.
It's the first time in a decade that neither Brady, Roethlisberger, Eli Manning or Peyton Manning has gotten to the Super Bowl.
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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL
(Reuters) – R&B singer Chris Brown will be questioned as part of an investigation into allegations that he punched a man during a fight over a parking space in West Hollywood, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said on Monday.
Deputies responded to a call on Sunday about a fight involving six men on Santa Monica Boulevard, the department said. Witnesses said the Grammy-winning singer had assaulted a man during the brief altercation.
No arrests were made. The alleged victim was not named in a department statement that said Brown and his entourage had left the scene before deputies arrived.
Investigators plan to contact the singer about the incident at a later time, according to the department.
Brown, 23, is serving a five-year probation sentence after pleading guilty to assaulting fellow R&B star and former girlfriend Rihanna on the eve of the 2009 Grammy awards.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
The first soldier to survive after losing all four limbs in the Iraq war has received a double-arm transplant.
Brendan Marrocco had the operation on Dec. 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his father said Monday. The 26-year-old Marrocco, who is from New York City, was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009.
He also received bone marrow from the same dead donor who supplied his new arms. That novel approach is aimed at helping his body accept the new limbs with minimal medication to prevent rejection.
The military is sponsoring operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in the wars.
"He was the first quad amputee to survive" from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there have been four others since then, said Brendan Marrocco's father, Alex Marrocco. "He was really excited to get new arms."
The Marroccos want to thank the donor's family for "making a selfless decision ... making a difference in Brendan's life," the father said.
Surgeons plan to discuss the transplant at a news conference with the patient on Tuesday.
The 13-hour operation was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Johns Hopkins, and is the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant done in the United States. Lee led three of those earlier operations when he previously worked at the University of Pittsburgh, including the only above-elbow transplant that had been done at the time, in 2010.
Marrocco's "was the most complicated one" so far, Lee said in an interview Monday. It will take more than a year to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new arms, Lee said.
"The maximum speed is an inch a month for nerve regeneration," he explained. "We're easily looking at a couple years" until the full extent of recovery is known.
While at Pittsburgh, Lee pioneered the novel immune suppression approach used for Marrocco. The surgeon led hand transplant operations on five patients, giving them marrow from their donors in addition to the new limbs. All five recipients have done well and four have been able to take just one anti-rejection drug instead of combination treatments most transplant patients receive.
Minimizing anti-rejection drugs is important because they have side effects and raise the risk of cancer over the long term. Those risks have limited the willingness of surgeons and patients to do more hand, arm and even face transplants. Unlike a life-saving heart or liver transplant, limb transplants are aimed at improving quality of life, not extending it.
Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs.
Lee has received funding for his work from AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a cooperative research network of top hospitals and universities around the country that the government formed about five years ago. With government money, he and several other plastic surgeons around the country are preparing to do more face transplants, possibly using the new minimal immune suppression approach.
Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been living with his older brother in a handicapped-accessible home on New York's Staten Island built with the help of several charities.
The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.
Despite being in a lot of pain for some time after the operation, Marrocco showed a sense of humor, his father said. He had a hoarse voice from a tube in his throat during the long surgery, decided that he sounded like Al Pacino, and started doing movie lines.
"He was making the nurses laugh," Alex Marrocco said.
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AP writer Alex Dominguez contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP) — Cissy Houston has a few words, and a few more, for Bobby Brown.
In "Remembering Whitney," the mother of the late Whitney Houston writes that from the start she had doubted whether Brown was right for her daughter. And she thinks that Whitney might not have ended up so "deep" into drugs had they not stayed together.
"I do believe her life would have turned out differently," Houston writes. "It would have been easier for her to get sober and stay sober. Instead she was with someone who, like her, wanted to party. To me, he never seemed to be a help to her in the way she needed."
"Remembering Whitney" came out Tuesday, two weeks short of the first anniversary of Houston's death. She drowned in a hotel bathtub in Beverly Hills, Calif., at age 48. Authorities said her death was complicated by cocaine use and heart disease.
During a recent telephone interview, Houston said she has no contact with Brown and didn't see any reason to, not even concerning her granddaughter, Bobbi Kristina. She reaffirmed her comments in the book that Whitney Houston would have been better off without him. "How would you like it if he had anything to do with your daughter?" she asked.
Houston said she wanted the book published so the world would not believe the worst about her daughter. Cissy Houston, herself an accomplished soul and gospel singer who has performed with Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, describes Whitney as a transcendent talent and vivacious and generous person known affectionately by her childhood nickname, "Nippy." But she acknowledges in the book that her daughter could be "mean" and "difficult" and questions at times how well she knew her.
"In my darkest moments, I wonder whether Nippy loved me," she writes. "She always told me she did. But you know, she didn't call me much. She didn't come see me as much as I hoped she would."
But, "almost always," Whitney Houston was "the sweetest, most loving person in the room."
Brown is portrayed as childish and impulsive, hot tempered and jealous of his wife's success. Cissy Houston describes a 1997 incident when Whitney sustained a "deep cut" on her face while on a yacht with Brown in the Mediterranean. Whitney insisted it was an accident; Brown had slammed his hand on a table, breaking a plate. A piece of china flew up and hit Whitney, requiring surgery to cover any possible scar.
The injury was minor, the effects possibly fateful.
"She seemed sadder after that, like something had been taken away from her," Houston writes.
For years, Whitney's drug problems had been only a rumor to her mother, who writes that concerns expressed by record executive Clive Davis were kept from her by her daughter and others. But by 2005 she had seen the worst. Houston remembers a horrifying visit to the Atlanta home of Brown and Houston, where the walls and doors were spray-painted with "big glaring eyes and strange faces." Whitney's face had been cut out from a framed family picture, an image Cissy Houston found "beyond disturbing." The next time Houston came to the house, she was joined by two sheriff's deputies who helped her take Whitney to the hospital.
"She was so angry at me, cursing me and up and down," she writes. "Eventually, after a good long while, Nippy did stop being angry at me. She realized that I did what I did to protect her, and she later told people that I had saved her life."
Brown and Whitney Houston divorced in 2007, after 15 years of marriage. When she learned that her daughter was leaving Brown, Cissy Houston was "extremely relieved" and "thanking God so much I'm sure nobody else could get a prayer in to Him."
Houston has no doubt that if Whitney were alive she would still be singing and making records. Houston said during her interview that she has seen "Sparkle," a remake of the 1970s movie that came out last summer and featured Whitney as the mother of a singing group struggling with addiction. Although Cissy Houston doesn't like movies about "drugs and all that kind of stuff," she was impressed by "Sparkle."
"I thought she was great in it and all the kids were great," says Houston, who adds that the "whole movie was hard to get through."
The book, too, was painful and her grief continues. She writes that sometimes she hears a doorbell ring and thinks it's Whitney, or sees a vase in a different place and wonders if her daughter is around. Some nights, Cissy Houston wakes up crying, not sure at first where she is.
"But then I get up out of bed, wipe my eyes, wash my face, and lie back down to my sleep. Because that is all I can do," she writes. "I am so grateful to God for giving me the gift of 48 years with my daughter. And I accept that He knew when it was time to take her."
While the Standard & Poor's 500 index ended the year up 13 percent, most large businesses in the region that counsel other companies on how to improve their operations saw their stock prices drop.
Business support services was one of the few sectors getting clobbered in a 2012 Tribune ranking of Illinois and northwest Indiana stocks' performance.
Stock prices gained at about 70 percent of the 127 companies on the list, and about half outperformed the S&P 500. Bank owners such as Taylor Capital Group emerged from their 2011 doldrums, and Ulta Salon Cosmetics & Fragrance Inc. and Discover Financial Services marked their second consecutive year of soaring stock prices.
The year's biggest decliner, down 76 percent, was Groupon, as once-torrid revenue growth at the daily deals offerer started slowing.
Career Education was the second-worst performer; its stock fell 56 percent. The highly scrutinized for-profit school chain said it would close campuses and cut jobs amid sinking revenue and financial losses.
Sectors boosted by broad gains in 2012 included electrical parts and equipment, industrial machinery, and specialty chemicals.
Of seven Illinois banks on the list, all but one outperformed the S&P 500, with price appreciation of those six ranging from 16 to 86 percent.
In contrast, stocks of four of five professional services firms — Navigant Consulting, Huron Consulting Group, Heidrick & Struggles International and R.R. Donnelley & Sons — closed down 2 to 38 percent.
Each had its own set of issues.
Navigant's services, for example, include advising companies that face disputes, litigation and investigations, including government probes, as well as businesses that need help valuing potential mergers and acquisitions.
"You see fewer government investigations during an election year, as regulators are leaving their jobs, and they don't want to start new ones," said Tobey Sommer, a SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst. "Also, worries about the 'fiscal cliff' slowed M&A because CEOs didn't want to look foolish acquiring a company in September ahead of the fiscal cliff when they might have been able to buy it for 20 percent less in January had we gone off."
Meanwhile, Heidrick's troubles included a slowing market for executive searches. In early 2012, analysts expected Heidrick's annual earnings to be in the range of about $1.30 per share. It appears that it will earn closer to 57 cents a share.
Huron's earnings estimates during 2012 were also trimmed, to about $2.10 from about $2.40 a share as the timing of fee payments to its health care consulting business proved volatile.
"Its underlying demand is strong," but an increasing number of clients had signed contracts where a larger portion of revenue was contingent on the outcome of Huron's consulting work, said Randle Reece, analyst with Avondale Partners LLC. That made it harder for the company and the analysts who cover it to predict the timing of revenues, since they are deferred.
For investors interested in "Dumpster diving," Morningstar Inc. considers Exelon, WMS Industries and Caterpillar to be high quality yet undervalued this year, said Heather Brilliant, chief equities strategist.
Navigant is among the region's beaten-down stocks liked by stock research firm EVA Dimensions LLC. "Its fundamentals are improving, and it's really cheap," said EVA analyst Andrew Zamfotis.
Best of the best
Here are the top three stock gainers of 2012:
The National Weather Service has issued a freezing rain advisory for northeast Illinois that warns of an ice storm that is expected to last until 9 p.m. this evening.
A mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain hit the Chicago area around noon, but there have been no reports of any major accumulation, said Bill Nelson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Still, Nelson warned that a heavy fog will roll in after 7 p.m. tonight and could last until mid to late Monday morning.
According to the agency, the region was going to be hit with freezing rain, possibly mixed with sleet, that will turn to rain as the temperatures rise above freezing in later afternoon or early evening. The agency warns of ice accumulation, up to a tenth-of-an-inch or two, making travel hazardous and possibly leading to downed tree limbs and power lines.
Because the ground is below freezing, the precipitation will freeze on contact, the agency said, leaving sidewalks as well as streets with that potentially dangerous coating of ice.
Forecasters don't expect the storm to have any major lasting effects other than a widespread, dense fog that could pose trouble for drivers once it arrives later tonight.
"We just urge everybody to exercise caution and take things slow," Nelson said.
Much of the ice from today will likely melt as temperatures in the Chicago area reach the mid-30s overnight and slowly increase to the upper 40s by Monday, according to forecasters. Nelson added that it is normal for a heavy fog to appear when cold air is replaced with warmer air and moisture.
Meanwhile, some city and state agencies have already deployed crews to salt streets as the ice storm continues. The city's streets and sanitation department earlier today deployed its full feet of 284 plows to salt main streets, including Lake Shore Drive, and residential roads.
The state's transportation agency has 360 trucks in the northeastern part of Illinois ready to salt roads as soon as precipitation hits the area, said Mike Claffey, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
IDOT will be monitoring weather conditions, but roads will likely be slick this afternoon when the ice storm arrives, Claffey said. He also cautioned drivers to stay off the roads.
"It's going to be very slippery, tricky driving conditions," Claffey said. "If you don't have to be out, you should not be."
jmdelgado@tribune.com
Twitter: @jendelgado1
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