Nationwide manhunt in progress for NY surgeon

 

Surgeon Timothy Jorden saved the lives of patients with gunshot wounds, lived in a big home by Lake Erie and owned four vehicles. He was a product of a working-class neighborhood who became an Army officer before coming home to earn his medical degree.

Now the healer is linked to a killing.

Police across the country were on the lookout Thursday for the 49-year-old trauma surgeon in connection with the shooting death of his ex-girlfriend in a building at the Buffalo hospital complex where they both worked. Police say the former Army weapons expert may be armed and should be considered dangerous.

"He was an excellent surgeon. He saved so many lives. For him to take one is unreal," said a stunned June
DuPree, a neighbor of Jorden's in an exclusive cluster of homes on a lakefront bluff.

But she and others also said the affable and accomplished doctor seemed different lately — thinner, not quite as friendly and less meticulous about appearances. Friends of the victim, meanwhile, offered glimpses of a much darker side.

"I saw him at the beginning of the season and noticed how much weight he had lost," DuPree said. "He said, 'Yeah, I lost a little bit.' But it was more than a little bit. It was a lot. He wasn't too friendly that time I saw him. He just didn't want to talk."

SC's Latest Jobless Rate to be Released

South Carolina's latest unemployment rate is being released.

The state's Department of Employment and Workforce is scheduled Friday to announce the jobless rate for May.

The announcement comes after nine consecutive months of improvement. The state's jobless rate was 8.8 percent in April. That's down from 10.5 percent last July and the lowest it's been in more than three years.

The rate peaked at 12 percent in December 2009 before beginning a steady decline.
In April, Marion County continued to post the state's highest unemployment rate at 16.8 percent. Greenville County had the lowest rate at 7 percent.

'House Hunters' houses aren't always for sale?

The show has a prospective buyer or buyers tour three properties, giving their critiques along the way on closet space, countertops and wall colors. At show's end, one home is chosen for purchase.

But how real is "reality" on the show? An account posted by one home buyer on the popular Hooked on Houses blog, causing a mini-uproar on the Web, says the show is almost completely staged.

Bobi Jensen, whose San Antonio house hunt was featured in 2006, wrote, "The producers said they found our (true) story — that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental — boring and overdone. So instead they just wanted to emphasize how our home was too small and we needed a bigger one desperately. It wasn't true, but it was a smaller house than the one we bought so I went with it."

Jensen also wrote, "They didn't even 'accept' us being a subject for the show until we closed on the house we were buying. So then when they decided to film our episode, we had to scramble to find houses to tour and pretend we were considering." She added, perhaps most surprisingly, that "the ones we looked at weren't even for sale. … They were just our two friends' houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!"

Vizio Debuts All-in-One Desktops, Ultrabooks

Vizio, a company long known for its HDTVs, is hoping to make an equally big splash in the PC market. Today in New York, the company finally launched the all-in-one desktops and laptops it announced at CES earlier this year.

In a presentation that included remarks from partners Intel, Microsoft, and Walmart, Vizio CEO and founder William Wang and CTO Matt McRae talked about the current PC landscape, and how there is a dearth of standout design. According to them, the new Vizio systems remedy that with sleek forms, as well as a lack of bloatware and moderate price points. 


 China to send its first woman into space on Saturday

 BEIJING — China has said it will send its first female astronaut into space on Saturday, when the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft blasts off from the Gobi desert for the country's first ever manned space docking.

 
Liu Yang, a 33-year-old major in the People's Liberation Army who entered the astronaut training programme just two years ago, will take part in China's fourth manned space launch, a spokeswoman for the country's space progamme said.

"From day one I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts," Liu, a trained fighter pilot who is married but has no children, told the state broadcaster CCTV in an interview broadcast after Friday's announcement.