A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 18

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Silver Linings Playbook” sweeps Satellite Awards

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Silver Linings Playbook” was the big winner at Sunday night’s Satellite Awards, a show produced by and voted on by the International Press Academy and held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Beverly Hills.

The David O. Russell comedy, which has been overshadowed in the awards picture by more recent films like “Les Miserables” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” won five awards, including Best Motion Picture. Rusell won the award for directing, while stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence were named best actor and actress. The film also won for editing.

Supporting actor and actress awards went to Anne Hathaway for “Les Miserables” and Javier Bardem for “Skyfall.”

Mark Boal won the original-screenplay award for “Zero Dark Thirty,” while David Magee won the adapted-screenplay honor for “Life of Pi.”

Other winners: “Rise of the Guardians,” best animated film; “Chasing Ice,” best documentary; and a tie between “The Intouchables” and “Pieta” for best foreign film.

Proving that the IPA is a body of voters inclined toward sweeps, the television series “Homeland” and “The Big Bang Theory” each won three awards in the TV categories, picking up honors as best drama and comedy series, respectively, and also winning the actor and actress awards.

The awards:

FILM AWARDS

Motion picture: “Silver Linings Playbook”

Director: David O. Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Actor: Bradley Cooper, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Supporting actor: Javier Bardem, “Skyfall”

Supporting actress: Anne Hathaway, “Les Miserables”

Original screenplay: Mark Boal, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Adapted screenplay: David Magee, “Life of Pi”

Motion picture, animated or mixed media: “Rise of the Guardians”

Motion picture, documentary: “Chasing Ice”

Motion picture, international: (tie) “The Intouchables,” “Pieta”

Cinematography: Claudio Miranda, “Life of Pi”

Editing: Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Score: Alexandre Desplat, “Argo”

Song: “Suddenly” from “Les Miserables”

Sound (editing and mixing): Andy Nelson, John Warhurst, Lee Walpole, Simon Hayes, “Les Miserables”

Visual effects: Michael Lantieri, Kevin Baillie, Ryan Tudhope, Jim Gibbs, “Flight”

Art direction & production design: Rick Carter, Curt Beech, David Crank, Leslie McDonald, “Lincoln”

Costume design: Manon Rasmussen, “A Royal Affair”

TELEVISION AWARDS

Miniseries or movie made for television: “Hatfields & McCoys”

Actor in a miniseries/movie made for television: Benedict Cumberbatch, “Sherlock

Actress in a miniseries/movie made for television: Julianne Moore, “Game Change”

Supporting actor in a miniseries/TV movie: Neal McDonough, “Justified”

Supporting actress in a miniseries/TV movie: Maggie Smith, “Downton Abbey”

Drama series: “Homeland”

Genre series: “Walking Dead”

Actor in a drama: Damian Lewis, “Homeland”

Actress in a drama: Claire Danes, “Homeland”

Comedy or musical series: “The Big Bang Theory”

Actor in a comedy: Johnny Galecki, “The Big Bang Theory”

Actress in a comedy: Kaley Cuoco, “The Big Bang Theory”

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

Outstanding contribution to the entertainment industry: Terence Stamp

Nikola Tesla Award: Walter Murch

Auteur Award: Paul Williams

Honorary Satellite Award: Bruce Davison

Newcomer Award: Quvenzhane Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Humanitarian Award: Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Motion picture ensemble: “Les Miserables”

Television ensemble: “Walking Dead”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Not-Too-Sweet Wok-Popped Coconut Kettle Corn

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Not-too-sweet coconut kettle corn.

I’m usually not a big fan of sweet kettle corn, but I wanted to make a moderately sweet version because some people love it and it is nice to be able to offer a sweet snack for the holidays. I realized after testing this recipe that I do like kettle corn if it isn’t too sweet. The trick to not burning the sugar when you make kettle corn is to add the sugar off the heat at the end of popping. The wok will be hot enough to caramelize it.

2 tablespoons coconut oil

6 tablespoons popcorn

2 tablespoons raw brown sugar

Kosher salt to taste

1. Place the coconut oil in a 14-inch lidded wok over medium heat. When the coconut oil melts add a few kernels of popcorn and cover. When you hear a kernel pop, quickly lift the lid and pour in all of the popcorn. Cover, turn the heat to medium-low, and cook, shaking the wok constantly, until you no longer hear the kernels popping against the lid. Turn off the heat, uncover and add the sugar and salt. Cover again and shake the wok vigorously for 30 seconds to a minute. Transfer the popcorn to a bowl, and if there is any caramelized sugar on the bottom of the wok scrape it out. Stir or toss the popcorn to distribute the caramelized bits throughout, and serve.

Yield: About 12 cups popcorn

Advance preparation: This is good for a few hours but it will probably disappear more quickly than that.

Nutritional information per cup: 59 calories; 3 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 0 grams polyunsaturated fat; 0 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 1 milligram sodium (does not include salt to taste); 1 gram protein

 

​Up Next: Granola

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Influx of Cash in Asia Raises Familiar Worries

HONG KONG — To all the concerns that cloud Asia’s growth prospects next year — the fiscal measures set to take effect in the United States, the euro zone debt crisis and the uncertain growth trajectories of China and Japan — add one more: a renewed flood of cash into some of the region’s more dynamic economies.

Asia’s fast-growing economies have weathered a tough 2012 relatively well, and economists say that unless the U.S. and euro zone economies take a sharp hit in 2013, the region could pick up steam again next year.

But that good news comes with a price tag. Analysts have begun to warn recently that Asia’s relative economic buoyancy could once again attract large amounts of cash, possibly leading to a repeat of what happened two years ago.

Back then, big inflows, mostly from the West, caused many emerging-market currencies to surge and prompted talk of “currency wars” as central bankers scrambled to keep their currencies from rising too fast.

Now, with growth in Asia picking up, and central banks in developed nations stepping up their efforts to oil the wheels of their beleaguered economies, the influx of cash is again starting to have worrying side effects.

Property prices, for example, have risen across much of the region. The South Korean won has climbed more than 5 percent against the U.S. dollar since late August. The Philippine peso has risen about 4 percent, to its highest level since early 2008. The Taiwan dollar, the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit also have strengthened.

“We could be heading back towards where we were in 2010,” said Frederic Neumann, regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. “Capital is pouring back into emerging Asia.”

Next year, said Rob Subbaraman, chief economist for Asia ex-Japan at Nomura in Hong Kong, “could be a bumper year” for net capital inflows. “The stars are aligned.”

For many parts of the world, a tide of capital would be a blessing. The United States, Europe and Japan have spent much of the last four years trying to reinvigorate their economies by lowering rates and injecting cash into strained financial systems through purchases of financial assets.

More is in store.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it would continue to buy large amounts of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities until the job market improved.

Likewise, the Japanese central bank may step up its existing asset-buying and lending program at a policy meeting this week, analysts believe.

Over the years, some of that liquidity has seeped into parts of the world where growth is faster and returns are higher. The amounts of money flowing into developing Asia have, at times, been vast. During the rush in late 2009 and 2010, David Carbon, an economist at DBS in Singapore, estimated, the region saw inflows to the tune of $2 billion a day, for example.

Economists at the Japanese bank Nomura estimate that between early 2009 and mid-2011, net capital inflows to Asia, excluding Japan, totaled $783 billion — far more than the $573 billion that came in during the preceding five years.

The renewed inflows in recent months have not been so large. Moreover, not all countries have attracted cash in equal measure. Investors have been wary this year of India’s seeming inability to push through important economic overhauls, for example. That has caused the rupee to sag more than 11 percent since February. China, meanwhile, restricts incoming foreign investments to relatively small amounts.

Elsewhere in the region, however, there are signs of renewed pressure.

An index compiled by Nomura that gauges capital inflow pressures has risen in recent months, said Mr. Subbaraman, the Nomura economist. Although it remains below where it was during the spike in 2010, it is now at its highest since May 2011.

Said Mr. Neumann of HSBC, “currencies have strengthened despite resistant central banks, real estate markets are frothing away, and lending to consumers and companies has accelerated.”

All of that has reignited the concerns that traditionally accompany major — and potentially fickle — capital inflows.

For exporters, stronger currencies are a headache, as they make the exporters’ goods more expensive for consumers elsewhere.

For ordinary citizens, rising property prices make homes increasingly unaffordable. Soaring property prices are also vulnerable to painful reversals if conditions change.

Underscoring that point, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday that a sharp rise in house prices in Hong Kong raised “the risk of an abrupt correction.”

Likewise, a big increase this year in corporate bond issuance — while a positive in that it supports growth and diversifies corporate funding — bears risks.

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A collection that identifies California as a world apart

PALO ALTO — Something was unusual about the 1663 map of the Western Hemisphere.

Yes, much of the North and South American coasts followed contours geographers would recognize today. And in California, Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara and Point Reyes were clearly marked. But wait! What was that body of water marked Mare Vermiglio, or Red Sea, separating California from the mainland? And why was California a big carrot-shaped island?

That geographic oddity caught the attention of Glen McLaughlin, an American businessman who was browsing through antique maps at a shop in London in 1971. He bought it — and began pursuing a quirky and expensive passion that would lead him to devote an entire room in his San Jose-area home to what is believed to be the largest private collection of such maps.

"It was not a very pretty map, but it had the concept that California was a very different place, a special place," McLaughlin recalled about that first purchase.

Four decades later, his collection of 800 maps, all showing California as an island, is making a splash in academia. And to both California lovers and haters, it promotes the sentiment that the state, even if not a physical island, remains a cultural and political one.

McLaughlin recently turned his collection over to Stanford University's Branner earth sciences library in an arrangement that was part sale, part donation. It is thought to be worth $2.1 million.

An Oklahoman who found a new home and success as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, McLaughlin became intrigued with 17th and 18th century depictions of California as a mysterious island of riches and, he said, "hope for the future."

From early exploration to Gold Rush days to the current high-tech era, California has been a kind of island of freedom and innovation, he said. "There is enormous tolerance for different points of view. So inventors, who might be called kooks or nuts someplace else were embraced here and encouraged," said McLaughlin, a hearty 77. It is, he added, "the grandest place on Earth."

The maps and an online repository are expected to enrich scholars' knowledge of the first California experiences by European explorers. Spurred in part by imaginary descriptions in an early 16th century novel, Spanish travelers originally searched for an island supposedly populated by cannibalistic Amazons with plentiful jewels and gold. It took two more centuries to refute that and other island theories.

The collection shows "layer upon layer of history," said Julie Sweetkind-Singer, a Stanford map librarian. "It shows the perceptions of the times and the idea of exploration and finding new worlds." In their day, the maps excited people the way images from the Hubble Space Telescope do today, she added.

Among the first to study the maps intensively will be author and geography expert Rebecca Solnit, whose 2010 book, "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas," mapped that city for such things as Native American place names, contemporary murders and coffeehouses. She soon will start a six-month fellowship at Stanford with the goal of writing a book based on the McLaughlin collection.

Although the maps are technically wrong, their symbolism remains powerful, she said.

"California is not an island and doesn't have an east coast and no Vermilion Sea. But it is so separate from other parts of the United States, economically, culturally and even spatially," Solnit said. With mountains and deserts isolating California, and its agriculture, high-tech and entertainment industries so well developed, "who's to say we are not this magical, amazing place?"

The maps, she added, "show this weird kind of dance between imagination and desire on the one hand and exploration and fact on the other."

McLaughlin said he has cartography in his DNA. His great-grandfather was a surveyor, his father once won a school contest in drawing maps, and McLaughlin himself was an Air Force pilot trained in navigation. He fell in love with Northern California when stationed there in the late 1950s and returned as a civilian to its high-tech and finance industries. Among other positions, he was a co-founder of Greater Bay Bancorp, a large bank that was acquired by Wells Fargo.

Not a golfer or one for the party circuit, he fell into his map habit as quiet relief from the financial minutiae of his work and the stress of dealing with the computer world's "bits and bytes."

It also gave him entree to the rarefied world of scholars and collectors, where the mistaken island images, like misprinted postage stamps, "always draw more attention than the run of the mill," said McLaughlin, an unexcitable man who recounts his map acquisitions like a retired professor recalling good students of the past.

The growing size of his collection sometimes exasperated his wife, Ellen. At first he stored them under a bed, but that made them difficult to protect from the family cat. He then acquired architects' cases and eventually moved them to a dedicated study in a 10-room house in Saratoga. With part-time helpers, he produced well-regarded essays and catalogs on his collection and UC Berkeley's.

Recently, he and his wife moved to a smaller home nearby, pared their possessions and arranged the transfer to Stanford. The collection is expected to move across campus in 2014 to a center that will be created at the university's main Green Library; the space will be named after David Rumsey, a real estate developer who is donating his immense collection of 18th and 19th century Western Hemisphere maps and atlases.

McLaughlin's maps, carefully stored in Mylar sleeves or framed behind glass, display beautiful curiosities. His first, in English and Latin, shows sea monsters and galleons in the oceans. A 1656 French one gives "Californie Isle" a foot-like northern coast with five peninsula toes. A 1670 Dutch version shows angels on top and below a bare-chested Native American chief with snakes and bars of gold.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 17

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

Read More..

Switzerland sends Salvation Army to Eurovision gig

GENEVA (AP) — Switzerland is putting its faith in the Salvation Army to win the Eurovision Song Contest when it is staged in Malmo, Sweden, next year.

Television viewers chose one of the Christian missionary group‘s Swiss chapters, whose bass player is 94 years old, from among five national finalists late Saturday.

The Eurovision contest is a kitschy fixture on the European cultural calendar watched by more than 100 million people across the world.

Viewers and juries pick the winner from an eclectic mix of bubblegum pop and rock acts representing each European country.

Political songs are forbidden and Swiss media have speculated that the Salvation Army’s Christian aims might still fall afoul of the rules.

Switzerland hasn’t won the contest since Canadian singer Celine Dion represented the country in 1988.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

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Newtown has Mixed Feelings About the Media Horde in Its Midst

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Wolf Blitzer understands that his presence here is not appreciated by some local people, who wish that the TV satellite trucks, and the reporters who have taken over the local Starbucks, would go away and leave them to ache, grieve and mourn in peace.

But he also knows that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ranks with the national tragedies he has covered: Oklahoma City, Sept. 11, Virginia Tech. So for now the most intimate and heartbreaking of catastrophes and the insatiable, unwieldy beast of global news media are locked in an awkward union in a bucolic New England town that never expected to encounter either.

Mr. Blitzer, the longtime CNN anchor, said the few exhortations to go home he had heard while working here had been far outnumbered by comments from people who thank him for telling Newtown’s story sensitively and who want the world to know what happened here. Still, he said, Newtown is providing a particularly vivid laboratory of how the media report this kind of tragedy.

“If you have people bringing dolls or flowers to makeshift memorials and they’re crying, that’s a powerful image, it’s part of this story, it’s part of our history right now, and we have to deal with it,” he said on Sunday.

This town, of course, has been transformed by unimaginable tragedy. But in a more mundane and presumably transitory way, Newtown and particularly the small community of Sandy Hook have also been transformed by those coming to report on it, a news media presence that has clogged quiet roads, established glowing encampments of lights and cameras, and showed up in force at church services and public memorials.

Nearly every newscast on CNN since Friday night has been broadcast from Newtown. The same has been true for nearly every network television morning and evening newscast. Coverage of other events has been minimized if not scrapped entirely, at least for a few days — sometimes with breathlessly inaccurate results about the massacre. On Friday, there was a succession of reports about the shooting and the gunman that turned out to be wrong: reports about the gunman’s name, about his mother’s occupation, about how he got into the building.

The confusion continued into Saturday when NBC broadcast an exclusive report that the gunman had an altercation with four staff members at the school the day before the shootings, according to state and federal officials. A revised account played down the possibility of an altercation.

Reporters like NBC News’s justice correspondent, Pete Williams, tried to be transparent about the fact that many initial details about the shooting came from anonymous and occasionally contradictory sources.

When Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan’s name circulated widely as the gunman’s name on Friday afternoon, he said “we are being told the name Ryan,” but cautioned that “at the end of the day that name might be wrong.”

Despite the errors, Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, the nonprofit journalism organization, said he was “touched and impressed by the nonstop coverage so far.” He said he had not seen any children interviewed without a parent nearby.

Some news organizations said they had specific rules about such interviews. A spokeswoman for CBS News said that its policy “is not to interview children under the age of 18 before getting permission from a parent.”

While police officials have asked — at times almost begged — the news media to respect the privacy of families that have lost a loved one, reporters and bookers do have to ask. Thus the sight of big-name anchors going door to door this weekend, seeking interviews. They said they know when no means no.

“We are always extremely sensitive to the feelings and the wishes of loved ones,” said Tom Cibrowski, the executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America.” But, he added, “There is a time when some do choose to honor their child or the victim, and we can provide a forum.”

Most moving, perhaps, was the eloquent tribute that Robbie Parker paid Saturday in front of TV cameras to his dead 6-year-old daughter, Emilie Alice. Nonetheless, in Newtown, a police officer has been assigned to keep unwelcome visitors away at the homes of the families of each of the dead children.

Some here have had gripes about individual reporters pushing cameras and microphones into the faces of unwilling residents, particularly those leaving the firehouse in grief on Friday after receiving news about what happened at the school.

Still, Michael Burton, the second assistant chief at the firehouse, who said he witnessed some intrusive reporters, also said the coverage has been a blessing beyond sharing the town’s grief.

A fire department in Texas, learning of the Christmas tree sale at his firehouse, bought the two trees that became the center of a memorial at the bridge leading up to the school. Someone in North Carolina bought another 26, one for each of the slain children and school personnel, all now adorned in a green tribute leading up to the school.

“If not for the media coverage, none of that would have happened,” he said.

On Sunday morning, Eric Mueller, an art teacher at a private school in New Haven, began hammering 27 wooden angels that he and eight friends had constructed into the ground in front of his house in Newtown. Within minutes, he was joined by more than a dozen reporters and photographers. “My wife said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press,’ ” he said.

He said his gesture was for the residents of Newtown, not for the world. But he said he had no problem with the news media descending on the town.

“I’m fine with it right now. I’ll go back in the house and be done with it and let the angels speak for themselves.”

Peter Applebome reported from Newtown, Conn., and Brian Stelter from New York.

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In Connecticut, a mother coped silently with a troubled son

NEWTOWN, Conn. — On the outside, Nancy Lanza was the picture of contented motherhood: volunteering at her sons' school, gardening, keeping a picture-perfect home so well-ordered a neighbor described it as pristine.

Outside public view, say some who knew her, she had a struggle on her hands, and that was her son Adam: a brilliant but sometimes difficult boy.

Lanza battled with the school district over Adam and eventually quit her job, pulled him out of school and educated him at home, said her sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza.

"I know she had issues with the school. … In what capacity, I'm not 100% certain if it was behavior, if it was learning disabilities, I really don't know," Marsha Lanza told reporters. The investigation widened Saturday into the still-baffling shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., with police releasing the identities of the 26 students and teachers they say Adam Lanza shot before turning the gun on himself.

His mother, police said, was shot at the family home before her son set out on his deadly rampage through the school.

"Adam, he was … definitely the challenge to the family in that house," Marsha Lanza said. "Every family has one. I have one. They have one. … But he was a very bright boy, he was smart."

Jim Leff, who knew Nancy Lanza casually through a friend, said he had been put off by an impression that she was high-strung, until he came to understand what she was trying to cope with as Adam's mother.

"Now that I've been filled in by friends about how difficult her troubled son … was making things for her, I understand that it wasn't that Nancy was overwrought about the trivialities of everyday life, but that she was handling a very difficult situation with uncommon grace," he wrote in a testimonial to her on his blog.

Neighbors said the Lanzas moved several years ago into the hilly neighborhood of graceful houses and pastoral views and immediately fit into the social scene, attending the picnic after the annual Labor Day parade and a rotating ladies' night at several homes.

By the accounts of some who knew her, Nancy Lanza, who grew up in rural New Hampshire, was comfortable using guns and kept several in the house.

Landscaper Dan Holmes said Lanza often talked about her gun collection, and about taking her sons target practicing. "One thing I will note is that she was a big, big gun fan," Leff wrote on his blog.

Police have said the three weapons found near Adam Lanza's body inside the school were legally purchased and registered to his mother.

Yet it appears that Adam may have tried to buy a weapon of his own before Friday's shootings. Just days before, two federal law enforcement officials say, the 20-year-old attempted to purchase a single "long gun" rifle from a Dick's Sporting Goods store in Canton, Conn., but was turned away because he did not want to wait for a required background check.

"He didn't want to wait the 14 days," said one source, declining to be identified because the case was still under review. "The sale did not take place."

Marsha Lanza, whose husband is the brother of Adam's father, Peter Lanza, said the entire family was trying to understand what happened. She said her sister-in-law never talked of being threatened by her son, or about any violence he had committed.

"And if he did, I know she wouldn't tolerate it," she said. "If he needed help, I know they would have gotten it for him.

"Because they were the type of parents — when they were married, as well as being separated — if the kids had a need, they would definitely fulfill it."

She said Nancy Lanza divorced in 2009 and was awarded the house and enough money — up to $12,450 a month in alimony, according to local news outlets that reviewed the divorce files — that she didn't have to work.

A law enforcement source said the couple were ordered to undergo parental counseling as a condition of their divorce, but another source familiar with the case said that is a standard condition of divorces in Connecticut involving a minor child.

Other Lanza family members emerged from seclusion Saturday, and, like Marsha Lanza, expressed disbelief.

"The family of Nancy Lanza shares the grief of a community and nation as we struggle to … comprehend the loss that we all share. ... On behalf of Nancy's mother and siblings, we reach out to the community… and express our heartfelt sorrow for their incomprehensible tragedy and loss of innocence that has affected so many," the family said in a statement.

It was read at a news conference by the sheriff of Rockingham County, N.H., where Nancy Lanza's brother is employed as a law enforcement officer.

Adam Lanza's father, Peter, also issued a statement.

"Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are," it said. "We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why."

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

kim.murphy@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Hennessy-Fiske reported from Newtown, Murphy from Seattle and Serrano from Washington, D.C.

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