BRANDON MARSHALL

Dolphins offer Brandon Marshall a chance to keep shining :

I usually do not get too excited about big offseason moves (as evidenced by the string of posts on this page), but the Dolphins' acquisition of wide receiver Brandon Marshall looks like a great one for he and Miami.

Arguing against Marshall's skill is difficult. At 26, he has three consecutive 100-catch seasons and can be one of the more physically dominant receivers in the league. As evidenced by his 21-catch game last season, Marshall can take over any particular week.

One dead, 200 left on the street after seven alarm Chinatown inferno :

Firefighters found a body on the top floor of one of four Chinatown buildings on Monday night hours after they were gutted by a raging seven-alarm blaze, officials said.
The victim, an elderly man, wasn't immediately identified but is believed to be 87-year-old Sing Ho, who lived on the sixth floor.

Sources said firefighters entered an apartment at 285 Grand St., where He lived, and found the body on a bed.

The blaze started late Sunday in the next-door building at 283 Grand, which records show had racked up numerous violations in the past.

Ho's daughter Nina was too distraught to talk Monday night, but her daughter Kitty, 30, said, "We're so worried."

Family friend Vincent Poon, 26, said Nina was on the phone with her father as the fire raged around him.

"He said that there was a lot of smoke and he couldn't see," Poon said. "A couple of moments later, the line was disconnected. After that she went to the hospital, fire, cops and still had no info."

The blaze was under control by 2:20 a.m. Monday, but pockets of flame erupted throughout the day, officials said.

Four buildings went up, leaving more than 200 people homeless and 30 firefighters injured

Nuclear Security Summit

In Appeal for Diplomacy, Obama Invokes the Mushroom Cloud :

Nearly a decade ago, a President of the United States used the specter of a nuclear blast to argue his case for invading a foreign country. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," President Bush's then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN in 2002, a sound bite that came to define the rationale for a pre-emptive war in Iraq despite the lack of proof that it presented a WMD threat.

This week, another U.S. President, Barack Obama, invoked mushroom-cloud imagery to argue for a major diplomatic initiative. "If there was ever a detonation in New York City, or London, or Johannesburg, the ramifications economically, politically and from a security perspective would be devastating," Obama said Sunday. He was speaking just hours before the start of the Nuclear Security Summit, arguably the largest diplomatic gathering on U.S. soil since the U.N.'s founding conference in San Francisco in 1945.

matt james death

Notre Dame recruit Matt James dies after fall from hotel balcony :

Notre Dame football recruit Matt James died while on vacation in Panama City, Fla. According to a story by the Cincinnati Enquirer, James fell off a third-floor balcony and died almost instantly.

James, who was one week shy of his 18th birthday, was a star offensive tackle at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati and considered one of the best players in the country. A first-team selection on USA TODAY's All-USA team, he was to enroll at Notre Dame in June.

Irish coach Brian Kelly recruited James as the coach of Cincinnati before taking the job at South Bend and making the lineman the centerpiece of his first recruiting class. He released a statement through the school.

Plants vs. Zombies for iPad gets hot and buttered

The iPad's bigger screen real estate has held some of the biggest promise for fans of tower defense games, and iPhone and iPod Touch best-seller Plants vs. Zombies from PopCap could be one of the best early examples.
The iPad version of the title, dubbed Plants vs. Zombies HD, was leaked last week along with a slew of other iPad games through Apple's iTunes Web interface for apps. At $9.99, it costs more than three times its smaller sibling.

However, the iPad-optimized version brings the game nearly up to parity with the versions found on PC and Mac computers, which cost twice as much. This includes the proper top placement (instead of the side) of all the weapons and resources you must work with to defeat your zombie foes, as well as survival mode, which lets players try to stay alive for as long as possible. For many of those who have finished the game's campaign, this is the mode of choice, and something that was sorely missing from the iPhone version.

Must-Have iPad Apps for Business Professionals

With less than 48 hours until the official launch of the Apple iPad, the App Store is beginning to populate with apps for the new tablet device. The first iPad apps include the requisite entertainment--like the Netflix movie-streaming app, or Need for Speed: Shift--but there are also a fair number of apps targeted specifically at business professionals.

I realize that there are techies out there who bristle every time the iPad is mentioned as any sort of business or productivity tool. To some, anything with a half-eaten fruit logo is--by default--not meant for enterprise endeavors. This group will no doubt hold out for a Windows 7 tablet like the HP Slate, or perhaps a tablet based on the upcoming Google Chrome OS.

Google-Topeka Trick Joins Historic April Fools' Hoaxes

So why's Google suddenly Topeka? Hang on, let me Topeka that for you ... So, it turns out it's an elaborate April Fools' Day hoax—and hardly the first corporate prank to tickle the masses on April 1.

The presumably temporary Google-to-Topeka name change mirrors the Topeka's unofficial adoption of "Google" as its new name, at least for the month of March. The Kansas city's switcheroo is a cry for attention from Google Topeka officials auditioning U.S. cities in which to test a fiber-optic broadband network.

Writing on Google's Topeka's official blog on April Fools' Day, chairman and chief executive officer Eric Schmidt noted potential confusion—yes, the Topeka Maps site will cover more than just the Kansas capital—and assured other competitors for the broadband experiment that the Google-to-Topeka name change "will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate."

Other Google April Fools' Day 2010 hoaxes include a new Google Wave feature that sends a man in a lab coat to physically wave at you when you have a new notification, text-only mode for Google's YouTube site, and the ability to upload keys and other 3-D objects to Google Docs.

While it may be eye-opening (or inspire eye rolling) in its scope, Google's April Fools' Day Topeka trick is only the latest big-time bamboozle perpetrated by fast food barons, straight-faced documentarians, pseudo-scientists, and other merry pranksters on April 1.