Jennifer Aniston and Louis Theroux's wedding has been the subject of months of media scrutiny as everyone waited for the moment when the lovebirds would finally tie the knot.
Despite getting engaged in August of last year the happy couple have been forced to delay their wedding day various times.
It was originally thought that they would marry in the spring this year but work commitments and location choice have caused a halt on the proceedings.
A source close to 41-year-old Justin said that "the main source of uncertainty has been removed."
The source told The MailOnline: "Jen and Justin have gone back and forth on where to marry and whether to have a destination wedding so many times.
"Jen has always made it clear LA was her first choice and Justin has compromised and agreed to marry in California.
"Justin's reservations with LA are well known and he wanted to marry on the East Coast where his friends and much of his family is based, where he proposed to Jen and where he feels most comfortable."
This conflict over East versus West coast has extended beyond their wedding location, it is also an issue over where they'll live as a married couple.
And the source added: "Contrary to popular opinion Jen does not hate New York- she studied there growing up but it's now become too intense for her.
"She has made it clear how much it would mean to her to get married near where they now live and where she is happiest and feels most settled.
"They won't wed at their recently renovated Bel Air mansion but will likely use their home to host an intimate reception."
Justin has apparently come around to his 44-year-old fianc?e?s desire to get hitched in Hollywood.
One of the biggest blocks to their wedding has also been their hectic work schedules, with Justin landing a lead role in the new HBO series The Leftovers.
This had reportedly led Jen to have some doubts over his commitment.
The insider said: "In the past fortnight, Justin has worked hard on convincing Jen that he really is committed to marrying and that the delay has largely arisen as a result of his career really taking off in the last six months as well as her inability to decide exactly the wedding she wants to have."
With wedding plans now in "overdrive", they are "moving forward and hope to be married by the end of the year."
Do you think Jen and Justin will actually tie the knot? Tweet us @SofeminineUK.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]People who experience parental divorce during childhood have higher levels of an inflammatory marker in the blood which is known to predict future health, according to new research from the United Kingdom.
State College, Pa. -- 10 July 2013-- AccuWeather.com reports Chantal, or its ghost will cruise the Bahamas and waters just east of Florida by this weekend with rough surf, building seas, torrential downpours and gusty squalls.
After bringing the potential for flooding rain and mudslides to portions of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico at midweek, AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center meteorologists expect Chantal to turn more to the northwest late this week and weekend.
Chantal was struggling to survive as it approached Hispaniola Wednesday, but a zone of showers and gusty squalls associated with the system is expected to move north of the island and its rugged mountains later this week.
Travel, beach and boating interests in the Turks and Caicos Islands, The Bahamas and the southeastern coast of United States should continue to monitor the progress of Chantal.
While Chantal is forecast to spend much of its life as a tropical storm to perhaps a Category 1 hurricane, rough surf and building seas will affect the islands in the region and beaches from the Florida East Coast to areas as far north as the Carolinas into this weekend.
The exact track and intensity of Chantal beyond the Bahamas is a bit uncertain at this time with possibilities ranging from the system dissolving to regaining strength after crossing Hispaniola.
Even if Chantal fails to recover from the venture around the high mountains of Hispaniola Wednesday into Thursday, a zone of torrential downpours and locally strong thunderstorms would be strewn over the region, due to a persistent flow of tropical moisture from the Caribbean.
The moisture alone brings the potential for flash and urban flooding to Florida to the southeastern part of the mainland United States.
While steering winds will be weak around the southeastern U.S. into early next week, a general drift of the system and its moisture toward the northwest is most likely. Chantal or a remnant thereof could drift toward the U.S. as a result.
The tropical moisture, with or without Chantal, is likely to linger from the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida next week in the form of downpours, locally strong thunderstorms and a risk of localized flooding.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the NSA surveillance story, says Venezuela is likely Edward Snowden's choice for asylum, but Snowden will not have an easy time traveling without a passport and with the possibility of being caught by U.S. police or Interpol. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.
By Alastair Jamieson, Staff writer, NBC News
Venezuela is the "most likely" asylum choice for former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the journalist who published the contents of the self-declared leaker?s classified documents said Tuesday.
In an interview with Reuters shortly after speaking to Snowden by online chat on Tuesday, Glenn Greenwald said that Venezuela - one of three Latin American countries that have offered Snowden asylum - is the one most likely to guarantee his safety.
Nicaragua and Bolivia have also said they would accept Snowden but Venezuela is better poised "to get him safely from Moscow to Latin America and to protect him once he's there," Greenwald told Reuters. "They're a bigger country, a stronger country and a richer country with more leverage in international affairs."
It's believed NSA leaker Edward Snowden is holed up inside this hotel at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.???
Snowden, 30, is believed to be holed up in the transit zone of Moscow?s Sheremetyevo Airport from where he has applied for asylum in more than 20 countries in a bid to avoid extradition to the U.S.
Even if Snowden agrees an asylum deal with Venezuela, travel problems could take time to resolve: His U.S. passport has been canceled and U.S. allies may deny airspace to any flight on which he is believed to be traveling.
Greenwald, a blogger and columnist for the U.K.?s Guardian newspaper, told Reuters he based his opinion on an "informed guess" after recent contacts with Snowden.
He later clarified on Twitter that he had ?no idea? where Snowden would actually go next, and that he was merely stating that Venezuela ?seemed most likely able? to arrange the whistle-blower?s safe passage from Moscow.
Greenwald added that a resolution to Snowden?s situation could take "days or hours or weeks."
He was speaking from his home in Rio de Janeiro, having returned there from Hong Kong where he worked alongside Snowden, publishing reports that disclosed the vast scale of surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency on the telephone records of U.S. citizens.
Greenwald told Reuters that Snowden had Internet access in the airport transit zone ? a diplomatic no man?s land -- and had been able to communicate with those seeking to help him.
He said Snowden's task was "figuring out how to get to the country that has offered him asylum" without coming within reach of the U.S., which characterized as "the rogue, lawless empire that has proven itself willing to engage in rogue behavior to prevent him physically from getting there."
Venezuela confirmed Monday it had received Snowden?s asylum request, but had no more information on whether a deal had been reached.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said Tuesday night that Snowden had yet to accept his country's offer of asylum. He added that if Snowden did make it to Venezuela, he would not be extradited to the United States.?
The?paucity of asylum offers?has led to speculation?Snowden might seek to remain in Russia, creating a diplomatic headache for President Vladimir Putin who has already made clear he wants the leaker to move elsewhere.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Dmitri Trenin suggested Snowden?s move to Moscow may have been a Russian attempt to snub the U.S. that had backfired.
Where does the Snowden case leave us with respect to U.S.-Russian relations? Those Russian officials who were evidently involved in organizing Snowden's passage from Hong Kong to Latin America via Sheremetyevo probably sought to capitalize on the U.S. government's embarrassment in compensation for the recently increased U.S. and European criticism of the Kremlin's policies. The plan, however, went awry. By the time he reached Sheremetyevo, Snowden's U.S. passport had been revoked, and no promised travel documents from Ecuador had arrived. Russia, which had been meant to be a mere conduit in the operation, suddenly became Snowden's temporary home.
However, Steve Vladeck, professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law, said he thought the chances of Snowden being extradited to the United States were ?basically going down by the day.?
He said it appeared unlikely the Russians would turn Snowden over and ?if he?s able to successfully make it to a country like Venezuela ? I think it?s very unlikely that he ever ends up in a U.S. courtroom.?
Vladeck said extradition was less about the law than international relations.
?The dirty little secret of U.S. extradition law is that 95 percent of it is political and really only 5 percent of it is law so the options that are on the table at this point are primarily diplomatic,? he said.
?At the end of the day, no matter what the law is, there are so many ways to avoid extradition or facilitate extradition that the politics, what is most in the interest of the country at issue is really going to have a lot more to say about the end-game than anything that?s written in an extradition treaty,? he added.
Greenwald also told Reuters he is working through the remainder of Snowden?s leaked documents and plans to write more stories in the coming months.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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This story was originally published on Wed Jul 10, 2013 5:27 AM EDT
Contact: Daniel Simons dsimons@illinois.edu 217-689-1527 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Many brain-training companies tout the scientific backing of their products the laboratory studies that reveal how their programs improve your brainpower. But according to a new report, most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw: They do not adequately account for the placebo effect.
The new analysis appears in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
The results of psychological interventions, like medical ones, must be compared to improvements in a control condition, said University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons, who co-wrote the article with Walter Boot, Cary Stothart and Cassie Stutts, of Florida State University. In a clinical trial for a new drug, some participants receive a pill with the critical ingredients, and others receive an identical-looking pill that is inert a placebo. Because participants cannot tell which they received, people in each condition should be equally likely to expect improvements.
In contrast, for most psychology interventions, participants know what's in their "pill," Simons said.
"It's not possible to use a brain-training program for 10 hours without knowing the type of training you received," he said. "People can form expectations for what will improve based on their experiences with the training tasks, and the existence of differences in expectations between people in treatment and control groups potentially undermines any claim that improvements were due to the treatment itself. Not one of the studies cited by the brain-training companies looks at differing expectations between the groups."
Merely having an "active control group," one that does something for the same amount of time as the treatment group, does not protect against the placebo effect, Simons said. A treatment group that completes an intensive memory-training regimen might expect improved performance on other cognitive tasks assessing memory. A control group that does crossword puzzles or watches DVDs for the same amount of time likely won't expect the same amount of improvement on the same tasks, he said.
"These problems are not limited to brain-training studies," Simons said. "They hold true for almost all intervention studies."
To illustrate the pervasiveness of this problem, the researchers examined expectations for improvement in studies of the effect of playing action video games on measures of perception and attention.
"Such studies find greater improvements in performance on attention and perception tasks after training with action video games than after training with non-action games for the same amount of time," Boot said. "However, even with this sort of active control condition, these interventions still are at risk for differential placebo effects."
The researchers measured expectations in two survey studies involving 200 participants each. Participants watched either a short video of an action game ("Unreal Tournament") or one of the games commonly used as controls in these studies ("Tetris" or "The Sims"). They then read descriptions of the cognitive tests used in the studies, watched short videos of the tests, and answered questions about whether they thought their performance on the tests would improve as a result of training on the video game they had viewed.
The results showed that expectations for improvement were greater for the action-game group than for the control games on exactly the same tests that showed bigger improvements for action-game training in the intervention studies. In fact, the pattern of expected improvements exactly matched actual improvements seen in video game intervention studies, the researchers found.
"If expectations for improvement align perfectly with the actual improvements, then any claim that the treatment was effective is premature," Simons said. "Researchers must first eliminate differences in expectations across conditions."
"Even though participants in psychology interventions typically know the nature of their intervention you can't play a video game without knowing the game you're playing there are steps researchers can take to ensure that the advantages of the treatment group are not due to expectations," Boot said.
For example, researchers can mislead participants as to the expected benefits of a particular intervention, giving those in the control group higher expectations for improvement than those in the treatment group. Researchers also can assess expectations generated by treatments in a separate sample of participants to ensure that expectations do not differ between intervention and control treatments.
"Although placebo effects can be helpful as well, we need to know what causes improvements in an intervention," Simons said. "We don't want to recommend new therapies, change school curricula, or encourage the elderly to buy brain-training games if the benefits are just due to expectations for improvement. Only by using better active controls that equate for expectations can we draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of any intervention."
###
Simons is an affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.
Editor's notes: To reach Walter Boot, call 850-645-8734; email boot@psy.fsu.edu.
The paper, "The Pervasive Problem with Placebos in Psychology: Why Active Control Groups are Not Sufficient to Rule out Placebo Effects," is available from the U. of I. News Bureau.
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Contact: Daniel Simons dsimons@illinois.edu 217-689-1527 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Many brain-training companies tout the scientific backing of their products the laboratory studies that reveal how their programs improve your brainpower. But according to a new report, most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw: They do not adequately account for the placebo effect.
The new analysis appears in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
The results of psychological interventions, like medical ones, must be compared to improvements in a control condition, said University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Simons, who co-wrote the article with Walter Boot, Cary Stothart and Cassie Stutts, of Florida State University. In a clinical trial for a new drug, some participants receive a pill with the critical ingredients, and others receive an identical-looking pill that is inert a placebo. Because participants cannot tell which they received, people in each condition should be equally likely to expect improvements.
In contrast, for most psychology interventions, participants know what's in their "pill," Simons said.
"It's not possible to use a brain-training program for 10 hours without knowing the type of training you received," he said. "People can form expectations for what will improve based on their experiences with the training tasks, and the existence of differences in expectations between people in treatment and control groups potentially undermines any claim that improvements were due to the treatment itself. Not one of the studies cited by the brain-training companies looks at differing expectations between the groups."
Merely having an "active control group," one that does something for the same amount of time as the treatment group, does not protect against the placebo effect, Simons said. A treatment group that completes an intensive memory-training regimen might expect improved performance on other cognitive tasks assessing memory. A control group that does crossword puzzles or watches DVDs for the same amount of time likely won't expect the same amount of improvement on the same tasks, he said.
"These problems are not limited to brain-training studies," Simons said. "They hold true for almost all intervention studies."
To illustrate the pervasiveness of this problem, the researchers examined expectations for improvement in studies of the effect of playing action video games on measures of perception and attention.
"Such studies find greater improvements in performance on attention and perception tasks after training with action video games than after training with non-action games for the same amount of time," Boot said. "However, even with this sort of active control condition, these interventions still are at risk for differential placebo effects."
The researchers measured expectations in two survey studies involving 200 participants each. Participants watched either a short video of an action game ("Unreal Tournament") or one of the games commonly used as controls in these studies ("Tetris" or "The Sims"). They then read descriptions of the cognitive tests used in the studies, watched short videos of the tests, and answered questions about whether they thought their performance on the tests would improve as a result of training on the video game they had viewed.
The results showed that expectations for improvement were greater for the action-game group than for the control games on exactly the same tests that showed bigger improvements for action-game training in the intervention studies. In fact, the pattern of expected improvements exactly matched actual improvements seen in video game intervention studies, the researchers found.
"If expectations for improvement align perfectly with the actual improvements, then any claim that the treatment was effective is premature," Simons said. "Researchers must first eliminate differences in expectations across conditions."
"Even though participants in psychology interventions typically know the nature of their intervention you can't play a video game without knowing the game you're playing there are steps researchers can take to ensure that the advantages of the treatment group are not due to expectations," Boot said.
For example, researchers can mislead participants as to the expected benefits of a particular intervention, giving those in the control group higher expectations for improvement than those in the treatment group. Researchers also can assess expectations generated by treatments in a separate sample of participants to ensure that expectations do not differ between intervention and control treatments.
"Although placebo effects can be helpful as well, we need to know what causes improvements in an intervention," Simons said. "We don't want to recommend new therapies, change school curricula, or encourage the elderly to buy brain-training games if the benefits are just due to expectations for improvement. Only by using better active controls that equate for expectations can we draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of any intervention."
###
Simons is an affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.
Editor's notes: To reach Walter Boot, call 850-645-8734; email boot@psy.fsu.edu.
The paper, "The Pervasive Problem with Placebos in Psychology: Why Active Control Groups are Not Sufficient to Rule out Placebo Effects," is available from the U. of I. News Bureau.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 9-Jul-2013
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