Now comes word that Abby Elliott is the new lady in his life, according to a report from Life & Style.

Who is Abby Elliot? Abby Elliott joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2008. She is the daughter of actor Chris Elliott. And there’s quite an age difference too – Abby is 23, while Fred is 43. Armisen has been on SNL since 2001.

Fred Armisen and Elisabeth Moss had been married for seven months before calling it quits in May (although word just hit the street last week). That was Armisen’s second marriage, for anyone keeping score.

Here’s the buzz about Abby Elliott dating Fred Armisen: “Life & Style can exclusively report that Saturday Night Live co-stars stars Fred Armisen and Abby Elliott are dating.”

A source tells Life & Style that Abby and Fred started dating “a few months ago” and that they “are getting to know each other in a romantic way and taking things very slowly but enjoying each other’s company.”

Do you think Fred Armisen is moving on too quickly? What do you think of the buzz that he and Abby Elliott are dating?

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Just like Strasburg a year ago, it appears that Harper and the Nationals will come down to the midnight Monday deadline in an attempt to reach a contract agreement. Harper, a 17-year-old slugger, is represented by Scott Boras, who is known for playing hardball during negotiations.

“If [Harper] wants to play here, he’s going to play here,” Strasburg said Sunday, after pitching five innings in the Nationals’ win over Arizona. “He doesn’t need advice from anybody to convince him otherwise. If he doesn’t want to play here, then we don’t want him here.”

Boras has said that Harper is an interesting case because few high school sluggers have been taken No. 1 overall, so there are few comparable cases. Harper is also considered one of the top power-hitters to come along in years.

“There are few high school players in the draft history, since 1965, that have the extraordinary tool of power,” Boras said following the draft. “When it’s evidenced, it’s rare.”

Washington general manager Mike Rizzo said Saturday that he expects to sign Harper.

If the Nationals do, it might take another massive commitment. They signed Strasburg seconds before the midnight deadline last year to a record $15.1 million contract.

“It’s his decision,” Strasburg said of Harper.

Former U.S. Figure skating champion Nicole Bobek (r.) was sentenced to five years on probation for her role in a N.J. methamphetamine ring.

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Former U.S. figure skating champion Nicole Bobek was ordered to spend five years on probation for her role in a New Jersey methamphetamine ring, a sentence that she said would give her a chance to get her life back on track.

“Nothing but positive things can come out of this,” Bobek said outside the Jersey City courtroom where she was sentenced Monday. “It’s been a long 1 1/2 years. I’m looking to get back onto that ice.”

The 32-year-old pleaded guilty in June to a charge of conspiring to distribute crystal meth. She was among 28 people accused last year of running a network that allegedly distributed $10,000 worth of methamphetamine per week.

The alleged leader of the group, Edward Cruz Jr., was sentenced last week to 16 years in prison.

Bobek won the U.S. figure skating title in 1995. But her disappointing 17th-place finish at the 1998 Winter Olympics took a psychological toll on her, according to her lawyer, Sam DeLuca. Bobek had been skating since age 3, forgoing high school and even home schooling for the rigorous, cloistered world of professional training, DeLuca said.

“Here is girl whose start was shining … and when the star went out, when the star started fading, she was not prepared,” DeLuca said. She then fell into “a sleazy world” of drug addiction and bad influences, he said.

Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Lisa Ledoux argued for a sentence of a year in jail, saying Bobek was no innocent victim and was not a minor player in the drug ring.

Bobek, wearing a black and white dress with her blonde hair in a french twist, choked up as she spoke of how sorry she was during sentencing, telling the judge that she was off drugs, holding a job and teaching children at the Special Olympics.

“I believe I can help others. I plan to change my life around and do something with it,” she said.

Superior Court Judge Kevin Callahan noted he had received letters on Bobek’s behalf from former Olympic athletes, including JoJo Starbuck, and even rock ’n’ roll musicians he didn’t name.

Callahan warned Bobek that she was at a dangerous crossroads and that a single parole violation or failed drug test could land her in prison for at least five years.

Bobek, accompanied by her mother, applied to serve her probation near the family’s Jupiter, Fla., home. She was also ordered to serve 250 hours of community service and pay a $2,500 fine, plus additional court expenses.

Dan Akerson, 61, a veteran private equity investor little known in auto circles, replaces Whitacre, 68, as of September. Akerson had been appointed by the Obama administration as one of the directors meant to safeguard the government’s $50 billion financing to restructure GM.

Whitacre’s departure had been expected, but the timing of his announcement caught even GM insiders off guard, just a day before GM was expected to file the paperwork for a landmark stock offering that would mark its reemergence as a publicly traded company a year after bankruptcy.

Whitacre, who continued to commute from his home in Texas during his stint as CEO of the Detroit-based company, had said repeatedly he would be an interim leader.

“It was obvious that I was not going to be at GM for the long haul,” Whitacre said in surprise remarks at the end of a conference call to discuss the company’s second-quarter earnings. “We have put a strong foundation in place, so I am very comfortable with my timing.”

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a management expert at the Yale School of Management, said Whitacre was having a positive impact at GM and should have stayed on under normal circumstances.

“The instability certainly is a shock to insiders; it’s stunning to outsiders and you don’t usually have that happen,” Sonnenfeld said. “There is a story here that we are not getting. Clearly this was not part of a planned succession.”

A former AT&T Inc chief executive, Whitacre had been expected to stay on at GM through the filing of the IPO. As recently as last week, he described plans for a series of meetings with big investors to tout the offering.

The sudden management change could delay GM’s planned IPO filing on Friday by a few days, sources with knowledge of the process said.

The U.S. Treasury said GM’s board made the decision, which did not require government approval.

South Beach Capital Markets Advisory Corp President Bruce Foerster said the shakeup at the top of GM risked spooking investors and causing them to add a new risk premium to the upcoming stock offering.

“You needed the sun, moon and stars all aligned and now they’re out of whack again,” said Foerster, formerly head of equity capital markets at PaineWebber and the head of global equity syndicate at Lehman Brothers.

Akerson, also a former CEO at Nextel, will become GM’s fourth chief executive in just a year and a half, underscoring the challenge in remaking the corporate culture of an automaker still in the early stages of a turnaround.

A managing director of The Carlyle Group for the past seven years, Akerson spearheaded some of the private equity firm’s biggest recent deals, including the buyout of energy company Kinder Morgan.

His appointment as GM CEO thrusts an executive known for quiet deal making into the spotlight as salesman in chief for the top U.S. automaker.

BIGGEST PROFIT IN SIX YEARS

Separately, GM posted a second-quarter profit of $1.3 billion as evidence of a turnaround driven by cost-cutting in its 2009 bankruptcy and better sales in the United States.

The second-quarter profit was the largest since 2004, when the U.S. auto market was still booming with annual sales of near 17 million vehicles and GM’s brands accounted for more than one in four purchases of new cars and trucks.

GM’s results show it is trailing its more successful and smaller rival, Ford Motor Co, which posted a second-quarter profit of $2.6 billion, but that it is ahead of Chrysler, which lost $172 million.

But analysts expect the company to use the results to build the case for a record stock offering and allow the U.S. government to reduce its 61 percent ownership stake.

A successful GM IPO would provide the Obama administration with evidence the unprecedented and unpopular intervention in the U.S. auto industry has been a financial success.

Europe, where GM is still struggling to restructure its Opel unit, remained a notable weak link for the automaker, with an operating loss of $160 million.

North America had an operating profit of $1.6 billion. International operations, including GM’s China joint ventures with SAIC and Wuling, had an operating profit of $672 million.

GM lost about $88 billion between 2005 and 2009 when it was driven into bankruptcy by plunging sales and tight credit.

Sources told Reuters on Wednesday the largest U.S. automaker had secured a $5 billion credit facility, marking its return to the capital markets a year after it emerged from a government-funded landmark bankruptcy.

Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell declined to comment in detail when asked about the credit facility. He said the arrangement was “one of the building blocks” GM needed to restore its balance sheet.

(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Detroit, Megan Davies and Soyoung Kim in New York and John Crawley in Washington; editing by Maureen Bavdek, Gary Hill, Andre Grenon and Carol Bishopric)

The harassment accusations set off a chain of events that led to the discovery of allegedly falsified expense reports about Hurd’s meetings with the woman and culminated in Hurd’s stunning resignation this week that left a hole in the world’s largest technology company.

The person familiar with the case told the AP that hurd agreed to pay the woman, but this person wouldn’t reveal the size of the payment. The settlement was between Hurd and his accuser and did not involve a payment from HP, this person said.

This person requested anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

The deal was reached Thursday, a day before Hurd’s resignation.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the settlement.

Hurd engineered a stunning turnaround of the Silicon Valley stalwart before his ouster.

Under Hurd, HP has spent more than $20 billion on acquisitions to transform itself from a computer and printer maker dependent on ink sales for profits to a well-rounded seller of hardware and lucrative business services. HP’s market value nearly doubled during his five years.

The company is suddenly leaderless as it stands at a turning point to integrate some of those acquisitions, the most recent of which was the purchase of smart phone maker Palm Inc. for $1.4 billion in June.

Hurd was forced to resign Friday after HP’s board of directors said Hurd falsified expenses to hide numerous private dinners with a woman who was paid up to $5,000 per event to greet people and make introductions among executives attending HP events that she helped organize.

The expenses were scrutinized when the woman recently accused Hurd of sexual harassment. The nature of the complaint could not be learned. Hurd and a lawyer representing the woman, whose identity could not be learned, all said the relationship was not sexual.

Hurd insists they were legitimate business expenses. Hurd doesn’t know the total value of expenses being disputed or have a full accounting of them, the person briefed on the situation said.

Hurd’s departure leaves it to another leader to keep HP on the course he mapped out.

HP’s stock fell nearly 10 percent to $41.85 in after-hours trading, when the news was released after the close of markets Friday.

The company has a deep bench in management and the stock drop was reactive and doesn’t reflect the company’s prospects, an analyst said.

“I don’t view his departure as catastrophic,” said Dinesh Moorjani, an analyst with Gleacher & Co. “The strategy is working fine. The level of uncertainty for me is relatively low just given the circumstances. This wasn’t a one-man company.”

Hurd, who spent 25 years at ATM maker NCR Corp. before coming to HP in April 2005, became a Wall Street darling. The $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems made HP a major player in technology services, challenging archrival IBM Corp.

HP also now offers computer networking, helped by the $2.7 billion takeover of 3Com Corp., racheting up the rivalry with Cisco Systems Inc. The Palm acquisition catapulted the company into the fast-growing smart phone business.

The additions also broadened the pool of people who could replace Hurd. It’s a deep bench, and internal candidates could have an edge, given that Hurd and predecessor Carly Fiorina — who got the boot in 2005 over concern about her management style and her decision to buy Compaq Computer — both came from outside HP.

Five Filters featured article: “Peace Envoy” Blair Gets an Easy Ride in the Independent. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Nashua-based NEMO Equipment Inc. makes innovative mountaineering tents that stand up on their own without poles, using inflatable air bladders instead for support against the stiffest winds.

The innovative startup with only 13 employees is but one success story in the outdoor gear market that has shown remarkable resilience against economic headwinds.

The more than 4,000 outdoor equipment manufacturers that gathered in Salt Lake City for a trade show last week weren’t just optimistic. Many sounded giddy. [More...]

“People are buying tents and sleeping bags and they’re going camping,” said Kate Ketschek, NEMO’s marketing director. “When times get tough, people get back to their roots.”

The industry was spooked last year when the economy tanked, but it held its own and is rebounding fast. The recession hardly nicked it _ sales were down 2 percent in 2009 but are rising at a rate of 6 percent, said Frank Hugelmeyer, president and CEO of the Outdoor Industry Association.

It helps that buyers of nearly $50 billion worth of outdoor gear are, by and large, discriminating, and that many brands like The North Face or Mountain Hardwear have moved into the fashion mainstream.

Many outdoor consumers will spend extra for the best products even if it means cutting back on other purchases, said Joe Mc Swiney, president of Seattle-based Cascade Designs, a diversified manufacturer of camping gear.

“We’re doing fabulously,” said Mc Swiney, who said his private company doesn’t release sales figures but is “experiencing strong growth.”

“This industry has a buoyancy,” he added. Outdoor recreation is “the kind of thing people fall back on when they don’t have a lot of money to spend on other things.”

The optimism was widely shared on the aisles of the Outdoor Retailer show, held twice a year in Salt Lake City. Organizers just signed up to keep it here for several more years.

Ventura, Calif.-based apparel maker Patagonia is having its best back-to-back years since it was incorporated in 1972, said Rob Bon Durant, vice president of marketing. “We’ve been incredibly recession-resistant.”

Patagonia, with $330 million in sales, grew 12 percent last year and expects to do as good or better this year, he said. It counts on loyal customers for a quality brand that returns 1 percent of sales to environmental causes. “When disposable income doesn’t matter, people choose us,” he said.

It’s a scene comfortably familiar to any fan of the long-running ’90s TV show Friends. But this is not mid-’90s Manhattan; this is Beijing, mid-2010. And the couches are peopled not by hip New Yorkers but by upwardly mobile Chinese young professionals who come in search of the easygoing Friends lifestyle that is increasingly hard to find in Beijing’s stressed housing market.
(See pictures of China on the wild side.)

China’s Central Perk, a painstakingly detailed reconstruction of the TV original, is tucked away in a corner of a downtown Beijing office tower. It is the brainchild of Chinese businessman Du Xin, who gave himself the English name Gunther in honor of the show’s long-suffering barista. “Friends is very popular among Chinese young people because it fulfills a need they have for friendship,” says Du. “Beijing is such a big city, it’s very easy for you to feel lonely. I think there should be a place where you feel safe and comfortable and can hang out. I wanted to build such a place for my customers.” (Comment on this story.)

For many of the young professionals, China’s property boom is translating into a decidedly untelegenic lifestyle. As government stimulus funds and eager investors flock to the real estate sector, rents across the nation are soaring. In Beijing, where the average monthly salary is roughly RMB 3,700 ($545), the monthly rent for a typical one-bedroom apartment was about RMB 2,900 ($427) as of June, according to Homelink Real Estate. That leaves many with no choice but to find people to share their home with. More and more, flatmates are sharing small, cramped apartments with several other people — a lifestyle less reminiscent of Friends than of another TV favorite of Chinese youth, Prison Break. (See pictures of the making of modern China.)

A generation ago, workers in Beijing were from Beijing, and most lived with their families or in company dorms. Today sharing apartments in big Chinese cities, where most people now migrate to, has become the norm. Landlords and rental agents are increasingly willing to rent more expensive apartments to several tenants at once rather than leave a flat empty while they wait to find a wealthier tenant or family, and young professionals are squeezing into smaller and smaller spaces. Until recently, Jennifer Xie, who is three years out of college and works in administration, shared a small suburban apartment with her boyfriend and six others. “Altogether, there were eight people — four couples — living in a three-bedroom apartment,” Xie says. “One couple slept in the living room.” When Xie became pregnant a few months ago, they moved into their own place, a change that has hurt the young couple’s wallets but left them with few regrets. “It was much too crowded,” Xie says. “We had to take turns to cook. We all shared one small fridge and one line for drying laundry … I don’t miss that time.”

The shortage of affordable housing is not exclusively a Beijing problem. Housing prices across the country have been soaring in the past 18 months, leaving both renters and first-time buyers gasping for air. From Shanghai to Guangzhou, prices in the past year have risen by double digits. In the city of Haikou, on the southern island province of Hainan, the average house price has gone up 50% in the past 12 months. Back in the capital, as things have become tighter, there have even been tales of young office workers taking off to country villages in the hills outside the city, willing to endure a two-hour commute to work each way for the reward of cheaper rent and their own place. (See pictures of Shanghai today.)

An official crackdown on real estate speculation that was started early this year, coupled with new regulations to promote the construction of more affordable housing, should lower prices and bring some relief to Beijing’s beleaguered house hunters. There are signs that the measures are already having some effect, but what changes do come will inevitably come slowly. House prices in Beijing fell just 0.4% in June, month on month.

For now, many of Beijing’s young professionals will have to put up with cramped accommodations and a shortage of personal space. Wang Xiyuan, a 27-year-old Beijing office worker sitting on Du’s faithful replica of Central Perk’s iconic orange couch, was unable to afford her own place until recently. Before, she and a friend were sharing a cramped two-room flat in which the only communal space was a tiny kitchen. “What attracted me most about Friends was the friendship between the roommates,” Wang says. “But it’s not easy to live with a friend. Americans have different habits than Chinese. They are more open and direct. Chinese people are sometimes too shy to tell you what they really think. They just get madder and madder at you, but don’t tell you.”

Tense roommate relations is apparently good news for Du. He wants his coffee shop to become like a living room for the city’s young professionals — with $3.70 lattes for sale. “I wanted to create a place where friends can come and hang out in comfort,” he says, as the Friends theme song plays softly from the nearby TV that’s screening reruns. “That’s why I opened this caf

Saudi Arabia said it would ban the BlackBerry Messenger function on Friday if it and RIM do not reach an agreement, though a source with direct knowledge of talks between RIM and the government said they had made progress.

RIM is facing increased pressure to open its smartphones to government scrutiny. Lebanon and India, in addition to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have raised national security concerns over encrypted BlackBerry user data and are demanding access to it.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has promoted Internet freedom as a basic human right, said the United States will hold talks with the UAE and other countries on the issue.

Canada is concerned about the looming ban and its “broader implications,” Trade Minister Peter Van Loan said in a statement. He said Canadian officials were working with RIM, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to find a solution.

“Canada has been working closely with the officials at Research In Motion as well as with governments on the ground to assist them in dealing with these challenges,” the minister told reporters in Ottawa.

Shares of RIM fell about 2 percent Thursday on the Nasdaq and Toronto stock exchanges. The stock has lost about 9 percent of its value since the UAE threatened over the weekend to ban BlackBerry email, messaging and Internet services after three years of negotiations with RIM over access to user data.

RIM is in an unusual position of having to deal with government requests to monitor its clients because it is the only smartphone maker that manages the traffic of messages sent using its equipment.

Although the Gulf region accounts for only a small portion of RIM’s more than 41 million subscribers, analysts said they were concerned about the impact on the Canadian company’s reputation for providing iron-clad smartphone services.

“The company has to stand its ground…they’ve built their loyalty largely around security,” said Nick Agostino, analyst at Mackie Research Capital Corp.

RIM has said its technology will not allow a third party to monitor communications running through the BlackBerry’s enterprise servers. Co-CEO Michael Lazaridis, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, accused governments of picking on smartphones to score political points.

“This is about the Internet,” Lazaridis was quoted as saying. “Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can’t deal with the Internet, they should shut it off.”

Governments from China to Iran have become more vocal about controlling conversations on the Internet and on mobile phones, citing risks to national security.

Disputes between government regulators and technology providers have escalated into diplomatic disputes, such as the one between China and Google Inc over Internet censorship and cyber attacks earlier this year.

Clinton, who had also waded into the Google-China dispute, said on Thursday about the BlackBerry issue: “We are taking time to consult and analyze the full array of interests and issues at stake because we know that there is a legitimate security concern, but there is also a legitimate right of free use and access.”

Some analysts said it may be difficult for governments to get what they want.

“I think their expectations are unrealistic over the long term to maintain the kind of control that they’re looking for. They’re really trying to put the genie back in the bottle here,” said Kevin Restivo, a senior mobile phone analyst at IDC.

Lebanon said on Thursday it was studying security concerns related to the BlackBerry and would begin talks with RIM.

Media reports had said that Indonesia was pressing on RIM to allow monitoring of BlackBerry data, though the country’s communications minister said it was not banning the service.

India, worried that BlackBerry’s secure messaging services could be misused by militants, has demanded more access for its security agencies, and the country’s telecoms minister said it had not reached an agreement with the company.

“India has made these threats time and again and India’s starting to sound like the boy that cried wolf, a little bit, because RIM continues to maintain service there and has talked to the government many times and come to resolutions over the course of time,” said Restivo.

RIM has said BlackBerry security is based on a system where customers create their own keys. The company neither has a master key nor any “back door” to let RIM or third parties to gain access to data.

But one security expert said the RIM system was not impregnable. “I could design a good hundred ways to gain access,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for BT.

The company said Wednesday it has never provided anything unique to the government of one country and cannot accommodate any request for a copy of a customer’s encryption key. (Additional reporting by Souhail Karam, Emma Ashburn and Jeffrey Hodgson; Writing by Ritsuko Ando in New York and Frank McGurty in Toronto; Editing by Dave Zimmerman, Robert MacMillan and Tim Dobbyn)