Ronan Keating's new love Storm Uechtritz has the ex-factor

Ronan Keating with new girlfriend Storm Uechtritz in Surry Hills. Picture: Reginato Anthony Source: Supplied

SINGER Ronan Keating has found love again - this time in the arms of an Australian blonde he met on the set of The X Factor.

Six months after announcing his marriage of 14 years was over, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal the Irish crooner is dating 31-year-old Sydney TV producer Storm Uechtritz.

The couple were both married when they met while Uechtritz was working as a producer on The X Factor last year before announcing the end of their marriages in April.

Ronan Keating's 14-year marriage over after 2010 affair

Ronan Keating on the affair with Francine Cornell

Industry speculation has been rife about a budding romance between the duo since Uechtritz - niece of former ABC boss Max - quit Seven's TV talent quest for rival Nine show The Voice early this year.

Keating, 35, finally confirmed the relationship after they were spotted out in Surry Hills together last week.

"Storm and I have been friends for some time and that has recently evolved into something more serious," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "We are both really happy."

It is understood Uechtritz is now job hunting in the UK and is expected to return to Britain with Keating when The X Factor wraps in November.

The former Boyzone frontman and wife Yvonne, 38 - who have three children, Jack, 13, Marie, 11 and Ali, 7, - split last year before officially announcing they were divorced in April.

Keating took full responsibility for the breakdown of the marriage, saying "I got what I deserved" after his wife caught him having an affair with 27-year-old dancer Francine Cornell.

Uechtritz, who bears a striking resemblance to both Keating's ex-wife and Cornell, told friends in April her marriage was over because she and her husband had "grown apart".

She married Sydney financial director Tim Ivers in a beachside ceremony on Queensland's Magnetic Island in August 2009.

They had been together since meeting at university in Brisbane and shared their first dance together to Keating's hit song, You Say It Best.

Friends said Ivers was "a lovely guy" whose separation had come as a huge shock.

"Tim and Storm came to a friend's wedding together in Queensland in April and told everyone they were splitting up," one friend said.

Russian Volleyball Coach Found Dead in Hotel Room of Apparent Suicide

Volleyball is a huge sport in Russia with millions of dollars invested in teams and gold medal dreams for each Olympics. This year the Russian women were favorites in the tournament only to be knocked out of the quarterfinals to the eventual gold medalists of Brazil. 

Following the disappointing finish, head coach Sergey Ovchinnikov returned to his position with Dynamo Moscow as they resumed training in Croatia. There, he reportedly hung himself in his fourth-floor hotel room. 

Russian men's coach Vladimir Alekno feels that the Olympics defeat weighed heavily on his counterpart: "He took the Olympics very personally. I saw what he was going through and how upset he was after the defeat. He didn't talk much. Even after victories he was always thinking about something and smoked a lot."

Ovchinnikov was 43 and for now the police are ruling his death a suicide even though it seems super suspicious to this sports blogger. 

Australia Mining Slowdown Hitting Economy Never Down on Luck

Australia, known as the lucky country for its resource abundance and temperate climate, is about to find out how long its latest winning streak will last.

BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), the world’s biggest miner, last week mothballed projects valued at more than A$50 billion ($52 billion) by Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG. At the same time, Australia’s resources minister called the end of a bull run in commodity prices, and the central bank chief predicted the cresting of the investment wave within two years.

The deceleration of the industry that helped secure 21 recession-free years heightens focus on the views of a minority seeing economic contraction in a nation where consumers took on more debt than Americans at the height of the mortgage bubble. While Bloomberg News surveys indicate growth exceeding 3 percent in 2013 and 2014, Deutsche Bank sees the danger of a recession.

“There is a view around Australia that says this is a different economy,” said Adam Boyton, chief economist for Australia at Deutsche Bank in Sydney, who previously worked at the nation’s Treasury. “My point is: was it skill or luck that drove iron ore and coking-coal prices higher from the Australian perspective,” he said. “It was more luck than skill.”

The windfall Australia gets from exports, called the terms of trade, will slump 15 percent in the final three months of 2012 from a year before, a magnitude that presaged a recession in three of the five times it’s happened in the past half century, according to Boyton. The central bank estimates the terms of trade reached a 140-year high last year.

Fred Barnes: How Ryan Recasts the Race

After naming Paul Ryan as his running mate this month, Mitt Romney gave better speeches, especially when Rep. Ryan was at his side. Gov. Romney's poll numbers ticked up in Ohio and Virginia, both swing states. His online fundraising shot up like a geyser (68% of it coming from new donors). The Romney Facebook page added 510,000 friends in five days.

Those are the most tangible signs of the Ryan Effect on the presidential campaign. Yet they are not the most important. Once Mr. Ryan entered the race, everything changed: the issues, the substance of the candidates' speeches, perceptions of Mr. Romney and President Obama, the role of a running mate.
Never before has a vice presidential candidate become a central figure in a presidential race. There was no Gore Effect in 1992 or Cheney Effect in 2000. And never have a running mate's ideas become leading issues overnight, likely to dominate the campaign through election day.

The Ryan Effect turned the race upside down. The thrust of Mr. Obama's bid for re-election had been maligning Mr. Romney and pandering to Democratic interest groups. Mr. Romney was concentrating on attacking Mr. Obama for the subpar economic recovery and weak job growth.

The economy remains a central issue, as do Mr. Obama's overall record and Mr. Romney's past one. But now the looming fiscal crisis, Medicare, and the size and role of government are front and center of the campaign. The presidential contest has been elevated into a clash of big ideas and fundamental differences. Neither presidential candidate, but especially Mr. Obama, could have imagined this. Credit Mr. Ryan.

This shift has been damaging to the president and helpful to Mr. Romney. The slogan of Mr. Obama's campaign is "Forward," but he's become the status-quo candidate. Mr. Romney, having adopted slightly revised versions of Mr. Ryan's bold plans for reducing spending and reforming Medicare, is now the candidate of change. This might have happened to some extent without Mr. Ryan in the race, but it certainly wasn't inevitable.

With his ambitious agenda for tackling debt and spurring growth, Mr. Ryan makes Mr. Obama seem smaller. With no plan of his own, Mr. Obama has made a fetish of ignoring the fiscal emergency. That stance no longer looks tenable.

By the same token, the fact that Mr. Ryan's plan is politically risky makes the normally cautious Mr. Romney seem larger for having picked him. He's not like the hapless 1948 Republican presidential contender Tom Dewey, without the mustache. He recognized that his criticisms of Mr. Obama had failed to create a sense of urgency about the nation's faltering economy. Mr. Ryan is adept at describing, with facts and figures, the peril America faces and the urgency of facing up to it.

For the president, the unavoidable presence of Mr. Ryan is bound to be unsettling. "Ryan psychs Obama out," Harvard's Niall Ferguson writes in this week's Newsweek. It would seem so. In three face-to-face encounters, Mr. Obama has conspicuously shied away from engaging with Mr. Ryan.

According to the White House, the president has reached out to Mr. Ryan in the past but gotten nowhere. This isn't true. Mr. Obama spoke to Mr. Ryan in January 2010 at a Republican retreat, said he'd read the "Roadmap" that presaged Mr. Ryan's budget, and noted that he agreed with "some ideas in there" and disagreed with others. "We should have a healthy debate," the president added.

Instead he unleashed an assault. Mr. Obama's allies, including budget director Peter Orzsag and Democrats in Congress, quickly pounced on Mr. Ryan and his proposed policies. Then, at a White House health-care summit a month later, Mr. Ryan delivered a withering critique of the president's overhaul of the health-care system. Mr. Obama responded briefly, then called on another speaker.
It was at their third meeting in April 2011 that Mr. Obama took on Mr. Ryan, seated directly in front of him. His attack was brutal. He suggested the budget drafted by Mr. Ryan as chairman of the House Budget Committee would jeopardize food safety and care for children with autism or Down syndrome. Mr. Ryan was not asked to reply, much less debate those issues.

Mr. Ferguson believes the reason Mr. Ryan "psychs" the president out is that "unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country." Mr. Obama may be sensitive for another reason as well. He's been called the smartest president ever. But Mr. Ryan is not only more knowledgeable than Mr. Obama about fiscal and economic issues, he's more adept at debating them.

Mr. Ryan frustrates his detractors. Like his mentor, the late Jack Kemp, he is upbeat and friendly and eager to seek out converts. He is willing to compromise to bring them on board, too, as he did in welcoming Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon as co-sponsor of his Medicare reform initiative.

In frisking Mr. Ryan, politically speaking, Democrats and the media have been unable to decide where he is most vulnerable. Over the weekend, the New York Times referred to him as a libertarian, while the Washington Post questioned whether he's even a deficit hawk.

What particularly upsets opponents is Mr. Ryan's image. "The disarming thing is his sense of mission is greater than his sense of ambition," says Ryan adviser David Smick, a Washington economic consultant. "This is disconcerting to his critics."

They would like to do to him what they did to Sarah Palin when she was John McCain's running mate in 2008. Mrs. Palin's biography raised questions about her qualifications to be vice president, but after 14 years in Congress Mr. Ryan's qualifications are sterling. Critics are left with the option of attacking him as an extremist or a phony. But the evidence from his career in Washington indicates that he is neither.

There's one more fruit of the Ryan Effect, noted by my Weekly Standard colleague William Kristol. The Republican campaign, he writes, has turned into a movement. A "mere electoral effort" has become a cause. Only Mr. Ryan could have produced this phenomenon.

For the moment, Mr. Ryan has upstaged Mr. Romney. That won't last. The top of the ticket always dominates. But Mr. Ryan has given the Romney campaign what it lacked: the ideas and the energy that provide a clear path to the White House.

Obama Outspends Mitt Romney On Digital Ads 4:1

Seen an Obama ad online lately? The numbers say, yes. Since President Barack Obama kicked off his reelection effort last spring, his campaign spent $31

million on digital ads through June of this year. That's nearly four times the $8.1 million that Mitt Romney's campaign reported spending on digital ads

through June.

OFA dropped nearly $4.5 million alone on digital advertising and text messages in June, according to original ClickZ Politics analysis of Federal Election

Commission filings. In contrast, Romney's campaign spent just around $500,000 on digital ads last month.

The disparity has been present throughout the election season. By March, Obama had paid nearly $19 million for digital ads compared to Romney's $5.2 million.

And at this stage in the game the numbers don't indicate that conservative super PACs will fill the digital gap for Romney. By May of this year, Super PACs

had spent about $7.8 million on digital ads backing Republican presidential primary candidates or opposing Obama, according to ClickZ Politics analysis.

Although we can expect digital dollars from the right are or will begin to coalesce around Romney, there does not appear to be enough digital spending from

the right yet to compensate for Obama's widening lead.

A possible caveat: the Romney camp spent over $9 million on unspecified media buys in June. Those were placed by a somewhat mysterious outfit called American

Rambler Productions, a firm that reportedly was established to handle Romney's media buys. In recent months, the campaign has listed some digital ad

expenditures with American Rambler rather in addition to those made through its original digital consultancy, Targeted Victory.

The campaign spent around $500,000 with Targeted Victory in June, though it's unclear whether any additional digital ad buys last month went through American

Rambler, named after the vehicle brand that helped turn around American Motors Corporate when Mitt's father George Romney served as the automaker's chairman

and president.

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a study that claimed, "Barack Obama holds a distinct advantage

over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters." The study pointed to volume and frequency of

tweets, YouTube videos, and site blog posts along with Facebook likes to support its arguable conclusion. Since released, the study has come under scrutiny

by some who suggest it applied metrics that don't provide a clear view of actual social media engagement among voters with the campaigns.
The report and media coverage of it bolstered the perception that Democrats do digital better than Republicans, but the reality is much more nuanced than

that. The volume of Obama's digital and social media efforts, coupled with the campaign's big digital ad spending lead show the Democrats are simply doing

more digital marketing. While the Romney camp seems to be allocating a smaller portion of the budget to digital, signs indicate that a sophisticated, data-

driven approach is in place. Simply put, the Republicans may be focusing their efforts primarily on key voter segments in battleground states rather than

spreading their digital ads around elsewhere.

Still, there's little doubt the spending gap will have some digital consultants on the right scratching their heads and wondering why Romney isn't budgeting

more money to digital advertising.

Together, OFA and the Democratic National Committee spent $33 million on digital ads through June, according to ClickZ tallies. The DNC allotted almost $2

million to digital ads since last spring, mainly through Bully Pulpit Interactive, the same digital ad agency Obama's campaign is using. However, it's

unclear whether all of the DNC money backed Obama or other Senate or House candidates.

Like the Obama:Romney split, the overall Republican:Democrat breakdown is nearly 4:1. Combined, the Romney camp and Republican National Committee spent $8.4

million on digital ads through June. Some of the $238,000 from the RNC was placed through Connell Donatelli, the consultancy that handled John McCain's

digital advertising in the 2008 election. The committee is also buying ads direct from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Records show the RNC spent around

$84,000 direct with Facebook this year, and about $17,000 with Twitter. While Google grabbed just around $5,000 from the RNC in direct buys in 2012, most

likely much more has been spent through Connell Donatelli and possibly Targeted Victory.

Joey Kovar's MTV Family 'Heartbroken' By His Death

Fans, friends and close family members are reeling from the news of Joey Kovar's untimely death Friday (August 17), possibly caused by a drug overdose. The

news of the 29-year-old "Real World: Hollywood" castmember and aspiring actor's passing has left many saddened and in shock.

"RIP Joey Kovar my heart breaks," tweeted Kovar's "Celebrity Rehab" castmate Mackenzie Phillips. "My love and prayers go out to your family."

"Road Rules" and "Challenge" veteran Mark Long also tweeted his sadness over learning the news.

"RIP Joey Kovar #sad," he wrote.

"Sad news about Joey Kovar," added Katie Doyle, a fellow "Road Rules" and "Challenge" alum. "Never do drugs. #RIP"

Bunim-Murray Productions, the production company behind "Real World," "Road Rules" and "The Challenge," offered their sincere condolences over the loss of

their friend.

"Joey was a gentle and big hearted guy and his real world family will miss him. Our sympathies go out to his family and friends," the company said via their

Twitter account. "Our deepest condolences go out to the friends and family of Joey Kovar. RIP dear friend."

"Real World: Cancun" and "Challenge: Fresh Meat" castmember CJ Koegel also expressed his sadness about Kovar's death via Twitter and included a link to a

photo of Kovar on Instagram that has the words "We lost a member of our family but he will never be forgotten" written underneath it. The photo was re-

tweeted by "Real World: New Orleans" castmember Ryan Knight.

"RIP Joey way too young," he wrote.

Kovar's fans have also expressed their condolences and sympathies for the addiction Kovar suffered with publicly.

"Reading this article has left me completely heartbroken," wrote MTV reader MelindaLauren05. "I watched Joey on the Real World and Celebrity Rehab and I

rooted for him to find sobriety the whole time. I can't imagine what the family is going through but I do know what it is like to struggle with addiction. I

feel lucky to have overcome mine, but it still is always a shock to find out someone struggling has lost their struggle to the disease. My deepest sympathies

to his family in this time of need."

"Joey was so inspirational to me," added reader DamianW. "He was so honest, caring, and motivated. One of my favorite cast members. You were and are a great

dude. mad love, homey."

Mission Impossible: Managing Joe Biden

The most emotionally powerful minute of Joe Biden’s two-day swing through rural Virginia almost didn’t happen.

After the vice president paid a solemn visit Wednesday to the memorial honoring the victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting here, reporters asked him

about his feelings upon seeing the site.
As Biden began to answer, his aides intervened, yelling “Let’s go,” and trying to shoo reporters back to the motorcade.

(PHOTOS: Joe Biden over the years)

Only when it became clear that the vice president wanted to express himself did his entourage stop interrupting to let the candidate speak.

When he did, Biden recalled his own family tragedy — losing his young wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident — and paused repeatedly to keep his

composure.

It was the side of Biden — comfortable with his emotions, and with a gift for human connection — that makes him appealing to many voters. And the moment

never would’ve taken place if he had not effectively overruled his would-be handlers.

It was a vivid illustration of a phenomenon that pervades the 2012 campaign: The consuming effort by operatives to stamp the spontaneity and life out of

modern politics.

(Also on POLITICO: Ryan: Biden is ‘desperate’)

Of course, Biden’s two-day swing through small-town Virginia also offered a perfect example of why this brand of control-freak politics has emerged. His

unrehearsed comment to a mixed-race audience in Danville that the Republicans and their Wall Street allies want to put people “back in chains” made

national news as an example of rhetorical excess.

In an era of Twitter and saturation news coverage — when one stray remark can upend a day’s news cycle and campaigns struggle to shape their preferred

message — politicians and their aides are increasingly intent on restricting the media’s interaction with candidates. Barack Obama or Mitt Romney both shun

the sort of freewheeling news conferences that used to be a staple of campaigns. And when reporters do seek to engage the candidates, the staff minders

attempt to shut it down with ham-handed aggressiveness.

All candidates live with the contradiction — a media culture that implores politicians to seem authentic but is ready to punish them when they really are —

but the challenge is especially exquisite in Biden’s case.

(Also on POLITICO: Axelrod: 'Chains' not racial comment)

He is an irrepressible, garrulous and emotive politician, who’s flourished and fumbled through 40 years in national office by practicing politics the old-

fashioned way — from the gut and without much script. He’s as fine a one-on-one politician of any officeholder of his generation, a talent especially

prized because it is not a particular gift of Obama’s.

But his penchant for off-message moments regularly sends aides in the West Wing and at Chicago reelection headquarters into orbit.