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Thomas Beatie, who is known across the world as 'The Pregnant Man', has announced his split from his wife of nine years.

Thomas Beatie, 38, revealed the break-up from his wife Nancy during a taping of the syndicated CBS show 'The Doctors'.

He also admitted during the interview that he had undergone his final gender reassignment surgery from female to male.

'Nancy hasn’t seen the new me yet,' said Beatie in a taping for the show which will be screened on Monday May 7.

'Like all marriages, we have our ups and downs, and we’re going through a rough patch right now.

'At the moment, we’re separated.'

Mr Beatie was born as a woman, Tracy Lagondino, in Hawaii in 1974, but says he always felt like he wanted to be a man.

When he was in his twenties he began having testosterone injections, giving him facial hair, a lower voice and altering his sexual organs.

In 2002 he had a mastectomy and legally became a man - but he chose to keep his vagina, uterus and other female sexual organs so the couple could have children, as his wife had had a hysterectomy.

He posed for an infamous picture in 2007 which displayed him as heavily pregnant but with facial hair.

He told Oprah on her show four years ago: 'I wanted to have a child one day. I didn't know how. It was just a dream.'

In an interview in March of this year Beatie and Nancy explained the stresses and strains they faced on a daily basis since coming into the public eye.

‘We have had a rough ride,’ said Beatie.

‘We have had death threats, crazies. I’ve been called a freak. The really nasty stuff has come online, with email, Facebook and YouTube.

‘Some of it has just been weird — such as people going to Hallowe’en parties dressed as me, “The Pregnant Man”.

'Some of it has been terrifying. One man has made videos pretending he has kidnapped Susan. He has a Susan doll and he hits her over and over. It’s sick.

‘The FBI have been involved and they monitor things for us. The world is full of crazy people and we have to have our wits about us.’

The couple bought sperm from an anonymous donor and Mr Beatie underwent artificial insemination. After an ectopic pregnancy which led to emergency surgery, he eventually fell pregnant with Susan in late 2007.

He had his next two children in quick succession, as he only had a short window of not taking testosterone.

Mr Beatie was having just eight menstrual cycles a year instead of 12, and only half of these cycles were useful for conception as he had previously had a fallopian tube removed due to the ectopic pregnancy.

He said at the time: 'I am only able to get pregnant four days out of the year... We had our babies in a short space of time because we don't have the luxury of waiting years between each child.'

Keeping life as normal as they could for their children Susan, Austin and Jensen, public interest in their unconventional family has always been intense with probing questions being asked of them, including how their sex life worked.

‘There are physical issues there obviously, but they aren’t the things that get in the way. The biggest problem is that we have three small children.

'Our challenge is actually getting the bed to ourselves!’ explained Beatie.

While Thomas and Nancy desperately tried to be an ordinary family, it was clear there were issues at play that never could be resolved.

Thomas gives birth to son Jensen James Beatie with his wife Nancy by his side

Thomas, in particular, felt the full burden of the world’s disapproval, including accusations of making money from the whole pregnancy experience.

Healthy baby boy: Jensen was born weighing eight pounds, nine ounces

But that’s not the case,’ said Beatie.

‘We did make a bit of money, but we lost a lot more. My t-shirt printing business went under — partly because we had to close the doors to stop all the crazies coming in.

‘It cost me thousands of dollars to become a man, and many more to get pregnant. Then I had to hire a lawyer to be allowed to call myself the father on Susan’s birth certificate.

‘Legally, it has been a nightmare. The authorities wanted to put Nancy and me down as “parent and parent” on the birth certificate, as they do for same-sex couples, but I wasn’t having it.

‘I am legally a man, and I am the father. It all got so confused that at one point they put Nancy down as the father and me as the mother.

‘That took a bit of sorting out. In the end, we had to formally adopt the children, even though they are biologically mine, from my eggs. It’s unfair and, of course, it cost us thousands in legal fees.’

In fact attention fell on Beatie's difficult childhood as a way for conservatives to understand his and Nancy's decision to become a family.

His mother committed suicide when he was 12, and he and his father were never close.

He was born a girl and given the name Tracy, but says that he was always a tomboy.

By the time he reached his 20s, he was convinced he was a man trapped in a woman’s body. At 24, he started taking male hormones — the first step towards a sex change.

By this time he had met Nancy, a body-builder. She is 11 years older than him and has two teenage daughters, Amber and Jen, from a previous marriage.

However, at the age of 28 she had a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis — where cells from the lining of the womb are found elsewhere in the body — so she couldn’t have any more children.

The couple married in Hawaii in 2003.

Thomas had already had a mastectomy to remove his breasts, and hormone treatment that gave him an outwardly male appearance.

In March Mr Beatie revealed he had filed for bankruptcy and was desperately seeking a job to get his family off welfare handouts and pay his $5,000-a-month mortgage

He tried to appear on celebrity dance show Dancing with the Stars last year but was pipped to the post by transgender contestant Chaz Bono.

He also revealed that he would be having a hysterectomy in an interview with 'The Doctors' last year.

Instagram, an Internet start-up in San Francisco, has no revenue and about a dozen employees. It has not yet celebrated its second birthday. But to Facebook, it is already worth a billion dollars.

Facebook announced on Monday that it would pay that much in cash and stock for Instagram, the latest big winner in an industry that seems to be more awash in money by the day.

Instagram joins other out-of-nowhere Internet hits like Groupon and YouTube. The acquisition, which is Facebook’s largest to date, could give it a stronger position on mobile devices.

Instagram is essentially a social network built around photography, offering mobile apps that let people add quirky effects to their smartphone snapshots and share them with friends.

It has dozens of competitors, but Instagram stands out for its fast ascension and almost cultlike following. It has 30 million users who upload more than five million photos a day, even though it was available for only Apple devices until last week, when the company released an Android app.

For Instagram’s founders, two Stanford graduates in their 20s who are now worth in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, it has been a productive couple of years. The other big winners will be their early investors at venture capital firms.

“It’s the Web fairy tale that all start-ups dream of,” said Melissa Parrish, an analyst with Forrester Research, who added: “They took a simple behavior — sharing pictures with friends — and made it a utility that people want.”

Facebook is getting ready for its own big payday. It is aiming for a public offering as soon as next month that could value the company around $100 billion. That means it can easily afford Instagram’s price, if only to keep a rising star out of the hands of competitors like Google.

Facebook may also need Instagram to help it keep up with the constantly changing whims of the online audience. Facebook was born in the computer-and-browser era and is trying to adapt to a world that is increasingly mobile-centric. Instagram is a purely mobile creation.

Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, said buying Instagram would help Facebook with one of its most urgent needs: making its service more appealing on smartphones.

“It’s easier to update Facebook when you’re on the go with a snapshot rather than with text,” Ms. Lieb said.

Kevin Systrom, who founded Instagram with Mike Krieger and is now its chief executive, has been on the radar of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, for some time. Mr. Systrom was a sophomore at Stanford in 2004 when he developed a service called Photobox that let people send large photo files to each other. The service caught the eye of Mr. Zuckerberg, who offered him a job. But Mr. Systrom decided to finish his studies and went on to found Burbn, which let people post photos and other updates.

Burbn never attracted more than a few hundred users, but they uploaded a lot of photos. So Mr. Systrom and his team stripped it down and released a sleeker version for the iPhone, calling it Instagram. It gained early momentum because it allowed users to also post their pictures to Twitter, piquing the interest of those who saw links to the photos in their feeds.

For most of Instagram’s early days, the company consisted of just four employees, including its two co-founders. They worked in what had been the early offices of Twitter in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, crammed in with other start-ups.

The walls were painted dark gray and Ikea lamps sat on the ground, lighting an otherwise gloomy ground-floor space that looked almost the same any time of day or night. The team sat in the middle of the room at four desks pushed together to make one large table — though none of the tables lined up quite right. This year, as staff members were added, Instagram moved to a larger office across the street.

In early 2011, Mr. Zuckerberg reached out to Instagram to discuss buying the company, but Mr. Systrom chose to keep it independent and focus on expanding it, two Facebook employees who asked not to be named said last year.

At the time, Instagram had less than seven million users. Now celebrities like Justin Bieber and brands like Gucci post regular updates.

Not everyone was applauding the acquisition. Soon after the news broke, many Instagram fans began voicing their displeasure on the service and on Twitter and Facebook. Some, like Paul Ahlberg, seemed upset that Facebook would have access to their personal information. “I liked Instagram when it was stupid pictures and filters, not a Facebook data collector,” he wrote on Twitter.

Others lamented the loss of what they saw as an alternative to Facebook and threatened to delete their accounts. “So Facebook just bought Instagram,” a Twitter user named Robert Wagner wrote. “In other news, I just quit using Instagram.”

Some fans were concerned about the fate of Instagram, since Facebook has bought several small start-ups to grab their talent and then shut down their original offerings.

But both Mr. Systrom and Mr. Zuckerberg stressed repeatedly in separate blog posts that Facebook planned to keep Instagram up and running as a separate service, at least for the time being.

“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network,” wrote Mr. Systrom in a company blog post. Instagram and Facebook executives declined to comment further on Monday.

Though Facebook has tended to write much smaller checks in the past, Instagram’s momentum probably compelled Facebook to make a billion-dollar deal. Last week, Instagram closed a roughly $50 million financing round with several investors, including Sequoia Capital, an early backer of Google; Thrive Capital, the firm run by the real estate heir Joshua Kushner; and Greylock Partners, an early investor of LinkedIn.

The financing round valued the photo service at about $500 million, according to one person with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because the discussions were private. With Facebook’s purchase, one week later, that investment doubled in value. The short time frame may indicate that the deal came together in a matter of days.

Instagram has talked about bringing in revenue by allowing brands to drop sponsored photos into the stream on user’s screens, or being paid by brands when users tap to buy something from them, but it has not yet announced any such plans.

Facebook has also been trying to figure out how to make money as people spend more time on smaller screens.

“We really don’t know how Facebook will monetize mobile platforms,” Ms. Lieb said. “The first step is to make Facebook friendlier on mobile devices, and this will certainly do that.”

YouTube is launching a new platform called “I Will If You Will” for Earth Hour 2012, which lets users challenge others to take an environmentally friendly action for the planet.

Earth Hour, now in its sixth year, encourages people to turn off their lights for 60 minutes one day a year. It’s celebrated annually on March 31 between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. This year, the campaign is hoping its impact will last more than one hour.

“In its sixth year, with hundreds of millions of people taking part in Earth Hour, we want to go beyond the hour to encourage positive action for the environment,” Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley said. “The power of social media enables us to unite the global community in the endeavor to protect the planet.”

The “I Will If You Will” campaign is hosted by YouTube and was spearheaded by the Earth Hour founders, the World Wildlife Foundation and Leo Burnett. Supermodel Miranda Kerr is also on board.

As part of the campaign, Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax movie will turn the main character’s mustache green if 500 children commit to switch off their lights for the hour, the president of Fiji Epeli Nailatikau will walk 30 kilometers if businesses and NGOs make pledges, and Miranda Kerr will teach a yoga class to 500 fans who create their own challenge (a condition which was already met).

YouTube also plans to dim its entire site with a virtual light switch for the hour, as it did last year. The social video platform has donated nearly 15 million digital impressions for Earth Hour. Also joining in Earth Hour this year are more than 5,000 cities and towns in 147 countries.

Will you turn out your lights for Earth Hour? Will you challenge your friends to take action?

YouTube has given all members of its non-profit program the ability to live-stream from their channels.

YouTube wrote in a blog post Monday that this will give its non-profit program members the chance to spread their causes, by sharing charity events and conferences in real-time.

“In the past we have rolled out self-service live-streaming for a small group of select partners,” Ramya Raghavan, YouTube news and politics manager, told Mashable. “Today it is open up to all 16,000 nonprofit organizations in the YouTube Nonprofit Program.”

Two non-profits have already made use of live-streaming on the platform. Last Saturday, March 3, the American Foundation on Equal Rights live-streamed YouTube’s first play, 8, about the trial for Proposition 8 in California. The ONE campaign and RED live-streamed a day-long symposium on World AIDS Day in December.

YouTube has been making a big push extending its non-profit program. In April, it will host a day-long summit in San Francisco to better help non-profits tell their stories on the social video platform.

What types of events do you think non-profits should live-stream? What other organizations do you think YouTube should open up live-streaming to next?

Internet company Google has gone ahead with its new privacy policy despite warnings from the EU that it might violate European law.

The change means private data collected by one Google service can be shared with its other platforms including YouTube, Gmail and Blogger.

Google said the new set-up would enable it to tailor search results better.

But data regulators in France have cast doubt on the legality of the move and launched a Europe-wide investigation.

Google has merged 60 guidelines for its individual sites into a single policy for all of its services.

It means browsing data and web history, which is gathered when a user is signed in with a Google account, can be shared across all of the websites.

Logging out of Google's services will reduce the amount of data stored by the company, although - like many other sites - it will still store anonymous data about web activity.

France's privacy watchdog CNIL wrote to Google earlier this week, urging a "pause" in rolling out the revised policy.

"The CNIL and EU data authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services," the regulator wrote.

"They have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and its compliance with European data protection legislation."

The regulator said it would send Google questions on the changes by mid-March.

'Strong as ever'

In response, Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said he was happy to answer any concerns CNIL had.

"As we've said several times over the past week, while our privacy policies will change on 1st March, our commitment to our privacy principles is as strong as ever," Mr Fleischer wrote in a blog post.

The company rejected the regulator's request to hold off on making the changes. Users are being moved on to the new single policy shortly after midnight on 1 March, local time.

Google's business model - the selling of ads targeted on individual user behaviour - relies on collecting browsing information from its visitors.

Until today, this information was kept apart between services.

This meant a search on, for example, YouTube, would have no significance on what results or advertising you would encounter on another Google site like Gmail.

The new agreement, which users cannot opt out of unless they stop using Google's services, will mean activity on all of the company's sites will be linked.

Many websites and blogs in the technology community have given guidance for users concerned about how their browsing history will be used.

They suggest users can access, and delete, their browsing and search history on the site by logging in to google.com/history.

A similar page for YouTube viewing and search history can also be accessed.

Users can see which Google services hold data about them by viewing their dashboard.

'Advertiser interests'

In preparation for the policy change, Google displayed prominent messages notifying visitors about the plans. A dedicated section was set up to provide more details.

However, campaign group Big Brother Watch has argued that not enough has been done to ensure people are fully aware of the alterations.

A poll of more than 2,000 people conducted by the group in conjunction with YouGov suggested 47% of Google users in the UK were not aware policy changes were taking place.

Only 12% of British Google users, Big Brother Watch said, had read the new agreement.

The group's director Nick Pickles said: "If people don't understand what is happening to their personal information, how can they make an informed choice about using a service?

"Google is putting advertisers' interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean."

A poll of more than 2,000 people conducted by the group in conjunction with YouGov suggested 47% of Google users in the UK were not aware policy changes were taking place.

Only 12% of British Google users, Big Brother Watch said, had read the new agreement.

The group's director Nick Pickles said: "If people don't understand what is happening to their personal information, how can they make an informed choice about using a service?

"Google is putting advertisers' interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean."

Google has failed to deliver on promises to tackle illegal file-sharing, according to an organisation which represents music labels around the world.

The IFPI said guarantees Google had made about copyright infringement 12 months ago "remained unfulfilled".

It conceded that the search engine had made "modest steps", but alleged it was profiting from piracy.

In response, Google declined to comment on what it called a "press stunt".

In the report, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) accused Google of making money from "sites and applications that engage in piracy".

It said, as the world's biggest search engine, it had a "special responsibility" to protect copyrighted music.

It said some work had been done but that more action had to be taken if Google "is not to continue to be abused as a vehicle for piracy."

"Google also needs to do more to ensure that it does not derive revenue from illegal activity and supports the digital marketplace in which it itself is a participant," it added.

Speaking on behalf of record labels around the world, the IFPI has urged Google to take action, including spending money to prioritise search results which direct users to legal music services.

In September 2011 Google's Senior Vice President & General Counsel Kent Walker blogged about the company's commitment to copyright material.

He wrote: "Making high-value content available in authorised forms is a crucial part of the battle against online infringement."

In a statement to the BBC, Google also "pointed to congressional testimony by the company's copyright counsel, Katherine Oyama, last month about what it's doing to fight online piracy".

Oyama was attending a hearing on controversial US legislation, which would give the US government the power to request court orders to shut down websites associated with piracy.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) has the backing of Hollywood and the music industry, but the founders of Google, Twitter and eBay - amongst others - have criticised the bill.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Oyama detailed some of Google's current measures to fight piracy, arguing that further legislation was unnecessary.

"The only long-term way to beat piracy online is to offer consumers more compelling legitimate alternative," she said, highlighting how Google created revenue for record labels by selling adverts around their music videos on YouTube.

She added that Google had closed down almost 150,000 accounts from people who attempted to use sponsored search results to advertise counterfeit goods.

Oyama also described Google's speed in removing pirated material from search results and YouTube accounts. She said that, in 75% of cases, the offending links were removed from its pages within six hours of receiving notice from the copyright holder.
'Not Google's job'

Newsbeat asked people what they thought about the issue.

Kim Jarrett, 23, from Essex, said: "I don't think it's Google's job to stop it.

"It's a search engine for people trying to find information and if information is there it's not for them to censor it.

"If record companies have a problem with illegal downloading of music then they should speak to their lawyers and get in touch with the websites themselves."

Annie Lee, 18, from London added: "I do think that Google has some stake and responsibility, but at the same time it's not really their domain - they're just out there as the search engine.

"[But] Google could stop having on their search results all these different download sites - it is pretty straightforward.

"But at the same time people are just going to keep devising new ways to do it."

(Mashable) -- We already knew about YouTube's redesign, which tech-savvy readers have been enabling for the past 10 days. As of now, however, the new YouTube is available to everyone.

Unlike parent company Google, which tends to roll out redesigns over a period of days, YouTube pressed the button and switched the homepage for every user worldwide at 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday.

So what's the change all about? One word: channels. The world's most popular online video service now sees itself as a descendent of cable TV, with millions of channels rather than hundreds -- and it's doing its darndest to encourage you to use it that way.

The first new thing you'll see is an "add channels" button in the top left-hand corner of the page. Under that you'll find your top 10 favorite channels, which you can "pin" to the top of the page.

"The future of the YouTube experience has channels at the center of it," says Margaret Stewart, director of User Experience at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California. "It's a container for all the world's video, and it needs to be the best home for that."

YouTube is also tweaking the colors of its logo and adding a soft gray background to the videos. In a sign that the service is becoming more integrated with its parent company -- and that more employees are going back and forth between San Bruno and the Googleplex in Mountain View -- Stewart says the redesign includes "subtle alignments with Google's visual style."

Part of that process, naturally, includes integration with the Google+ social network. But YouTube is also making it easier to post videos on Facebook and Twitter, too. And the channel change also came to YouTube apps on platforms other than the web. For example, it just became a lot easier to access YouTube channels on your Xbox.

There are four new channel templates that content creators can use, including one template designed for networks (with prominent featured content) and one for bloggers (with the most recent content first). Executives and designers at the company emphasize that this just the beginning of the redesign; more channel-focused changes and channel templates are coming soon.

Read up on the new YouTube user manual, and let us know in the comments: Has the strategy worked? Will this make you use YouTube channels more?

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