The world’s best female golfer, Lorena Ochoa of Mexico, has exclusively revealed to CNN that a meeting with Tiger Woods in her youth inspired her to become the player she is today.

Tiger Woods and Lorena Ochoa pose at the Golf Writer’s Association of America Awards in 2007.

The pair first met at Tory Pines when both competing in the Junior World Championships, an event that Woods won a record six times and Ochoa has won five.

The two then met again 15 years later at the Golf Writer’s Association of America Awards where both were named players of the year.

Ochoa, 27, told CNN’s Living Golf program the meeting had a big impact on her: “You don’t realize the importance of things until you’re older and look back. I’m just glad it worked out the way it did for us.

“He was boy and I was a girl, we were both young and we didn’t know what we were doing. I didn’t see him for another 15 years, but I reminded him and showed him the pictures and he was like “wow”.”

Ochoa, who started playing golf aged just five-years-old, has now won 26 LPGA Tour titles but said despite the success it has been harder to sustain her number one spot than it was to attain it.

“It’s harder to stay number one than getting there - if you get distracted or stop practicing you can very easily lose your position.

Ochoa overtook Annika Sörenstam to become the world number one ranked golfer in 2007 and since has won two majors, including the Women’s British Open and the Kraft Nabisco Championship.

The Mexican also picked up the Honda LPGA Thailand recently but says her drive to win more remains the same: “My life has changed a lot. I’ve been preparing myself to get to that position so it didn’t take me by surprise. It took me five years from turning professional to becoming the number on in the world. It’s not easy but it’s been a lot of fun and I want to stay here.”

The next major championship for Ochoa to set her sights on will be the McDonald’s LPGA Championship on June 11-14

AC Milan president Silvio Berlusconi has told Kaka that he must decide on his reported $92 million move to Real Madrid on Monday.

Former World Player of the Year Kaka must make a decision about his future.

The Serie A club’s owner revealed on Italian television station Rai, he would meet with the Brazil playmaker at the start of next week to thrash out the former World Player of the Year’s future.

“I will speak on Monday probably,” Berlusconi said on Wednesday night’s Porta a Porta program. “On Monday you will all know the decision that has been taken. And to add, we will talk when we have a definite decision.

“At the moment there is no decision. On Monday I will meet with Kaka, and then we shall see. Putting aside the great friendship [with Kaka], the negotiations are in the hands of Kaka’s father, he is the one who will decide. [If Kaka goes] we still have a certain Ronaldinho.”

Milan chief executive Adriano Galliani said that the club had agreed to sell the 27-year-old Kaka for “solely economic” reasons: “Milan can not go on losing €70 million ($99 million) a year,” he told Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport on Thursday

“Kaka has behaved very professionally with us, he has never asked for his deal to be revised or his contract extended. He has been here six years and won everything there is to win. But we can’t afford to miss out on €70 million.”

Galliani said there was no chance of English club Chelsea — who appointed former Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti as manager on Monday — swooping in to beat Real for Kaka’s signature.

An agreement with Chelsea could not exist,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport. “Kaka goes to Real or he remains at Milan. That is his will and we are doing everything in complete agreement.”

Chelsea had earlier denied making any bid for the player, following British reports that the Londoners would make a world-record offer.

Earlier on Wednesday, Milan denied a Spanish radio station’s report claiming that a deal had already been sealed following a meeting between Galliani and new Real president Florentino Perez.

Milan’s official Web site denied the report, saying that Galliani had visited Madrid purely for a special dinner in honor of Perez, who won the recent club presidential elections.

On the Web site, Galliani also sounded a note of warning over the loss of star players from Serie A to the bigger spending clubs in Spain and England.

“I might sound boring, but today no one even dares to think that players like Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo can come to Italy,” he said.

“If we don’t solve these problems, we will not have the Kakas, Patos and Ibrahimovics anymore. If we go forward like this, with these stadiums, we will become a small league.”

Kaka is currently in Brazil with the national team ahead of a World Cup qualifier against Uruguay, and on Tuesday had appeared to rule out a move from Italy’s Serie A.

“I’ll say it for the last time. The last time. I don’t want to leave Milan,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport. “In this period I prefer to remain silent because I don’t want to be misunderstood. Or, worse still, to be used.

“To the millions of Milan supporters, I say that I have made my choice. I have said what I want to stay. Leave me in peace, please.”

Last January, Kaka rejected a move to Premier League Manchester City who were prepared to pay him a reported $750,000 per week.

Kaka’s former coach at Milan, Carlo Ancelotti, was on Monday appointed manager at Chelsea.

Chris Slaman thought he was living within his means. When he purchased his home for $650,000 four years ago, he put down $120,000 and took on a $3,000 a month mortgage.

Chris Slaman, 45, of Santa Clarita, Calif., is like many Americans and is struggling to get a loan modification that would make his mortgage affordable.

Then, like so many other Americans, he lost his job. As his savings dwindled, what once seemed reasonable gradually became impossible.

Slaman landed another engineering job a few months later but it was too late to recover.

“It just sort of snowballs,” said Slaman, 45. “You can’t see the light.”

In order to get a loan modification, he purposely stopped making payments. His lender, IndyMac – which was taken over by the government – offered him a loan modification that would have cut his monthly payment from $3,000 to $2,600.

Are You Looking to Buy a Home or Worried About Losing Your Home? Share Your Story With ABC News

But there was a catch, a big one. The bank wanted him to put two year’s worth of property taxes in escrow. He would have six months to build up that escrow fund, but for those six months his monthly payment would be $3,900.

“For us, this was more money than we were paying from the beginning,” said Slaman, who lives in Santa Clarita, Calif. “That was the deal breaker. I never attempted to make another payment.”

Now he is ready to hand over the keys and look for a rental property.

Across the country, through this recession, it’s a similar story.

President Obama initiated a new program in February — Making Home Affordable — which aimed at making it easier for people like Slaman to have their loans modified.

The administration got 14 loan servicers — including five of the largest — to voluntarily sign on to the program. Under the plan, the government partially subsidizes interest-rate reductions for eligible borrowers so that their monthly payments are 31 percent of their pre-tax income.

Two weeks ago, the Treasury Department announced that 55,000 people had received loan modification offers through the $75 billion program.

Bruce Marks, CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization, calls that a “failure.”

FILE - In this Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006 file photo, actor David Carradine arrives for the 16th annual Environmental Media Awards in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Phil McCarten, file)

Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” who also had a wide-ranging career in the movies, has been found dead in the Thai capital, Bangkok. A news report said he was found hanged in his hotel room and was believed to have committed suicide.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, Michael Turner, confirmed the death of the 72-year-old actor. He said the embassy was informed by Thai authorities that Carradine died either late Wednesday or early Thursday, but he could not provide further details out of consideration for his family.

The Web site of the Thai newspaper The Nation cited unidentified police sources as saying Carradine was found Thursday hanged in his luxury hotel room.

It said Carradine was in Bangkok to shoot a movie and had been staying at the hotel since Tuesday.

The newspaper said Carradine could not be contacted after he failed to appear for a meal with the rest of the film crew on Wednesday, and that his body was found by a hotel maid at 10 a.m. Thursday morning. The name of the movie was not immediately available.

It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a cord used with the room’s curtains. It cited police as saying he had been dead at least 12 hours and there was no sign that he had been assaulted.

A police officer at Bangkok’s Lumpini precinct station would not confirm the identity of the dead man to The Associated Press, but said the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel had reported that a male guest killed himself there.

Carradine was a leading member of a venerable Hollywood acting family that included his father, character actor John Carradine, and brother Keith.

In all, he appeared in more than 100 feature films with such directors as Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman and Hal Ashby.

But he was best known for his role as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin priest traveling the 1800s American frontier West in the TV series “Kung Fu,” which aired in 1972-75.

It all began with the Prozac defense. Then came the Ambien defense. And now the Zoloft defense.

According to court documents, 38-year-old Brandon Hampson of Lynbrook, N.Y., is charged with assault…

The side effects of certain psychoactive drugs have for years emerged in court cases as the supposed hidden culprits in various crimes, from vehicular homicide to physical assault.

Now, the most recent example of this legal move is being played out in the First District Court in Hempstead in Long Island, N.Y.

According to court documents, 38-year-old Brandon Hampson of Lynbrook, N.Y., is charged with assault against his then-girlfriend, Lisa Essling, 28, of Amlverne, N.Y. on Aug. 25, 2006. Police claim that Hampson tackled Essling to the ground before punching and kicking her in her head, face and back. Hampson is charged with third-degree assault, a misdemeanor crime. The charge is accompanied by four other counts that suggest violent behavior from Hampson.

Eric Bernstein, who is defending Hampson in the case, said that he believes the fact that his client had been taking the anti-depression drug Zoloft, but had been off the medication prior to the incident, strongly suggests that withdrawal from the antidepressant could explain his behavior.

“Our defense is that … withdrawal from the drug was a contributing factor — if not directly responsible — for the event,” Bernstein said. “Clearly this is not a joke or gimmick-type defense. This is very serious, very legitimate and is going to get a lot of traction. You’re going to be seeing more of this, because it’s real.”

There are signs that the defense could face an uphill battle. Hampson was convicted of assault against a former girlfriend in 1995; Bernstein would not comment on whether he was taking Zoloft at or near the time of that episode.

Eric Phillips, the prosecuting attorney in the case, said no evidence exists to suggest that Hampson had been taking Zoloft at or near the time of the 1995 assault — which, if true, could affect how a jury perceives the likelihood that side effects from the drug could be involved in the more recent incident.

Searchers hunting for debris from missing Air France flight 447 may be able to recover the first bits of wreckage today.

Two separate, large fields of debris , including a 23-feet long piece of the plane, were discovered Tuesday about 60 miles apart in the Atlantic Ocean some 700 miles off the coast of Brazil. Those two areas of remnants are causing some to suggest the plane broke up in mid-air.

‘It almost couldn’t occur unless your plane came apart in flight,” said ABC News aviation consultant John Nance today.

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris vanished with 228 people onboard Sunday night, nearly four hours into its journey.

Before disappearing, failures in the plane’s systems began generating automated maintenance messages that were sent to the airline just 10 minutes after the pilots themselves sent a text message to Air France indicating they were encountering turbulence and thunderstorms.

The automatic messages, received over three minutes, indicated a growing series off electrical and equipment failures just before the plane disappeared, according to published reports.

“There’s a period where you see many systems degrading very, very quickly, which again starts making you think that there was something major going on with the airplane,” said William Voss, director of the Flight Safety Foundation.

Those clues may help investigators who also hope to find the key to the mystery: the jet’s voice and data recorders, known as black boxes, which could be at the bottom of a mountainous, remote ocean.

Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, says these are tougher ocean conditions than he faced when searching for the sunken passenger ship in the 1980s.

“Somewhere in there is a black box, in very rugged terrain at extreme depths. So it’s about as bad as you can make it,” Ballard said.

The boxes, the size of a proverbial bread box, can survive in up to 20,000 feet of water, and they emit a pinging sound. But water temperatures can affect the distance that sound travels, and the mountainous ocean floor can block the signal, which is only guaranteed to last about 26 more days.

The information the black boxes hold is critical: The cockpit voice recorder would have the last two hours of conversation recorded; the flight data recorder could hold information about as many as 400 systems on the plane to help investigators piece together the puzzle.

“We have to find that,” Nance said. “This is a whole new class of airplane, not just the Airbus, but Boeings like it. We have to know what happened.”

“It’s down there,” Nance said. “It’ll be mangled, but it’s down there.”

When ordering a dinner entrée at a restaurant, few expect the waiter to return with a plate that holds more than their daily supply of calories — or enough salt to meet their maximum daily intake for three days.

But if you order from the menu at some popular chain restaurants, this is exactly what you can expect to get. So says a scathing new report, titled “XTreme Eating 2009,” released Tuesday by the nutrition and advocacy organization Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at CSPI, said that while the report covers just nine offerings from various chain restaurants, there are many more options that did not make the list, but which are nonetheless unhealthy.

“These items are just the tip of the iceberg in a growing trend of making restaurant foods bigger and badder,” she said. “There are a number of trends in the restaurant industry right now that make it harder for Americans to eat well and watch their weight.”

Restaurant industry representatives bristled at the annual report, which they said does not accurately portray most restaurant fare. Sheila Weiss, a registered dietitian and nutrition consultant for the industry group National Restaurant Association said many restaurants have made strides toward healthier options in recent years.

“I think that unfortunately reports like this focus on the negative aspects,” she said. “What would be helpful for the consumer would be to show them the options that are the healthy options in restaurants.

“There is definitely a time to indulge, and definitely a time to eat your favorite foods, in the context of a healthy lifestyle.”

Central to the discussion of what restaurants should be offering consumers is the role of personal responsibility. In other words, shouldn’t customers be able to order what they want, no matter what it does to them if they clean their plates?

Calories, Fat and Salt Content

Wootan acknowledged that the responsibility ultimately comes down to the consumer. But, she said, restaurants should be required to put certain nutritional information like calories, fat content and sodium content on menus next to these offerings.

“We’re not saying take it off the menu,” she said. “But the least that restaurants can do is to tell you how many calories you’re eating.

“How can you make an informed decision and exercise personal responsibility without information?”

But even when presented with the information, will consumers make the right choices? When it comes to these foods, nutritionists say maybe not.

“People like [these foods],” said Barbara Rolls, director of the Laboratory for the Study of human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa. “A lot of them are playing to our basic taste. A lot of them are based on the comfort foods we grew up with.

“In the end it’s our responsibility, but the restaurants are really good at making this stuff taste good and we need to really be giving people more choices in portion size.”

Keith Ayoob, nutritionist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, agreed. “All of these chains have one thing in common — they make food people like to eat,” he said. “One thing that applies to all of these meals is that they’re way too high in calories.”

On average, it turns out, people require about 2,000 calories per day — usually a little less for women, sometimes a little more for men. But the dent that these options put into that daily figure is often large.

“Maybe if they knew the calories in the entrees they’d order differently — or maybe they wouldn’t. People do make some kind of choice when they choose to go these restaurants.”

Another factor in the popularity of such dishes may be the illusion of value — a throwback to the idea that the more food — and hence more calories — that we can get for our buck, the better. So noted Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Ct.

“The dishes profiled by CSPI offer the very opposite of value; they are the kind of purchase no well-informed shopper would make,” Katz said. “They are like measuring the value of a car by tonnage in an era when what matters far more is fuel economy.”

The following pages detail the nine foods spotlighted by the CSPI report — and, in some cases, what you can do to limit the damage if you find them in front of you.

It is as if Air France 447 crashed in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle — even though the Bermuda Triangle is thousands of miles away from the crash site, and most pilots will tell you its dangers are nothing more than urban legend.

Still, this was a tragedy of unusual proportions. The plane fell from the sky in mid-flight, something that almost never happens in modern aviation. The cause is still a mystery; the pilot is reported to have sent a text message about stormy weather, and the plane sent automatic signals reporting an electrical fault, but not more. 228 people are believed dead.

Recovery experts say the equatorial Atlantic where the plane went down is an especially bad place for a plane crash. The waters there, not far from where Atlantic hurricanes take shape, are often stormy. And the ocean floor near the mid-Atlantic ridge is deep and uneven, worsening the chances of recovering anything from the Airbus 330, which went down on a flight from Brazil to France.

“If I were to put this on a scale of one to ten of bad, it’s up there,” said Robert Ballard, the famed ocean explorer who, among other things, led the expedition that found the RMS Titanic in 1985. “It’s not a ten. The worst place you could lose something would be up in the polar regions or up in the high latitude areas.”

John Perry Fish, vice-president of American Underwater Search and Survey, a firm that specializes in difficult salvage operations, had his own list of concerns. “Uninhabited regions that have inhospitable climates — for instance, winter near the poles,” he said. “If the prevailing winds are 30 knots [about 35 miles per hour] there may be only one day in a month that you can actually work.”

The Worst Places in the World

Very few planes go down in mid-flight. Most aviation accidents happen on takeoff or landing. That’s part of the reason, aside from simple economy, that aviation authorities are willing to let commercial flights cross over places that would be especially treacherous in the event of an accident.

Some examples:

The South Pacific: with its wide-open stretches of water and tropical climate, storms there can be larger and more violent than elsewhere, with few places to land if a plane needs help. We still don’t know what happened to Amelia Earhart.

Air France has told families of passengers on Flight 447 that the jetliner broke apart and they must abandon hope that anyone survived, a grief counselor said Thursday as military aircraft tried to narrow their search for the remains of the plane.

Air France’s CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, speaking to families in a private meeting, said the plane disintegrated either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean and there were no survivors, according to Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, who was asked by Paris prosecutors to help counsel relatives. The plane, carrying 228 people, disappeared after leaving Rio de Janeiro for Paris on Sunday night.

Investigators were relying heavily on the plane’s automated messages to help reconstruct what happened to the jet as it flew through towering thunderstorms. They detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, according to an aviation industry official with knowledge of the investigation. He spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because he was not authorized to discuss the crash.

“What is clear is that there was no landing. There’s no chance the escape slides came out,” said Denoix de Saint-Marc, who heads a victims’ association for UTA flight 772, shot down in 1989 by Libyan terrorists.

No survivors makes Flight 447 Air France’s deadliest plane crash and the world’s worst commercial air accident since 2001.

Military rescue planes were trying to narrow the search zone Thursday as ships headed to the site to recover wreckage. The “extreme cloudiness” in the search zone also prevented U.S. satellites scanning the area from providing any useful leads, according to French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck.

Brazil’s Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said debris discovered so far was spread over a wide area, with 140 miles (230 kilometers) separating pieces of wreckage. The overall zone is roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast, where the ocean floor drops as low as 22,950 feet (7,000 meters) below sea level.

After weeks of watching his family dominate tabloid covers and personally battling criticism about his child rearing and husband skills, “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ patriarch Jon Gosselin said in no way does he feel he is exploiting his children.

“I don’t even want to use that word, because I think it’s ridiculous,” he told People magazine. “We have healthy, happy, well-adjusted, educated kids. They’re bouncing around and having a good time.”

Jon Chooses People Just Like Kate

Jon, 32, appears in the glossy magazine saying “enough is enough,” when it comes to all the overwhelming attention the family is receiving.

“Jon’s definitely suffering a little bit right now with all of this attention on him and his family. He’s sort of done with the whole situation,” said People magazine senior staff writer Michelle Tan. “He’s said enough is enough with the paparazzi.”

His interview comes just weeks after his wife, 34-year-old Kate Gosselin, used the popular magazine as an outlet to describe her feelings about what was happening to her marriage. In May, she discussed the perilous state of the Gosselin union, confessing that “Jon is confused and struggling with a lot of different things.”

“I think anybody who has watched the show has noticed that Kate’s definitely the vocal one of the two, and Jon’s very laid back. And I think now with this increased scrutiny, Kate is still opening up a bit more than Jon,” Tan said. “Jon is just getting more and more guarded. He’s just feeling under the attack, and really wants to keep things private.”

Jon reportedly underwent hours of rigorous media training on how to deflect personal questions during his interview in New York.

Meanwhile, Kate and the sextuplets enjoyed a family vacation on the beaches of North Carolina. With a pail in hand and an orange bikini, Kate Gosselin wowed onlookers by being tanned and toned.