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2010-10-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

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White House Adviser: US Must Prepare for Asteroid

2010-10-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

The White House has asked Congress to consider how to best deal with the potential threat to Earth of an impact with an asteroid from space.

If an asteroid were on a collision course with Earth, would we be ready to defend against its destructive impact or would we be helpless and defenseless?

NASA, America's space agency, is being charged with leading the way to protect not only the U.S. but the entire world in the event of such a horrifying scenario. And a top White House science adviser says we have to be prepared.

In separate 10-page letters to the House Committee on Science and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, outlines plans for "(A) protecting the United States from a near-Earth object that is expected to collide with Earth; and (B) implementing a deflection campaign, in consultation with international bodies, should one be necessary."

While Holdren indicates that no large asteroid or comet presents an immediate hazard to our planet, the fact that devastating impacts have occurred on Earth in the distant past is enough to warrant safety precautions for the future.

"Indeed, a steady stream of these objects enters the Earth's atmosphere on a daily basis, consisting mostly of dust-sized particles and estimated to total some 50 to 150 tons each day," Holdren wrote.

As remote as it may seem that Earth could be the target of a giant rock from space, nevertheless, Holdren insists that "the possibility of a future collision involving a more hazardous object should not be ignored."

Asteroids are rocky bodies found within the inner solar system, originating in an area known as the asteroid belt, located between the planets Mars and Jupiter.

If a large asteroid were to strike Earth, it could cause a global climate change, which many scientists believe is what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago -- not a good prospect for life on Earth in the present day if a similar event occurred.

NASA's Near Earth Object program, or NEO, looks for and monitors asteroids that are at least a kilometer in diameter.

But, as Holdren points out, one problem in the search is that "the orbits of known objects can be changed by gravitational or solar radiation perturbations, or even collisions with other objects, meaning that periodic monitoring of known NEOs must also be conducted."

Numerous movies have depicted the devastation caused by an asteroid collision with Earth, including "Meteor" (1979), "Deep Impact" (1998) and "Armageddon" (1998).

After 12 years of cosmic hunting, NASA search teams have determined that 149 NEOs larger than a kilometer in size are in orbits that might pose a problem for Earth, but none is considered an impact threat in the next 100 years.

The White House OSTP office is working to establish plans and procedures in the event of a possible NEO threat to America.

One of those plans involves using the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the Department of Homeland Security, to handle responsibilities on the ground regarding an NEO threat.

After an asteroid-to-Earth trajectory is determined to impact an area of the U.S., FEMA would notify the population through the National Warning System and it would begin emergency response activities.

Holdren's letter also indicates the importance of notifying other countries of an impending asteroid strike "in an effort to minimize the potential loss of life and property."

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And there's the hope that, if an asteroid becomes an actual threat to our planet, a plan would be implemented to try to somehow either destroy the rock or deflect it off course.

Holdren suggests to Congress that NASA and the Department of Defense should work together to devise any strategy that would involve the military.

So the good news is that high-level discussions are on the plate as to how Earth can defend itself against the onslaught of a potential disaster from space.

The bad news: There's no plan set up yet. For the time being, we're staying out of harm's way.

13 executed at Tijuana drug treatment center

2010-10-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

The assault may have been carried out in retaliation for the seizure of 134 tons of marijuana in the city last week.
Reporting from Mexico City —

Gunmen stormed a private drug treatment center in Tijuana and executed at least 13 men at close range, authorities in Baja California said Monday.

The Sunday night attack was the first big assault on a clinic in the border city, where Mexican officials say their crackdown against drug gangs has weakened criminal groups and restored relative calm. Similar attacks have taken place on treatment centers in the northern state of Chihuahua, home to Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent place.

Two to four attackers gathered the Tijuana victims in a room of the El Camino treatment center and opened fire with assault rifles, authorities said.

It was not immediately clear how the shooters gained access to the site, which sits behind a thick steel gate in a working-class neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. Authorities said they were unsure of the motive. Victims were 19 to 56 years old.

Survivors reported hearing gunfire for about two minutes.

"I was there in back, and as soon as I heard, 'Everyone on the floor! Everyone on the floor!' we thought they were police," a survivor told the Tijuana-based Border News Agency. "I threw myself under the bed and didn't come out."

Melquiadez Hernandez Esparza, 52, identified as the manager on duty at the time, said he stayed in a nearby room with nine clients until the shooting stopped.

The center, one of about 175 drug and alcohol treatment facilities in Tijuana, was reportedly home to about 40 addicts who built doghouses and did other carpentry work to support the facility. Authorities said the center was not licensed.

Elsewhere in Mexico, treatment centers have served as havens for fugitives and outlets for drug sales, making them targets for drug cartels and ordinary street gangs. In June, 19 people were slain in an attack on a clinic in the city of Chihuahua.

Baja California's prosecutor, Rommel Moreno, said Sunday's attack may have been tied to the Mexican army's record-setting seizure last week of 134 tons of marijuana in Tijuana.

Soon after the killings, someone broke into the police frequency, playing narco-ballad music and warning that the attack was "a taste" of Juarez-style carnage, a police official said. Moreno confirmed a news report that the radio voice threatened that a person would die for every ton of marijuana seized.

"It is perverse to me the way they are trying to scare people," Moreno told a Mexico City radio station. "What we are trying to do is provide calm."

Officials said they believe the marijuana stockpile belonged to the drug-trafficking group based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and led by the country's most-wanted suspect, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman.

If true, it may signal that the powerful Guzman-led cartel is moving to wrest control of the Tijuana corridor from its longtime rival, the Arellano Felix cartel, weakened by more than two years of infighting.

Security forces have been credited with debilitating the Arellano Felix group, but they could face a greater test from the more powerful Sinaloans. Residents fear that their city could turn into a battleground similar to Ciudad Juarez, where rival cartels have been at war for nearly three years, leaving more than 6,500 dead.

Reprisal killings are common after drug gangs lose big loads of contraband, and Tijuana authorities were braced for violence after last week's seizure, whose estimated value was $200 million.

Even before that haul, a spate of killings marred what Tijuana boosters and many residents were describing as an encouraging period of relative peace. More than two dozen people were slain during the first two weeks of October.

Two years ago, soaring kidnappings and frequent gangland slayings related to an internal cartel feud spurred many residents to flee across the border into San Diego County.

But the most spectacular violence subsided with the arrest early this year of Teodoro Garcia Simental, who led one of the warring factions. Well-to-do residents began to trickle back.

Sunday's attack was the deadliest in the city of 1.5 million since 2008.

Calm has proved deceptive, and short-lived, in other drug hot spots. Still, officials have sought to showcase Tijuana as an emblem of success in the Mexican government's controversial 4-year-old war against drug cartels and the iron-handed approach of the police chief, Julian Leyzaola.

This month, the city threw itself a big two-week party, drawing luminaries such as Al Gore to promote Tijuana's role as a business and innovation hub and try to push the drug issue to the background.

Who should be in charge of Enterprise 2.0?

2010-10-25T19:10:00.001-07:00

There have been a number of discussions lately about where the leadership for internal social media should be located in an organization. For businesses, it’s an increasingly important question as the numbers continue to show that social media is becomes ever more strategic to the way organizations communicate and collaborate today.

While many Enterprise 2.0 efforts have been largely tactical up until now, that has begun to change as social media becomes a first class citizen with the more traditional ways that workers communicate and collaborate. In particular, I’ve noticed that the question of who’s in actually charge of internal social media is being asked more and more often these days.
Let’s put aside for the moment such notions as it’s every worker’s responsibility to be collaborative in the workplace or that social media, often portrayed as an activity that would go of itself, doesn’t really need a leader. Instead, it’s a serious management question in the same way it would be asking who’s in charge of any important general-purpose business capability, say operations or human resources.
Most recently the Harvard Business Review explored this subject in Who Should Be Your Chief Collaboration Officer, noting that:

In most companies today, senior executives are still responsible for their unit — sales, marketing, HR, division A, division B. Yes, they are told to be team players and work with their peers. But that is often not enough. You need someone to look after the whole, by taking a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos.

While businesses are still coming to terms with how social affects their business — including how it should be used for collaboration, communication, marketing, customer support, and so on — the discussion has turned increasingly serious in recent years about whether there actually needs to be a Chief Community Officer or Chief Collaboration Officer. Such a role is reminiscent of the burgeoning new Chief Customer Officer, a role that is gaining steady traction in the last several years according to the CCO Council, with 39 firms with over $2 billion revenue now actually having a C-level executives primarily intended to represent customer needs.
For many businesses, having a leader responsible for that oh-so-critical business activity: teamwork, seems like a smart one given the low levels of cross-functional teamwork that actually takes place in many organizations. In the end, good collaboration needs conscious effort and encouragement.
In reality however, lack of broader interdepartmental cooperation and teamwork is felt to be endemic to many workplaces. As I’ve covered in the past about the challenges of implementing Enterprise 2.0 and fostering collaboration in organizations that don’t do it naturally, there are often many reasons why collaboration is hard to do or not happening enough.
Consequently, most workers today would probably agree that the modern organization today is all-too-often typified by its silos of function, across which little useful information crosses. This leads to long-term dysfunction and inefficiencies as the needed knowledge and expertise can’t reach where it’s required. In fact, it is directly across these communication silos where technology solutions have been designed for decades to lower the barrier of communication, of which social software is only the latest example. But having good collaborative technology is not the only the problem. People are.

Who is really responsible for collaboration?

Does collaboration really need a dedicated C-level leader? Do they need to be fully imbued with the authority, mandate, and resources to reshape culture and behavior in an organization? And is this role really the best place for strategic use of internal social media to reside? In my research I’m finding that the answer is clearly this: not necessarily. In fact, as we’ll see there are many solid bulwarks within an organization’s hierarchy from which to actively drive improvements in communication and collaboration using social software.
For many classical IT systems, there was often a obvious role in the organization for which it was ultimately responsible. Most IT systems centralize automation and control, yet the opposite is often true of social systems, which distribute and disseminate information and attention using the rules of human behavior, connecting participants to the far-flung reaches of the business. Basically whoever wants to listen or participate. Consequently, there are a few more actors and thus potential leaders, including some unlikely ones, that will determine the success of an Enterprise 2.0 effort.
Related: CoIT: The centralization of IT is being challenged in the social media era.
In fact, while the HBR article recommends that an existing C-level executive “assume the mantle”, successful leadership is likely to come from several quarters at once. As organizations move from a 1990s era environment of e-mail and relatively static intranet portals to a new one of social computing-based communication and self-organizing collaboration, leadership that drives success transformation and change is going to come from most or all of these different areas:

Where Enterprise 2.0 leadership can be found

Senior Management. In my analysis of Enterprise 2.0 case studies, strong executive leadership is one of the primary success factors for adoption and sustained uptake of social software in strategic, company-wide settings. Effective senior executives set the pace and tone of how companies are run and the best of them lead by example. Unfortunately, many senior executives are either too busy to actually use social software very much or are uncomfortable with using it for a variety of reasons related to issues such as compliance, legal exposure, and professional inclination. On the other side of the coin, studies have shown there is real value in this leadership, most recently finding that CEOs of the most admired 50 firms are more actively engaged online (41%) than companies with mediocre reputations (28%). I don’t yet advocate a true C-level Chief Collaboration Officer for most firms (that’s for when social has become more entrenched), but a motivated CIO, COO, and or even CFO — the latter who is often head of company strategy — will do just fine.
Middle Management. These days the HR department is becoming more and more involved with social media, at first by dictating social media policy and now more recently becoming involved in how collaborative performance and literacy is instilled in the workforce, including how it is ranked in performance reviews. Corporate communication has also found itself in the front line of social media, though often more externally, yet ends up having the experience and knowledge ahead of much of the rest of the organization and able to assist. Finally, strategic planning and corporate strategy staff have been seeing the Enterprise 2.0 writing on the wall for years now with leading analyst firms such as Gartner listing Web 2.0, social networking, and social collaboration on their top 10 strategic technology lists for at least 6 years running now, most recently for 2011. All of these areas are well positioned for Enterprise 2.0 leadership and are typically already involved in some way, yet often lack of practical experience and the secondary nature of the role can hinder their efficacy.
Senior Staff. The leaders of existing Enterprise 2.0 project seem to be natural fits to drive collaborative improvement across an organization. So too are the community managers supporting the daily activity of the social intranet and other online communities within the organization. Any designated social computing evangelist is another natural seeming role. Yet despite their primary role in collaboration and relevant experience with the topic, they’re often too new and too unfamiliar with the business workings of the organization to truly help other parts of the business adopt social computing methods. Nor do they have the credibility to drive behavioral and cultural change around the way workers collaborate the way more senior managers and executives do.
Emergent Leadership. Finally, there seem to be effective leaders that appear from unlikely sources. Often particularly gifted communicators and change champions that are chomping at the bit to drive positive change, they use effective communication and the tools themselves to spread the word and lead experiments and inspire others in the organization to try new ways of doing things. By no means common, I’ve now seen enough of emergent leaders to know that they also can form an important part, even a critical role, in the Enterprise 2.0 leadership spectrum.

So my answer to the Enterprise 2.0 leadership question should be fairly clear by now. It really takes a village, or more properly, an forward-looking organization that is trying to recalibrate itself around the way that the way that the world seems to be shifting. That shift, the fast-moving and global world of sharing, participating, and openness that is social media at its finest, is one in which smart organizations will pull together their best internal leaders to proactively make themselves better. This will get the ideas, innovation, and knowledge into the right places at the right times to the benefit of customers, shareholders, and ultimately, you and I.
How has leadership around Enterprise 2.0 manifested itself in your organization? Please share in Talkback below.

Inside the new MacBook Air's screen

2010-10-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

Almost immediately after Apple launched the new MacBook Air, TechRestore began offering a matte finish screen replacement for its glossy screen. I asked CEO Shannon Jean a few questions about getting inside the new MBA:

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Q. Who’s panel are you using? Is it the same OEM that Apple uses?

A. Same exact specs – there’s only one panel like this being made right now.

Q. Is it any easier to get inside MBA now that there’s less electronics in the display? (i.e. no microphone?)

A. It’s much more difficult. The screen is paper thin and it’s not inside a housing like the traditional screens. It’s in layers, it’s insane. Perhaps you can do a post on this service, then I can send you images of the screen to do an additional post. I don’t think there’s ever been a screen like this used in a laptop. It’s very similar to a Sony PSP screen, where the LCD panel and backlight are separate pieces.

Q. Anything else on the new screen?

A. Like I mentioned, this is an ultra-thin screen that is not encased in a typical screen housing. Looks like Apple saved weight and space by keeping the parts separate. Very cool, except getting the screen out of the unit is a challenge with the Iron Man adhesives that Apple uses. Plus the fact that replacing the screen will require a dust free environment, since you are essentially peeling back the screen like an onion and there are all kinds of ways to cause damage. If you scratch the backlight layer, it will show through the LCD, if you get dirt/dust in between the LCD and reflective layers, it will show up, just to name a few.

Q. Have you taken your MBA apart yet?

A. Photos attached.

Here’s what it looks like to get inside the 2010 MacBook Air.

More photos after the break…

Google faces probes over privacy issues

2010-10-25T19:07:00.001-07:00

Google is feeling rekindled heat over the private data it collected without permission in more than 30 nations.

The British Information Commissioner's Office on Monday asked to take a closer look at the evidence Google made available earlier this year, after the company admitted that cars sent to take photos for its Street View mapping service also carried Internet eavesdropping gear.

The U.K.'s request follows Canada's disclosure last week that Google, indeed, collected sensitive information during its Street View campaign, not just "fragmentary data," as the company had earlier indicated.

"Some of the captured information was very sensitive, such as a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, along with their telephone numbers and addresses," says Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's Commissioner of Privacy. "It is likely thousands of Canadians were affected."

Google's Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, had stated in a May 14 blog post that the Wi-Fi data harvested by the Google vehicles was "fragmentary " since the cars were "on the move." On Oct. 19, Canada issued an investigative summary. Three days later, Eustace amended his stance.

"A number of external regulators have inspected the data," Eustace wrote in a Friday blog post. "It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords."

Eustace listed several privacy measures Google has recently implemented. "We are mortified by what happened," he wrote, adding that Google would like to "delete this data as soon as possible."

Google spokeswoman Christine Chen says the company wants "to protect the privacy of those whose data we mistakenly collected."

Google already has deleted data harvested in Austria, Denmark, Ireland and Hong Kong, but has been unable to delete more because "many of the investigations are still ongoing," Chen says.

Privacy lawsuits and Congressional inquiries in the U.S., the re-opened British probe and potential investigations by privacy regulators in other nations make destroying more data problematic.

Intensified scrutiny of how and why Google collected this data could help explain how and why such a large, sophisticated data-collection project came to be.

"It's very likely that when the data was initially gathered, the engineers who gathered it intended to use it," says John Simpson, managing director of the non-profit Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.

Wifi Direct certifications starts, device-to-device transmission also starting soon

2010-10-25T18:55:00.001-07:00

Bluetooth has some competition - Wi-Fi Direct is touted to everything Bluetooth does, but with far less issues and annoyances all while using a protocol that is far more widespread and easier to setup.

Starting today - Wi-Fi Direct devices will enter the certification process - the actual products to use this tech are unknown at this point, but there should be some hardware on the shelves before Santa arrives in 2 more months.
Functionality wise, the claims stand out instantly - for someone to make a device-to-device connection over Wi-Fi just ONE of the devices needs to be Wi-Fi Direct certified. This will help create a user base out of the box, which is a great step towards instant sales.
"Most" products certified will also support "one-to-many" Wi-Fi connections, such as enabling a Wi-Fi Direct laptop to then connect wirelessly to your printer, HDTV and a tablet or phone simultaneously - the best thing? No router in-between would be required! Also, 802.11b users may be left out in the dark, with 802.11a/g/n being supported over 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.
Wi-Fi Direct will require no new hardware - so in theory, any existing Wi-Fi chipset could be upgraded via firmware to support Wi-Fi Direct.

Olympic Committee vows to crack down on illegal betting

2010-10-25T18:54:00.001-07:00

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is planning to increase its efforts to tackle illegal gambling in sport ahead of the 2012 London Games by working closely with governments and betting agencies.
Although the IOC said there were no reported cases of athletes being involved in illegal gambling at previous Olympics, the governing body was under no illusions that it could eventually happen.

"There used to be a time, a long time ago now, when people used to say there was no illegal doping in their country," IOC president Jacques Rogge told a news conference at an IOC meeting on Sunday.
"There is illegal betting in every country in the world.
"Some (countries) are more effective (in preventing it) than others but not necessarily free of this new scourge of sports."
Rogge said the complex nature of illegal sports betting made it almost impossible for sporting bodies to identify breaches so the IOC was relying on help from governments and betting organisations to alert them to any suspicious activity.
"How you decide there has been illegal betting is not always easy because more and more illegal bettors bet on a particular aspect of the game," Rogge said.
"It could be a run in cricket, it could be a double fault in tennis, it could be a corner in the first two minutes of a football match. It is very difficult to judge this.
"We are also helped by the betting partners and the flow of money going into these bets, but it's not black and white and (is) sometimes difficult to look at."

Firefox extension reveals Facebook and Twitter logins

2010-10-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

Public wireless networks have always been perceived as generally safe. Surely, the odds of having your private details stolen out of thin air must be slim to none? And surely, the ability to steal those details must be restricted to the most knowledgeable and most evil of techies? Even Google's recent announcement that it accidentally collected complete emails, usernames and passwords using its Street View cars was treated as a one-off accident. Grabbing private data from unsecured networks isn't something that the average user can do – so the average user isn't concerned.

On Sunday, Seattle-based developer Eric Butler may have changed that perception for good by releasing a tool called Firesheep. Firesheep takes almost everything required for stealing people's Facebook and Twitter sessions – along with those from many other sites – and puts it into one attractively designed Firefox extension. Never underestimate the power of good packaging.

Password stealing from open networks is nothing new, and the flaws that Firesheep exploits have been known for more than a decade. ARP spoofing, a more powerful technique in which all the data on a network is surreptitiously routed through one rogue computer, has been known and occasionally exploited since the 1990s. Point-and-click tools for password-stealing and login-hijacking have been around for almost as long – the most highly regarded one, Cain and Abel, was first released in 2001 and is still used today.

Using these tools required three things: a significant level of technical knowledge; a desire to hunt around the less friendly parts of the internet; and the nous to deal with software that might, if you choose unwisely, do a lot of nasty things to your computer.

Firesheep, though, has an easy-to-use interface and, perhaps most importantly, a cute name. Surely this can't be a "cracking tool"? It wasn't released by someone going by a name like 'dEvILSp0RN42'. It doesn't feature white text on a black background. It has well-thought-out and literate documentation. To use it, you simply install it into Firefox and click a few buttons. One minor additional step, installing WinPcap, is required for Windows users.

I've already seen folks on Twitter casually mentioning that they can't wait to try out Firesheep somewhere public. The perception that it's fun and at most "slightly illegal" is strong. I expect at least one journalist to naively write an article about how they used it in a public cafe and found – much to their shock, surprise and horror – that it actually worked. Let's be clear: using this on a network that you don't completely own and control would be a violation of the Computer Misuse Act. Logging in to someone else's Facebook account is exactly the kind of "unauthorised use of computer material" that the act makes illegal.

Cracking tools don't get mainstream media coverage because most journalists don't have the deep technical knowledge required to understand them. TechCrunch was one of the first sites to cover Firesheep, saying that Butler "exposed the soft underbelly of the web" – but that soft underbelly had been exposed for years. Firesheep is doing a much more important thing: it's shining a bright, 500W halogen floodlight on that soft underbelly and telling everyone where they should attack it. This tool may do for Wi-Fi hacking what Napster did for MP3 sharing all those years ago: take it out from the shadowy parts of the internet and place it centre stage.

Raising awareness of security issues, and creating the demand to help close them, can only be a good thing.

What 2 Watch 4: Giants vs Cowboys and LA Kings vs MN Wild

2010-10-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

NFC East rivals clash tonight on Monday Night Football. The resurging New York Giants visit the Dallas Cowboys, a team in desperate need of a win. Dallas is 1-4 this season, with all four of its losses coming by seven points or fewer. It's just the 6th time in their illustrious history that the Cowboys have started 1-4 or worse. Cowboys QB Tony Romo has thrown for 1,566 yards and 10 TDs this season.
He'll face an improved Giants defense tonight. Osi Umenyiora has really benefitted from new defensive coordinator Perry Fewell's schemes; he has 8 sacks and 7 forced fumbles through 6 games this season.

Giants Defense NFL Ranks Last 2 Seasons
Category...........2009..................2010
Sacks..............T-18th..................T-2nd
Yds PG............T-13th...................2nd
Yds per play.....20th......................1st
Pass yds PG.......15th.....................2nd

Facts To Impress Your Friends

* The Giants swept the two-game season series against the Cowboys last year
* Eli Manning is 6-5 in regular-season starts vs. Dallas
* Osi Umenyiora has never sacked Tony Romo in six regular-season meetings
* DeMarcus Ware has eight sacks of Eli Manning in 10 previous games

The Los Angeles Kings invade Minnesota tonight to face the Wild. Jonathan Quick will likely start in net for the Kings, and has a 5-2-0 lifetime record against the Wild. Part of the Kings' early-season success can be attributed to their play in the third period. The Kings have outscored their opponent 11-5 in the third period; that's the largest positive goal differential in the NHL in that period. They are the only team in the league that has been outscored in each of the first two periods (6-5 in each) but has scored more goals than they have surrendered in the final session. Meanwhile, Minnesota's power play is off to a dazzling start. Currently, they are converting their power plays at a 38.7 percent clip, the highest for the month of October in recent memory. Minnesota center Matt Cullen leads the team in goals (3) and assists (6).

Highest Power-Play Percentage in October, Since 1987-88 Season
Wild...........2010-11..........38.7
Penguins....1995-96.........38.5
Penguins....1992-93.........35.5
Sharks........2010-11.........33.3

Album review: Taylor Swift, "Speak Now"

2010-10-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

By Allison Stewart
Taylor Swift's ridiculously entertaining new album, "Speak Now," is a lengthy, captivating exercise in woo-pitching, flame tending and score-settling -- with a heavy emphasis on the latter.
The song "Innocent," written in response to last year's Kanye West contretemps on the MTV Video Music Awards, may be the most telling. It is a small masterpiece of passive aggressiveness, a vivisection dressed up as a peace offering: "It's okay, life is a tough crowd," Swift faux-consoles West, who is, apparently, "32 and still growing up now."

A teenager when she released her first album and now the world's most famous 20-year-old, Swift, on her third album, neatly skirts the impending adulthood observers feared might become her Waterloo, mostly by avoiding mention of it entirely. It helps that she sounds like planet earth's youngest, most earnest 20-year-old, and that she wisely avoids relatability-killing songs about paparazzi or life on the road and makes only fleeting references to her apartment.
Lucky for Swift, regular girls and superstars apparently face the same troubles: alienation, constant romantic earthquakes, a distrust of people who are fake.
Swift is the fleshly embodiment of a Disney princess (and not the Miley Cyrus kind, either), but songs like "Innocent" suggest a tiny fist emerging from the velvet glove. It's an encouraging development, one that brings texture and depth to a disc of otherwise unearthly sweetness. The already-much-dissected bluesy guitar ballad "Dear John" deftly skewers rumored ex-paramour John Mayer ("All the girls that you've run dry/Have tired, lifeless eyes/Cause you burned them out"), whose already battered reputation may never recover.
"Better Than Revenge" was likely written about actress and alleged Joe Jonas-poacher Camilla Belle. Think such speculation is unseemly? Swift no longer seems like the kind of girl who would care if you Went There, providing so many telling details about her songs' real life heroes and villains that "Speak Now" might as well come with a decoder ring.

About Belle (allegedly): "She's an actress/But she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress," Swift meows. She sounds unsure what those things are, exactly, but that just makes it worse.
Swift is otherwise a champion empathizer, with a great gift for describing the lost innocence of childhood and the clumsy miscommunications of adults. She brings to mind, of all things, a girly Dashboard Confessional, another artist enamored of ardent, beefed-up acoustic roman à clefs. She wears well, but "Speak Now" is long: 14 wordy, stretched-thin, occasionally repetitive songs, all written entirely by her, and broken up by nary a guest star and only an occasional backing vocalist.
This full-frontal Taylor assault is doubtlessly meant to silence those who doubted her writing and singing abilities, but it makes for arid patches. "Dear John" drags at almost seven minutes; it would have soared at four.
The disc's songs tend to fall into three categories: poppy and generic new wave tracks ("The Story of Us") that suggest a nicer Avril Lavigne; catchy country-pop songs ("Mine," an unofficial sequel to "Fearless" hit "Love Story"), of which there are not enough; and muscular acoustic ballads, often with strings or an orchestra (the great "Back to December"), of which there are sometimes too many. Except for the swingy bluegrass track "Mean," this is the least country album in the history of country albums.
"Speak Now" is peppered with giggles, spoken word bits, sighs and one too many pouring rain metaphors, all meant to underscore Swift's adorableness, which has long been an indisputable matter of record. The only real misfire is the title track, in which Swift interrupts a wedding with a protestation of love for the groom ("I am not the kind of girl who should be rudely barging in on a white veil occasion," she informs the gathering, somewhat awkwardly).
In this razor-edged update of "Fearless" hit "You Belong With Me," Swift stacks the deck by depicting her rival as a bridezilla with a "gown shaped like a pastry," a great image but a bad idea: it's one of the few times she seems petty and juvenile, and not just young.
It goes without saying that the groom strips off his tux and ducks out the back door with Swift, but you can't help but feel sorry for his would-be bride . With America's Sweetheart as an unexpectedly merciless rival, it hardly seems like a fair fight.

Michael Chiklis Plays 'No Ordinary' Superhero

2010-10-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

The story has often been told, how Michael Chiklis reinvented himself from the schlubby suburban flatfoot of his early-1990s drama "The Commish" to a ferocious rogue cop on "The Shield."
Chiklis won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance in "The Shield." It seemed Detective Vic Mackey was the role of his lifetime.

Hold on.
Returning to series TV two years after "The Shield" concluded its run with shock and awe, Chiklis has transformed himself again for his new show, "No Ordinary Family" (which airs on ABC Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET). For Chiklis, this might be another signature role.
Here, he plays Jim Powell, who, when the series began last month, was a meek family man overwhelmed by the demands of marriage and parenting two teens. He was also frustrated by his dead-end job as a police sketch artist, being sidelined from what he saw as real police work.
In short, Powell was feeling powerless. Then, by a quirk of sci-fi fate, he acquired superstrength.
Meanwhile, Stephanie, his brilliant research-scientist wife (Julie Benz, "Dexter"), became superfast. Their 16-year-old daughter (Kay Panabaker) could read minds. And their 14-year-old learning-disabled son (Jimmy Bennett) was suddenly a supergenius.
Since then, complications have arisen for the Powells as the family dynamic is rocked to its core. Each member of the family is struggling to grasp an altered sense of themselves. And they must deal with pitfalls as well as opportunities imposed by their amazing new abilities.
What to do with them? With her superbusy schedule, workaholic Stephanie welcomes her superspeed as a way to keep up with her hectic personal life and career.
But Jim's desire to use his powers for the good of society causes conflicts at home.
"Just because you've decided to clean up the city doesn't make crime-fighting the family business," Stephanie snaps at him when he asks her to help on a case on this week's episode.
The blessings and the curse of superpowers — that's hardly a new concept in storytelling annals. But so far "No Ordinary Family" has offered a fresh, layered twist with for-all-ages appeal. It's no ordinary show.
"It's a hybrid," says Chiklis during a recent interview. "This is a family drama wrapped in a police procedural wrapped in a superhero show. We have familiar day-to-day problems exacerbated by extraordinary powers. We try to ground the superhero genre in reality."
For Chiklis, it's definitely a switch from "The Shield," a Peabody Award-winner that was raw, unsparing and morally ambiguous — the sort of grown-up drama that, aired by cable's FX, could never have found a home on broadcast.
"Coming off seven years of doing that, I wanted to do something that had mass appeal," says Chiklis, bullet-headed and still fit at 47.
"I imagine if another show had come my way that was dark and adult, with the sort of brilliance 'The Shield' had, I would have jumped on it," he says. "But I knew that sort of project isn't an everyday event. Someday, I might like to go back to the dark side. But right now, I was inclined to go an entirely different way."
Back on the ABC broadcast network (where for four seasons he thrived as "The Commish"), Chiklis describes "No Ordinary Family" as "substantive, soulful — and then you laugh."
"It seemed like a fun gig for me — something I can live with for a while. And I was up for the challenges it posed on a production level — we have the sort of special effects that, as recently as two years ago, you literally couldn't do on a weekly basis," he says.
"I'm a little bit of a superhero geek," says Chiklis, which must have helped him rise to the occasion as craggy-complexioned The Thing in the 2005 feature film "Fantastic Four" and its sequel two years later.
Of course, as Vic Mackey on "The Shield," Chiklis was also an action hero. It seemed he was always in motion, even in rare moments at rest, his mind racing to plot his next move. But that volatile performance was nothing like Jim Powell, who must hone such newfound skills as vaulting from the sidewalk to a towering rooftop (or, for Chiklis, mastering the necessary special-effects stunts).
"It's fun, jumping off a bridge or throwing a car down the street," he says with a laugh. Then, when he gets home from a 16-hour shooting day, he calls for makeshift ice packs to soothe his tired muscles.
That's his typical greeting to his loving wife: "I say to her, 'Michelle! Frozen peas!'"

Steele: GOP has been willing to work with Obama

2010-10-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON -- The head of the GOP rejects charges that Republicans have refused to work with President Barack Obama.
Speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said that on issues ranging from the economy to health care to the environment, the GOP has made its positions clear.

But, he says, ideas put on the table by Republicans have been "summarily rejected" by the Democrats.
Steele says that GOP leaders "couldn't even get a meeting with the president."
Steele says he thinks voters are tired of the way Democrats, who control the White House and Congress, are running the federal government.
He predicts an "unprecedented wave" of voter dissatisfaction will give his party control of the House, and possibly the Senate, after next month's midterm elections.

First-Ever TIPS Auction at Negative Yields

2010-10-25T18:41:00.001-07:00

This afternoon’s U.S. Treasury auction marked the first-time ever that Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) were sold at a negative yield, meaning that investors were willing to
pay the government simply for the right to own these securities.

$10 billion of five-year TIPS were sold at -0.55%, indicative of the extremely strong demand amongst investors for securities indexed to inflation amid the inherent inflationary consequences of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies.

Mac App Store Provokes Developer Interest, Concern

2010-10-25T18:37:00.000-07:00

Apple is on a mission to cram the iPad’s and iPhone’s successes into the Mac, beginning with a brand-new software store serving Mac apps. That may be both good and bad.

The Mac App Store will create a new channel for Mac users to find software easily, and it will make it easier for programmers to reach a large audience. But some developers worry about Apple’s future road map, and the potential the App Store has to turn the Mac platform into a more closed, controlled environment subject entirely to Apple’s whims.

“I wonder when Apple will stop shipping Safari,” said Mike Beltzner, director of the Firefox browser at the Mozilla foundation. “It’s obvious already from [Wednesday's] keynote that they’re looking to bypass the web.”

Apple in a press conference Wednesday announced that the next-generation Mac operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will launch with a Mac App Store similar to the iOS App Store serving its mobile devices. Steve Jobs said the company was planning to take lessons from mobile and weave their benefits into the Mac platform.

When the Mac app store opens, users will be able to automatically install apps and seamlessly run updates whenever they’re available, just like on the iPhone. Apps downloaded through the Mac app store will load in a quick-launch tool, similar to the springboard interface of the iPhone and iPad.

Most Apple developers seem thrilled about the opportunity to sell their wares through an online Mac store, but some have dissenting views. Here are the pros and cons of a Mac app store, gathered from brief conversations with programmers.

More money, more innovation

The Mac app store presents an opportunity for programmers to reach an audience of 50 million Mac customers (for comparison, that’s about half the size of the audience of iOS users). That could amount to hot sales for Mac apps and a few lucky success stories, like the few we reported on when the iOS App Store was young.

Just as the App Store did with the iPhone, we can expect a wave of new programmers opting to make apps for the Mac. As a result, customers will get thousands of Mac apps enabling Mac computers to do things we never even thought about.

“I think it can breathe some new life into Mac software,” said John Casasanta, partner of the MacHeist software bundle.
App discoverability

Even though the idea of a Mac app store is to create a one-stop-shop for all your third-party software, it won’t necessarily make it easy to find apps.

In the case of the iOS App Store, discoverability is still a problem. The list of best-selling apps is the easiest way to find apps, but otherwise the App Store doesn’t provide an adequate method to sift through the other 300,000 apps. You have to do as much research to find the right software as you would searching the web for third-party apps.

If the Mac app store accumulates a large number of apps (and it sounds like it will), customers will likely face the same paradox of choice.
A race to the bottom or top?

The iOS App Store currently serves about 300,000 apps, but many agree that the majority of offerings in the store are sub-par, and are priced at 99 cents or less. Many are even free, and offer minimal value that corresponds to their cheap price.

Casasanta wonders if we’ll see a similar “race to the bottom” with the Mac app store. However, he said he was more optimistic about the Mac app store, because the Mac developer community long ago established standards for quality. As a result, he thinks Mac users will see a plethora of quality software.

Cheaper and greener software

Ideally, because you won’t be paying for packaging or shipping of Mac apps purchased through the store, pricing on software should be cheaper than what we see today. And obviously, digital distribution means you won’t need to toss any boxes or plastic into the recycling bin.
Is there any other choice for programmers?

Developers’ websites and independent stores will have a tough time competing with a centralized Mac App Store. That means any Mac programmer who wants to make serious money may have to participate in the Mac App Store, says Justin Williams, a Mac developer who quit coding for the iPhone because of the App Store’s controversial history.

“Even though I don’t like the concept of the app store, I have to be there,” Williams said. “It’s such a large audience that you’re putting me in front of that it’d be stupid not to.”
Apple’s way or the highway

Apple is likely to enforce the same policies regulating the types of apps that are and aren’t allowed in the Mac App Store, just as it does the iOS App Store. That means the horde of Mac programmers selling apps in the Mac App Store are subject to the same strict rules, like no porn, no apps that defame famous people, and others.

Mac app developers will also likely face the same headaches as iOS developers, such as lengthy wait times until an app goes live, or questionable rejections, Williams said. However, he hopes Apple will apply lessons it learned from the App Store to the Mac App Store to mitigate these potential issues.
Closing the web?

Right now the fundamental difference between the Mac and the iPad is that the former can run any Mac-compatible program copied onto the computer, whereas the iPad is only authorized to run apps downloaded through the App Store. In other words, the Mac is more open than the iPad.

Some developers, such as Mozilla’s Beltzner, fear that Apple will continue pushing the iOS regime harder if the Mac App store becomes extremely successful. That could lead to an iPad-like app environment where the Mac only runs apps downloaded through the App Store, and not from a website, for example.

Williams shares this concern.

“I can see them getting to the point in [OS X version] 10.8 or 10.9 where they say we have to lock [the Mac] up entirely,” Williams said.

Casasanta, however, doesn’t see that happening.

“It makes absolutely no sense because, unlike the App Store for iOS, the Mac App Store isn’t the only way to distribute your apps and will likely never be the only way,” he said.

Rangers must reverse horrible record in San Fran

2010-10-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Not only have the Texas Rangers never been to the World Series before, they are winless in nine games at AT&T Park. And make that an 11-game losing streak in San Francisco dating back to the windy, cold nights at the Giants' former home of Candlestick Park.

The Rangers must find a way to win in San Francisco's pitcher-friendly waterfront ballpark at least once, because the Giants have home-field advantage in the Series. Game 1 is Wednesday night — and the Giants know Texas manager Ron Washington will have his team ready with post-season ace Cliff Lee on the mound.

"I keep saying the same thing over: It's not the best team that wins, it's the team that plays the best on that day," Washington said after his team reached its first World Series by beating the defending champion New York Yankees. "Well, that was quite a few days that we played better than the teams we played and that's why we are headed to the World Series."

The Giants returned to the Bay Area on Sunday afternoon following their Game 6 victory Saturday night at Philadelphia that sent the franchise to its first World Series since the Barry Bonds-led 2002 team that finished runner-up to the wild-card Angels.

This team is so different from that 2002 team. There is no superstar in this gritty bunch.

"We fought," said left-fielder Pat Burrell, one of several new faces to come along during the course of the year. "We scratched and clawed. I don't know how we did it but we did it."

Texas was scheduled to get into town early Monday evening, opting to wait until Tuesday to hold its first workout on the field where it has endured so many defeats. Yet since AT&T Park opened for the 2000 campaign, Nolan Ryan's Rangers have at least made things interesting. Of those nine losses to the Giants, five were by two runs and three by one run. The only somewhat lopsided score was 5-1.

The Giants have the NL all-stars to thank for starting the World Series at home. This is the first time the Series has begun in a National League park since 2001 at Arizona. Home-field advantage stopped rotating between the leagues in 2003, going instead to the league that won the all-star game. The NL finally ended its 13-year drought by winning this year's Midsummer Classic, and the Giants are the beneficiary.

"We're proud and we're humbled to be where we are today," said Bill Neukom, San Francisco's bowtie wearing second-year managing partner.

Texas players actually had a few chances to change that all-star outcome, but Elvis Andrus, Josh Hamilton, Vladimir Guerrero and Ian Kinsler combined for just one hit in seven at-bats against the NL all-stars.

Giants closer and 2010 major league saves leader Brian Wilson retired Andrus to start his perfect eighth inning at Anaheim's Angel Stadium.

Lee, who had just been traded from Seattle to Texas four days earlier, didn't factor into the decision pitching one inning of relief.

But boy has the lefty been a key for the Rangers in October. He is 3-0 during this run and 7-0 with a 1.26 earned-run average for his career in the post-season, covering eight starts in five series with the Phillies and Texas.

San Francisco will look to produce more offence — as tough as that might be against Lee and Co. San Francisco was outscored 20-19 by Philadelphia in six NLCS games and had three one-run victories in both that series and the division series against Atlanta.

One thing the Giants have is balance, with somebody different capable of delivering a key play or hit on any given night. So far this post-season, it's been Cody Ross.

"It's not one guy that carries this club," manager Bruce Bochy said. "It takes the whole team every night."

Alzheimer's risk doubles in heavy smokers

2010-10-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

People who smoke heavily in middle age seem to more than double their risk of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia late in life, research suggests.

Smoking is a well-established risk factor for stroke, but the link between smoking and risk of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia has been less clear since heavy smokers often die from other ailments before smoking's toll on the brain is evident.

To find out more, Dr. Minna Rusanen of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio and colleagues analyzed data from 21,123 people in California who participated in a survey between 1978 and 1985.

When the study began, the participants were between 50 and 60 years old, and they were tracked for an average of 23 years of followup.

During that time, 5,367 participants or 25 per cent were diagnosed with dementia, including 1,136 with Alzheimer's disease and 416 with vascular dementia, the researchers found.

Compared with non-smokers, those smoking more than two packs a day had 2.14 times higher risk of dementia 2.57 times higher risk of Alzheimer's, and 2.57 times higher risk of vascular dementia — another common and sometimes overlapping cause of progressive deterioration of memory and thinking.

"This study shows that the brain is not immune to the long-term consequences of heavy smoking," said the study's principal investigator, Rachel Whitmer, a research scientist with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif.

"We know smoking compromises the vascular system by affecting blood pressure and elevates blood clotting factors, and we know vascular health plays a role in risk of Alzheimer's disease," she added in a release.
Tobacco myth 'up in smoke'

"In conclusion, if, as a smoker, you are able to remain free of cancer and cardiovascular disease in middle age, you are also more likely to lose your memory and mental abilities in later years through increased likelihood of having Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia," said Claude Messier of the school of psychology at the University of Ottawa, commenting on the research.

"Another health myth sponsored by the tobacco industry is going up in smoke," Messier added in an email.

Messier said strengths of the study include:

* The large number and variety of participants, which makes the sample representative of the population.
* The volunteers were evaluated in mid-life and followed over time, which is considered more accurate than asking people to recall what they did decades ago.

Limitations of the study include a less precise diagnosis of dementia, and self-reports of smoking that may be less reliable.

The researchers took into account factors such as age, sex, education, race, marital status, hypertension, body mass index, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and alcohol use.

One of the study's authors declared potential conflicts of interest from receiving honoraria from pharmaceutical companies.

The study was funded by the National Graduate School of Clinical Investigation, EVO grants from Kuopio University Hospital, and grants from the Juho Vainio Foundation and Maire Taponen Foundation.

The study was also supported by a Kaiser Permanente Community Benefits Grant and National Institute of Health and Academy of Finland Grant.

Departing Microsoft visionary sees 'post-PC' world

2010-10-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp's departing software chief, has asked the company to move on from its roots as a computer-oriented company to imagine a 'post-PC world' that relies on wireless devices and the Internet to function.

The call from Ozzie, who announced his retirement from Microsoft last week, is meant to galvanize the company, which has fallen behind Apple Inc and Google Inc in the rapidly growing phone and tablet computer sector that many now see as key to the future.

"Close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," wrote Ozzie in a memo posted on his personal blog on Monday. "Those who can envision a plausible future that's brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead."

(To read the blog, click here link.reuters.com/nam22q)

The message comes almost exactly five years after Ozzie made his initial mark on Microsoft with his 'Internet Services Disruption' memo, which is regarded as Microsoft's manifesto for moving toward "cloud computing," where data and software are supplied over the Internet rather than installed on machines.

In Monday's blog, Ozzie said some of the goals he envisioned five years ago "remain elusive and are yet to be realized."

He goes on to praise competitors for "seamless fusion of hardware and software and services," which appears to be a nod to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phone system, which are proving more popular with consumers than Microsoft's own offerings.

"Their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences," said Ozzie.

Microsoft's new phone software will be available on handsets in the United States next month and a slew of Windows-powered tablet devices are expected next year.

Instead of a tech world founded on PCs and software -- which Microsoft essentially created -- Ozzie urges Microsoft to think about "cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding" and "appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services."

Such devices could be at home, in the car, controlling elevators or highways, said Ozzie.

"Today's PC's, phones and pads are just the very beginning," said Ozzie. "We'll see decades to come of incredible innovation from which will emerge all sorts of 'connected companions' that we'll wear, we'll carry, we'll use on our desks and walls and the environment all around us."

Ozzie, 54, is working on some of Microsoft's entertainment projects before retiring from the company in several months. He took over the role of Chief Software Architect from co-founder Bill Gates in 2006.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said there are no plans to appoint a new chief software architect when Ozzie retires.

Warren Buffett's latest pick? Investor Todd Combs

2010-10-25T18:29:00.000-07:00

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett may have just made one of his boldest market bets: hiring 39-year-old Todd Combs to manage a major part of Berkshire Hathaway's investments.

On Monday Berkshire announced Combs, chief executive and portfolio manager at Castle Point Capital Management LLC, had been hired after a three-year search to "handle a significant portion of Berkshire's investment portfolio."

Castle Point is a value-oriented long-short equity fund that focuses on financial services companies. He managed $395 million on July 1, according to a July investor letter obtained by Reuters.

Through June this year, his fund has risen 28 percent from its November 2005 inception, against a 49 percent drop in his benchmark, the SPDR Financial Services sector fund.

The Greenwich, Connecticut-based Castle Point manager, though hardly a household name, is considered by some peers to be one of the best financial services sector investors around. And, like his new boss, he is a gifted writer of thoughtful shareholder letters.

"At Castle Point we like to think of ourselves as owners of businesses," Combs said in a seven-page July letter to shareholders -- sounding a bit like the Oracle of Omaha.

In the same conversation where he invokes value investing pioneers Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, he also channels Charles Darwin in discussing the chances of investment loss.

"(W)e may begin with the acknowledgment of the pervasive reality of failure -- that, for instance, 99.9 percent of biological species that have ever existed are now extinct," he wrote. "Or, a little close to home, that only one original member of the Dow Jones industrial index continues to be a member today."

As manager of a long-short hedge fund, Combs tries to generate high returns with less volatility than the broader market. The fund's best years came in 2007, when it rose 19 percent, and 2006, when it was up 14 percent.

In 2008 when the bottom dropped out during the financial crisis, Castle Point had a 5.7 percent loss. Last year the fund rebounded, climbing 6.2 percent.

Castle Point notes its returns have not been tied to the underlying performance of financial stocks. Combs realized average returns of 1.7 percent during 36 positive-return months, against gains of 4.8 percent in the XLF.

At the same time, his losses were more muted: down 1.8 percent on average during 20 negative-return months, compared with a drop of 7.7 percent for the index. Castle Point returns were about half as volatile as those of the broader Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

His top 10 long holdings in June included CIT Group senior secured credit, CME Group Inc, MasterCard, US Bancorp, Western Union, State Street Corp, Amadeus IT and RenaissanceRe.

Until today, Combs was one of many successful but obscure hedge fund managers. Investors who follow Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway say it should come as no surprise the 80-year-old iconoclast took a less traveled road to find a potential successor.

"The most talented people and the people with the best independent judgment are not to be found at large institutions," said James Armstrong, president of Henry H. Armstrong Associates in Pittsburgh, who oversees $400 million.

Karzai: We receive cash from Iran

2010-10-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

arzai insists that the cash transfers are legitimate and used to cover important costs

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said that his office receives cash in bags from Iran.

The Afghan leader said on Monday that this method of aid distribution is transparent and helps cover government expenses. He also said that the US makes similar cash payments.

The comments came after a report on Sunday that Karzai's chief of staff, Omar Dawoodzai, receives covert bagfuls of money - possibly as much as $6 million in a single payment - sent by neighbouring Iran in a bid to secure influence.

Karzai said the money was used for palace expenses, salaries and for "people outside," but gave no further details.

The New York Times, citing an unnamed Afghan official, said that millions of dollars in cash channelled from Iran are used to pay Afghan parliamentarians, tribal elders and Taliban commanders.

US concern

Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, said world leaders should have "every reason to be concerned about Iran trying to have a negative influence on Afghanistan."

He added Iran had a responsibility to exert "a positive influence on the formation of a government there, and to ensure that Afghanistan is not a country where terrorists can find safe harbour, or where attacks can be planned on their soil."

Karzai said he gets money from several "friendly countries" but named only the US and Iran, the latter
contributing almost $1 million twice per year. Karzai said he will continue to ask for Iranian money.

"The government of Iran assists (my) office with five or six or seven hundred thousand euros once or twice a year, which is official aid," Karzai told reporters at a joint news conference in Kabul with visiting Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon.

"This is transparent, this is something that I have discussed even with President George Bush,
nothing is hidden, the United States is doing the same thing."

PJ Crowley, US state department spokesman, said Washington did not question Iran's right to provide aid to Afghanistan but that it was skeptical of Tehran's motives "given its history of playing a destabilizing role with its neighbours."

Asked about Karzai's assertion that the United States had also in the past provided cash in bags, Crowley said this had happened but was not taking place now.

"Going back a number of years, because of the nature of the Afghan financial system, there have been times where assistance has come into Afghanistan in the form of cash," Crowley said.

"That's not the form that our assistance takes today."

Denial by Iran

In Tehran, the semi-official Fars news agency said Iran's embassy in Afghanistan denied the New York Times report.

"Such baseless rumours are spread by some Western media with the aim of harming growing relations between the two neighbour and friendly countries," Fars quoted the embassy as saying in a statement.

The insurgency raging in Afghanistan is now the bloodiest it has been since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban, despite the presence of 150,000 foreign troops.

Iran has wide and growing influence in Afghanistan, especially in the west of the country, where it has important economic ties.

US envoy Richard Holbrooke has said the United States recognises that Iran has a role to play in resolving the Afghan conflict.

But Tehran denies supporting armed groups in Afghanistan and blames the instability on the presence of Western troops.

Packers in position to take control of NFC North

2010-10-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

GREEN BAY, Wis. -- The Green Bay Packers finally got the best of Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings.

And with the Chicago Bears struggling, the NFC North title appears to be there for the taking.

At least for a day, the Packers could forget about their own disappointing start, recent back-to-back overtime losses and a remarkable rash of injuries. Sunday night's emotional victory over the Vikings brought renewed optimism to Green Bay on Monday.

It also brought a team that hasn't yet played up to its potential one day closer to a tough road game against the New York Jets on Sunday.

"I don't think you run around with your pompoms this week," Packers coach Mike McCarthy said. "That's the last thing that I'm going to do. Everybody had a chance to enjoy the win last night, and I'm sure everybody feels good today. It was easier coming to work today than it was last week. That's our business. Winning is important. A lot of good things come off of winning. But it's onto the next one. It's a simple as that."

McCarthy said Monday that the Packers are likely to lose two more players, linebacker Brady Poppinga (left knee) and defensive lineman Mike Neal (shoulder), to season-ending surgeries.

Green Bay already has seven players on injured reserve, including four starters: tight end Jermichael Finley, linebacker Nick Barnett, running back Ryan Grant and safety Morgan Burnett.

And the Packers were far from perfect against the Vikings.

The offense was better on third down that it had been in recent weeks. Running back Brandon Jackson had what McCarthy called his best game as a Packer. The Packers' tackles, veteran Chad Clifton and rookie Bryan Bulaga, helped hold the Vikings without a sack.
But Aaron Rodgers had two uncharacteristic interceptions deep in Vikings territory and didn't appear to be on the same page as his receivers on several throws.

Defensive coordinator Dom Capers had to improvise after Cullen Jenkins pulled a calf muscle in pregame warmups and Ryan Pickett reinjured his ankle. The Packers couldn't play much base defense against a team that was committed to running with Adrian Peterson.

Still, the defense forced Favre into three ugly second-half interceptions. Linebackers Desmond Bishop and A.J. Hawk, players who had to deal with diminished roles earlier in the season, both had interceptions Sunday.

And the Packers were able to put pressure on Favre at the end of the game.

In all, there's a feeling that the Packers are in good position despite not yet playing up to their potential.

"The scary thing is I don't think we've ever played on all cylinders in regards to offense, defense and special teams," Clay Matthews said Sunday night. "But, you see little flashes here and there. I know defensively with losing some of those key playmakers we've still been able to hold our own and take it all of the way down to the wire. Unfortunately, a field goal here or a missed play there, that's really the difference right now."

The Packers have tried to downplay the emotion associated with facing their former quarterback, especially after losing to him twice last season. Even after a win, Rodgers wasn't interested in talking about Favre.

"It's obviously something that the media has talked about a lot and has brought to my attention, obviously, a number of times," Rodgers said. "I guess we can maybe stop with some of that for a little while."

But teammates said Sunday's win might have meant more to Rodgers than he was letting on.

"I think honestly, it does mean a great deal to him," Matthews said. "We might see it as any other game, but for him, there's certainly a little something special. For him, sitting behind Favre, then coming out and putting together two fantastic seasons and losing to him twice, for him to come out against the guy who - whatever you want to call it, the quarterback who was in front of him - it means a great deal to him."

Backup quarterback Matt Flynn sensed it, too.

"I think it means a lot to him," Flynn said. "Obviously it's a big game for us as a team, the way the season has gone. But personally, I think this was definitely one he had circled that he wanted to win. I'm happy for him. I'm happy he got it."

As far as McCarthy was concerned, the celebration ended Monday morning.

"We're just pulling some things together," McCarthy said. "It's a good win. It's an excellent win as far as the big dose of confidence that comes with a division win and everything surrounding this game. But it's over. We're on to the Jets."

Girl who had hiccups for five weeks charged with murder

2010-10-25T18:10:00.001-07:00

A teenager who became famous after hiccupping uncontrollably for weeks has been charged with luring a man she met online to a house where he was robbed and fatally shot.

Jennifer Mee, 19, of St. Petersburg and two others are charged with first-degree murder in the death of Shannon Griffin, 22, on Saturday.

Ms. Mee’s unusual condition landed her on NBC’s Today Show in 2007 and got her a hug from country star Keith Urban.

But her life seemed to fall into disarray when the hiccups finally stopped five weeks after they started. She ran away from home twice and her family has sued a hiccup cure company for allegedly using her image for profit without permission.

“I’ve said for a while now: her case of the hiccups wasn’t a case of the hiccups, it was a curse of the hiccups,” Ms. Mee’s mother, Rachel Robidoux, told radio station 93.3 WFLZ in Tampa on Monday. She said she did not know exactly what happened to Mr. Griffin, but described the situation as a nightmare and said her daughter had not lived with her in a year.

St. Petersburg Police Chief Chuck Harmon said Monday that Ms. Mee met Mr. Griffin through a website recently and lured him to a house across the street from her apartment building, where the two others robbed him at gunpoint.

Mr. Griffin struggled and was shot several times. Chief Harmon said it was a robbery gone awry and that less than $50 was stolen from Mr. Griffin, who had worked at a Walmart for at least a year and was supposed to be on vacation this week.

On her MySpace page, Ms. Mee describes herself as a “female version of a hustla” and adds that “her heart is still in Vermont,” where her father lives. She last logged in to her page on Sunday.

Ms. Mee’s hiccups — up to 50 a minute — gained her notoriety in 2007. She tried home remedies and consulted medical specialists, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist, until the hiccups finally stopped on their own.

She was being held without bond early Monday and Pinellas County jail records did not show whether she had an attorney. She is scheduled for a court appearance Monday afternoon at the Pinellas County Court in Clearwater.

NPR chief sorry over handling of Williams' firing

2010-10-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

Vivian Schiller, chief executive of NPR, apologized to colleagues for how she handled Juan Williams’s firing.

NPR's chief executive says she's sorry for how analyst Juan Williams' dismissal was handled - but not for firing him. Vivian Schiller sent an apology to National Public Radio staff members on Sunday night and wrote to managers at NPR stations. Her dismissal of Williams for saying on Fox News Channel that he gets nervous when he sees people on a plane with clothing that identifies them as Muslim became a "public relations disaster," NPR's ombudsman said.

The question now for NPR is whether the situation will cause lasting damage to public broadcasting permanently, or whether in some ways it might help it.

Williams, who was fired in a phone conversation, deserved a face-to-face meeting, Schiller wrote. She has also expressed regret for saying, after last Wednesday's firing, that whatever feelings Williams has about Muslims should be between him and "his psychiatrist or his publicist - take your pick."

NPR, which had long been troubled by Williams' dual role as an analyst at Fox, said his remarks violated its standards of not having on-air personnel giving opinions.

"I stand by my decision to end NPR's relationship with Juan, but I deeply regret the way I handled it and explained it," Schiller wrote to staff members.

Williams said Monday that he had not received any apology from NPR or talked to anyone at the station since his dismissal. NPR said Schiller has tried to reach him.

"Obviously, I feel that I should have had the opportunity to supply NPR with the entirety of the context of the statement to make sure they understood, and I am hurt by the suggestion that I need a psychiatrist and am a bigot," he said.

Schiller's decision unleashed conservative critics already suspicious of public radio at a time when many stations were soliciting pledges, right after a liberal icon donated $1.8 million, and shortly before an election that could put some of its opponents in a position of power.

NPR had previously asked Williams not to identify himself as an NPR analyst when he appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" or other Fox shows. The journalist said last week he believed his bosses were looking for an excuse to fire him. It looked to many on the outside as if Williams was losing his job for saying something that hardly seemed like a fireable offense.

Yet the decision also eliminated a distraction - NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard said Williams had long been the subject of the most listener complaints - and allowed NPR's leaders to portray themselves as defenders of old-school journalistic values.

The fallout spread quickly. PBS ombudsman Michael Getler said he had received hundreds of calls or e-mails critical of the decision, even though Williams did not work for public television. When Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina introduces planned legislation to eliminate government funding for public radio, he said it would include television, too.

The Williams dismissal also came shortly after the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, a frequent target of conservative critics, donated $1.8 million for NPR to hire people to report on government in all 50 states.

One danger for NPR is that Williams' exit calls attention to the network's lack of on-air diversity, said Richard Prince, who blogs about diversity for the Maynard Institute of Journalism Education. Williams was one of its few nonwhite personalities. NPR has two programs hosted by black women, an on-air reporter who is black and another who has just been hired, a spokeswoman said.

More than 100 people called or e-mailed Cincinnati's NPR affiliate, WVXU, with the majority complaining about the decision, said Rich Eiswerth, the station's CEO, president and general manager. Two people canceled their memberships, he said.

"In my opinion, this is going to be a tempest in a teapot," Eiswerth said. "The news cycle being what it is - a week from now is a decade in the news cycle - I don't think it will have a big impact on NPR."

WAMC radio in Albany, N.Y., said it received several complaints, not necessarily from its members. "There was an organized right-wing attempt to use this to embarrass NPR," said Alan Chartock, the station's president. "NPR had it coming, because they really blew it."

But he said the decision to fire Williams might help fundraising for NPR stations in some parts of the country.

Fourteen percent of NPR listeners identified themselves as Republican, 40 percent said they were Democrats and 41 percent were independent, according to a survey taken in June by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Among all surveyed by Pew, the breakdown was 25 percent Republican, 33 percent Democratic and 34 percent independent.

"With their listeners, (Williams' exit) would be a positive," said Robert Lichter, author of "The Media Elite," a 1986 book that traced political leanings of journalists. "I don't imagine a lot of their listeners are regular Fox viewers."

An estimated $3.3 million of NPR's $166 million budget comes from federal grants, or less than 2 percent, rendering the political threat to strip its public funding a small issue. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting accounts for roughly 10 percent of the NPR affiliate stations' revenue on average - more for small, rural stations and less in the big cities, said Dana Rehm, NPR spokeswoman.

PBS, meanwhile, gets 15 percent of its budget through CPB funds - making the threat more meaningful.

"As far as members of Congress are concerned, we believe that they will understand the distinction between the different organizations," said PBS spokeswoman Jan McNamara.

The "vast majority" of people who called NPR to complain are not NPR members, Rehm said. The net effect on individual donations still is not known, she said. NPR has also checked with its corporate benefactors and found most remain steadfast in their support, she added.

NPR hopes that listeners and other journalists will appreciate their efforts to stand strong about removing all appearances that their employees are biased, particularly with the strong cable news trend in the opposite direction. NPR already earned a reputation for prissy purism among some critics when it wouldn't allow staff members to attend comic Jon Stewart's Washington rally this weekend, fearing their presence would send a political signal.

"There's no question that point has been lost in the heat of the entire controversy," Rehm said.

Obama touts job creation as midterm elections near

2010-10-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday touted his administration's job-creation efforts just eight days before elections in which voters' economic anxiety threatens his Democrats' grip on Congress.

Making a campaign stop in the tiny state of Rhode Island, Obama acknowledged some of his policies were not popular and that Americans were frustrated by the weak economic recovery. But the steps he took averted a second Great Depression, he stressed.

"It took us a long time to get us into this economic hole that we've been in. But we are going to get out and I am absolutely convinced there are brighter days ahead for America," Obama told workers after touring the American Cord & Webbing plant in Woonsocket, outside Providence.

It was the start of the last full week of campaigning before the November 2 elections, with polls showing Obama's Democrats at risk of losing control of the House of Representatives and headed for a slimmed-down majority in the Senate.

U.S. voters will elect 435 members to the House of Representatives and fill 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

Projected Republican gains could put the brakes on Obama's legislative agenda.

Obama used his Rhode Island visit to highlight a $30 billion small-business lending program to help generate jobs, a package he pushed through Congress in September. Republican opponents have called it wasteful spending.

TALKING A GOOD GAME

Obama repeated his charge that Republicans had played politics with the small-business lending package by holding it up in the Senate for months. The bill finally cleared the U.S. Congress in September.

"They talk a good game about tax cuts and giving entrepreneurs the freedom to succeed," he said. But "they voted against tax breaks for companies creating jobs here in the United States," he said.

Obama's attacks on Republicans have done little to dent voter disappointment with his economic policies, which have so far failed to bring down unemployment stuck near 10 percent.

Delivering change is hard and it is understandable that people are discouraged, "but we're just in the first quarter," Obama told a Democratic fundraising event in Providence. "We have a whole game to play."

The fundraiser was one of two for the congressional campaign of Providence Mayor David Cicilline and other candidates in Rhode Island, a traditionally Democratic-leaning state.

Polls show Cicilline with a lead of about 10 percentage points over Republican state lawmaker John Loughlin in the race to succeed Democrat Patrick Kennedy in the U.S. House, but Obama's visit showed he was taking no chances.

Obama has found himself in a bind, however, over the governor's race in Rhode Island.

The president has withheld endorsement of the Democratic candidate, state treasurer Frank Caprio. He is in a tight contest against former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who is running as an independent and was a high-profile endorser of Obama during the Democratic primaries in 2008.
Caprio, on hearing that Obama had no plans to formally back anyone in the race, told Rhode Island radio station WPRO that Obama can "take his endorsement and really shove it as far as I'm concerned." He called the decision "Washington insider politics at its worst."
White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton told reporters traveling on Air Force One, "Out of his respect for his friend Lincoln Chafee, the president decided not to get involved in this race."
Burton said Obama was "comfortable" with his decision.
Obama is keeping up a busy schedule of campaign appearances this week aimed at rekindling the enthusiasm that helped sweep him to victory two years ago.
The congressional elections are widely seen as a referendum on Obama's own record.
Obama is trying to show voters -- especially the middle class seen as crucial to embattled Democrats' electoral prospects -- that he and his party are doing everything they can to boost the tepid U.S. economy.

Twister tears through northeast Texas, local authorities say

2010-10-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

At least one tornado ripped through northeast Texas Sunday evening, destroying homes, turning over vehicles and knocking train cars off tracks, local authorities said.

A tornado struck Rice Texas at 5:30 p.m., Navarro County Chief Deputy Mike Cox said.

The twister destroyed three homes, damaged at least two more, turned over an 18-wheeler truck onto a passenger car and knocked cars from a freight train off their tracks, he said. It also caused extensive damage to Rice Elementary School.

Four people were transported to the hospital with minor injuries, Cox said.

In addition to "significant damage" from a tornado moving through Navarro County, witnesses have also spotted possible tornados in other parts of northeast Texas, the National Weather Service said.

Betty Montgomery of the Lone Oak Fire Department said callers had reported a debris cloud and structural damage to homes, but authorities had not confirmed whether a tornado had touched down.

At least one home in Lone Oak was destroyed, Red Cross spokeswoman Anita Foster said.

Joey Romero, 24, said he and his girlfriend rode out the storm in the freezer of a Sonic restaurant at a service station in Rice.

They were driving from Dallas to Houston when it started to hail, he said.

"We pulled over under some covering. Hail the size of golf balls started falling. Then, we saw hail the size of baseballs," he said.

Someone screamed when they saw the tornado forming behind Sonic, he said. The wind roared and the station lost power.

"The first few seconds it was all sort of surreal. I couldn't really believe it was happening...We all walked back in the freezer. It was cold in there and there wasn't light and people were starting to cry," he said.

The hail shattered car windows, Romero said. The second-year medical student at University of Texas, Houston, said he helped treat injuries. A police officer told him a truck and a car had flipped over on the highway.

After several hours inside Sonic, Romero was on the road back to Houston late Sunday.

"Even now, we can see the storm off to the east of us. The sky is pitch black," he said.

NIU on lockdown; Campus uneasy as police reveal few details about missing student and remains found

2010-10-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Antinette Keller appears in this photo supplied by NIU Police Department. Antinette Keller, a Northern Illinois University student has been missing since Oct. 14, 2010.

(Courtesy NIU Police Department)

Unease and fear hit the Northern Illinois University campus on Sunday as dormitories remained on lockdown and students waited to hear if remains found in a heavily wooded park belonged to one of their own.

From campus elevators to the NIU bleachers as the Huskies beat Central Michigan University on Saturday night, the talk on campus centered on freshman Antinette "Toni" Keller. She disappeared Oct. 14 after telling friends she was going for a walk toward Prairie Park, just south of Illinois Highway 38.

"She's a young girl who went off to school and had everything waiting for her ... and it just stopped," said Mary Tarling, a cousin of Keller's and a family spokeswoman. "It's hard not to have that hit your heart.

"Anyone who saw something, even if it might not have seemed important then, it might be now."

Authorities on Saturday said they discovered human remains in Prairie Park nine days after Keller, 18, of southwest suburban Plainfield, reminded her friends to call her once they were out of class. The remains were found with various items consistent with some of Keller's belongings, DeKalb police Chief Bill Feithen said, declining to be specific. The remains appeared to be there for short time after Keller's disappearance, he said.

NIU attracts students predominantly from the Chicago area and was the scene of a grisly shooting on Valentine's Day in 2008 that left six people dead, including the shooter, and wounded more than a dozen others.

While police were mum Sunday about whose remains they found in the woods and what happened to Keller, NIU officials have beefed up security. Campus dorms have been locked so only residents can enter. Police have stepped up their presence and extended hours for campus buses.

Fearing the worst, Keller's friends returned to the same steps outside their dormitory Sunday where they always gathered to strum guitars and smoke cigarettes.

Friends said it was normal for Keller, sketchbook and camera in hand, to take what she called "art adventures" — to get away and find inspiration from the outdoors.

But they got worried when she didn't return their calls.

The next day, the group of inseparable friends knew something was wrong. Marissa Gill decided to report her missing.

"If something happened, I wanted them to find her fast," said Gill, a junior from Rockford.

While authorities were notified and began their search, Keller's friends also were on the hunt. Ben Yamamoto, a freshman from Lake Zurich, said he went out to Prairie Park, a heavily wooded 150-acre park with a walking trail, three times during the week hoping to find "anything."

"I just wanted to find her," Yamamoto said.

Keller's relatives said they talked to her the day before she disappeared and said she had planned to come home for the weekend.

Police have classified the discovery of the remains as a death investigation. The DeKalb County coroner's office referred questions to police.

University spokesman Bradley Hoey said the precautionary measures, such as locking the front door of dormitories, are university policy that has been in place for a number of years, not a reaction to the 2008 campus shooting. NIU has sent e-mails and text messages to students to alert them of the heightened security measures.

At Keller's dorm, Neptune Hall, students lamented their potential loss.

"Last night was probably one of the hardest nights we've ever had to go through," said sophomore Brooke Bocek, 20. "Everyone was crying. Here at Neptune, we're pretty much family."

Bocek said she thinks there should be more security at night throughout the school year.

Freshman Victoria Butler, 18, said she feels safe but wouldn't travel alone at night even with increased security. She added that if campus police beefed up security only for the weekend, "I think it's pretty pointless."

Hoey said the doors of dormitories would remain locked for the coming week.

Demetrius Doss, 18, said he has started escorting his female friends around campus in light of the investigation.

"For myself, I'm not really afraid," Doss said. "It's the women on campus. We need to look out for them."

Students are now required to swipe their student IDs to get into their dorms at all times, and students are allowed to access only the building they live in, Doss said. Typically, students are required to use their cards only after 11 p.m., several students said.

Though authorities haven't yet said what might have happened to Keller, those close to her already were mourning their loss.

"If this is how it is, at least she's in a better place," said Denis Mitchell, who said he was one of Keller's best friends.

Adam Bock, a graduate student who teaches introductory art classes, said Keller frequently revised her intricate, organic pattern designs without Bock's prompting. Keller was supposed to be in his 2 p.m. class the day she disappeared.

"It's tragic," Bock said. "She had a world of potential."

Taryn Boals, Keller's drawing teacher, said she was an "incredibly motivated" student. In the class of 15, Keller stood out and was eager to get an A.

Friends said Keller showed that type of passion in life. They described her as a laid-back "hippie" who loved music. The Beatles, Nirvana and Pink Floyd were among her favorite bands, said Mitchell, a freshman from Oak Lawn.

"She was like the flower child of the group," he said. "The sunshine."

Her friends, a tightknit group of mostly artists, said Keller spent most of her time outside, sketching and hanging out underneath an evergreen tree outside Neptune Hall.

"She was a child of nature," Gill said.

And she loved Snickers bars.

"All she wanted to do was sit out, eat her Snickers and look up at the stars," Yamamoto said.

Vale, union halt exploratory talks

2010-10-24T20:25:00.000-07:00

Exploratory talks between the union and the mining company in the Voisey's Bay strike have broken off without resolution, opening the way for a provincial inquiry.

Bob Carter, a spokesman for nickel mining giant Vale, said the Brazilian-based company met with the United Steelworkers union and a mediator in St. John's on Friday.

However, Carter says that after talks that lasted until late at night the "discussions ended with no resolution to the impasse."

Carter and local union president Darren Cove also said no new talks are planned in the 15-month-long strike.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams issued a statement Friday saying the mine's owner, Vale Newfoundland and Labrador Ltd., and the union must reach a settlement.

Williams had said an industrial inquiry would look into the protracted dispute in Labrador unless a deal was reached this week.
Recommendations sought

The three-person inquiry cannot legislate an end to the dispute, but it can make recommendations to the province on whether labour legislation needs to be changed and comment on the positions of the company and the union.

Cove says that with the mine running at full production, partly due to use of non-union labour and contractors, the company has little reason to settle.

He said the union would welcome the inquiry.

"The only place to go from here is the inquiry and we welcome the outcome of that. And, hopefully, there will be something put in place that will try to end the strike," he said in an interview.

Cove said the workers will continue to survive on strike pay, but he noted there are tensions in communities where union members and replacement workers live nearby.

Carter said the company has tabled five settlement proposals that include wage increases, pension improvements and bonuses.

"We feel the proposals we've tabled are fair and they are reflective of our operations in Labrador," he said.

Carter said between 200 and 250 workers are operating the nickel and copper concentrate mine in Voisey's Bay.

MacBook Air and the future of notebooks

2010-10-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

If there’s one Apple product that professionals love to hate, it’s the MacBook Air, Apple’s super-lightweight notebook that was just refreshed. At the launch event, Steve Jobs said the future of notebooks can be seen today in the new MBA. Whether the sexy Air is right for everyone at this moment is questionable – although it’s always chancy to bet against Steve Jobs – but the Air likely heralds the future for the MacBook.
At the rollout event, Jobs said: ‘We asked ourselves, “What would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up?’ Well, this is the result. … We think it’s the future of notebooks.”

There is no denying the beauty of the MacBook Air and now it comes in several sizes and price points. The hardware is rock solid and very capable, certainly more capable than the PC netbook concepts that so many keep pointing to as its competition (as well as the competition for the iPad).
However, the refreshed MacBook Air stacks up closely with the plain ol’ MacBook line. It brings the benefits of lightweight, aluminum unibody construction to customers who were used to plastic (polycarbonate) enclosures. Its screen resolution is greater and its flash-based memory can handle the abuse of mobility better than the standard hard drive in the MacBook.
Still, many customers of MacBooks may want greater storage in the box. I know several MacBook owners who have used the bundled iMovie application to edit movies and they found they were constrained by the limited storage capacity of the MacBook line. Of course, these customers would do better to simply plug in a USB drive or small array that would give them plenty of storage.
Others complain about the lack of Ethernet. The MBA has two USB 2.0 ports and 802.11n wireless, which Apple has decided is sufficient for mobile users. Those customers who want Ethernet can buy Apple’s optional USB-to-Ethernet adapter.
These points aside, I am puzzled by some of the MBA criticism. For example, my colleague Christopher Dawson says that the education market isn’t right for the MacBook Air. While he admits that its a better computer than a Windows netbook and its aluminum unibody construction is more solid, Dawson says the cheaper the better in education:

My point? How wise is it to spend $949 (educational pricing on their base model) on a new MacBook air for students? … But I could buy two or three netbooks for every 11″ MBA. And aluminum or not, a student bent on mischief (or one who has succumbed to the nation’s obesity epidemic and manages to sit on the computer, which happens more often than one might think) is going to destroy a thousand dollar computer just about as effectively as they will a $250 netbook. The only difference is that schools won’t have the budget to replace them.

By my reading, his point questions whether any notebook computer is right for education. Netbooks may be less expensive, but we all admit they are crap hardware. Is this the message we want for our kids: Crap? Dawson mostly admits that the MBA with flash and unibody construction (and let’s not forget the MagSafe power adapter technology) are likely more rugged than most netbooks.
Perhaps instead of netbooks, schools could pick a combination of iPads for mobility and iMacs for computing power and reliability, which would present the best value as well as have the most chance of surviving the rigors of this market. And the iMac solution offers the best value since it can run Mac OS X and Windows and Linux.
Meanwhile, professional users have kept up the mantra that the MacBook Air is no substitute for a MacBook Pro. And this is the truth.
My Apple Core colleague Jason O’Grady runs down processor issues with the new MBA, which runs a Core 2 Duo processor like the MacBook rather than the more-capable Core i3 processor.

Apple ships the 2010 MacBook Air with a discrete graphics processor (GPU) — an NVIDIA GeForce 320M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM — rather than using the integrated graphics that comes on the Intel chips. Perhaps Apple didn’t want to pay more for the newer chip, only to get better graphics that it wasn’t going to use? Again, just a theory.
My problem with Apple’s chip selection it that even though the performance bump from the Core 2 Duo to the Core i3 is marginal, the Core i3 has several other advantages.

Of course, the Air’s storage capacity issues will resonate with professional users as well. And don’t forget expandability. For example, I need a card slot that supports my investment in eSATA storage, so I have to go with the 17-inch model of the MacBook Pro line, which offers an ExpressCard/34 slot.
Certainly, Steve Jobs didn’t say that that the Air was a substitute for the MacBook Pro, he specially said “MacBook.” Based upon Steve and the Air’s spec sheet, it appears that the Air supplant the MacBook line. Users wanting greater storage and video performance in a notebook computer will be directed to the MacBook Pro line.
As as I wrote at the introduction of the first-generation MacBook Air, there’s something about this notebook that riles usually sensible technologists. The MBA is an amazing piece of industrial design and lightweight performance, but it doesn’t offer this or that technology. Yes, it can’t offer the best performance in its category, if that category is any and all notebook computers. But the Air a very capable machine.
Read: Why does the MacBook Air make so many so dumb?
What is significant is that in the new Air models we continue to see that Apple keeps driving its high-end technology down to the masses.
When the MacBook Air was released in 2008, I wrote that it was aimed at a narrow upscale segment of the market. These customers care about style and what that style says about them. It’s all a part of their personal brand.

These customers want excellent design and will value the drama created by the MacBook Air. When they open this machine at a meeting, it may say more about them than a $300 haircut, or a bespoke suit.

That focus has changed. This exciting and useful industrial design is now offered to a much wider segment. Apple’s calculation is that the new Air models provide the necessary storage capacity and performance for most users, especially for enterprise customers.
At the same time, the Air will provide a better, more reliable mobility experience. With flash onboard it will be super reliable and better able than a standard notebook to survive the fall from an overhead storage compartment on the airplane. And it runs Windows.
I guess Jobs is right. For most notebook users, the future is now in the Air.

Microsoft: Windows 8 Is 2 Years Away

2010-10-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

In a blog post on its Dutch website, Microsoft said that the next version of Windows, Windows 8, is in the works, but that the new operating system will not hit the market for about two years.

The news came at the bottom of a post commemorating Windows 7’s one-year anniversary, and suggests a substantially later deployment date than the one detailed in a leaked slide deck about the forthcoming product earlier this year.

According to the slide deck, the next version of Windows should include a Windows App Store similar to the one Apple unveiled for Mac last week, logins via facial recognition and faster boot-up times. It also cited early 2011 as the intended launch date.

Given that Apple will at minimum release its new Mac OS X Lion operating system by that time, it seems that Windows 8 will have to develop some impressive features to stay competitive.

Yet a three-year gap between operating systems is nothing new for Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has historically taken much more time to develop and deploy new versions of its desktop operating system than Apple. Windows 7 was released a year ago this month, approximately two and a half years after Windows Vista became available to most consumers. There was a five-year gap between Windows XP and Vista, a delay so painful that CEO Steve Ballmer publicly pledged that the company would never again allow such a long period to elapse between releases.

Nikkei inches down as yen weighs; earnings awaited

2010-10-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

* Earnings in full swing this week; Canon, Sony to report
* Eyes on companies' currency assumptions, impact on f'casts
* Toyota down; media reports to cut H2 dlr/yen rate to 80 yen
By Aiko Hayashi
TOKYO, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Japan's Nikkei average inched down on Monday as investors grew cautious ahead of the peak of Japan's earnings season, with many focusing on the impact of a strong yen on companies' full-year earnings outlooks.
The benchmark Nikkei erased small earlier gains as the dollar fell broadly after investors interpreted a Group of 20 agreement to shun competitive currency devaluations as a greenlight to resume dollar selling.
The reporting season gets into full swing in Japan, with a flurry of major companies set to report this week including Canon Inc (7751.T) on Wednesday and Sony Corp (6758.T) on Friday.
"The market here will likely be rangebound until earnings reports by blue-chip exporters this week are out of the way. Many in the market appear to think their full-year guidance figures won't be very good," said Hajime Nakajima, deputy general manager at Cosmo Securities.
One market focus is companies' currency assumptions for the year, and if a change in assumption rates will result in revisions for full-year earnings forecasts, analysts said.
Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) will lower its dollar/yen rate assumption by 10 yen to 80 yen for the October-March second half of the business year, which will cut its operating profit for the period by 150 billion yen ($1.84 billion), the Yomiuri newspaper said on Monday. [ID:nTKZ006604]
By the midday break, the benchmark Nikkei .N225 had shed 0.3 percent to 9,399.80, while the broader Topix .TOPX dipped 0.5 percent to 820.81.
In early Asian trade the dollar was down 0.4 percent against the yen at 81.09 yen JPY=. [FRX/]
"The G20 meeting agreed to refrain from competitive currency devaluations, and that had sparked expectations that extreme strength in the yen would be avoided," said Yumi Nishimura, deputy general manager at Daiwa Securities Capital Markets.
"But now the market seems to be returning to a bias toward weakness in the dollar, eyeing a possible further easing by the Federal Reserve next month, and that's weighing on stocks."
On Friday, the Nikkei average rose 0.5 percent, though it shed 0.8 percent on the week, weighed down by a fall of nearly 2 percent on Wednesday after China unexpectedly tightened credit.
The Nikkei's support likely stands at its 13-week moving average, now 9,372, which has served as support since September.

Resistance looms at its 26-week moving average, now 9,566, which has held down the Nikkei for about five months.
Exporter shares were generally soft, with Canon down 1.3 percent at 3,735 yen and Sony falling 1.4 percent to 2,696 yen. Toyota inched down 1.1 percent to 2,893 yen.
Shares of Honda Motor Co (7267.T) slipped 1 percent to 2,888 yen after the automaker said on Friday it was recalling 528,000 vehicles worldwide due to potential problems with a master brake cylinder seal. [ID:nN22210495]
But KDDI Corp (9433.T) surged 8.6 percent to 441,500 yen after the mobile phone operator said it would buy back up to 100 billion yen of its own shares in what could be the second-biggest share repurchase in Japan this year.
KDDI decided to launch the buyback because its stock was depressed and it had no plans for major acquisitions or any other big investments, Tadashi Onodera, who will step down as president in December, told a news conference in Tokyo.

Poly Real Estate, China's Property Developers Decline on Trial Tax Report

2010-10-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

Poly Real Estate Group Co. led China’s property developers lower in Shanghai and Shenzhen trading, after a newspaper report said the country may start levying a property tax before March next year.
Poly, the nation’s second-largest publicly traded developer, dropped 2.9 percent in Shanghai as of 9:43 a.m. while China Merchants Property Development Co. fell 2.7 percent in Shenzhen. An index tracking 34 real-estate companies in Shanghai lost 0.6 percent, compared with a 0.2 percent decline in the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index.
The country may start levying the property tax on a trial basis prior to March, the China Securities Journal reported today, citing Nie Meisheng, president of the China Real Estate Chamber of Commerce. The government said last month it will speed up the introduction of a trial property tax in some cities and then expand the levy to the whole country.

Property prices in 70 cities rose 0.5 percent in September from the previous month and the value of real-estate sales surged 56 percent, prompting the government to extend a crackdown on speculators and multiple home purchases.
China may have more than 100,000 canceled new and existing home sales in the fourth quarter of the year because of the latest government curbs on the sector, the 21st Century Business Herald reported today, citing Centaline Property Agency Ltd.
China Vanke Co., the nation’s largest real estate developer, said late yesterday third-quarter net income rose 6 percent from a year earlier to 459.5 million yuan ($69 million) even as sales dropped 27 percent.

Asian Markets Rise On G-20 Agreement

2010-10-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

SINGAPORE—Asian stock markets were modestly higher early Monday, with sentiment getting a small boost after the Group of 20 nations agreed on a truce to defuse currency-market tensions.
In Tokyo, strong-yen concerns continued to hold back buyers, while the Sydney market braced for an announcement of a US$8.2 billion takeover bid for the ASX Ltd. from Singapore Exchange Ltd.
Japan's Nikkei Stock Average was up 0.6%,
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was up 0.5% and South Korea's Kospi Composite was 0.9% higher. New Zealand markets were closed for a public holiday.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were up 27 points in screen trade.
Sentiment received a boost after a meeting of finance ministers from the G-20 nations in South Korea over the weekend vowed to avoid "competitive devaluation" of their currencies and resolved curb their external imbalances. Despite the absence of a specific multilateral deal, the uneasy truce aimed at defusing a "currency war" that's buffeted global markets appeared to lift risk sentiment.
"The G-20 went a step in the right direction toward easing global exchange rate tensions," Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients.
"That said, the overall communique is heavy on ambition but light on immediate action. In that sense, we do not think the market reaction will be substantial. Beyond any short-term positive reaction, continued basket weakness for [emerging market] currencies is likely," it added.
In TOKYO, shares were up modestly but worries over a persistently strong yen capped demand.
"If the U.S. economic data turn out disappointing this week, the yen may strengthen [against the dollar] on expectations the U.S. Fed will carry out larger-scale monetary easing," said Cosmo Securities strategist Toshikazu Horiuchi.
Fifteen of the 33 Topix subindexes were higher, with sentiment supported by expectations for brisk earnings to be announced by a string of Japanese companies this week.
Sumitomo Mitsui FG rose 1.7% after the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Saturday that the firm is expected to post strong results for the April-Septeber period.
Yahoo Japan rose 3.1% after announcing a 6.8% on-year rise in July-September net profit. Toyota Motor was off 0.6% after the Yomiuri Shimbun reported in its Monday edition that the automaker will revise its forecast for the dollar-yen exchange rate for this fiscal year to 80.00 yen from 90.00 yen.
In SYDNEY, the market got a leg up on gains in the banking sector, with Macquarie advancing 2.9%, ANZ Bank up 1.1%, Westpac Bank up 1.3% and Commonwealth Bank of Australia 0.9% higher.
Resources plays were mixed; BHP Billiton was off 0.1%, Rio Tinto rose 0.9% and Newcrest Mining advanced 0.9%.
In SEOUL, auto makers and shipbuilding stocks were supporting the market although weakness in tech plays restrained gains.
Hyundai Motors was up 0.9%, Kia Motors added 3.8% and Hyundai Heavy Industries rose 2.9%.

Clinton urges small crowd to vote big

2010-10-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

Oct. 24, 2010 -- Former President Bill Clinton speaks as Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) listens at a rally to get out the vote. Clinton earlier stumped for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Virg Bernero. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

DETROIT -- Former President Bill Clinton lavished praise Sunday on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Virg Bernero, but the Detroit rally took place in a high school gym that was only about one-third full.

Clinton, who has always enjoyed strong popularity in Detroit and was described by one Democrat on Sunday as having "rock star" appeal, drew a crowd estimated in the high hundreds to Renaissance High School on the city's west side.

He was trying to stir up the base for Bernero, shown in polls to be trailing Republican Rick Snyder by 20 percentage points.

The former president praised Bernero for balancing budgets and creating jobs as mayor of Lansing, a city Clinton said is a standout for its recent economic performance. He criticized Snyder for an economic plan he said is big on feel-good rhetoric and short on specifics and said the Ann Arbor businessman has chosen China over the U.S. when it comes to job creation.

"If he loses, you lose," Clinton said of Bernero.

Shortly before Clinton spoke, the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP, urged attendees to leave bleacher seats along one wall of the gym to try to fill the floor area in front of the podium.

Sunday's turnout for Clinton is a sign of the malaise afflicting Democrats in Michigan and around the country after huge voter turnout and countrywide gains in the 2008 election that swept President Barack Obama to power, said Bill Rustem, president of Public Sector Consultants in Lansing.

Still, "I am a little surprised," he said. "Bill Clinton remains a pretty iconic figure in Detroit and southeast Michigan."

Bernero spokesman Cullen Schwarz, who estimated the crowd size at 1,000, said the campaign never expected to fill the gym. Bernero was pleased with the size and the excitement of the crowd, especially since the site of the Clinton rally was nailed down less than 48 hours in advance, he said.

Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Snyder, said the criticisms Clinton leveled Sunday are "the same kind of partisan-charged rhetoric that Mayor Bernero and the Democratic establishment have been throwing at Rick for months now," and "it's just a message that's not resonating with voters.

"It's probably pretty indicative that they can't fill a gym on a Sunday afternoon for a former president of the U.S."

Two more stops for Clinton

Clinton later appeared in Ann Arbor to support U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Detroit, and was expected to move on to Battle Creek to stump for U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, D-Battle Creek.

The audience in Ann Arbor waited three hours to see Clinton share the stage with Dingell, because Clinton's appearance in Detroit got behind schedule. Snyder's only public event Sunday was at a dinner in Detroit with the Yeshiva Beth Yehudah Jewish schools group, Nowling said.

Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, said the GOP is motivating voters by blaming Democrats for a recession brought about by the Bush administration. "(Republicans say) 'We gave them 21 months to dig out of this hole we dug,' " Clinton told the Detroit crowd. "We're not out of the hole because it was a very deep hole."

The country is on the road to recovery, so "don't shoot yourself in the foot" by failing to vote, he said.

Though he didn't fill the room, Clinton sent many people away feeling fired up.

"It was very motivating," said Sonia King, a Detroit resident and city family services worker. Clinton's appearance will make a difference because those who attended will spread the enthusiasm through word of mouth, she said.

Sharon Baseman of Huntington Woods said many Democrats were likely at church Sunday or out knocking on doors or the crowd would have been bigger.

"He's a great communicator," and "we needed to have him or Barack" to fire up the base, she said.

Dems make pleas to vote

Democrats who spoke at the rally made passionate pleas about the need for a huge turnout on Nov. 2.

"It is up to you to decide what happens in this election," said Bernero.

Though polls point to a strong Republican year, "we're not buying that malarkey," said U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "We don't care about polls."

"Now is not the time to give up," said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing.

Many remained hopeful Clinton's appearance would make a difference.

"Clinton is still a rock star in Detroit," said Wayne County Commissioner Kevin McNamara, who represents southwestern Wayne County .

Sherpa who scaled Everest 19 times feared dead on climb

2010-10-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Chhewang Nima hit by avalanche near summit of Baruntse in Himalayas

A famed Sherpa guide was last night feared dead after being struck by an avalanche while nearing the peak of the 7,129m Mount Baruntse in eaastern Nepal.

Chhewang Nima was leading an expedition of seven people, which included some British climbers, up the mountain when he was struck by the avalanche as he was fixing ropes, his agency said last night.

The accident happened when he was less than 100 metres from the summit. The other members of the team dug the snow but were unable to find him.

Mr Nima, a married father of two boys aged about 10 and 12, is well-known among the professional climbing circuit and well-respected within his own community for his achievements in scaling the world's highest mountain.

He made his last ascent earlier this year, fixing ropes for less experienced groups to make the climb. The only climber who has scaled Everest more times than Mr Nima is Apa Sherpa, who set a record of 20 in May this year.

The poor weather conditions prevented a rescue mission from being launched yesterday, said Jeevan Ghimire of the Sherpa Shangri-La Treks and Expeditions agency for whom Mr Nima has worked for 15 years. Mr Ghimire said it was possible that because of Mr Nima's skills and experience he may still be alive. "He knows how to survive," he told the BBC.

A rescue helicopter was due to begin searching for the missing climber today. But harsh weather conditions, the high altitude and the fickle weather will make any rescue difficult, said Samir Patham of Adventure Pulse.

"As the accident occurred at an altitude of 23,100ft (7,045m), it would be extremely difficult to conduct a search and rescue," Patham wrote in an email. "Only rescuers who have acclimatised to the reduced oxygen content at that height can be deployed."

Expeditions to Mount Baruntse can cost between £2,500 and £4,500 per person, and turning around without summiting is therefore an expensive decision, Mr Patham said.

During an expedition to the Mount Everest base camp two weeks ago, Mr Patham met another group who were planning on scaling Mount Everest but were reconsidering the decision because of the heavy snow.

Mr Nima's employers said that the 43-year-old was a strong and safe climber and able to earn larger sums as a guide because of his achievements and his abilities to keep his climbing partners safe.

On Mount Everest alone, about 250 people have died trying to climb the mountain since it was first scaled in 1953.

A typical Nepali guide earns around 1,000 Nepali rupees (£9) a day, whereas one who has climbed Mount Everest can make five to six times that amount. "If he has climbed Mount Everest then he and his family would be pretty well-off compared to the others," Mr Patham said.

Mr Nima, who grew up poor in the north-east of Nepal and had little education, was able to send his children to a private school in Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, on the proceeds from his climbing work. His wife runs a small teashop in the mountains.

During the summer, when he was not climbing in the Himalayas, Mr Nima travelled to the United States for extra training. "He wanted to see more and learn more how to be a good guide, to be a safe climber," Mr Ghimire said.

India and Japan to sign nuclear deal

2010-10-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

India is ready to seal a civilian nuclear deal and boost trade ties with Japan, as New Delhi looks to prove its friendship in the wake of Tokyo's bitter territorial spat with Beijing.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, pictured, is heading to Tokyo to meet with his Japanese counterpart Naoto Kan Photo: REUTERS

"I am confident that we will be able to conclude an agreement (on a civilian nuclear deal), which will be a win-win proposition for both of us," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before heading to Tokyo to meet with his Japanese counterpart Naoto Kan on a three-day trip.

His visit comes as Tokyo struggles to repair ties with Beijing, hit by the worst diplomatic row in years over a disputed island chain in the East China Sea.

Mr Singh said India would like Tokyo to be its partner in nuclear energy, noting that Japan has "one of the highest and most advanced nuclear technologies."
Japan and India launched talks in June on signing an atomic civilian co-operation agreement that will allow Tokyo to export nuclear power generation technology and related equipment to energy-hungry India.
Mr Singh and Mr Kan were expected on Monday to declare the completion of talks on an economic partnership agreement (EPA), which Mr Singh said would open up the fast-growing Indian market to Japanese firms.
"I attach great importance to the potential of the economic co-operation," he said. The EPA "will boost our trade and economic ties manyfold."
Japan, a greying nation with a shrinking population, has long tried to enhance ties with emerging economies but its relations with China, Asia's other population giant, hit rock bottom in a row following Japan's arrest of a Chinese trawlerman last month in disputed waters.
Beijing reacted angrily to the arrest, cancelling all high level talks and civilian programmes as well as suspending exports of rare earth minerals crucial for Japan's hi-tech industries.
India has seized on this blocking of exports as a chance to step into a gap, with Mr Singh saying New Delhi and Tokyo can co-operate on the production of rare earth minerals in India.

Karzai Stands By Private Security Ban

2010-10-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai is standing by his decree to dissolve the private security companies some aid organizations use for protection, although a delegation of Western diplomats warned Sunday that huge amounts of aid and development money could be affected.
Several international aid organizations are drawing up plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, worried about the ability of Afghan security forces to protect their staffs, potentially taking with them billions of dollars in development cash as well as jobs for ordinary Afghans. President Karzai's decree makes exceptions for foreign embassies and military bases, but not aid groups.
Western officials warned Mr. Karzai in the Sunday meeting that the cash these development organizations manage will not start flowing directly to the Afghan government if they leave, said people familiar with the discussion.

Associated Press

An Afghan policeman looks at weapons confiscated from private security companies.

Some officials are worried that Mr. Karzai, whose government is fraught with corruption, is planning to get control of more of the aid money if these groups leave the country.
Mr. Karzai said he plans to move ahead with the private-security ban, which he outlined in August, setting a four-month implementation deadline. "The government of Afghanistan is [determined] to disband the private security companies and therefore asks our international partners for practical and sincere cooperation," Mr. Karzai said Sunday's meeting, according to a statement from his office.
The Afghan president has accused private security companies of causing civilian casualties and of corruption. He asked the international delegation that visited him Sunday to provide a list of the big development projects that need security, according to the statement.
"This is a non-starter," said a Western official familiar with Sunday's meeting. "Trying to select or single out individual projects is not a solution… The decree will have fairly catastrophic consequences for development and progress in Afghanistan."
The U.S.'s commander of coalition forces, Gen. David Petraeus, met with Mr. Karzai Sunday, as did the top United Nations representative to Afghanistan, Steffan di Mistura, and the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, among others.
Although the international delegation expressed their support for Mr. Karzai's ban, they asked that exceptions be made for aid and development groups. U.S. government and NATO officials concede that using private security firms isn't optimal, either.
Still, doubts remain about whether Afghan security forces can step in to fill the gap that the ban will create. They are already stretched thin, battling an insurgency that is proving resilient and spreading throughout the country.
This year has been the deadliest for NATO forces since the start of the nine-year war, with at least 599 soldiers killed so far, according to icasualties.org, an independent monitoring group.
Afghanistan's ministry of interior says its forces are capable of keeping aid organizations secure and will provide police from a special department to protect these groups for a fee, said Zemarai Besharay, the ministry's spokesman.
"Why not have the money paid to private security companies go to the ministry of interior?" Mr. Besharay said.
The ministry's plan is adding to concern among Western officials that the Afghan government is hoping that the ban on private security companies will be lucrative for the government. Western officials have told the government that the money the organizations spend on private security companies won't be directed to the Afghan police.
Spokesmen for Mr. Karzai couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.
In a separate development, four insurgents dressed in police and women's clothing stormed a U.N. compound in western Herat province, killing at least two Afghan security guards but failing to kill or injure any of the international aid workers, according to a U.N. statement.
The insurgents blew up a car packed with explosives, blowing open the gate to the U.N. compound before the insurgents entered the building. The Afghan police responded to the attack and fought off insurgents.

Hurricane Richard Makes Landfall

2010-10-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

AT 400 PM...THE CENTER OF HURRICANE RICHARD WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 17.2 NORTH...LONGITUDE 88.0 WEST. RICHARD IS MOVING TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 13 MPH....AND THIS GENERAL MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE TONIGHT WITH A DECREASE IN FORWARD SPEED ON MONDAY. ON THE FORECAST TRACK...THE CENTER WILL CROSS THE COAST OF BELIZE IN A COUPLE OF HOURS AND MOVE OVER LAND TONIGHT AND MONDAY.
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS HAVE INCREASED TO NEAR 90 MPH...WITH HIGHER GUSTS. RICHARD IS A CATEGORY ONE HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON HURRICANE WIND SCALE. NO SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN STRENGTH IS EXPECTED BEFORE LANDFALL...AND WEAKENING WILL BEGIN AFTER THE CENTER CROSSES THE COAST.
THE MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE ESTIMATED FROM HURRICANE HUNTER
AIRCRAFT DATA IS 981 MB...28.97 INCHES.

Prince Charles' friend dies in helicopter crash

2010-10-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

Prince William and Prince Harry say they are "shocked and deeply saddened" by the death of their friend Charles Stisted in a helicopter crash in Northern Ireland.

Rescue teams work at the isolated scene

Mr Stisted, 47, was the chief executive officer of The Guards Polo Club in Windsor, Berkshire, and a close friend of their father The Prince of Wales.

He was one of three people killed when an Agusta helicopter went down at a remote spot in the Mountains of Mourne in County Down at around 4pm on Saturday.

The Times said the helicopter's owner Ian Wooldridge also died in the crash, which is being investigated by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch of the Department for Transport.

A spokesman for Clarence House told Sky News: "The Prince of Wales, The Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Prince Harry are all shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible tragedy.
"Their Royal Highnesses thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed at this dreadful time."
It is thought the helicopter was returning to England after a shooting trip.

Prince Charles was a close friend

Emergency services were alerted when a member of the public reported seeing an aircraft in distress.
After a lengthy recovery operation, police confirmed that the pilot and his two passengers were killed.
South Down MP Margaret Ritchie said: "The local community is in absolute shock, but their thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims."
She visited the rescue teams and praised their efforts, saying they faced a tough task accessing the top of Eagle Mountain where the wreckage was found.
Sinn Fein MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone Michelle Gildernew said: "The shock of this accident has been felt by people right across Co Down and Co Fermanagh."
Democratic Unionist representative for South Down Jim Wells said the area had suffered a string of deaths in recent years.
In June last year three men were killed when their light aircraft crashed into a field near a private landing strip at Kilkeel, Co Down.

Singapore says tanker seized by pirates off Kenya

2010-10-24T17:42:00.000-07:00

Singapore says pirates seized a liquefied gas tanker registered in the city-state 105 miles (165 kilometers) off the coast of Kenya.

The Singapore Maritime and Port Authority said in a statement Sunday that the YORK was traveling from Mombasa to Mahe in the Seychelles with 17 crew when pirates commandeered it late Saturday.

The authority says it is working with the ship's owner, York Maritime Co., and government agencies to recover the ship.

It did not give the size of the vessel or the value of the gas it was carrying.

Foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan near 600 for 2010

2010-10-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

Total foreign military deaths in Afghanistan in 2010 neared 600 with the death of another service member on Sunday, an unwelcome figure that will likely weigh heavily on Western leaders amid declining support for the war.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Sunday one of its service members was killed by a homemade bomb in the south of country, bringing the total to 599 since the beginning of 2010.

No other details of the incident were available. Crude but effective homemade bombs account for well over half of the casualties suffered by foreign troops in Afghanistan this year.

With more than two months to go, 2010 is already the bloodiest for Afghan and foreign troops and civilians since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001. In all of 2009, a total of 521 foreign troops were killed.

The rising casualties offer little encouragement for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has promised a strategy review in December after mid-term elections a month earlier in which his Democrats face a backlash from an increasingly skeptical public.

Afghanistan will also be a major topic of discussion at a NATO summit in Lisbon next month, with European NATO members under pressure at home to justify their continued commitment.

PUBLIC DOUBTS

Disputes over the Afghan war have already brought down a Dutch government in February and a German president in May and, facing growing public doubts about the war at home, U.S. leaders have sought to lower expectations of what can be achieved.

The Netherlands formally ended its mission in August following strong public opposition to the war and earlier this month, days after four of its soldier were killed in an ambush Italy said it could begin pulling out troops from next summer.

NATO member Canada, which has suffered the third highest losses behind the United States and Britain, has announced it is ending its combat mission next year.

According to www.icasualties.org, an independent website that monitors foreign troop deaths, 2,169 troops have died since 2001, more than half of those in the past two years alone.

The United States has suffered by far the most casualties, with at least 1,348 deaths. British losses total at least 341, with the remaining 480 shared among the other 44 ISAF partners.

The United States also has the largest number of troops in Afghanistan -- nearly 100,000 -- with other nations contributing roughly 50,000.

Nearly half of foreign troop deaths have occurred in southern Helmand province and neighboring Kandahar, where thousands of U.S. and Afghan troops launched an operation in September to disrupt strongholds in the Taliban's heartlands.

June 2010 was the bloodiest month of the war with 103 killed as foreign forces pushed ahead with operations in Helmand and Kandahar. Another 88 were killed in July.

Foreign troop casualties lag behind those suffered by civilians as ordinary Afghans get caught up in the crossfire.

A mid-year report released by the United Nations showed civilian casualties had risen by 31 percent over the first six months of 2010, compared with the same period last year. That figure included 1,271 killed.

The number of people with war injuries also soared to record highs this summer at the main hospital in Kandahar province, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) earlier this month.

Almost twice as many patients with weapons-related injuries were treated at the city's Mirwais hospital during August and September -- some 1,000 -- compared with the same period in 2009, said the ICRC, which supports the hospital.

Briton Calls for Inquiry Into Abuses in Iraq War

2010-10-24T17:33:00.000-07:00

LONDON (AP) — Accounts of prisoner abuse and civilian killings in Iraq that are contained in a trove of leaked United States military documents are extremely serious and must be investigated, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said Sunday.

The 391,832 documents, which are mainly field reports by soldiers on the ground, detail daily carnage in Iraq since the 2003 United States-led invasion. They include reports of detainees abused by Iraqi forces, insurgent bombings, sectarian executions and civilians shot at checkpoints by American troops.

Iraq Body Count, a private group in Britain that has tracked the number of civilians killed since the war started in March 2003, said it had analyzed the documents, which were released Friday by WikiLeaks, the independent organization that obtained them, and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths.

Mr. Clegg told BBC television that it was not for Britain to tell the United States how to respond, but that any allegations of abuse by British troops “are extremely serious and need to be looked at.

“People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking,” he said.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, has examined the files in detail and said it found two cases in which Iraqis reported being abused by British troops.

Mr. Clegg’s Liberal Democrats opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he has called the war illegal. His party, in opposition when the war began, is now part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led ruling coalition.

Britain is holding an official inquiry into mistakes made by British officials in the build-up and aftermath of the Iraq invasion. A report is expected later this year.

WikiLeaks made the documents available to several news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian. As it did with secret documents released in August by WikiLeaks covering six years of the war in Afghanistan, The Times redacted or withheld any documents that would put lives in danger or jeopardize continuing military operations.

The Pentagon and Britain’s Ministry of Defense condemned the leak, both saying it could put soldiers’ lives at risk.

Apple will no longer pre-install Flash on Macs

2010-10-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

Apple Inc said on Friday it will no longer ship Mac computers with Adobe Systems Inc's Flash player pre-installed, as the company continues to erect barriers to the software.
Apple's decision does not ban Flash software from its computers as it has from the iPhone and iPad. Users will still be able to download and install a Flash player, which is widely-used to view videos on the Web.

Apple has been publicly hostile towards Flash and Steve Jobs has criticized it as a buggy battery hog. Adobe has responded by calling Apple overly restrictive.
In addition, Apple had effectively banned developers from using Flash to build applications for its mobile devices, but the company relented last month in the face of scrutiny from US regulators.
Apple unveiled on Wednesday an updated version of its ultra-thin MacBook Air laptop. The computer is shipping without the Flash software installed, as will all Mac computers in the future, Apple confirmed.
Apple spokesman Bill Evans said Apple simply wanted to make sure users had the most recent version of the software, which is frequently updated.
"We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe," he said.
In an emailed statement, an Adobe spokeswoman said: "As always, Adobe recommends that users download the most up to date version of Adobe Flash Player from Adobe.com."
Apple shares fell 0.7% to close at USD 307.47, while Adobe shares rose 1.8% to USD 28.21.

HP, RIM Tablets Duel for Enterprise Customers

2010-10-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

Hewlett Packard and Research in Motion demonstrated at the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando that there is more than one way to slice the tablet market.
Both companies highlighted their tablets, both aimed at the enterprise market, and both tablets were completely different from the Apple iPad and from each other. Could this mean a fragmentation of the tablet market or simply a market that is too broad for one device to satisfy?

HP is the first out of the gate with an enterprise tablet. The Slate 500 went on sale just after midnight on October 22 on the HP Web site. Chris Preimesberger, who examined the device, describes it as being narrower and lighter than the iPad. More significantly, the device runs Windows 7 Professional.
According to HP’s press materials, this tablet is designed as a business machine rather than a consumer electronics item. This means that it comes with Microsoft Office 2010, it has a stylus for entering handwritten notes and for writing e-mails. The Slate 500 includes a docking station with additional USB ports, a video port, and it includes two cameras, one facing to the front and one to the rear for video conferencing and for taking photos of things. The four-finger multi-touch screen also means that you aren’t dependant on the stylus to use the Slate.
What’s less well-known is that tablet computers aren’t new at HP. I used the first one well over a decade ago. In those days the device was more like a laptop with a detachable screen. On the bottom was the keyboard. Enclosed in the screen section were a battery, the hard disk and the WiFi radio, and a socket for holding the electronic stylus. You needed to use the stylus or a USB mouse and keyboard to use the computer. Over the years HP has updated its line of tablet computers, and the Slate 500 is a logical evolution of that product line.
RIM’s tablet, meanwhile, may be aimed at the enterprise, but it has little in common with the HP Slate. The RIM device is designed to be used in conjunction with a BlackBerry smart phone. Like the HP, the PlayBook has support for WiFi and Bluetooth. Also like the HP, it does not have a 3G or 4G radio. The PlayBook is designed to sync with BlackBerry devices, and it’s designed to tether to them for access to high speed wireless Internet access.
RIM claims the PlayBook is also not competing with the Apple iPad for consumer dollars. While about half of all BlackBerries are sold to consumers, it’s hard to imagine a large number of consumers wanting their tablet tethered to their phones.

Microsoft Kinect Hits Stores Next Week

2010-10-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Kinect hits stores next week. Available Nov. 4, Kinect is an Xbox 360 add-on that allows users to play games without a controller.
The Kinect is a slim bar that is placed near a TV to detect players movements. It lets users control games, music, and movies with hand movements and voice commands.
As a standalone product, Kinect costs $149.99. A bundle that includes an Xbox 360 250GB and the game Kinect Adventures is also available for $399.99. Sales of the bundle have already been popular and were a top 40 purchase on Amazon.com this week.
Many Kinect games have a family or group-focus. Last week, Microsoft revealed 17 Kinect-enabled games for Xbox. on the Nov. 4 launch, games like "Kinect Joy Ride," "Sonic Free Rider," and the "Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout" will go on sale. Five more games such as "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" and "EA Sports Active 2" will be released throughout November and Decemeber.
Kinect will launch in Europe on Nov. 10, in Australia on Nov. 18, and in Japan on the 20th.
Microsoft is taking Kinect on a media Blitz that includes appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and the Ellen Degeneres Show. Microsoft said in a press release that pre-order sales have been strong.
"For me it is a big, big deal," Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer said in a New York Times story. "There's nothing like it on the market." There's a lot at stake for Ballmer, whose bonus was slashed in half after the failure of the Kin phone.

Moon’s rich surface contains silver, carbon dioxide

2010-10-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

The surface of the moon contains not just water, but a rich mix of elements, including silver and carbon dioxide, astronomers said Thursday.

The findings to be published in the journal Science come from an analysis of data from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) experiment that crashed into the moon last year.

Data from the experiment had already shown water is even more abundant on the moon’s craters than expected.

Scientists said Thursday they had found light hydrocarbons, traces of sulphur and carbon dioxide in the plume of dust kicked up by the crashing craft.

They have also been able to estimate more thoroughly the amount of water in the crater, which they believe makes up about 5.6 per cent of the mass in the crater. There’s enough water in the form of pure ice crystals to be useful for humans, both as pure water or separated into parts for fuel, the scientists found.

Silver was found in trace amounts among the light metals that also included sodium and mercury.

The dramatic experiment in 2009 crashed the LCROSS spacecraft into the moon’s Cabeus crater, sending a huge plume of dust 10 kilometres upward to gather data about ice that was suspected to be hidden in the perpetually dark lunar craters.

The components of the dust were analysed by another space craft called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that followed closely behind, gathering data. Major telescopes around the world were also aimed at the Cabeus crater on the moon’s south pole to capture data from the dust plume.

The analysis shows how rich the moon is in useful minerals and that it remains chemically active and has a water cycle, NASA scientists said.

“Seeing mostly pure water ice grains in the plume means water ice was somehow delivered to the moon in the past, or chemical processes have been causing ice to accumulate in large quantities,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California.

“Also, the diversity and abundance of certain materials called volatiles in the plume suggest a variety of sources, like comets and asteroids, and an active water cycle within the lunar shadows.” The rocket’s impact was designed to replicate that of the large, natural asteroids that slam into the moon several times a month.

The NASA probe targeted a 100-kilometre wide, four-kilometre deep crater and was timed to strike when lighting conditions are ideal for observing the impact. The 585-kg craft created an impact crater about two metres deep.

Virgin Galactic CEO Branson Opens First Commercial Spaceport

2010-10-24T17:04:00.000-07:00

Virgin Galactic's Sir Richard Branson, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and prospective astronauts gathered in the southern New Mexico desert on Friday to celebrate the completion of the runway at the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport.
Spaceport America is the world's first facility designed specifically to launch commercial spacecraft. The celebration of its nearly 3km-long runway comes less than two weeks after another major step for Virgin Galactic: the first solo glide flight of its space tourism rocket ship.
"Today is very personal as our dream becomes more real," Branson said. "People are beginning to believe now. I think the drop flight two weeks ago, which went beautifully, I think it made people sit up and realize this is really reality."

The British billionaire said the next is more rocket testing, and getting the vehicle called SpaceShipTwo into space. He said he expects flights for space tourists to begin in nine to 18 months, and he will be among the first passengers.
Stretching across a flat dusty plain 45 miles north of Las Cruces, the runway is designed to support almost every aircraft in the world, day-to-day space tourism and payload launch operations.
Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant of the taxpayer-funded spaceport and plans to use the facility to take tourists on what will first be short hops into space. State officials want to add companies for other commercial space endeavours, such as research and payload delivery missions.
"Each flight we make, we'll learn more, we'll experience, we'll open up more opportunities that we cannot even conceive of today," Branson said. "This history, we're making it right now."
Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two - the special jet-powered mothership that will carry SpaceShipTwo to launch altitude - also made an appearance on Friday, passing over the spaceport several times before landing on the new runway.
Tickets for suborbital space rides aboard SpaceShipTwo cost $US200,000 ($A205,233). The 2 1/2-hour flights will include about five minutes of weightlessness. Some 380 customers have already made deposits totalling more than $US50 million ($A51.3 million), Virgin Galactic officials said on Friday.
Branson, the president of Virgin Group, which counts airlines, entertainment and mobile communications among its businesses, partnered with famed aviation designer Burt Rutan on the venture.
Until now, space travel has been limited to astronauts and a handful of wealthy people who have shelled out millions to ride Russian rockets to the international space station.
Some of the soon-to-be astronauts attended Friday's runway dedication, joined by Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon in 1969 as part of NASA's Apollo 11 mission.
While space tourism projects such as Virgin Galactic's venture receive plenty of publicity, the commercial space industry is seeing rapid developments with companies like SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, seeking to win NASA work to supply the International Space Station.
SpaceX has successfully placed a dummy payload into orbit and has contracts to lift satellites next. Other firms, including Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, and Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwell, Texas, are testing systems that would carry unmanned payloads to space.
Last month, Congress approved legislation that affirms President Barack Obama's intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into near-Earth space.

Rumor: Verizon Staffing Up Call Centers In Preparation For... iPhone?

2010-10-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

Two call centers with previous experience working for Verizon are both looking to staff up—adding thousands of customer service representatives for a, "major wireless cell phone service retailer" that many postulate could be Verizon itself.

If that's the case, is this yet one more sign in the unfolding rumor-mongering that is Verizon's potential iPhone launch?

Apple Insider's Josh Ong says that, "the connection between a flurry of call center recruiting and a Verizon iPhone is tenuous at best." However, both Teleperformance and Ryla both have experience working for Verizon, Apple, or both. The former's pulled double-duty for both companies, whereas Ryla has worked with Verizon for more than ten years.

Ryla's currently hiring for approximately 1,700 new positions across Indiana, Colorado, Virginia, and California. For the 500 or so people the company's seeking in Clovis, California, "The new hires will be answering customer-service calls on behalf of a Ryla client identified only as a Fortune 500 cellular/telecommunications company that expects to increase its marketing and sales," reports Tim Sheehan of The Fresno Bee.

Teleperformance's listing for Pennsylvania positions indicates that employees would, "Take Inbound Customer Service Calls for a major wireless cell phone service retailer."

The locations of its other open positions are a bit more varied—and equally cryptic. Positions in Utah include, "Outbound Sales Reps to sell products to existing customers for a leading software or wireless company," and positions listed in Idaho indicate that an employee would, "Take inbound technical support calls for laptop and mp3 player assistance."

Fanning the rumor flames, Teleperformance vice president of recruiting Marcie Ballard said in an October interview with The Augusta Chronicle that the new positions needed to be lined up by November of this year. More importantly, they would be supporting an existing (and major) wireless client with which the company has secured a brand-new line of business. Unfortunately, Ballard would not say what company that specifically is.

According to a report from Electronista, it would take a given calling center roughly three to four weeks to train employees prior to actually sticking them in a cube. If that's the case, then Teleperformance's November deadline puts the new employees in the chairs right around the January timeframe, assuming delays and time lost for the holidays—and that's the same January, "when many expect a Verizon iPhone to be ready," reports the site.

Haiti May Be Primed for Another Quake

2010-10-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The earthquake that devastated Haiti's capital and killed as many as 300,000 people in January may have been caused by an unseen fault and pressure could be building for another quake, seismic experts said on Sunday.
Two papers, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, take different approaches but both conclude the fault originally blamed for the quake was not the real source, and that it remains a threat.
"As the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault did not release any significant accumulated elastic strain, it remains a significant seismic threat for Haiti and for Port-au-Prince in particular," Eric Calais of Purdue University in Indiana and colleagues wrote.

"Much work remains to be done to identify and quantify potential earthquake sources in and around Hispaniola, an island where vulnerability to earthquake shaking will probably remain high in the near future," they said.
Haitians are still digging out after the magnitude 7 quake that shattered large parts of Port-au-Prince on January 12, making more than 1 million people homeless. Now cholera has broken out amid the devastation.

Calais' team said an analysis of slight shifts of ground motion picked up by global positioning system and radar devices suggest an as-yet undescribed fault near the town of Leogan may have been the source of the January quake.
At first, scientists focused on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault on Haiti's southern peninsula -- one of two main faults in the region.
But the team said measurements of ground motion suggest the movement caused the surface to bulge, but not to rupture. Calais' measurements led them to conclude a previously unknown fault must have caused the January quake.
A separate study led by Carol Prentice of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, also said the 2010 quake may not have relieved any pressure on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system.

Prentice's team used remote sensors and field studies to map changes in the land surface caused by the January quake or an earlier event.
They found nine streams whose beds had been offset by one of two large earthquakes that occurred on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system in 1751 and 1770. But the 2010 quake did not leave a surface trace and Prentice worries that may mean the strain accumulated since the earlier large quakes was not released.

"The lack of surface rupture is unusual," Prentice's team wrote.
"The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone remains a serious seismic hazard for Haiti, particularly for the Port-au-Prince area."
Calais was part of a group of experts who warned Haitian officials in 2008 that there could be a 7.2 magnitude quake on the horizon and he said in February the island was risk for another big temblor.

Melinda Gates Keeps Apple Out of her House... Again

2010-10-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

In a bit of news from the not-quite-so-unexpected department, a recent interview with the New York Times once again confirms that no, Virginia, Apple devices are not allowed inside the homes or lives of Microsoft's founding family.
It was Melinda Gates this time who again made mention of one of the top rules in the Gates household: No Apple. In an interview with the Times' Deborah Solomon, Gates was asked whether she owns one of Apple's iPods. Her response was as short as it was telling: "No, I have a Zune." Solomon continues.
"What if one of your children says, 'Mom, I have to have an iPod?'" she asks.
"I have gotten that argument — 'You may have a Zune,'" retorts Gates.
The back-and-forth continues in the same predictable fashion as Gates' prior interviews. We say this as we do, for the Gates family devotion to Microsoft should be fairly apparent, given Melinda Gates' responses to similar Apple interrogations.
"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids," she said in March 2009 Vogue article.
However, it's not as if either Gates parental unit has remained fully resistant to the charms of Cupertino. In the same Vogue article, Melinda Gates goes on to admit that the thought of cross-branded product ownership has indeed distracted her thoughts from time to time. Or, as she puts it, "Every now and then I look at my friends and say, 'Ooh, I wouldn't mind having that iPhone.'"
As well, even Bill Gates himself has lauded Apple's devices from time to time. He once told BusinessWeek that, "If there's anything good about the iPhone, it's software." And then there's his almost mea culpa statement to BNet's Brent Schlender:
"So, it's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, 'Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough.' It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'"
So which is it? Do the Gates love Apple? Do the Gates hate Apple? Is it time for both sides to admit that each has a right to exist just as much as the other? Solomon tries this approach in her final Apple-related question with Melinda Gates—"Isn't there room in this world for both Apple and Microsoft?"
"Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh," Gates responds. "Go talk to Bill."

Sony to Stop Producing the Walkman

2010-10-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

Time to retire those tapes. Sony has said that it's stopping production of the Walkman, due to lackluster sales of the outdated music player.
According to the company, the last round of the portable cassette player was produced in Japan in April, and once that batch sells out, the Walkman is history.

Some production will continue via a Chinese company for the few people who still rock out with the obsolete technology, a New York Post report said. However, its days are likely numbered.
Sony started producing the Walkman in 1979. The Walkman might have had a slow start, but by the 80s, it was the go-to portable stereo. Although the MP3 players are now the standard for portable music players, the Walkman was one of the first of these types of devices, selling 220 million worldwide in more than 30 years of production.
Before the Walkman, record players were the de facto choice for music players. But the Walkman was supplanted by portable CD players, which were replaced by MP3 players. Coincidentally, Sunday is also the iPod's ninth birthday, another iconic music player.
Sony still uses the Walkman name for other devices. In August it launched the Walkman NWZ-E350 series video MP3 players. These are budget devices; a 4GB model sells for $70 and an 8GB player is $80. Sony has also capitalized on the Walkman brand, offering Walkman phones.
Sony has said that it will continue to produce CD and mini-disc players, despite their decreased popularity.
In April, Sony announced that it would end the sale of floppy discs, storage devices the company had been producing since 1983.

Privacy body to re-examine Google

2010-10-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

Google's Peter Barron: "We're determined to learn the lessons from this mistake"

Britain's privacy watchdog is to look again at what personal information internet giant Google gathered from private wi-fi networks.

The Information Commissioner's Office had investigated a sample earlier this year after it was revealed that Google had collected personal data during its Street View project.

At the time, it said no "significant" personal details were collected.

But Google has since admitted that e-mails and passwords were copied.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.”

End Quote Alan Eustace Google

On its official Google blog, senior vice president Alan Eustace wrote that the company was "mortified" to discover, after the initial investigation in May, that personal information had been collected.

Privacy watchdogs in numerous countries, including France, Germany and Canada, had also investigated the information.

"It's clear from those [external] inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Mr Eustace wrote.

"We want to delete this data as soon as possible and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.

"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that... changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users."

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it had kept an eye on international investigations since its own one concluded in July.

That investigation said that the information "did not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person".
Enforcement powers

However, Google's admission of more detailed data has prompted further action by the ICO.

"We will be making enquires to see whether this information relates to the data inadvertently captured in the UK, before deciding on the necessary course of action, including a consideration of the need to use our enforcement powers," a spokesman said.‬

Google's director of privacy Alma Whitten said the company would work with the ICO to answer its "further questions and concerns".

She added that the data "has never been used in any Google product and was never intended to be used by Google in any way".

Information about the gathering of personal data came to light following a request by data protection authorities in Hamburg, Germany, for more information about the operation of Google's Street View technology which adds images of locations to maps.

This revealed that Google had "accidentally" grabbed data from unsecured hotspots for years as its Street View cars captured images of street scenes.

It led to many data protection authorities pressing Google for access to the mass of data it grabbed to see whether laws on the protecting of personal information had been broken.

Google said it had since "strengthened" its internal privacy and security practices.

Is Fallout: New Vegas too buggy to be great?

2010-10-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

Fallout: New Vegas might have faired well in terms of review scores generally, but it's been bugs from the kookie to the crippling that have been the main point of conversation surrounding Bethesda's latest.

And regardless of how much praise New Vegas has received in terms of its open world and engrossing story, reviewers everywhere have largely agreed that the fact New Vegas doesn't really move that far beyond Fallout 3 is disappointing.

A bag full o' bugs and dated visuals rightly worried some of you. In fact, some of you were put right off the post-apocalyptic idea altogether, saying that the engine is out of date and the cause for both problems.

"They shouldn't be using the same old crappy, buggy engine," said MattyR95, for example, "Seriously, I can't believe they'd still use it after the glitches in Fallout 3 and Oblivion."

On the other side of the fence, though, the Fallout faithful had much more tolerance. For starters, they were delighted that Fallout: New Vegas was so similar to Fallout 3.

"So why is this bad?" said Richy23. "Fallout 3 was an epic game, so why change it?"

He had support from razors edge too: "'Disappointingly similar to Fallout 3' is the king of oxymorons in my eyes."

Bright-Light agreed a bit too much: "Im so excited about this game that I'm gonna s**t myself."

Some of you weren't all that put off by the the bugs and glitches as long as they were dealt with speedily after release, which Obsidian and Bethesda have endeavoured to do.

Now Fallout: New Vegas has been out for a couple of days those of you who picked it up should have had a good solid weekend of radiation and decapitation by now. We want to whether you stick by your Fallout support or whether bugs and glitches have left you disappointed.

And does the same old Fallout formula still feel as exciting as it did in Fallout 3? Does Fallout's less than polished presentation take too much away from the gameplay or is Obsidian right to defend GEK as an "impressive" engine?

If you haven't been out to grab Fallout tell us why by all means, but the division of opinion on New Vegas has left us scratching our beards and pondering the wider gaming issues as well.

With games having such high production values these days is it hard for a title that's rough around the edges to be considered at the top of the AAA bracket? And do bugs bug you enough to leave your copy of a game gathering dust on the shelf?

It's the old question of graphics over gameplay. Fallout has an insanely large open-world to offer in its defence - but where do you stand? Can it be considered a true great?

Blizzcon 2010: Diablo 3, WoW Details

2010-10-24T16:37:00.001-07:00

Blizzard Entertainment kicked off its annual BlizzCon expo with a bang and some rumbling with news on Diablo III and the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, Cataclysm.
Chris Metzen, senior vice president of creative development at Blizzard, was the host of the keynote. After a lot of playing to the audience, and a little bragging on Blizzard's part (20 years of operation, 12 million WoW players, etc), he announced news on the next WoW expansion.

Cataclysm is scheduled to go on sale December 7, but current WoW players can download the purchase and software in advance, so as soon as it goes live on the 7th, they can begin playing immediately. The software will sell for $40, or $80 for a Collector's Edition box set.

Metzen then announced the final Diablo III class. Four of Diablo III's five classes have been revealed, and the opening keynote was the launch pad for the fifth class. Via a highly rendered video, the Demon Hunter class was introduced as a cross between a traditional RPG ranger and a vampire hunter. It used all ranged weapons, including dual crossbows in the video.

Finally, Metzen announced Diablo III would also feature PvP play, from single player to three-on-three play. He concluded his keynote with a very loud, bass-heavy animation of Deathwing, the main dragon in Cataclysm, that featured a lot of Zeratul-like preposterous dialogue and serious subwoofer action.

StarCraft 2 fans were tossed a bone, but one without much meat on it. No details on the StarCraft 2 expansion, but Blizzard does plan to release four new maps to Battle.net in the coming months. All of them are themed, one is a double entendre and the other three play on popular games. Auir Chef (Iron Chef, get it?) is a Protoss level, Left 2 Die evokes "Left 4 Dead," StarJeweled plays on BeJeweled, and Blizzard DotA is a poke at Defense of the Ancients from Valve (which in turn comes from WarCraft III).

Apple Overtakes RIM's Smartphone Shipments, Sets Sights on Nokia

2010-10-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Apple has jumped up to second place for worldwide smartphone shipments, finally passing Research in Motion for third-quarter smartphone sales. However, Apple still has a ways to go before it even begins to pose a threat to market leader Nokia.
That's all according to new numbers released by research firm Strategy Analytics this past Thursday. According to the company, Apple shipped approximately 14.1 million iPhones to RIM's 12.1 million blackberries in 3Q 2010—nearly a 15 percent difference between the two. For Apple, that's an increase of nearly double its 2009 shipping numbers at the same time period last year.
And while RIM was able to boost its shipped Blackberry count from 8.5 to 12.4 million devices—an increase of 45 percent—that still wasn't enough to stall Apple's advance. In terms of total market share for the 77.1 million devices shipped in the third quarter of 2010, Apple captured 18.3 percent to RIM's 16.1 percent. That's a bit of a flip-flop from 2009's 19.6 percent for RIM and 17 percent for Apple.
"RIM continues to be hampered by a limited presence in the high-growth touchscreen segment and consequently its global smartphone marketshare has edged down from 20 percent to 16 percent during the past 12 months," says a statement from Strategy Analytics.
As mentioned, Apple might be in second place, but the company still has a way to go before it challenges Nokia's dominance—helped in part by Nokia's commanding lead in the Asia and Europe markets. While the company was able to ship just a bit over 10 million more additional devices between the third quarters of 2009 and 2010, Nokia actually lost three percent of its market share during the same time period.
Nevertheless, Nokia's third-quarter shipments in 2010—26.5 million units—are still nearly double that of Apple's 14.1 million units shipped.
But regardless of the figures listed above, everyone should have cause for celebration in some fashion: Worldwide smartphone shipments are up 78 percent annually, jumping from a total of 43.4 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2009 to 77.1 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2010. That's, "the industry's fastest rate since the mid-2000s," according to Neil Mawston, director at Strategy analytics.
"However, the surging volumes are placing heavy demands on component suppliers and moderate shortages of select components are emerging ahead of the Q4 holiday season," he added.

End of the Nook? Amazon announces 14-day Kindle ebook lending

2010-10-24T16:34:00.001-07:00

It was only a matter of time. Amazon will be introducing a 14-day lending feature for Kindle ebooks later this year, the Kindle team announced yesterday.
The move brings the Kindle up to date with Barnes and Noble’s rival Nook e-reader, which has touted 14-day book lending as a key feature since it launched last year.
Just as with the Nook, Amazon says you won’t be able to read ebooks while they’re lent out. The feature won’t be available for all ebooks either, as it will be entirely up to publishers and rights holders to enable it.
It remains to be seen if Amazon will innovate beyond Barnes and Noble with the feature. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last year criticized the Nook’s book lending implementation as being “extremely limited”, so I suspect the company has some ideas in mind to differentiate the Kindle’s sharing. At this point, the Kindle seems just as limited as the Nook.
What does book lending on the Kindle mean for the Nook? With the feature matched by the Kindle, all the Nook has to differentiate itself now is its superfluous secondary color touchscreen. Sure, it supports expandable storage via MicroSD cards, and it also can read DRM-free ePub ebooks (unlike the Kindle) — but those aren’t exactly features that can combat the widespread name recognition of Amazon’s device.
Barnes and Noble tried to one-up Amazon earlier this year by introducing a WiFi-only Nook for $149, and reducing the price of the Nook 3G to $199, but Amazon fired back a month later with its revamped third-generation Kindle at $139 and $189 price points. While Amazon doesn’t divulge exact Kindle sales numbers, the company noted in its third quarter earnings report that strong sales of the new e-reader model led to significant revenue and profit gains. Barnes and Noble maintains that it has 20 percent of the ebook market and that sales of the Nook have been strong, despite missing analyst estimates in its recent second quarter earnings.
Barnes and Noble still has the advantage of using its retail stores to push the Nook, but Amazon matched that as well by bringing Kindles to Best Buy and Target stores in September. At Best Buy, Kindles are now displayed alongside Nooks and other e-reader devices, and I can’t imagine why anyone would choose the Nook over the Kindle in its current form. The Kindle hardware feels more refined, and it has a more complete ebook library with over 630,000 books versus the Nook’s 166,000 (Barnes and Noble advertises having over a million ebooks, but it’s including nearly a million free public domain ebooks in its figures which are also supported by the Kindle). Amazon has even released an SDK so that developers can create Kindle applications.
I recently picked up a third-generation Kindle, and I’ve noticed that many other e-reader holdouts — both among my circles and general users — are doing the same. The $139 price point is working wonders for Amazon, and it’s also part of a gradual move towards $99 pricing — at which point e-reader adoption will see new heights. Perhaps Barnes and Noble will attempt that lower pricing first (once again), but it can only drop the price so far before it becomes unfeasible.
Despite the release of the iPad, and the promise of even more tablets to come, there definitely seems to be a demand for low-cost portable devices dedicated to reading. I’m certain the Kindle will remain a dedicated presence in the market for some time, but at this point I’d have to say that the Nook’s days are numbered. For Barnes and Noble’s sake, I hope that rumors of a color Nook are more fact than fiction.

Social Network Privacy to Java Attacks: The Week in Security

2010-10-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

A recap of the week's security news follows privacy flaps affecting Facebook and MySpace as well as the growth of attacks on Java.

Privacy concerns kept reappearing in the new this week, starting with social networking giant Facebook.
Some of the most popular applications on Facebook were observed sharing Facebook User IDs, mostly inadvertently. The information could potentially be used to lookup Facebook user names and other public information. Rapleaf, which the Wall Street Journal reported had linked user ID information from Facebook apps to its own for-sale database of Internet users, identified the issue as having to do with referrer URLs. Facebook said it will address the issue with encryption.
A similar situation was found to be affecting MySpace apps as well.
“Our terms of use prohibit third-party developers from sharing any user data, including public information such as the user ID, with other entities,” a MySpace spokesperson said. “It has recently come to our attention that several third-party app developers may have violated these terms and we are taking appropriate action against those developers.”
Some of the affected MySpace apps include RockYou Pets and Tag Me. According to the Wall Street Journal, the information was primarily sent by MySpace when users clicked on ads. Like on Facebook, the user IDs can be used to look up public information, including potentially a person's name, photos and location. The advertising companies who were sent the data – which included Google, Quantcast and Rubicon Project – reportedly told the Journal they didn’t use the information.
Away from the world of social networking, Microsoft shined the light on a growing number of attacks on Java vulnerabilities. According to the company’s Security Intelligence Report, the most targeted vulnerabilities were three bugs that had already been patched – CVE-2008-5353, CVE-2009-3867 and CVE-2010-0094.
"Through our BrowserCheck application we have collected data that shows that over 80 percent of all visiting workstations have Java installed,” Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek told eWEEK Oct. 19. “Of these machines over 40 percent run a version of Java that has a critical vulnerability, making it the most vulnerable plug-in of all and giving the malware a excellent chance to install itself and control the targeted machine."
Adobe Systems, whose products have also been a frequent target of attacks, warned Oct. 21 of a new bug in Shockwave Player that could be used to hijack a vulnerable system. The company also announced a clearer timeline for Adobe Reader X, which for Windows users will include new sandboxing technology to mitigate attacks.
“Adobe's product security initiatives are focused on reducing both the frequency and the impact of security vulnerabilities,” an Adobe spokesperson told eWEEK. “Adobe Reader Protected Mode represents an exciting new advancement in mitigating the impact of attempted attacks. Even if exploitable security vulnerabilities are found by an attacker, Adobe Reader Protected Mode will help prevent the attacker from writing files or installing malware on potential victims’ computers.”
Also during the week, Forrester Research released a report on the future of the cloud security market, and what that future means for security vendors, cloud providers and organizations alike.

Top Gear on 60 Minutes tonight

2010-10-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight's CBS 60 Minutes show (7 p.m., Ch. 2) will feature interviews with the folks from Top Gear. I won't get to check it out because I'll be working, but I'm excited just the same.
It's the ridiculously popular British car show that I rave about at work, but nobody's ever heard of (or they've heard of it, but never seen it). Sometimes it's hard to explain its awesomeness.
Behold a clip of said Top Gear.

'Paranormal Activity 2' Spikes to Horror High

2010-10-24T16:17:00.001-07:00

Paranormal Activity 2 delivered the highest-grossing opening weekend ever for a supernatural horror movie, while the other new supernaturally-themed entry, Hereafter, had a quieter launch. Overall business was up nearly 12 percent from the same weekend last year, when the first Paranormal Activity led.

Haunting approximately 4,500 screens at 3,216 locations, Paranormal Activity 2 drew an estimated $41.5 million, topping The Grudge's $39.1 million for supernatural supremacy in first weekend gross. The horror sequel displayed better staying power than the oft-compared Blair Witch movies: it's already retained 38 percent of its predecessor's $107.9 million gross, while Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2's total retention of The Blair Witch Project was a mere 19 percent. The first Paranormal Activity opened nearly 13 months ago but had a slow roll-out into nationwide release. It peaked at 2,712 locations and its biggest single day was $8.6 million, leading up to a $107.9 million final tally.

After a week of limited play, Hereafter expanded nationwide to close to 2,500 screens at 2,181 locations and grossed an estimated $12 million. Among comparable titles, that was less than The Lovely Bones' $17 million but greater than Changeling and Stir of Echoes.

True to its content, Jackass 3-D fell on its face in its second weekend, but, since its grosses have been at a high level, that still meant a solid estimated $21.6 million. It was down 57 percent, while the first Jackass dropped 44 percent and Jackass: Number Two tumbled 50 percent at the same point. Jackass 3-D's sum climbed to $87.1 million in ten days, flying past Number Two's $72.8 to become the highest grosser of the franchise (though it still has a ways to go to be tops in attendance). Again, 3D presentations accounted for around 90 percent of Jackass 3-D's business.

Red held well, off 31 percent to an estimated $15 million. The action comedy has posted $43.5 million in ten days, and it will soon surpass Cop Out's $44.9 million final total among similar titles.

Holdovers in general saw small drops. The Social Network showed more staying power, slowing 29 percent to an estimated $7.3 million for a $72.9 million tally in 24 days. Secretariat eased 26 percent to an estimated $7.3 million for a $37.4 million purse in 17 days, while Life as We Know It was close behind with an estimated $6.9 million for a $37.6 million 17-day sum, down 31 percent.

Matt Damon and His Wife Welcome a Baby Girl

2010-10-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

Matt Damon and his wife Luciana have their hands full.

The couple, already raising three children, welcomed a girl, Stella Zavala Damon, who was born on Wednesday in New York.

"Mom and baby are both healthy," Damon's rep tells PEOPLE. "The whole family is thrilled."

Damon, who turned 40 earlier this month, and Luciana, 35, wed in 2005 and have two children together – Isabella, 4, and Gia, 2. Luciana also has a daughter, Alexia, from a previous marriage.

Damon currently stars in Hereafter, which opened wide on Friday.

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2010-10-24T13:17:00.001-07:00

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US surfer recalls deadly shark attack on his friend

2010-10-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

US surfer has relived the horror of a fatal shark attack on his bodyboarding friend in California.

Matthew Garcia said he first heard a desperate cry for help from Lucas Ransom as they surfed together at Surf Beach on Friday morning.

Mr Garcia then saw the shark flashing out of the water and biting his friend's left leg off.

The surfer eventually managed to bring Mr Ransom to the shore, but the bodyboarder bled to death.

"When the shark hit him, he just said 'Help me, dude!' He knew what was going on," Mr Garcia told the Associated Press news agency.

"It was really fast. You just saw a red wave and this water is blue - as blue as it could ever be - and it was just red, the whole wave."
Unknown shark-type

Mr Garcia said he first wanted to swim to the shore to get help, but then spotted his friend floating in the water.

"I flipped him over on his back and underhooked his arms. I was pressing on his chest and doing rescue breathing in the water.
Officials post a warning sign on Surf Beach Surf Beach was closed after the deadly attack

"He was just kind of lifeless, just dead weight."

Mr Garcia said he eventually managed to bring his friend to the shore.

However, officials from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department later pronounced Mr Ransom dead. He was 19.

The attack happened on Surf Beach, some 130 miles (210km) north-west of Los Angeles.

The authorities said they were still trying to identify the type of the shark that attacked the bodyboarder.

The last known fatal shark attack in California was in 2008, when a great white shark bit both legs of a surfer, causing the man to bleed to death

WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety

2010-10-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

LONDON — Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.

He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.
In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraqi war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”
Twelve weeks ago, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
Much has changed since 2006, when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, used years of computer hacking and what friends call a near genius I.Q. to establish WikiLeaks, redefining whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally.
Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.
Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”
He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.
“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.
Exposing Secrets
Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.
“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.
“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.
Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.
Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.
“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
Within days, his liaisons with two Swedish women led to an arrest warrant on charges of rape and molestation. Karin Rosander, a spokesperson for the prosecutor, said last week that the police were continuing to investigate.
In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Under British law, his Australian passport entitles him to remain for six months. Iceland, another country with generous press freedoms and a strong WikiLeaks following, has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government, like Britain’s, is too easily influenced by Washington. In his native Australia, ministers have signaled their willingness to cooperate with the United States if it opens a prosecution. Mr. Assange said a senior Australian official told him, “You play outside the rules, and you will be dealt with outside the rules.”
He faces attack from within, too.
After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.
Internal Turmoil
Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style is imperious. In an online exchange with one volunteer, a transcript of which was obtained by The Times, he warned that WikiLeaks would disintegrate without him. “We’ve been in a Unity or Death situation for a few months now,” he said.
When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”
Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.
In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.
“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.
Mr. Assange denied that any important volunteers had quit, apart from Mr. Domscheit-Berg. But further defections could paralyze an organization that Mr. Assange says has 40 core volunteers and about 800 mostly unpaid followers to maintain a diffuse web of computer servers and to secure the system against attack — to guard against the kind of infiltration that WikiLeaks itself has used to generate its revelations.
Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”
Even among those challenging Mr. Assange’s leadership style, there is recognition that the intricate computer and financial architecture WikiLeaks uses to shield it against its enemies has depended on its founder. “He’s very unique and extremely capable,” said Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic lawmaker.
A Rash of Scoops
Before posting the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq, WikiLeaks enjoyed a string of coups.
Supporters were thrilled when the organization posted documents on the Guantánamo Bay detention operation, the contents of Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account, reports of extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor, the membership rolls of the neo-Nazi British National Party and a combat video showing American Apache helicopters in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists.
But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.
A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” after the Afghan documents were posted “to find about people who are spying.” He said the Taliban had a “wanted” list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.
“After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,” he said.
Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision “with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,” he said.
But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”
In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts. He responded testily to questions about WikiLeaks’s opaque finances, Private Manning’s fate and WikiLeaks’s apparent lack of accountability to anybody but himself, calling the questions “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of “kindergarten.”
Mr. Assange has been equivocal about Private Manning, talking in late summer as though the soldier was unavoidable collateral damage, much like the Afghans named as informers in the secret Pentagon documents.
But in London, he took a more sympathetic view, describing Private Manning as a “political prisoner” facing a jail term of up to 52 years, without confirming that he was the source of the disclosed war logs. “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences,” he said.
Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. Last Monday, the Swedish Migration Board said Mr. Assange’s bid for a residence permit had been rejected. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was, once more, on the move.

Iran Is Said to Give Top Aide to Karzai Cash by the Bagful

2010-10-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, center, speaking with his chief of staff, Umar Daudzai. Officials say Mr. Daudzai serves as a conduit for Iranian cash into the Karzai government and may be trying to poison Afghan relations with the United States.

ABUL, Afghanistan — One evening last August, as President Hamid Karzai wrapped up an official visit to Iran, his personal plane sat on the airport tarmac, waiting for a late-running passenger: Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan.

The ambassador, Feda Hussein Maliki, finally appeared, taking a seat next to Umar Daudzai, Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff and his most trusted confidant. According to an Afghan official on the plane, Mr. Maliki handed Mr. Daudzai a large plastic bag bulging with packets of euro bills. A second Afghan official confirmed that Mr. Daudzai carried home a large bag of cash.
“This is the Iranian money,” said an Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Many of us noticed this.”
The bag of money is part of a secret, steady stream of Iranian cash intended to buy the loyalty of Mr. Daudzai and promote Iran’s interests in the presidential palace, according to Afghan and Western officials here. Iran uses its influence to help drive a wedge between the Afghans and their American and NATO benefactors, they say.
The payments, which officials say total millions of dollars, form an off-the-books fund that Mr. Daudzai and Mr. Karzai have used to pay Afghan lawmakers, tribal elders and even Taliban commanders to secure their loyalty, the officials said.
“It’s basically a presidential slush fund,” a Western official in Kabul said of the Iranian-supplied money. “Daudzai’s mission is to advance Iranian interests.”
The Western and Afghan officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the delicacy of discussing the financial dealings of Mr. Karzai and his aide. The sources said they were motivated by a concern that Mr. Daudzai was helping to poison relations between Mr. Karzai and the United States. Mr. Daudzai and Mr. Karzai both declined to respond to written questions about their relationship with Iran. An aide to Mr. Daudzai dismissed the allegations as “rubbish.”
Mr. Maliki, the Iranian ambassador in Kabul, also declined to answer questions. A spokesman for Mr. Maliki called the allegations “devilish gossip by the West and foreign media.”
The Iranian payments are intended to secure the allegiance of Mr. Daudzai, a former ambassador to Iran who consistently advocates an anti-Western line to Mr. Karzai, the officials said. Mr. Daudzai briefs Mr. Karzai each morning.
“Karzai knows that without the U.S., he is finished,” an associate of the president said. “But it’s like voodoo. Daudzai is the source of all the problems with the U.S. He is systematically feeding him misinformation, disinformation and wrong information.”
The payments to Mr. Daudzai illustrate the degree to which the Iranian government has penetrated Mr. Karzai’s inner circle despite his presumed alliance with the United States and the other NATO countries, which have sustained him with military forces and billions of dollars since the Taliban’s ouster since 2001.
Earlier this year, Mr. Karzai invited the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidential palace, where Mr. Ahmadinejad gave a virulently anti-American speech. When Mr. Ahmadinejad visited Kabul, he brought two boxes of cash with him, an Afghan official said. “One box was for Daudzai personally, the other for the palace,” the official said.
A senior NATO officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to discuss whether Mr. Daudzai was receiving money from Iran. But he said that the Iranian government was conducting an aggressive campaign inside Afghanistan to undermine the American and NATO mission and to gain influence in politics.
The NATO officer said Iran’s intelligence agencies were playing both sides of the conflict, providing financing, weapons and training to the Taliban. Iranian agents also financed the political campaigns of several Afghans who ran in last month’s parliamentary election, the NATO officer said.
The Iranian intelligence services have developed the ability to assassinate opponents and attack American troops inside the country, the NATO officer said.
“I am very concerned that they have a lethal capability and presence inside Afghanistan and Kabul,” the officer said.
Obama administration officials have expressed alarm about Iranian intentions. Last week, Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, complained to Afghanistan’s finance minister, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, about Mr. Daudzai and Iran’s influence in the presidential palace, a former Afghan official said.
Mr. Holbrooke did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview, Mr. Zakhilwal declined to talk about the discussion with Mr. Holbrooke or about any Iranian activities in Afghanistan.
“We have no choice but to be friendly with Iran,” Mr. Zakhilwal said. “It’s a hostile neighborhood.”

Mr. Daudzai is part of a group of Afghans around Mr. Karzai whose members once belonged to Hezb-i-Islami, a hard-line Islamist group that fought the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The guerrilla group, loosely allied with the Taliban, is still fighting NATO forces and the Afghan government.
Hezb-i-Islami’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was one of the most brutal of Afghan warlords. During the civil war in the 1990s, his forces conducted an extended bombardment of Kabul, killing thousands of civilians. Since 2001, Mr. Hekmatyar has spent at least part of the time living under the protection of the Iranian government. The group also has long-standing ties to Pakistan’s intelligence services, which maintain links to the Taliban.
Current and former Afghan officials say the Iranian government began financing Mr. Karzai before Mr. Daudzai became his chief of staff in 2003. It is not clear when Mr. Daudzai became a conduit for Iranian cash. In 2005, he was named ambassador to Iran. It was then, one Afghan official said, that Mr. Daudzai became acquainted with Iranian intelligence officials and grew close to senior Iranian leaders like Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Mr. Daudzai returned to Kabul in 2007 to resume his job as chief of staff. Since then, officials said, Mr. Daudzai has maintained a close relationship with the Iranian ambassador. Iranian officials have nearly unfettered access to Mr. Karzai’s palace, bypassing the normal rules of protocol.
“The relationship is intimate,” an Afghan political leader said of Mr. Daudzai and the Iranians.
Accounts vary as to how much Iranian money flow into the presidential palace. An Afghan political leader said he believed that Mr. Daudzai received between $1 million and $2 million every other month. A former diplomat who served in Afghanistan said sometimes single payments totaled as much as $6 million.
One former Afghan official said the money appeared to be kept in a safe in Mr. Daudzai’s office.
It is not clear whether Mr. Daudzai takes any of the money himself or whether he is the only conduit. But Afghan and Western officials say Mr. Daudzai owns at least six homes in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and in Vancouver, British Columbia, acquired during his time as Mr. Karzai’s top aide.
One Afghan official said Mr. Daudzai used his power over Mr. Karzai’s schedule to ensure that Afghans who saw him registered complaints about the American presence in the country and the deaths of Afghan civilians in the war. “This is the strategy,” the Afghan official said.
Mr. Daudzai’s efforts on Iran’s behalf have met with some resistance. According to the Western official, Mr. Daudzai ran afoul of Afghan intelligence officials when he tried to help some Iranian businesses set up operations in Kabul. The Afghan intelligence officials believed that the Iranian officials were fronts for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a powerful wing of the Iranian military.
The Iranian businesses were shut down by the National Directorate of Security, the Western official said. But not for long.
“Daudzai helped them get going, then N.D.S. closed them down, but then they reopened again,” the Western official said. An Afghan official confirmed the account.
Iranians get involved in other parts of Afghanistan’s political life as well. The Iranian ambassador is trying to sway the choice of speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Afghans said. According to an Afghan official, Mr. Maliki recently called Mirwais Yasini, a candidate for the speaker’s job, and urged him to step aside in favor of Yunus Qanooni

Passenger traffic up 25% at Dubai Airport

2010-10-21T09:13:00.001-07:00

Passenger traffic at Dubai International airport increased 25 percent year-on-year in September, while freight volumes rose 11.3 percent, the latest figures from Dubai Airports show.
In the nine months to September 30, 2010, traffic through Dubai International rose 15.8 percent with
34,838,359 passengers passing through the airport.
In September, traffic reached 3.9m passengers across more than 130 airlines and 210 destinations, making Dubai International the sixth busiest airport in the world.
“We are seeing expansion across the board, not only from our usual top flight destinations such as India, the UK, Iran and Germany but we are also seeing significant increases in passenger traffic to and from the US, China and Australia," said Paul Griffiths, CEO, Dubai Airports.

French workers vow to step up pension protests

2010-10-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

rench workers will step up their protests against pension reforms next week, a top trade union leader says.
Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT workers' confederation, made the statement as union leaders prepared to discuss plans to hold a seventh day of national protests across France.
Meanwhile, rolling strikes are continuing against government plans to raise the pension age from 60 to 62.
Blockades of refineries and fuel depots have led to fuel shortages.

The pension reforms bill is set to be speeded up to make sure it it is voted on on Friday, a parliamentary source has told Reuters news agency.

The lower house has already approved the bill, which aims to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67.
On its website, the Senate says it will extend the debate on pension reform into Saturday and Sunday if necessary.
On Wednesday, it adopted an amendment calling for a full review in 2013 of pension reforms.
Unions are meeting late on Thursday to decide whether to call a seventh national day of protest, possibly on Tuesday 26 October.
However, union leaders fear they may lose momentum because of the national holiday of All Saints' Day at the end of next week, when the schools and many salaried workers will be away.
President Sarkozy has called for an end to the disruption.
"We cannot be the only country in the world where, when there is a reform, a minority wants to block everyone else," he said on Thursday.
"By taking hostage the economy, companies and the daily lives of French people, we are going to destroy jobs."
Stepping up action Mr Thibault told RMC radio on Thursday: "The government remains intransigent. We need to continue with massive action as soon as next week... We will ask the unions for strong action that will allow people to stop work and go on to the streets."
In the southern port city of Marseille, there is no public transport, trains have been delayed or cancelled and the ports blockaded. The rubbish collectors' strike, now in its 10th day, and the nine-day rubbish collectors' strike means several thousand tonnes of refuse is piling up on the city's streets.

The top central government official in the area, Michel Sappin, said: "There is a real danger to the safety and health of Marseille."

The unions' tactics are clear, says the BBC's Matthew Price in the city - to cause discomfort, if not chaos, and to create uncertainty across the country.
They believe that keeps the pressure on the government to change its retirement plans but, adds our correspondent, it also risks alienating the public, who so far according to surveys still support the strikers.
The strikes are hitting the entertainment industry, too. Singer Lady Gaga has postponed two concerts in Paris on Friday and Saturday.
A statement on her website says this is because "there is no certainty that the trucks can make it" to the venue.
Thousands of students marched in Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux.
In Bordeaux, demonstrators carried banners reading, "We would have burnt this reform but there's no petrol left", the AFP news agency reported.
In Lyon, youths clashed again with riot police, throwing bottles and overturning a car. Police retaliated with tear gas.
The protests have largely been peaceful with the exception of Lyon and the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Across France, a number of universities are blocked or disrupted.
Electricity imports Ahead of the vote, correspondents say unions are stepping up the pressure on a 10th day of refinery strikes, go-slows on motorways and work stoppages at regional airports.

The BBC's Christian Fraser in Paris says there is a precedent for such a move.

In 2006, student protests forced the government to retreat on the controversial youth labour scheme, even after then President Jacques Chirac had signed it into law.
Some unions want to continue the protests whatever happens in parliament, but that will depend on public support and the resolve of their members, many of whom have gone without pay for days even weeks, our correspondent adds.
About a quarter of France's service stations had no fuel on Wednesday, and strikes also stopped work at two of France's three liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.
On Wednesday, the country began importing electricity as the wave of protest action took hold of energy supplies.
At least 12 of France's 58 reactors were shut for maintenance, but the unions say production has been cut at four others.
As well as the general strikes and protests, there have been six days of co-ordinated action in the past six weeks that have brought as many as three million people to the streets.

AT&T third quarter on target

2010-10-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

AT&T's third quarter earnings were on target with estimates as the company activated a record 5.2 million iPhones amid a total of 8 million smartphones.

The company reported third quarter earnings of $12.3 billion, or $2.08 a share, on revenue of $31.6 billion, up 2.8 percent from a year ago. Those earnings were inflated by one-time gains that included a tax settlement and the sale of Sterling Commerce to IBM. Strip out those gains and earnings were 55 cents a share, in line with Wall Street estimates. AT&T's revenue was better than the $31.2 billion expected.

AT&T third quarter on target: 5.2 million iPhone activations

AT&T’s third quarter earnings were on target with estimates as the company activated a record 5.2 million iPhones amid a total of 8 million smartphones.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $12.3 billion, or $2.08 a share, on revenue of $31.6 billion, up 2.8 percent from a year ago (statement). Those earnings were inflated by one-time gains that included a tax settlement and the sale of Sterling Commerce to IBM. Strip out those gains and earnings were 55 cents a share, in line with Wall Street estimates. AT&T’s revenue was better than the $31.2 billion expected.
Among the key moving parts in the third quarter:

AT&T added 2.6 million wireless subscribers and now has a total of 92.8 million. These gains were fueled by connected devices—e-readers, security systems and GPS devices—instead of people. AT&T added 745,000 postpaid customers and 321,000 prepaid.
Postpaid churn was 1.14 percent. Total churn was 1.32 percent.
80 percent of postpaid sales were smartphones.
Wireless data revenue was $4.8 billion, up 30.5 percent from the third quarter a year ago.

Wireless service revenue was $13.7 billion, up 10.5 percent from a year ago.
The company added 236,000 U-Verse TV subscribers and most of those companies also got the U-Verse Internet service. U-Verse revenue in the third quarter was $1.1 billion.
Business service revenue continued to stabilize, but were down 3.9 percent from a year ago to $9.5 billion.
The company also reiterated its 4G migration plan.

Nokia phones in profit

2010-10-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

Nokia's earnings returned to the black in the third quarter thanks to smartphone sales, but it also announced 1,800 layoffs.

The Finnish mobile phone maker said today that it took home a profit of 529 million euros ($741 million) in the third quarter compared with a loss of 559 million euros in the year-ago quarter. Revenue rose almost 5 percent to 10.3 billion euros from 9.8 billion euros a year back earlier.

Surpassing analyst expectations, the third-quarter results were boosted by higher selling prices on Nokia smartphones. For the quarter, the company's Devices and Services unit pulled in sales of 7.2 billion euros, an increase of 4 percent from a year ago.

Nokia sold a total of 110.4 million mobile devices up 2 percent from last year. However, sales of "converged" mobile devices (smartphones and mobile computers) hit 26.5 million units, up 61 percent from a year ago.

The solid quarter was welcome news to Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, who took the reins from Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo last month.

"In the five weeks since joining Nokia, I have found a company with many great strengths and a history of achievement that are second to none in the industry," Elop said in a statement. "And yet our company faces a remarkably disruptive time in the industry, with recent results demonstrating that we must reassess our role in and our approach to this industry."

Nokia still faces a tough, competitive climate. The company announced today that it plans to streamline some of its operations, notably in its Symbian smartphone unit. That move and others will lead to the layoffs of some 1,800 employees worldwide.

Clearwire edges toward 100Mbps wireless broadband

2010-10-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Michael Sievert, Clearwire's chief commercial officer, says that a trial wireless broadband network in Phoenix is close to delivering 100Mbps download speeds.

CHICAGO--Clearwire is getting near 100Mbps downloads on its LTE-based trial wireless network in Phoenix, a company executive said today.

During a keynote presentation here at the 4G World trade show, Michael Sievert, Clearwire's chief commercial officer, shared initial speed test results on a trial network the company has built in Phoenix to test the next generation of a 4G technology called LTE, or Long Term Evolution. Clearwire announced it was testing LTE network technology in Phoenix in August.

According to Sievert, the company has clocked download speeds at 50 megabits per second using 10MHz channels for up and down speeds. When using 20MHz channels, the speeds go up to 90Mbps. These speeds are significantly faster than the 3Mbps to 6Mbps average download speeds the company currently gets on its commercial network, which uses a competing technology called WiMax.

What's more, the trial LTE network is also faster than other networks using similar technology. Verizon Wireless, which is expected to launch its LTE network by the end of the year, has said it expects real-world download speeds of between 8Mbps and 12Mbps.

The ultra-fast speeds on the Clearwire LTE trial network are somewhat exaggerated due to the fact that these networks have no other users loading the network, which can affect performance. But the results still clearly show the evolution in wireless broadband, where speeds are constantly increasing.

Aside from the demonstrated faster speeds, the trial in Phoenix also sheds light on Clearwire's future plans, which increasingly look tied to LTE rather than WiMax, the technology that Clearwire is using currently to build its network.

Sievert said that company hasn't made any official plans to deploy the LTE technology. Instead, he emphasized a familiar company sentiment, which is that Clearwire is technology agnostic.

As an industry, "we need to get away from the technology alphabet soup," he said. "Customers don't care what the underlying technology is. They just want you to give them the speeds they want. As an industry we need to spark their imagination and show what will happen as wireless moves from narrow band to wide band."

Sievert said that its Phoenix network demonstrates true broadband speeds for wireless, which he said will offer new services to wireless consumers. Among these new services is high-quality, high-definition video.

"There is an amazing potential in wireless broadband," he said. "And it's just beginning. There's great promise for the future and it's more exciting than ever."

Clearwire executives have been saying for months that the company is open to using other technologies to achieve its wireless broadband goals.

"We won't fight a technology war," Clearwire's CEO said at the CTIA trade show last spring. "We can sunset one technology if we need to. We provide customers what they want: access to the network at a low cost. And our network is designed so we can add LTE if we need to."

Earlier this week, Clearwire announced full 4G service for New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company now offers service in 55 markets. Its resellers and partners, Sprint, Comcast, and Time Warner, will also be reselling the service in many of these markets. The company expects to cover about 120 million people in the U.S. with its network by the end of 2010.

Electronic Arts to acquire Angry Birds publisher

2010-10-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

Electronic Arts is acquiring Angry Birds publisher Chillingo, the company confirmed to Reuters today.
According to the report, EA is buying Chillingo for under $20 million. However, an EA spokesperson, who told Reuters that the acquisition would help the company increase its "market leadership on the Apple platform," would not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Chillingo is a major player in the mobile-gaming space. The company publishes Rovio's Angry Birds, which is one of the top-selling titles of all time in Apple's App Store. It also publishers several other games, including Cut the Rope, Robin Hood: Archer of the Woods, and Modern Conflict. Its content is available on several platforms aside from iOS, including Windows Mobile and RIM's BlackBerry OS.
With the help of Chillingo, EA can now start focusing more of its efforts on the growing mobile-gaming space.
According to a recent study from Flurry Analytics, 19 million people currently play games on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch for an average of 22 minutes each day. And even that figure is low, Flurry said, because its analytics tools are only running on 20 percent of all the applications available in Apple's App Store.
In a separate study released earlier this year, Flurry Analytics found that Apple's iOS gaming market share has increased at an astounding rate. In 2008, its share stood at just 5 percent of the portable games market. By the end of the 2009, it chipped away at Sony's PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS to capture 19 percent market share. That figure could be even higher by the end of 2010.
This isn't EA's first foray outside of the traditional gaming market. Last year, the company acquired PlayFish for as much as $400 million to bolster its social-gaming offering.

Politicos press Facebook CEO over privacy flap

2010-10-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is, once again, being forced to fend off pointed privacy questions from Washington politicians.

In a letter sent this week to the 26-year-old executive, two prominent members of the U.S. House of Representatives demanded answers about the company's latest privacy breach, which allowed third party applications to gather personally identifiable information.

It's not clear, as CNET noted, that Facebook knew that some of these third-party companies, including extremely popular ones like FarmVille manufacturer Zynga, were allegedly selling data to advertisers and tracking companies in violation of Facebook's terms of use. That was reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.

Reps. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, directed their queries at Zuckerberg. They posed 18 questions, including: What guidelines does Facebook have in place for third-party applications to protect its users from advertent or inadvertent privacy breaches? And: Please identify the officials within Facebook who are responsible or ensuring that third-party applications satisfy Facebook's terms and conditions.

The pair of politicians requested a response by October 27. Normally this would be followed up by a committee chairman's threat to haul Zuckerberg in front of a congressional committee to be roasted slowly in front of TV cameras, but the House has been adjourned since late September because of the upcoming elections.

For its part, Facebook said it would be happy to answer questions.

Company spokesman Andrew Noyes said: "We look forward to addressing any confusion that has resulted from The Wall Street Journal article and we're happy to work with Reps. Markey and Barton to answer any questions they may have. Facebook is committed to safeguarding private data while letting people enjoy meaningful social experiences with their friends...We are continually working with developers and other responsible parties in the community to put in place further safeguards against violations of our terms."

In May, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking about an earlier privacy flap.

But it's been the combination of Markey and Barton who have been the most prominent Capitol Hill critics of Internet companies. They've pressed Google over Street View, demanded answers from Apple after a privacy policy change, warned an Internet provider not to go ahead with its plans to serve up relevant ads, and taken aim at Web-monitoring firm NebuAd. Barton has been particularly pointed in his criticism of Google.

Markey and Barton tend to be far more focused on these topics than their colleagues. Neither is, on the other hand, in a position to convene a hearing directly. Markey is no longer head of the House Internet subcommittee; he gave that position up in January to take over a panel focused on the environment and global warming. (Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat facing a difficult re-election bid, is the current chairman of the Internet subcommittee.)

The flash future of the MacBook

2010-10-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

The features and size are leading many to debate whether the redesigned MacBook Air is really a Netbook in disguise.

That's beside the point. What the MacBook Air really is? The future of Apple's laptops. And if you ask Steve Jobs, the future of all laptops.

During his 90-minute presentation at Apple headquarters yesterday, Jobs introduced two models of a redesigned MacBook Air, an 11-inch and 13-inch. Both are supremely skinny (less than .11 inches at the tiniest point) and weigh in at just under three pounds. Two very explicit feature choices enabled that: leaving out the optical drive for loading discs, and the decision to drop the hard drive. Instead, there's just flash-based solid-state drive. And there's going to be more where that came from.

"All notebooks will be like this someday," Jobs said, adding that the Air is "the future of the MacBook."

Why? Well, it's a practical issue: Apple made that design choice in order to squeeze bigger, longer-lasting batteries inside and to slim down the profile as much as possible.

But it's also related to a larger philosophical issue for Apple. Jobs framed it during his presentation yesterday that the new Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) coming out next summer was heavily informed by the iPad and its instant-on, App Store-accessing iOS mobile operating system.

The way the iPad is used--for some productivity apps, consuming media, checking e-mail--is very similar to where Jobs apparently sees notebooks going someday. Jobs reiterated his hope for this later in the hallway in a comment made to my colleague, saying that to him, "what's most exciting is we got rid of the hard drive."

The original Air introduced in 2008 had a standard hard drive but came with a solid-state drive (SSD) as a much more expensive option. Now if you want an Air, it's the only option. To potential customers this could seem rather limiting, and the idea of that being the only option someday rather undesirable. For Apple, though, this is not that much of an adjustment.

Apple is already the largest flash memory customer in the world, stuffing those chips inside the roughly 9 million iPods, 14 million iPhones, and 4 million iPads it sells every three months. Now it is setting itself up as the biggest cheerleader for solid-state notebooks.

Even though SSD was an option in the original Air, Apple didn't push the flash agenda in notebooks at all. Today it's a different story. Jobs strongly hinted Apple is someday planning to eventually make flash-based notebooks standard. He seems to be thinking, if it's good enough for the iPhone and iPad, why not for a superportable laptop?

Of course, Apple is not the only one making SSD standard in smaller notebooks. Sony's done it with the Vaio Z notebook too, and some of the very first Netbooks were flash only but in very small capacities, around 16GB and lower.

So what's great about an flash-based notebook? A few positives:

• Takes up less room. As we noted, that's the biggest reason why Apple is going in that direction. They just pop some flash memory onto the system board and call it a day. No hard drive enclosure, or even an SSD enclosure, to make room for anymore.

• Flash memory is faster. If Apple is trying to re-create the experience of using an iPad with its instant-on capability and its ability to automatically resume right where you left off in an app, a solid-state drive doesn't take as much time to wake up as a hard drive does. Jobs said the Air with flash is "twice as fast" as an Air with a regular hard drive.

• Cooler temps. Jobs likes quiet machines--you won't find a noisy fan in his notebooks. Hard drives spin furiously when reading and writing data, generating heat while they're at it. Flash-based drives don't have moving parts to generate as much heat. (Still, cooling can be a problem in the original MacBook Air, as some have reported. We'll see if Apple was able to solve that with this new design.)

• Safer for klutzes. Flash memory doesn't have the moving parts of a hard drive, so dropping a flash-based notebook or bumping it means you're much less likely to cause a really nasty/expensive data loss problem for yourself.

Of course, not everyone will think this is the best idea. For the following reasons:

• Flash is still relatively expensive. Traditional hard drives are cheaper right now, and price can be the deciding factor when shopping. But that will continue to change over time.

• More expensive means smaller doses. Apple is offering 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities of the new MacBook Air. The 13-inch 256GB version is the most expensive at $1,600. On the flip side, the smallest capacity 13-inch MacBook Pro has basically the same size hard drive as the largest Air, 250GB, for $1,200--so there remains a pretty big price gap. Still, it's shrinking. And as it gets cheaper, it will be a much easier sell to even price-conscious buyers that all Apple's notebooks have solid-state drives.

• Reliability over time. Even Samsung, one of the top producers of flash memory, warns that their performance can degrade over time depending on how a device is used.

So while it's not without its drawbacks even now, it's safe to assume flash memory performance and price will continue to improve over time.

How long though? It's looking very likely that in the next few years flash-based notebooks will be the norm for Apple, and ordering a traditional hard drive might be just an add-on option in the ordering process. That seems especially likely as Mac OS is moving toward becoming more like iOS, which only runs on flash-based devices.And where Apple goes--as we've seen in MP3 players, touch-screen tablets, and smartphones--the rest of the hardware industry follows.

Depp Could Be The Thin Man

2010-10-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

It would seem that Johnny Depp is not only in a remake mood, but has also been enjoying working aboard Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides with director Rob Marshall. Why so? Because he’s apparently pestering him to work on a new version of The Thin Man for Warner Bros.
Dashiell Hammett wrote the detective novel in 1934, which finds private eye Nick Charles giving up his hard-boiled life to settle down into a world of dedicated alcoholism after marrying wealthy socialite Nora. But his old job comes calling when he’s drawn into investigating a murder, with his wife along for the ride.

While the novel itself never generated a sequel, it became the source material for a series of movies from Warners, with William Powell as Nick and Myrna Loy as Nora. And NBC turned it into a short-lived TV show in the 1950s.

The role of heavy-drinking, easy-quipping Nick sounds like a natural fit for Depp, and while there’s no script in place yet, Vulture reports that the actor is looking to develop it via his Infinitum Nihil production company, and he’s thinking Marshall could be the man to make it.

Interesting trivia point here: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who recently directed Depp in The Tourist, is on record as saying that one of the big influences on that film as it developed was the Thin Man movies. Sounds like Depp got a little extra inspiration…
James White

Mark Wahlberg Could Star in 'The Crow' Remake

2010-10-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

Mark Wahlberg is reportedly pitched to take on Brandon Lee's iconic role in another movie adaptation of "The Crow". According to Bloody Disgusting, the Oscar-nominated actor has been offered to portray main character Eric Draven in "The Crow", a remake of the 1994 film.

Previously, producer Edward R. Pressman said that they had begun looking for lead actor for the project. "[We've got an offer out] to a major actor," he said earlier this year, before adding "and things are moving ahead very aggressively, with the aim of doing the film this year."

Moreover, the filmmakers had chosen filming locating as Pressman stated at that time, "The setting is the southwest - the Mexico/Arizona area - and an urban [setting], Detroit or Pittsburgh or something like that. There are two locations that the film is set. Its initial platform is in the southwest and then it moves to the big city in the north, middle or eastern America, and then back."

Nick Cave was hired to rewrite the script with a draft from Stephen Norrington, who has also been attached to direct. The upcoming action thriller will follow a man brutally murdered coming back to life as an undead avenger of his and his fiancee's murder.

Eclair-running Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 goes on video again

2010-10-20T18:10:00.000-07:00

The Android 2.1 Eclair update for the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is still cooking, but their product blog is letting us have another taste with another video of the new firmware running on an X10 and all the goodies that it brings.

The first videos, showed off camera update - 720p video with continuous autofocus - and didn't spend much time on the UI changes. This new video digs a little deeper - the custom Timescape on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is first.

It's reportedly more responsive and now auto-scrolls the text in tiles (e.g. Facebook), so you don't have to open up the dedicated app just to read longer messages. Android 2.1 itself brings goodies - Live Wallpapers were shown off in the first videos, Quick Contacts and the SNS-enabled phonebook are the stars of this show.

The in-call interface on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 has been improved too. Check out the video in question to see how it works (the video is shot with another updated X10).

Like last time, you can leave a comment at the Sony Ericsson Product Blog if you're interested in seeing some of the other new stuff the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 will get once the Android 2.1 Eclair firmware passes the testing phase.

BlackBerry Bold 9780 spotted on the Vodafone Netherlands website

2010-10-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

The highly rumored BlackBerry Bold 9780 is almost official - it has just been spotted on the Vodafone Netherlands web page and should hit the market soon. And while we've already seen the smartphone before, its specs sheet was still missing. Up until now.

Now, thanks to Vodafone Netherlands, we can finally take a closer look at the BlackBerry Bold 9780 specs list and see what's under the phone's hood.

Sadly, there is still no information on the thing's processor, but the rest is all there on the Vodafone website. Even the price - the Bold 9780 is expected to start selling for 509 euro commitment-free price.

The BlackBerry Bold 9780 is powered by the recently introduced BlackBerry OS 6.0 and packs a hardware QWERTY keyboard, 512MB of RAM, a built-in GPS receiver and support for 3G with HSPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The Bold 9780 screen measures 2.44 inches but Vodafone is mum on its resolution (rumor has it's an HVGA display). As for the camera, it is capable of taking 5MP stills.

Ferrari 458 Challenge testing at Monza

2010-10-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

The new Ferrari 458 Challenge has been put to the test at the Monza circuit in Italy yet again. The model will compete in the Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli in the 2011 season.

Based on the recently launched 458 Italia, the Challenge version features the same 570 HP V8 engine, but important modifications have been made to the gear ratios and calibration of its dual-clutch F1 gearbox to guarantee higher torque at lower revs.

The 458 Challenge is built from carbon-fiber and Lexan in order to reduce weight and also has a specific suspension set-up with solid aluminum bushings, stiffer springs, single-rate dampers, center-nut 19” racing rims, larger dimension Pirelli slicks, and a ride height lowered by 30mm all round.

In the video you will see the car’s start up, downshifts, and acceleration, but all you’ll really care about is listening to the engine’s beautiful music!

2011 Ford Mustang Compressor by GeigerCars

2010-10-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

The 5.0-Liter-V8 engine found in the 2011 Ford Mustang is nothing to shake your head at, especially with its 412hp and 390 ft.-lb. of torque. However, GeigerCars have taken that excellent starting point and sent it on its way to a bigger and better finish. The German tuner has prepared a supercharged package for the 2011 Mustang that will increase the car’s output to a total of 497 HP.

This 85hp boost was accomplished by adding a screw condenser with a volume of 2.3 liters that offers a boost pressure of 0.5 bar. Other technical improvements were also made that lead the Mustang to 497 HP available at 6,400 rpm and 634 NM of torque at 4,200 rpm. The factory installed electronic top speed limiter has also been removed so this muscle car can now hit a top speed of 170mph.

The 2011 Ford Mustang’s handling has also been improved with the addition of a modified suspension, a set of OZ Ultraleggera lightweight alloy rims (8.5x20 inch size for the front axle and 10x20 inch size for the rear), and a sport chassis.

Ferrari 458 Italia versus Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera

2010-10-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

Anytime you get the chance to have two mouth-watering supercars in the same video, it absolutely becomes required watching.

Road & Track released this teaser video of two of the best supercars on the market today, the Ferrari 458 Italia and the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Picking between the two is like picking between Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. You won’t go wrong with either one. On one corner, you have the 458 Italia, a car that despite the problems it has encountered recently, is still high on top of our wish list. Conversely, the Gallardo Superleggera isn’t too far behind either. Some of you might even prefer the other one. Either way, there’s nothing wrong with having one of these cars in your garage.

The auto magazine left a lot of details surrounding this comparison between the 458 Italia and the Gallardo out of the video – we’re guessing it’s going to come out in their magazine – but they did tell us what they prefer on the street and on the track..