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Edition
On Barack Obama's Big Day, Voices
Raised in Opposition
By Mark Impomeni (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:49:00 AM
Filed under: Republicans, Barack Obama,
Obama Administration, Inauguration As
President-elect Barack Obama stands to
take the oath of office today, some
conservative commentators and pundits are
lending their voices to a chorus of
opposition against his policies. While the
nation has been mostly caught up in a
paroxysm of elation at the coming of a new
administration, these opinionators are not
reveling. Rather, they are exercising their
time-honored and sacred right to dissent.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh
says that the new president is entitlted to
exactly the same reception from
conservatives that liberals greeted
President George W. Bush with in 2001.
"They didn't give Bush a chance in 2000.
Before he was inaugurated the search-and-
destroy mission had begun. I'm not talking
about search-and-destroy, but I've been
listening to Barack Obama for a year and a
half. I know what his politics are. I know
what his plans are, as he's stated them. I
don't want them to succeed."
Another conservative luminary, Michelle
Malkin, took after Republicans in
Washington whom she says have gotten
out of the way of the Obama freight train.
Malkin wants elected Republicans to show
more backbone in opposing Obama and his
policies. "My criticism of the GOP
Steve Bell: Bush prepares for life as an ex-president
By Steve Bell (News: Main section |
guardian.co.uk)
establishment is they are completely out of
touch with how fly-over America feels
about this [inaugural] spectacle."
RedState.com's Erick Erickson, a rising
star in the world of conservative activism
and punditry, focused his ire at the media,
whose over-the-top coverage has turned
the inauguration preparations into a canival
-like side show. Erickson says the media is
not covering Obama, but engaging in
George Bush and Dick Cheney leaving
office after eight years in power
19/01/09 - 20/01/09
idolatry.
"I think we are going to be treated to
hagiography for weeks if not months. The
first time Obama uses the bathroom,
Newsweek will do a five page spread."
The national good mood over Obama's
inauguration is likely to last for at least his
first 100 days in office. But as President
Obama's and the Democratic Congress'
plans and policies begin to take hold, he
will begin to be judged more and more on
results. Obama no doubt knows this, and is
trying in vain to dampen expectations and
to insulate his administration against the
backlash that will come with anything less
than resounding success. But these
conservative commentators would not
mind seeing President Obama have a little
more difficult time establishing himself.
Their opposition should be a signal to
Obama that soon the basking in the
public's adulation and the media spotlight
will end, and he will have to deal with a
loyal, and vocal, opposition.
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
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Will the Inauguration be the Most
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Voices Raised in Opposition
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Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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LibertyNewsprint.com U.S.
Who Screwed Up the Oath,
Roberts or Obama?
By David Knowles (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:51:00 AM
Filed under: Barack Obama, Inauguration
Let's just say that the big moment between
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts
and President Barack Obama did not
exactly go according to plan.
First, Roberts seemed to hesitate in the
first part of the oath, prompting Obama to
start in with "I Barack Hussein Obama," as
Roberts continued on with the rest, causing
a verbal traffic jam.
Then, Roberts changed the wording of
the oath, misplacing the word "faithfully",
and obliged a bemused Obama to
incorrectly repeat after him. In short, those
35 words that should have gone without a
hitch, will forever go down in history as
the way not to swear in a president.
Watch the cringe-worthy performance
that we'll be reliving for years to come:
& a m p ; l t ; a
LIVE VIDEO: The Inauguration of Barack
Obama
By Michael Kraskin (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:52:00 AM
Filed under: Viral Video, Inauguration
Thanks, MSNBC.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News,
World News, and News about the
Economy
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
Watch Live Video of the Event
href="Take">Take">http:/
/polls.blogflux.com/poll-
31725.html">Take the
poll</a><br
/><br /><a
href="Free">Free">http://
polls.blogflux.com/">Free Poll by
Blog Flux</a>
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Obama is Now President Even Though
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Rick Warren Gets Tepid Response
Photos
Will the Inauguration be the Most
Watched Event in TV History?
Voices Raised in Opposition
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Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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Will the Inauguration be the Most
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2 Politics Tech Tips*
When Liberals Gloat
By David Knowles (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:19:00 AM
Filed under: President Bush, Barack
Obama, Media To the victor go the spoils.
Just as has been the case in the aftermath
of every political contest in our nation's
history, the people who voted for the
winner walk around, for a time, with a
little something extra in their collective
step, while the constituents of the defeated
candidate complain of sore winning.
Witness the responses to Barack Obama's
victory here at Political Machine. Our
conservative writers will have none of this
change business, while our liberal voices
are bursting out in song.
After enduring two consecutive victories
by George W. Bush, during which I felt
equally low to my right-leaning colleagues,
I know too well the sting of hearing the
other party talk of mandates and the like.
And it is easy to understand why Obama's
Rick Warren Gets Tepid Response
By Liza Porteus Viana (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:02:00 AM
Filed under: Democrats, Republicans,
Barack Obama, Gay Rights, Obama
Administration, Inauguration About, oh,
maybe 10 people eventually clapped when
Rev. Rick Warren was introduced to give
the invocation during Barack Obama's
inauguration today. It did seem, however,
that he got more claps than former
President Bush.
The founder and senior pastor of the
Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA,
no doubt took the podium with at least a
little trepidation, given the outcry over his
selection by the gay community. Even
though the Warren dustup wasted several
days' worth of headlines after Obama
announced his selection, it appears now no
one cares too much and people just want to
revel in the moment.
Moonlight Allows Inauguration Streaming on Linux, PPC Macs [Linux]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:30:00 AM
Novell programmers worked overnight to
iconography, and bumper-sticker-ready
slogans are like so much salt poured into
conservative wounds. But if Republicans
are surprised that Obama really pulled this
thing off, they should realize that a whole
lot of Democrats feel the same way. Yes,
as incredible as it sounds, Barack Hussein
Obama is our new president.
While today's historic celebration is extra
A new Gallup Poll just out shows that
most Americans either approve of Warren
giving the invocation or don't even know
he was doing so, while just 9 percent
disapprove of Warren's role. Even among
liberals, support for Obama's choice far
outweighs disapproval, 39 percent to 16
percent. Among Democrats, there is 37
ensure that Moonlight, their open-source
implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight,
will allow streaming from the official
inauguration page for Linux, PowerPC
sweet for all those who supported Obama,
and one long nightmare for those who
didn't, the overwhelming majority of
Americans are wishing the new guy the
best. Sure, as Mark pointed out earlier, a
few powerful GOP figures (such as Rush
Limbaugh) are openly declaring they do
not wish Obama well, so help them God,
even the lion's share of those disappointed
percent approval compared to 10 percent
disapproval. Among liberals, the numbers
are similar with 39% approving and 16%
disapproving. Approval is obviously
higher among Republicans and
conservatives.
As many have said, Warren just prayed,
he wasn't trying to convert anybody or
Mac users, and others systems with
by the outcome of this election would like
to see the country rebound quickly, no
matter who is awarded the credit.
So, to my liberal friends (and those who
just feel like celebrating something), have
a good time today. Enjoy this moment.
There are, as Obama puts it, "tough days
ahead."
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
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Watched Event in TV History?
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espouse any perceived "anti-gay" message.
In fact, as he prayed, you saw people with
hands outstretched, crying. They were
taken with the moment. It was a testament
to Obama's inclusion of people of all
views.
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
Watch Live Video of the Event
Obama is Now President Even Though
He Has Not Taken the Oath
Rick Warren Gets Tepid Response
Photos
Will the Inauguration be the Most
Watched Event in TV History?
Voices Raised in Opposition
Send Us Your Pictures
Cheney to Attend Inauguration in
Wheelchair
Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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Firefox. [ via]
Daily Digital Newspaper
Obama
President Before
Oath Taken
By David Knowles (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:02:00 AM
Filed under: Barack Obama, Inauguration
12:00 p.m. Barack Obama is now the
president of the United States, even though
he hasn't yet taken his oath of office. So
says the Constitution, anyway. History is
made, even if the proceedings are running
a tad behind schedule.
12:05 And now the oath has been
administered, albeit clumsily. Did they
rehearse that? Oh well, I'm sure nobody
will ever replay that moment on television
again.
Anyway, remember where you are and
what you're doing, because you'll need that
information when future generations ask
you.
And check out the first image on the
updated White House website.
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
Watch Live Video of the Event
Obama is Now President Even Though
He Has Not Taken the Oath
Rick Warren Gets Tepid Response
Photos
Will the Inauguration be the Most
Watched Event in TV History?
Voices Raised in Opposition
Send Us Your Pictures
Cheney to Attend Inauguration in
Wheelchair
Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Obama Inauguration Likely To Be
Most Watched Event in Television
History
By David Knowles (Political
Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:20:00 AM
Filed under: Barack Obama, Breaking
News, Media According to Pew Research,
67% of Americans say they will watch
today's inauguration of Barack Obama. If
so, that would put the number of viewers at
202 million, almost double the amount of
people who watched the final episode of
M.A.S.H.
We'll have to wait for Nielsen's final
numbers, but it's clear that Obama's
inauguration, in addition to drawing the
Newspapers Again Thinking About Micropayments
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 8:38:00 PM
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in the
paper journalism world lately about
business models, so it's no surprise that
bad ideas for business models are
springing up again. Specifically, some are
largest live crowd to Washington DC, will
set a new record for a television audience.
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
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Will the Inauguration be the Most
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Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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beginning to wonder if micropayments
could work. As Clay Shirky notes in the
article, any time people bring up
micropayments as a solution, it's a hail
mary pass -- a last ditch effort by someone
who has no other ideas. Now, every time
we bring up micropayments, we get some
pushback, but no micropayment system
Inauguration Photos From The Ground
By Tommy Christopher and Caleb
Howe (Political Machine)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 2:36:00 AM
Filed under: Barack Obama, Inauguration
Pardon my future hat head.
From hell's Heart I stab at thee
more photos ...
No animals!?! Damn. I gotta dump all of
my chinchillas.
Follow all our inauguration coverage on
Steve Bell's If ... Stand away from the beard!
By Steve Bell (From the Guardian:
G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Steve Bell's If ...
has ever been shown to consistently work
on a large scale -- especially when it comes
to news. People will. undoubtedly point to
iTunes or even the iPhone app store as
micropayment examples to the contrary,
but both of those pale when compared to
free music and free apps in terms of
volume -- and considering the business
Politics Tech* International*
Watch Live Video of the Event
Will the Inauguration be the Most
Watched Event in TV History?
Voices Raised in Opposition
Send Us Your Pictures
Cheney to Attend Inauguration in
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Liberals, Start Your Gloating
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models we've seen adopted that don't rely
on those sorts of payment structures it's
difficult to believe that such systems will
really be dominant over the long haul.
They work in the short term, mainly due to
the convenience factor -- but they're a stop
gap -- not a true strategy to deal with
digital economics. Micropayments add in
3
More Silly Restrictions
Will Limit Team Obama's
Ability To Communicate
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:08:00 AM
While there are some indications that
newly inaugurated President Obama is
going to be able to keep his Blackberry (or
some other device) to communicate with
the outside world, similar "restrictions" are
being used to curtail his staff's ability to
communicate. Specifically, staffers have
been told they have to give up instant
messaging. The reasoning, once again,
comes down to the lawyers, and that
records need to be kept of all written
communications in the White House,
according to the Presidential Records Act.
However, it's seriously (and reasonably)
pissing off Obama staffers who have come
to rely on IM as a very efficient way to
communicate and get stuff done.
It's really sad when efficiency is getting
stifled by lawyers, though it happens all
too often. Why not just make it clear to
staffers to consider the fact that everything
they instant message may be seen on CNN
the next day, and tell them it's their
responsibility to use the tools effectively?
This is the federal gov't we're talking
about. Why are they being treated like
grade school kids? The purpose of the
Presidential Records Act is to increase
transparency in government. But, like so
many unintended consequences of
regulations, it's doing the opposite. It's
driving people to use less efficient and less
useful tools of communication to decrease
transparency.
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an element of unnecessary friction -- which
represents an economic inefficiency. They
may work for some time, but eventually
someone comes up with better business
models that get rid of that inefficiency.
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4 Tech* Special*
MusicShake Gets Jiggy With
Respected Dutch Researchers
Note That Piracy Has A Positive Revamped Website (And We
Impact On The Economy Have Some Free Music For You)
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 6:36:00 AM
Stanley de Vries wrote in to let us know
that TNO, a respected Dutch research firm
has come out with a large, 142-page, report
about piracy, commissioned by the
government, where it noted that piracy
appeared to be net beneficial for the
economy -- as opposed to some other
studies you may have heard about from the
entertainment industry. You can download
the full report as a PDF, but it's in Dutch.
Some translated news stories cover the
high points. The report notes that there's
little evidence that downloading is the
cause of CD sales falling -- noting
indications that downloaders actually buy
more music on average, and that a much
more likely reason for CD sales declining
was that people had finished "re-buying"
all the CDs they had owned on cassette
before that format was killed off. Stanley
was also kind enough to translate a few
excerpts from the first 5 pages (meaning
there's still plenty more to go
through):"The economic effects of file
sharing short- and long term are strongly
positive" [Interesting approach here: They
give the well-being of people also
economic value...]
Can You Spell “Barack Obama”?
By Robin Wauters (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:03:33 AM
Many Americans and others are still
unable to spell Barack Obama’s first name
correctly. At least that is the conclusion of
the folks at GooseGrade, a service that
allows readers to post corrections for
grammar, spelling and factual errors on
blogs and other online media outlets using
a free widget.
GooseGrade did some quick and dirty
"With regards to the music business we
can say that downloaded recordings are not
necessarily a lost sale"
"Lot's of people download for free to
learn about new music and eventually buy
when they like it"
"The calculations of the industry [about
the losses caused by illegal downloads] are
not necessarily correct because they are
based on a lot of assumptions and contain a
lot of uncertainties because underlying
data is not known with any accuracy"
(So far we were still only on page 3)
"Downloading goes hand in hand with
buying"
"Among downloaders of music and
movies, the percentage of buyers is as high
as among non-downloaders and with
games the percentage of buyers is even
higher"
"People that download music visit
concerts more often and buy more
merchandise"
"The practice of file sharing implicates
that the producers [their definition is a bit
vague here] need to change their business
model"
"That is why innovation of the business
model is now of the utmost urgency"
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research and found at least 60 million
pages on the Internet with Obama’s first
name misspelled. “Barak” is the most
common misspelling, followed in close
second by “Barrak”, and finally “Barrack”.
It’s one “r”, a “c” and a “k,” for those still
having trouble. The startup even counted
web sites intentionally placing misspelled
‘meta-tags’ or keywords into the site code
of their pages to pick up traffic from
misspelled searches.
In case you were wondering, I can find
By Robin Wauters (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:33:01 AM
MusicShake, an LA-based startup that
offers a music and sound effect mixing
service for amateurs that goes by the same
name, has completely redesigned its
website and added a couple of features to
make the service more social and fun to
use on a regular basis.
MusicShake offers a free desktop
application (unfortunately, Windows only
for now) that lets users create personalized,
professional sounding music using a
variety of modules and pattern-
combination methods, which is quite
addictive once you get the hang of it (takes
about 10 minutes and there are templates
to help get you started). You can convert
music you make to mp3 and download
them to your computer, or convert them
into a personalized ringtone. You can also
show off music you create to your friends
and place it in charts to promote your work
to others.
So far, there have been close to 50,000
music tracks created with the service,
which can individually be purchased in the
MusicShake store; revenues are split 50/50
with the creator. There’s also a
subscription option that gives you a month
of unlimited MP3 downloads and ringtones
in exchange for 1,499 in “Shake Cash” (or
$14.99).
TechCrunch readers are in for a treat
today: the first 1,000 readers to sign up for
about 101 million pages on Google with
the correct name (results may vary
depending on your location).
GooseGrade points out that thousands of
bloggers and other online authors will miss
out on incoming search traffic by
the service using the promotion code “
PROMOTC” get access to 3 free mp3
downloads (worth $3.00 each).
The new website comes with a
redesigned UI and color scheme, and also
adds a social layer on top of the online part
of MusicShake: direct communication
between members, a dedicated page that
gives an overview of users’ profiles,
forums, a way for registered users to build
and share their own playlists etc. Music
tracks created through MusicShake can
also easily be shared via Facebook, Imeem,
YouTube, and other communication
channels.
The service was launched in September
2007 at the TechCrunch40 conference- see
video below - when the company was still
based in South Korea. MusicShake has
raised$3.5 million in two funding rounds.
CrunchBase Information Musicshake
Information provided by CrunchBase
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over
the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
misspelling Obama’s name, although they
fail to note the fact many will probably
also search for the wrong terms and that
search engines already take the
misspellings into account when serving up
results.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile
Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
Daily.
Daily Digital Newspaper
IP Litigation Falls In
The US... But Someone
Is Confused As To Why
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:22:00 AM
There's a new report out that highlights
that there were fewer IP related lawsuits in
the US in 2008 than in 2007. The drop was
about 10%: from 10,276 to 9,210.
However, the reasoning given in the report
for the decline is difficult to square with
reality. It claims that: "The trend reflects
the success of the recording industry in
protecting its copyrights, leading the
industry to bring fewer lawsuits in the past
few years." That isn't even close to
accurate. The RIAA has had very little
success protecting its copyrights. The legal
strategy has been a colossal failure,
without a single legal win that held up, and
file sharing has only grown over time.
Hell, the RIAA has admitted failure in
their lawsuit strategy, hence the decision to
cut back on them (not end them,
completely, as was originally claimed). So,
it's difficult to see how anyone could
conclude that the program was a success,
and resulted in fewer lawsuits. And, of
course, the aggregate numbers may not be
all that telling, either. In the past, patent
system defenders have noted a drop in
cases filed recently, but they fail to note
that it was because more patent litigation
these days is filed against a long list of
companies, rather than just one or two. So,
in actuality, more companies are getting
sued for patent infringement, even if there
are fewer overall lawsuits.
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This Land is Your Land
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:13:47 AM
For me this was the most emotional
moment of yesterday's concert at the
Lincoln Memorial: Pete Seeger and Bruce
Springsteen leading a chorus of This Land
is Your Land.
All those people singing, and Pete Seeger
after all these years -- he can still lead a
crowd in song.
Daily Digital Newspaper
Watching The Inauguration With All My Facebook
Friends
By Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:06:37 AM
There are plenty of places to watch the
inauguration today online (see our guide).
I’ve been clicking around, and many of the
streams are jittery, as you would expect,
but I find myself coming back to CNN’s
live stream. The video keeps skipping on
me, but at least the audio is consistent.
Maybe that’s because CNN.com is serving
a record number of live video streams
(13.9 million live streams between 6 AM
and 11:45 AM ET, versus 5.3 million on
Election Day, the previous record). The big
draw, however, is that CNN partnered with
Facebook, and I can watch the proceedings
along with comments from all my
Facebook friends in the sidebar.
My friend Dimitry Leger noted that
“Obama looks like a heavyweight boxer
waiting to enter the ring for the big fight.”
When Bush appeared Kevin Werbach, who
is on the Obama transition team,
commented, “crowd is singing the nanana
goodbye song now.” (Scott Beale also
noticed this). Loic Le Meur doesn’t like all
the praying. Kevin Rose “is hoping this
stream starts working…”
Watching events like these with people
you know is always better than watching
alone, but since most of us are at work
today, Facebook serves as a proxy for a
virtual living room that can hold hundreds
of people. I find these comments much
more interesting than random Twitters
from people I don’t know. So I am going
to stick with Facebook and CNN for the
rest of the inauguration ceremony. (Uh-oh
the stream just went completely kaput for
me—at least I can still read everyone’s
commentary. I’m switching to Hulu for the
live video).
Update: During Obama’s speech, the
comment stream was filled with
everyone’s favorite quotes in real-time.
(His flubbing the oath was also noticed).
After the speech, some typical reactions
from Netvibes founder Tariq Krim:
“greatness is never given, it is earned;” and
from ex-Googler Chris Sacca describing
the moment as experienced in D.C., “Yes!
Everyone is crying and hugging.
Everyone.”
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile
Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
Daily.
Tech* International* 5
Don't Tell American Idol
You Can't Make Money
From Free Content
By Carlo Longino (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 11:08:14 PM
As Mike recently pointed out, he gets a
little annoyed when people say"free is not
a business model." As he points out, free is
really just part of the business model, and
the challenge is in using free as part of the
business model, and he's compiled
example after example after example of
people doing exactly this. Now add
American Idol to this list. Building on its
free content -- the TV show -- its producers
have teamed up with the company that
makes the popular teen virtual world
Habbo to create an Idol-themed one.
Habbo has built a solid business upon its
virtual world by selling virtual goods to
teenagers. The new American Idol world
will be tied to the show and feature new
activities and virtual goods as the show
progresses, and will also feature tie-ins
from Idol's sponsors. The main content is
given away for free, and used to
successfully generate further advertising
revenues and create interest in secondary,
paid products -- like this virtual world, but
also the popular American Idol concert
tours and other offerings. So why doesn't
anybody blast American Idol's producers
for giving their content away for free?
Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight
Community. To get insight and analysis
from Carlo Longino and other experts on
challenges your company faces, click here.
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Kakuro 865 medium
(From the Guardian: G2 |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:05:02 PM
Fill the grid so that each run of squares
adds up to the total in the box above or to
the left. Use only numbers 1-9, and never
use a number more than once per run (a
number may reoccur in the same row, in a
separate run).
Buy the Guardian tomorrow or subscribe
to our Digital Edition to see the completed
puzzle. guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
Feeds
6 Tech*
Whitehouse.gov Has A New
Face, And a Blog
By Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:44:22 AM
As President Barack Obama was giving
his inauguration speech, another transfer of
power was happening online. At exactly 12
PM ET, Whitehouse.gov, the official
Website of the President switched over to a
new design. There are links to Obama’s
Agenda and a Briefing Room where
citizens will be able to find Obama’s
weekly Web video address, appointments
and nominations, executive orders, and
slideshows.
And, of course, there is a blog. The first
blog post, written by the White House
director of New Media, Macon Phillips is
titled: “ Change has come to
Flickr Solves Pesky Issue Of Users Leaving Site When They Click Ads
By Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 11:54:56 PM
Yahoo needs all the revenue help it can
get these days, which is why it’s odd that
subsidiary Flickr hasn’t been serving ads
properly for a day or so and apparently no
Whitehouse.gov.” The theme of the post is
transparency:
One significant addition to
WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign
promise from the President: we will
publish all non-emergency legislation to
the website for five days, and allow the
public to review and comment before the
President signs it.
Hopefully, the administration will
continue some of the experiments with
citizen participation which it tried on
Change.gov, its transition Website.
Whitehouse.gov certainly has the same
look and feel.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because
it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
one at the company has noticed. A reader
writes in to point out that if you click on
any of the ads that appear on the site when
you do a search (try this one for Apple),
the user sees the linked page in an iframe
instead of being taken to the advertisers
site.
Breathalizer Source Code
Ruling Upheld
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:10:02 AM
A few years back, in a high profile series
of lawsuits, a lawyer representing some
folks accused of drunk driving asked the
manufacturer of a breathalyzer testing
machine for access to the product's source
code, so experts could review it to make
sure it functioned properly. The company
refused, citing trade secrets. However, a
judge noted that this went against the
defendants' rights to a fair trial, and said
that the breathalyzer evidence had to be
thrown out. Slashdot points us to the news
that an appeals court has upheld the ruling
noting that due process outweighs the
company's trade secrets. While I have no
Teens Face Child Porn
Charges... For Taking Nude
Photos Of Themselves
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 3:12:44 AM
There was just that report noting that 20%
of teens admitted to sending around
sexually explicit photos of themselves --
and now, six high school students in
Pennsylvania are facing child porn charges
because the three girls took naked photos
of themselves and sent them to some boys
(thanks to everyone who sent this in). The
girls are charged with manufacturing,
disseminating or possessing child
pornography, while the boys who received
the photos are charged with possession.
Now, it's pretty clear that the girls did
That’s handy, because the advertiser is
problem with prosecuting drunk drivers, I
do agree that the evidence should be solid -
- and not allowing the source code to be
examined is a problem.
This is, in many ways, similar to the
issue with e-voting machines. Considering
the gov't is making important decisions
based on these machines, it seems only
reasonable that the source code should be
at least reviewable to investigate the
quality of the machines. Though, it strikes
me as odd that we're even more stringent
with Breathalyzers than with e-voting
machines. Where's the similar ruling about
e-voting machines and the availability of
their source code?
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
something dumb here -- but teens do an
awful lot of dumb things. It's part of
growing up. Getting charged with child
porn for taking photos of yourself and then
being labeled a sex offender for the rest of
your life seems... a bit extreme. This is
why we've pointed out that laws, like the
one in Georgia, that require sex offenders
to hand over not just their emails, but
passwords to all their accounts, are so
ridiculous. If someone is actually found to
be dealing in child porn, that's one thing --
but casting such a wide net is clearly
overkill.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
charged but the user never leaves the
Flickr site (something only Facebook
seems able to pull off). My guess is this is
fixed by morning.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because
it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Daily Digital Newspaper
Facebook Grader
For The Sad, Sad
People Out There
By Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 10:32:16 PM
Hubspot’s Facebook Grader will tell you
your “reach and authority” on Facebook.
My score is 90/100.
The tool works by analyzing the number
of friends you have, how important those
friends are (whatever that means), how
complete your profile is, how many wall
posts you have and how many groups you
belong to. It turns out I haven’t filled out
much of my profile and there are some
other things I’ve neglected to attend to, so
I only get an A-.
I can live with that, but there are others
out there who seem to take issue with how
the site ranks people. French entrepreneur
Loic Le Meur is “ outraged” that it doesn’t
take into account that he has a fan page, for
example (I find fan pages obnoxious
myself), and gave him a score of only 97.6.
C’est la vie.
To sum up my opinion of this tool, it’s
beyond useless. Not that I ever planned to,
but the last thing I’ll ever do now is fill in
more of my profile or join more groups.
Maybe I can get that 90 down to 0.
The company has a similar tool for
Twitter.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because
it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Daily Digital Newspaper
Record Labels Make The Case
That Irish ISP Is Guilty Of
Copyright Infringement
By Michael Masnick (Techdirt)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 5:00:00 AM
A few different readers sent in the latest
on the lawsuit that the major record labels
have filed against Irish ISP Eircom. While
the adversarial relationship between ISPs
and the recording industry has been
discussed for years, this is the first case in
which the labels are directly suing an ISP
for copyright infringement. Their
argument, similar to the "inducement" rule
that the US courts made up (it's not
actually in any US law) is that Eircom was
actively encouraging piracy. In the case,
they used internal emails from Eircom
MySpace CEO and Paris Hilton Caught
Canoodling At Sundance
By Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:55:05 AM
The New York Post buried the lead in
today’s Page 6 column about Paris Hilton’s
adventures at the Sundance Film Festival.
The Post spends five paragraphs babbling
about Hilton’s BFF status before
mentioning this sighting:
. . . while Paris hung out with MySpace
CEO Chris DeWolfe at the MySpace Cafe.
They were later seen sucking face at a
party.
Glad to hear the Hollywood couple is
still together.(The picture here is from a
TV clip from last summer when the two
Albatron 22-inch multi-touch LCD becoming a reality in March
By Tim Stevens (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:11:00 AM
After Microsoft announced Windows 7
would natively support multi-touch
displays, Albatron was one of the first to
show off a prototype panel intended to take
advantage of that functionality. Seven
months later the company is finally letting
you know when you'll be able to buy one,
and is also taking another opportunity to
execs where some execs jokingly talked
about how piracy was good for musicians
because it would reduce money for rock
stars to spend on cocaine. Apparently,
obviously joking comments are being used
to establish intent these days. Either way,
this seems like a weak case for the record
labels. Plenty of people encourage piracy.
It's not going to go away if all those people
shut up. The industry needs to stop
freaking out over the fact that piracy
happens, and start focusing on actual
solutions in the market.
Permalink| Comments| Email This Story
started dating).
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free
database of technology companies, people,
and investors
talk up its optical touch tech, which
features sensors embedded into the bezel
rather than the surface itself -- in theory
resulting in a brighter image and greater
durability. The company is planning to
release its 21.5-inch LCD in March, and,
while provided details are few, we know
that the display will support 120Hz, have
DVI and VGA inputs, and will relay touch
information to the PC over USB. We also
know that the company's motto is
Track Money For Groups with
Scred’s MiniCorps - Invite codes
By Mike Butcher (TechCrunch)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 3:09:01 AM
Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends
track and manage their shared expenses
and debts, has come up with a new twist to
its app which may also help out young
startups. With its MiniCorps app (as in
‘mini-corporation’) you can track the
income and expenses for a whole group,
work out if you are making a profit or loss,
and know how much revenue you’ve
made. Via a lightweight storefront
MiniCorps can also receive money and sell
items online, with all of it tracked by Scred
without anyone having to touch an Excel
document. All the cash is handled via
LG gets official with 50PQ60D and 42PQ60D
Xcanvas plasmas in Korea
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 11:33:00 AM
Don't bet the farm on it just yet, but given
the FCC filing that outed these sets at the
tail end of December, we'd say it's safe to
assume that the panel you see above (and
after the break) will be headed to America
in short order. Made official today in South
Korea, LG's Xcanvas 50PQ60D and
42PQ60D plasmas sport a sleeker, more
fully integrated design that conceals the
speakers within the border. The TV itself
also detects ambient light and
automatically adjusts brightness in order to
conserve energy, and the built-in USB port
"captures the spirit of the Albatross,"
which we're going to go ahead and assume
Tech* Gadgets* Movies*
Paypal, which seems limiting for now but
at least it makes it pretty accessible.
Suddenly amateur rock bands everywhere
can rejoice. The question is whether
Scred’s apps will get any traction against
US competitors BillMonk, Buxfer, and
Obopay.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free
database of technology companies, people,
and investors
enables portable media to be loaded on for
all to see. Few other details about the pair
are being released, but you can expect 'em
on sale halfway across the world in around
is a reference to Monty Python and not
Baudelaire.
Filed under: Displays
Albatron 22-inch multi-touch LCD
becoming a reality in March originally
appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
09:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
7
Brad Pitt and Angelina
Jolie Suit Each Other
Well
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 1:07:00 PM
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie set the
shutterbugs ablaze in Germany on
Monday.
The stunning couple was snapped at the
Berlin, Germany premiere of Brad's
Golden Globe-nominated film, 'The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button.'
Both Brad and Angelina wore suits to the
event -- Angelina looking radiant in winter
white, and Brad dressed up in chic, classic
black.
three weeks for $1,460 / $1,022,
respectively.
[Via Slashgear]
Continue reading LG gets official with
50PQ60D and 42PQ60D Xcanvas plasmas
in Korea
Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home
Entertainment
LG gets official with 50PQ60D and
42PQ60D Xcanvas plasmas in Korea
originally appeared on Engadget on Tue,
20 Jan 2009 11:33:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink|
Email this| Comments
8 Gadgets*
Sony's VAIO P spotted for sale
in Hong Kong, price tag spotted
too
By Tim Stevens (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:49:00 AM
Just last week our hopes for an affordable
VAIO P were quickly dashed as Amazon's
UK site fixed what was apparently typo,
setting the price on Sony's "don't call me a
netbook" ultraportable to over $1,000.
That's in-line with what we've been
expecting for the US release, but still we'd
held out some hope for a last-minute price
cut. Now, like a twist of the knife, we have
photos of the machines for sale in the wild
-- with a wild price tag to match. Kip HT
took these pictures (one above, one below)
at a Hong Kong retailer and passed them
along, sending word that the top-spec
model was going for the equivalent of
$2,188.48. No word on a price for the
cheapest model, but it seems we now have
confirmation that the Sony tax also applies
overseas.
[Thanks, Kip HT]
Continue reading Sony's VAIO P spotted
for sale in Hong Kong, price tag spotted
too
Filed under: Laptops
Sony's VAIO P spotted for sale in Hong
Kong, price tag spotted too originally
appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
09:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments
Video: OQO model 2+ MID gets
unboxed, previewed
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:12:00 AM
We were pretty stoked about the OQO
model 2+ when we got to spend a few
quality minutes with it at CES this year,
and apparently actually getting one
delivered to your house is even more
spectacular. The cool cats over at MID
Moves were able to score one of the Gobi /
OLED-equipped handhelds for review, and
rather than making us wait until all
opinions were formed, they've hosted up a
nice preview video along with a few high
quality unboxing shots. Initial impressions
seem pretty positive, with the SSD helping
things along quite significantly. Granted,
we would've preferred a WiFi-on battery
life of more than two hours, but what fun
would it be to not have a single gripe to
harp on? More pictorial delight is in the
read link, and the vid's just past the break.
[Via Slashgear, thanks Kris120890]
Continue reading Video: OQO model 2+
MID gets unboxed, previewed
Filed under: Handhelds
Video: OQO model 2+ MID gets
unboxed, previewed originally appeared on
Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:12:00
EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
Atari Touch
Tablet unboxed 25
years after the fact
By Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:40:00 AM
Are you an artist wishing to unchain the
shackles of traditional media, looking for a
way to catapult yourself and your work
into the 20th Century? A chap named Benj
Edwards has been kind enough to unbox
for us Atari's Touch Tablet, a classic piece
of kit from the bygone age of 1984 that --
alongside the Atari Artist software -- lets
users manipulate the size, location and
color of shapes and lines. Digitally. The
software comes in two versions: the four
color version for those of you with 16K
RAM, and the 16 color version for those of
you with 24K powerhouse workstations.
When you're done with your pixel-based
Mona Lisa, you can back it up to a cassette
-- which will sit in a box in your parent's
garage until your older sister gets around
to taping an REO Speedwagon album over
it. What are you waiting for? Hit that read
link.
Filed under: Peripherals
Atari Touch Tablet unboxed 25 years
after the fact originally appeared on
Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:40:00
EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
HP Mini 2140 "business"
netbook now available
By Laura June (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:15:00 PM
HP's very recently announced Mini 2140
is available now for you to get one of your
very own if you so please. The handsome
fella's just been unleashed on the world,
and if you don't remember his stats, well,
that's what we're here for. The business-
aimed netbook features a 1.6GHz Atom
CPU, with options for either an 80GB or
160GB hard drive, up to 2GB of RAM,
and resolution options of 1366 x 768 and
1024 x 567 for the 10-inch screen, and of
course the ExpressCard / 54 slot. Though a
Linux OS has been announced, so far all
Windows 7 install roundup
By Paul Miller (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 11:01:00 AM
After resting up and settling into our post-
CES golden desk chairs, team Engadget
got busy at installing Windows 7 on pretty
Windows 7's WordPad Opens Word 2007 DOCX Files [Documents]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:00:00 AM
we've seen are options for XP and Vista
materialize, but we'll keep our eyes peeled.
Prices start at $499 for the base model, but
run up to $799 for the tricked out Vista
version. Now get back to work, slacker.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Continue reading HP Mini 2140
"business" netbook now available
Filed under: Laptops
HP Mini 2140 "business" netbook now
available originally appeared on Engadget
on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:15:00 EST. Please
see our terms for use of feeds. Read|
Permalink| Email this| Comments
much anything they could find. Most
installs went off without a hitch, and
BSoDs were fairly few and far between.
You can check out all our various first
impressions after the break... the names
aren't made up, but the stories are true.
As Gizmodo points out, the ribbon-style
WordPad in Windows 2007 opens Word
2007 files, the.docx kind, pretty handily,
LG overtakes Motorola for third
place in global handset shipments
By Darren Murph (Engadget)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:57:00 PM
Half a year ago, Motorola was still
clinging tight to the number three spot in
terms of worldwide handset shipments, but
boy -- what a difference six months makes.
According to numbers compiled by
DigiTimes, LG Electronics managed to
ship just over 100 million mobile phones
in 2008, while Moto checked in with "just"
99.9 million shipped. That makes LG the
third largest handset maker in terms of
shipments, barely beating out Moto and
Sony Ericsson who placed fourth and fifth,
respectively. As expected, Nokia and
Continue reading Windows 7 install
albeit with some formatting loss. Nice to
Gadgets* Biz Buzz* Tech Tips*
Samsung are still holding down the top
two spots, but it's the continued slippage of
Motorola that's most significant here. You
know what they say about being on rock
bottom, right? We bet Motorola's
wondering if that mantra applies here.
[Via phonescoop]
Filed under: Cellphones
LG overtakes Motorola for third place in
global handset shipments originally
appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
12:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this|
Comments
roundup
Windows 7 install roundup originally
appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments
know a full-fledged Office purchase isn't a
necessity.
9
When evaluating
economic polls,
subtract 15-20%
By Joseph Lazzaro
(BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:10:00 PM
Filed under: Politics, Recession, Financial
Crisis A note on economic polls: when
evaluating them, subtract 15-20%. Case in
point: U.S. public opinion toward outgoing
President George W. Bush.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation
poll taken in December 2008 found the
following:
Despite the worst U.S. recession in
decades, rising unemployment, declining
median incomes, unprecedented home
foreclosures, massive U.S. government
borrowing to bailout / rescue the bank
sector, and the lowest job creation of any
eight-year president in the modern era, the
poll found that:
• 23% of the American people said they
would miss Bush, 25% said Bush managed
government effectively, and about a third
said he would go down in history as a good
president.
Roughly a third of Americans viewing
Bush as a good president?, with 25%
saying he managed the government
effectively? What's going on here?
Who are these people? Upper-income
Americans or strong Republicans?
Exactly: either, or possibly both, which
is why you need to deduct 15-20% when
reading a poll, to gauge a president's
support, particularly on economic issues.
Continue reading When evaluating
economic polls, subtract 15-20%
When evaluating economic polls,
subtract 15-20% originally appeared on
BloggingStocks on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments
10 Business* Biz Buzz*
The Age of Obama
(Portfolio.com: Top 5)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 9:00:00 PM
I t was a mess when George W. Bush was
first sworn in. There was the wet rain; the
protesters jeering him just 39 days after the
Supreme Court ruled in Bush v. Gore that
Florida was his. Bush promised an era of
civility that echoed his Texas years where
he was popular and known as bipartisan.
Of course, it didn’t turn out that way.
Bush’s years were marked by rancor and
division, a Senate that flipped party control
three times and a vice president who once
cursed out a prominent senator with the
counsel to “go f—k yourself.”
It’s different now, of course. Barack
Obama is holding bipartisan dinners with
John McCain, the Senate colleague and
Republican presidential opponent he
vanquished two months ago. Obama's
victory was short of a landslide, but still
decisive with none of the doubt that
marked 2000’s recount, or even 2004’s
need for John Kerry to wait until the next
day to concede he lost Ohio and the
presidency. Obama comes into office
strong, with commanding popularity,
strong majorities in both houses, and all
the history that goes with being the first
African-American president.
What happens now on the economy is
anyone’s guess. Will Obama get his $800-
plus billion stimulus package through
Congress and, if he does, how much will
he have to compromise? Will the package
work to rescue an economy and a financial
system that’s reeling?
What we do seem to know—because of
the financial crisis and what it thrust on
Obama—is that we’re likely to have a
president who has a few known qualities
that will matter greatly to business. They
include:
Listening to the experts. More than any
presidency, in recent memory, the George
W. Bush administration ignored expertise.
In planning the occupation of Iraq, it
tossed out the extensive planning done by
the State Department with famously
disastrous results. It ignored the scientific
consensus on climate change and federal
funding of embryonic stem cell research.
The president trusted his gut. Conversely,
Obama relies more on expertise than any
president in modern memory. Even Bill
Clinton, with his notoriously wonkish
tendencies, still tended to take advice from
a relatively narrow circle of advisers.
Contrast that with Obama who has brought
in a large circle of economic minds to deal
with the financial crisis. There’s fiscal
hawks like Bob Rubin, old lions like Paul
Volcker, business sorts from Eric Schmidt
of Google to Warren Buffett.
Not everyone is welcome at the table.
You won’t see supply-siders hanging with
Obama. (And yet Larry Kudlow was at his
dinner with conservative commentators
last week.) More than most presidents,
Obama seems content to listen to the
experts and then respond accordingly. The
good side of this is the respect for
intelligence. The bad side, as David
Halberstam documented so thoroughly in
his classic, The Best and the Brightest—a
history of the Kennedy and Johnson
officials who led us into Vietnam—is that
the experts can be wrong. Whiz Kid Robert
McNamara was a trifecta of
disasters—Ford Motor Company, the
Defense Department and then the World
Bank. Listening to experts isn’t the same
as leadership.
Having flexibility. If we’ve seen
anything with Obama it’s that he’s not
rigid. He’s upped his stimulus package at
each turn. He’s signaled he’ll go slower
both on closing the detainment facilities at
Guantanamo Bay and withdrawing from
Iraq. Obama’s clearly able to change with
circumstances. To some this will seem like
flip-flopping, but wiser heads will likely
see it as a reasonable response to
circumstances.
Being a tax cutter. I’m wrong about
many things, but during the Joe the
Plumber kerfuffle, when Obama was being
labeled a tax-happy socialist, I gamely
predicted that he wouldn’t raise taxes and
would much more likely cut them. I think
that’s probably the road he’ll go down at
least for awhile. A lot of it is owing to the
financial crisis, of course. Who wants to
raise taxes in this environment? But tax
cutting has an intrinsic appeal. It’s the
easiest way to appease Republicans who
still salivate like Pavlov’s dogs whenever
tax cuts are mentioned, and it’s become the
way to govern under Democrats, too.
The '80s idea of tax reform—fewer
deductions, lower rates—had cache when
Ronald Reagan teamed up with Democrats
like Bill Bradley and Richard Gephardt to
pass it. But now the tax code is an ever-
expanding mess of deductions, and Obama
is no exception to these tactics.
The lofty moments of the start of the
44th presidency are worth savoring. But
it’s also worth remembering that when the
inaugural balls are over, on January 21,
President Obama has a job to do and we
now have a pretty good sense of the
principles that will guide him. Related
Links
Will Obama Really Raise Taxes?
What Business Can Expect From Obama
Obama's Real Economic Team
Analyst upgrades, downgrades
and initiations: CHKP, MOT,
RIMM, PALM, RL, HBC ...
By Eric Buscemi (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:10:00 PM
Filed under: Analyst reports, Analyst
upgrades and downgrades, Analyst
initiations Analyst upgrades:
• Jefferies upgraded Check Point
Software(NASDAQ: CHKP) to Buy from
Hold as they believe the recently acquired
Nokia security appliance business should
drive 2009 revenue and EPS meaningfully
higher. The firm raised their target price to
$27 from $20.
• Goldman upgraded Motorola(NYSE:
MOT) to Buy from Neutral and added
shares to its Conviction Buy List. The firm
expects shares to outperform even if
phones don't given the overly negative
value for the business.
• Research in Motion(NASDAQ: RIMM)
was upgraded to Outperform from Sector
Perform at RBC Capital. The firm cites
improving margin visibility and execution,
and lowered expectations for the upgrade.
• Ares Capital(NASDAQ: ARCC) was
upgraded to Neutral from Underweight at
JP Morgan.
• Canadian Pacific(NYSE: CP) was raised
at Canaccord to Buy from Hold.
• Lloyds TSB(NYSE: LYG) was
upgraded to Buy from Neutral at UBS.
Analyst downgrades:
• JP Morgan downgraded Venoco(NYSE:
VQ) to Underweight from Overweight
based on valuation and debt concerns.
• UBS downgraded MEMC
Electronic(NYSE: WFR) to Neutral from
Buy, added shares to the Short-Term Sell
List and lowered their target to $14.50
from $20. The firm believes 2009 wafer
sales will be much worse than expected.
Daily Digital Newspaper
• Deutsche Bank downgraded
SINA(NASDAQ: SINA) to Hold from
Buy to reflect integration risks from the
recent acquisition of Focus Media's digital
OOH assets as they see little room for near
-term upside.
• Palm(NASDAQ: PALM) was lowered
to Neutral from Overweight at JP Morgan.
• Polo Ralph Lauren(NYSE: RL) was cut
to Sell from Neutral at Goldman.
• Telus(NYSE: TU) was downgraded at
Banc of America/Merrill to Underperform
from Neutral.
Analyst initiations:
• Societe Generale believes
HSBC(NYSE: HBC) will need to cut its
dividend and raise additional capital in
order to strengthen its capital base. Shares
were initiated with a Sell rating.
• Citigroup initiated United
Technologies(NYSE: UTX) with a Hold
rating and $55 target. The firm sees
downside risk to the company's guidance
and believes consensus estimates could be
too high.
• B. Riley assumed Matrixx
Initiatives(NASDAQ: MTXX) with a Buy
rating and $22 target. The firm finds shares
attractively valued and sees limited
downside risk from current levels.
• ASML Holding(NASDAQ: ASML) was
initiated at Deutsche Bank with a Hold
rating.
Analyst upgrades, downgrades and
initiations: CHKP, MOT, RIMM, PALM,
RL, HBC ... originally appeared on
BloggingStocks on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
12:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
Serious Money: Obama brings a new day If oil is down, why is
-- then on to lots of hard work gasoline up?
By Sheldon Liber (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 11:10:00 AM
Filed under: International markets,
Management, Industry, Microsoft (MSFT),
General Motors (GM), Exxon Mobil
(XOM), Diageo plc (DEO), Serious
Money, Oil
It does not matter whether you are
focused on the gala event of president
Obama's inauguration or Gala apples, it is
a new day.
Actually the two gala's have a few things
in common. Gala apples are mutli-colored,
fairly resistant to bruising and are sweet,
with a mild flavor and a thinner skin than
most apples. Furthermore, they were
cultivated somewhere else, in New
Zealand.
I was brought up hearing an apple a day
keeps the doctor away. I hope when all is
said and done an Obama a day is able to
keep depression away.
The stock market was closed yesterday
in the United States (see: Martin Luther
King: investing in dignity) but there was
still news relating to the tough business
environment. One that Obama will have to
deal with after all the partying is over.
American Eagle Outfitters(NYSE: AEO)
Industrial metals: Strong plays on Obama's
rebuilding plans
By Steven Halpern (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:30:00 PM
Filed under: Newsletters, Alcoa Inc (AA),
U.S. Steel (X), Commodities, Stocks to
Buy, Obama Picks
"President Obama's proposed rebuilding
plans are great news for steel and other
industrial metals makers," says resource
sector specialist Larry Edelson, who
recommends a pair of beneficiaries: U.S.
Steel Corp.(NYSE: X) and Alcoa(NYSE:
AA).
The editor of Real Wealth newsletter
last traded at $10.06. American Eagle
made a move meant to make this year the
one that brings back a bit of the magic that
turned a little Western Pennsylvania chain
into one of the nation's most valuable
brands. Roger Markfield, 67, the
company's former chief merchandising
officer and still a member of its board, has
agreed to return full time for the new
position of vice chairman, executive
creative director. From my view the
company also needs to examine how it can
take advantage of the downfall of many
lessor competitors and fill some Gaps.
explains, "Obama has pledged to give the
U.S. economy a massive shot in the arm
with the biggest public works spending
package this nation has seen in more than
50 years.
"Besides spending on road, bridge, school
improvements and construction, the plan is
likely to include upgrading our
deteriorating electrical grid and greater
investments in public transportation,
among other infrastructure projects. The
plan is also expected to create about 2.5
million jobs.
"While steel and other base metal prices
Diageo plc(NYSE: DEO) last traded at
$54.13. The company may have to change
some of its plans given the current
economic climate just like everyone else.
Diageo already is reconsidering its plan for
a new Guinness brewery Diageo said last
year it would build a new brewery in
Leixlip, west of Dublin, while cutting
output and selling surplus land at St
James's Gate in Dublin, where Arthur
Guinness started brewing Guinness stout in
1759. "As result of the current difficult
global economic situation, which affects
both Ireland and the main international
markets to be served by the new
operations, Diageo has decided to conduct
a re-evaluation of this brewing investment
programme," it said.
Continue reading Serious Money:
Obama brings a new day -- then on to lots
of hard work
Serious Money: Obama brings a new day
-- then on to lots of hard work originally
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Jan 2009 11:10:00 EST. Please see our
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this| Comments
have tanked sharply this year on slumping
global demand, companies that produce the
metals have staged some massive cutbacks
in production and many have shuttered
large chunks of their operations.
Continue reading Industrial metals:
Strong plays on Obama's rebuilding plans
Industrial metals: Strong plays on
Obama's rebuilding plans originally
appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 20
Jan 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email
this| Comments
By Peter Cohan (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:50:00 PM
Filed under: Exxon Mobil (XOM),
Chevron Corp (CVX), BP p.l.c. ADS (BP)
This morning my wife asked me this
question and I had no idea how to answer
it. But it's true that oil is down -- it trades
at$34.39 a barrel; while gasoline prices
have been rising between 10 and 20 cents a
gallon from the low. I paid $1.66 a gallon
for mid-grade three weeks ago and $1.79
for mid-grade last week. So what's the
answer? Less supply because refiners shut
down for regular maintenance during this
time of year.
While this may not be true throughout
the country, it appears to be so in
California. In late December, The
MercuryNews predicted that gasoline
prices would rise 10 to 20 cents a gallon.
Why? California refiners including Exxon-
Mobil(NYSE: XOM) and Chevron(NYSE:
CVX) cut back on production for their
usual maintenance needs in January.
Moreover, a BP plc (NYSE: BP) plant in
Carson, CA , had mechanical problems
'Miracle on the Hudson' Pilot to Attend
Inauguration
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:35:00 PM
Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the heroic
US Airways pilot behind last week's
"Miracle on the Hudson," will be attending
the presidential inauguration of Barack
Obama tomorrow in Washington D.C.,
according to People.com.
Sullenberger and his family were invited
by Obama in the wake of intense news
coverage of the successful emergency
landing of Flight 1549 on the Hudson
Biz Buzz* Movies* 11
that affected production.
Overall this means lower supply with
demand remaining relatively constant.
California's Energy Commission reports
that production of CA's gas blend fell 11%
in January from the previous month. In the
short run, prices should fall back as these
refineries go back to normal production.
But experts predict that gasoline prices
nationwide could hit $2.50 a gallon
nationally this summer.
Peter Cohan is President of Peter S.
Cohan & Associates. He also teaches
management at Babson College. Portfolio
recently published his eighth book, You
Can't Order Change: Lessons From Jim
McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He has
no financial interest in the securities
mentioned. He has no financial interest in
the securities mentioned.
If oil is down, why is gasoline up?
originally appeared on BloggingStocks on
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:50:00 EST. Please see
our terms for use of feeds. Permalink|
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River in New York City on Thursday in
which all passengers survived, with most
uninjured.
People.com also reports that a big parade
is being planned in Sullenberger's
hometown of Danville, CA. The town's
mayor, Newell Arnerich, says, "We're
immensely proud of someone in our
community becoming an American
hometown hero. This guy embodies the
true American spirit."
12 Biz Buzz* Movies*
Before the call: IBM Q4
earnings
By Trey Thoelcke (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:30:00 PM
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts,
International Business Machines (IBM)
International Business Machines
Corp.(NYSE: IBM) is scheduled to release
fourth-quarter 2008 results today at 4:30
PM Eastern. Results will be p resented by
Mark Loughridge, senior vice president
and chief financial officer. To view the
webcast of the report, see IBM 4Q08
Earnings Presentation.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters
expect IBM to report a fourth-quarter
profit of $3.03 per share, 7.6% higher than
in the year-ago period. Revenues for the
quarter are expected to have fallen 2.5%
from a year ago to $28.2 billion. IBM
earnings have beaten estimates in the past
five quarters.
For the full year, analysts are looking for
earnings of $8.69 per share on revenue of
$104.8 billion, up from $7.13 per share and
$98.8 billion in the previous year.
Will Obama's decision-making style work?
By Peter Cohan (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 11:30:00 AM
Filed under: Boeing Co (BA), Politics
I am arranging my day around watching
President-elect Obama's inauguration. But
as I think about the two wars and economic
collapse that his weepy, self-pitying
predecessor leaves in Obama's lap, I am
wondering whether Obama can fix what
ails us. The way he makes decisions
suggests that he'll get good ideas and pick
the best. But it will be a while before we
know whether those ideas work.
Obama surrounds himself with the best
people, starts meetings with questions he
Mark Harmon Talks 'NCIS' and 'Weather Girl'
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 3:14:00 PM
ET was with "NCIS" star Mark Harmon
in Park City, Utah at the Slamdance Film
Festival to get the latest on "NCIS" and his
The consensus recommendation of
analysts remains to buy IBM, and the long-
term EPS growth forecast is 11.2%. The
share price is up slightly from the
beginning of the year, but about 18% lower
than it was a year ago.
See BloggingStocks' IBM coverage for
more information concerning Big Blue.
Visit AOL Money & Finance for more
earnings coverage.
Before the call: IBM Q4 earnings
originally appeared on BloggingStocks on
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see
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wants answered, and expects those people
to argue for different answers to the
questions. He probes each person to
understand the logic and data behind their
new film, 'Weather Girl.'
Last week ET broke the news that CBS
is planning a spinoff of "NCIS," which
itself was a spinoff of "JAG." Today Ryan
Devlin, Mark's co-star in 'Weather Girl,'
gets the 411 from Mark on what he knows
Big reason to buy gold
By Connie Madon (BloggingStocks)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 11:50:00 AM
Filed under: International markets,
Forecasts, Industry, China, Economic data,
Commodities
Would you buy gold now? South African
gold production has dropped 14% to 232
tonnes, down 38 tonnes from 2007 levels.
This is the lowest production level since
1901! Reasons for the slump included a
lack of skilled labor, severe power supply
limitations and an overhaul of mine safety
procedures.
China has now taken the number one
spot as the world's largest gold producer,
with output up 3% to 285 tonnes. U.S. gold
output dropped 2% to 234 tonnes. Global
production is down 3.6% to 2,385 tonnes,
the lowest level since 1995.
With big increases in the cost of
production to over $500 per ounce, there is
little likelihood of new mine production
this year. Gold prices are expected to reach
$1000 per ounce in the first half of 2009.
Investors are wary of the sharp drop in
thinking. At the end, he sums up what he's
learned and what decision he is leaning
towards. So far he's staffed a diverse team;
let one of his nominees, Bill Richardson,
go; lobbied Congress to release the second
$350 billion in financial bailout money;
and started negotiating an $825 billion
spending and tax break package.
Continue reading Will Obama's decision-
making style work?
Will Obama's decision-making style
work? originally appeared on
BloggingStocks on Tue, 20 Jan 2009
11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use
of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments
about the upcoming series.
"I don't think it spins off anybody who is
on the current show," Mark reveals. "The
network looks at a successful franchise,
saying, 'Can we get more out of it?' But I
will believe it when it is done. As an actor,
U.S. interest rates and the printing of new
money for various stimulus packages.
Do you plan to buy gold or silver this
year?
Big reason to buy gold originally
appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 20
Jan 2009 11:50:00 EST. Please see our
terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink|
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ET's Kevin Frazier Gets Details
Behind Inauguration Security
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:52:00 PM
As millions are estimated to be at the
nation's capital for the historic presidential
inauguration of Barack Obama on
Tuesday, ET's Kevin Frazier gets the
details on how Washington D.C. police are
heavily involved in keeping everyone safe.
ET paid a visit to the Joint Operations
Command Center, where rows of monitors
show a live video display of nearly the
you hope it doesn't do anything detrimental
to what you have. But ask me again in a
month."
Daily Digital Newspaper
Ben Affleck, Stars
Turn Out to D.C.
Rally
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 2:12:00 PM
As President-elect Barack Obama spent
the day before his historic inauguration
visiting homeless youth and doing service,
some celebrities are following suit. Ben
Affleck, among a list of other stars, came
together Monday in Washington, D.C., for
a good cause.
Affleck, joined by Martin Luther King
III, actor David Arquette and musicians
Herbie Hancock and Josh Groban, turned
out to the National Hunger Rally hosted by
Feeding America.
The national rally against hunger, which
took place at the Martin Luther King
Library on Martin Luther King Jr. holiday,
featured a joint performance by Hancock
and Groban.
entire metropolitan D.C. area. With the
help of the security cameras that have
zoom abilities, D.C. police plan to closely
monitor activity in the streets -- and if
necessary, they will send officers to any
location.
Watch the video to see one security
camera catch Kevin as he is on the street
talking to a police sergeant -- and then the
ET crew is filmed by security cameras as
they make their way back to their car!
Daily Digital Newspaper
5 Twitter improvements we're still waiting for
By Don Reisinger (Webware.com)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:31:00 PM
I'll be the first to admit that I'm addicted
to Twitter. Each day, it's kept in the
coveted second tab in my Firefox window,
lodged between Gmail and Meebo. But
that doesn't mean it offers me everything I
want or that I have no desire for more
features.
In fact, I have a list of features I'd like
added to Twitter.
Groups
I still don't know why Twitter has failed
to add groups to the service. Maybe the
company believes that groups would make
it too closely resemble a social network,
but who cares? Twitter is great, but that
doesn't mean like-minded users shouldn't
be able to form their own community.
Think of it this way: if Twitter added
groups, it would give you the opportunity
to have private areas where only your
friends and colleagues could converse and
it wouldn't stop you from meeting and
corresponding with new people outside
those groups. There's no downside.
Services like Present.ly and Yammer
offer enterprise employees an opportunity
to communicate with one another based on
groups that are assigned by their employer.
Twittermoms.com is an entire site
dedicated to bringing mothers who use
Twitter together. Granted, those services
aren't nearly as popular as Twitter, but they
certainly prove that there's a market for
groups. And so far, Twitter hasn't
delivered.
Tweet filter
I know Twitter has a block feature, but I
don't use it. What I'd really like to see is a
Tweet Filter feature that lets me block
Ben Affleck at the Sundance Film Festival
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 8:50:00 PM
Ben Affleck talks to ET about the latest
disaster zone in Africa and his new
daughter!
Ben puts on his producer cap for a new
documentary, 'Reporter,' about Nicolas
Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-
specific kinds of tweets from making their
way into my stream.
I don't necessarily want to block
everything some followers say, I just want
to block the annoying messages like, "
DonReisinger is now listening to
Womanizer by Britney Spears," followed
by, " DonReisinger is now listening to
Take My Breath Away by Berlin." To be
honest, I don't care what songs a follower
is listening to and I don't need updates
from a script they're running to tell me.
That said, I do want to see what they're
saying when they tweet actual messages.
That's why I want Twitter to devise a tool,
similar to a spam filter, that would allow
me to tag certain tweets, have Twitter
analyze them, and ensure that anything of
the sort won't make its way into my stream
again. That sort of functionality works
beautifully in Gmail. I'd love to see it work
that well on Twitter.
Unfollow notices
Why doesn't Twitter provide us with
daily updates about who unfollows us? It
informs us when someone starts following
us. Would it be that hard to track those
who unfollow us, as well?
I would really like to see who
unfollowed me. Maybe those people were
upset that I had too many updates on a
certain day or perhaps they didn't like
something I said. Without a notice, I'll
never know they're gone. But with a
notice, I can send them a message and ask
what happened to possibly repair our
broken relationship.
Maybe some wouldn't like receiving
additional e-mails announcing when a user
decides to unfollow them, but I think it
provides significant value. It can give you
hints about what your followers do and
winning columnist for The New York
Times, who is trying to bring the same
attention to the humanitarian crisis in the
Congo, where 5.4 million have died, that
he previously did for Darfur.
So we had to ask, is Ben's involvement
in Africa the reason he named his new-
born daughter Seraphina?
don't like and it makes you a better Twitter
user, since the last thing you should be
doing is annoying your followers.
Profile stats
I'd love to know how many people view
my Twitter page each day. It's not that I
have a vain desire to see how many people
are looking me up. Instead, I'd like to
know how many of those people become
followers.
People find their way to another user's
Twitter page, look at the tweets they've
been making over the past few days, and
decide then if they want to follow them.
I've done it. Sometimes I decide that, yes,
this is a person worth following. Other
times, I see that all they've done is linked
to their blog and failed to converse with
other users, and decide that following them
probably isn't in my best interest.
But having data detailing the number of
people who view my Twitter page and how
many become followers would be ideal.
Based off that information, I could
determine the value of my tweets to other
Twitter users and experiment to see if I
could devise a way to increase my follower
conversion rate.
Twitter is all about being part of a
community. Knowing what that
community likes and doing what you can
to appeal to that community is incumbent
upon us all. Twitter stream stats would
help in that endeavor.
200 characters
When Twitter first started, the service
had a strong SMS focus. Because of that,
New Video: Tom Cruise with Thea Andrews
in Berlin!
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 6:30:00 PM
ET's Thea Andrews catches up with Tom
Cruise in Berlin, Germany, where his
movie 'Valkyrie' is set to premiere this
week.
Tom says he is very excited to be
debuting his film in Germany, where the
Web Apps* Movies* Tech Tips*
the company wanted to ensure that tweets
would fit in the 160-character SMS limit,
allowing room for the message and
usernames. But as Twitter has grown into a
service with a strong online focus, it's
blatantly clear that 140 characters is not
enough.
I just don't see any justification for
providing only 140 characters anymore. I
can't tell you how many times I've tried to
write a tweet, only to run out of room with
just two or three characters remaining.
Like everyone else, I'm forced to find
places to cut down what I say just to add in
those necessary characters.
I understand that those who wish to use
SMS might be left out in a 200-character
world, but that doesn't mean it should stop
Twitter from pursuing this strategy. There
are a slew of applications, like Twitterific,
that are designed specifically for mobile
phones that allow users to update their
Twitter stream without using SMS. And
although some devices don't support third-
party apps and using text messages to
communicate with their followers will be
practically impossible after the 200-
character switch, I think Twitter needs to
accept that and move on.
Twitter is a growing service that has
moved past its SMS past. It's time its
executives embrace its new role as a
mainstream microblog and improve the
service while being mindful of its strong
online presence.
Want to hear Don complain some more
about Twitter? Follow him and indulge
yourself!
star said there had been some initial
trepidation because of the subject manner.
In 'Valkyrie,' Tom plays Col. Claus Graf
von Stauffenberg, who helped hatch a plot
to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the height of
World War II in order seize power and put
an end to the bloodshed.
13
Michelle Obama's Pre
-Inaugural Wardrobe
Revealed
(ETonline - Breaking News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 2:11:00 PM
As the fashion world waits to see what
Michelle Obama will wear on inauguration
night, the first-lady-to-be opts for a
familiar designer to dress her in the days
leading up to her husband's inauguration.
Michelle began her busy Sunday wearing
a Narcisco Rodriguez light purple coat and
dress to the ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery, Women's Wear Daily
reports.
The future first lady also wore a dress
from Rodriguez on the night Barack
Obama won the election.
Buddha Machine Wall
Plays Relaxing Ambient
-Loops [Sound]
By Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:00:00 AM
The Buddha Machine Wall webapp
streams ambient patterns—the kind just
distracting enough to take the edge off the
noise in your office.
The original Buddha Machine is a small
device resembling a transistor radio,
created by a pair of Chinese musicians
known as FM. With permission from FM,
the tech-support company ZenDesk hosts a
version that, just like the original, creates
randomized patterns from 9 FM-crafted
ambient loops. This post was powered by
loop B2—post your own favorite in the
comments if you try out the free Buddha
Machine Wall. For more ambient, work-
friendly sounds, check out previously
mentioned iSerenity, another web-based
source. FM3 Buddha Machine
Wall[ZenDesk]
14 Web Apps* Tech Tips* Religion* International*
Daily Tidbits: 'Obama Girl' DriveLook Recovers Text Data from
partners with Stickam for Missing Files [Featured Windows
inauguration Download]
By Don Reisinger (Webware.com)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 9:26:00 AM
Amber Ettinger, better known as "Obama
Girl," has teamed up with Stickam for
coverage of the presidential inauguration.
Live coverage will be streamed live
Monday at 8 p.m. EST from InauguralFest,
and viewers will be able to see what she is
doing all day at the inauguration starting at
10 a.m. EST Tuesday.
Integrated Media Measurement, an
online research firm, found ( PDF) that
women between the ages of 15 and 48 tend
to watch a television show and surf the
Web an average of 17.5 minutes per day,
while men do the same for just 15.7
minutes each day. Women between 30 and
39 average 23.3 minutes of simultaneous
Web and TV usage each day. More
importantly for marketers, women tend to
multitask more as they get older, while
men multitask less often. According to
Amanda Welsh, head of research for
IMMI, "women are more inclined to
multitask than men" while using the Web.
Professional social network LinkedIn
announced Monday that it has partnered
with IBM to bring social-network
functionality to Lotus Notes, an enterprise
client that provides e-mail and instant-
messaging services to users. The social-
network plug-in will provide Lotus Notes
Does HBO fear a gay-friendly planet?
By Douglas LeBlanc
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:24:57 PM
Home Box Office omitted Bishop Gene
Robinson’s invocation in its coverage of
the “We Are One” pre-Inauguration
concert on Sunday. Assorted bloggers,
including TV critic Aaron Barnhart of The
Kansas City Star and nka of TPM Café, are
speculating about whether this omission
amounted to censorship, and who should
be blamed for it. Barnhart proposes the odd
theory, as one of three possibilities, that
the Obama campaign “never intended for
users with contact and networking
information about those they're contacting
(as long as they are using LinkedIn) and
browse LinkedIn's news feeds. The
companies plan to unveil the new plug-in
at Lotusphere later this year and hope to
release it to Lotus Notes users by June.
Juniper Research released a report
Monday saying event-based sales should
increase the value and monetization of
mobile dating and chat room sites. The
report said that although subscription
revenue will still contribute the most
revenue to online dating sites over the next
five years, charging customers to contact
one another or providing virtual gifts will
become increasingly important in their
business models going forward. Juniper
also found that free services that charge for
contact are becoming more popular and
could become the standard sometime
during the next 10 years.
Navitell, a Belgium-based start-up that
develops software that adds location-
specific multimedia content to mobile
phones, announced Monday that it has
raised approximately $2.6 million in a
round of funding that was led by FPIM.
According to the company's executives,
they plan to use the funding to expand their
set of personalization services.
Robinson to be seen on national TV.”
Texts of Robinson’s prayer are available
from Episcopal Café and Sarah Pulliam’s
report for the Christianity Today politics
blog. Sarah also shot the video that leads
this post.
On Episcopal Café, Jim Naughton
pointed out before the event that Robinson
has revived his blog.
Hat tip: Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA
Today.
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:15:00 AM
Windows only: DriveLook, a free utility
from the makers of the ultra-handy
DriveImage XML, scans your hard drive
and searches for strings of text to save your
lost data.
The app initially starts as unlicensed,
somewhat disabled software, but you can
grab registration information from the
DriveLook page. It's not super-intuitive
where you enter your search terms, but it's
in the box at the bottom, one per line. You
can get more specific with the variables up
top, but if you know the words from a
Word file are hanging around somewhere
on your drive, just type in a few words you
remember from it, and hit "Start." That's
when you'll be asked to choose where
Create Kitchen Kits to Avoid Frantic
Drawer Searching [Kitchen]
By Kevin Purdy (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 6:00:00 AM
The Daring Young Mom site suggests an
alternative to digging through your often
crammed drawers full of measuring spoons
and cups to find a tablespoon right
away—create a "kit" to pull out and put
away.
Even if the kit itself ends up a loosely-
organized affair, only your measuring
spoons and cups are contained in a
box—any kind of disposable cardboard
box, really—so you're not pushing aside
baking spatulas or serving spoons and
other minutiae. If you've got more
cupboard space than drawer room, it's a
kind of creative throw-back to childhood
toy chests.
How do you keep your cooking gear
DriveLook, er, looks:
As you can see, you can look not only in
your physical drives, but removable drives
and even disk images, like the kind you
might make in DriveImage XML. When
close at hand, yet organized enough to find
what you need? Offer up your organizing
ideas in the comments. Tips for Tuesday -
Best Kitchen Organization Tip[Daring
Young Mom via TipNut]
Daily Digital Newspaper
DriveLook gets to work, it'll be somewhat
of a drive-slower, as you might expect, but
it's cool to see in real-time what it's
finding:
I'd show off a finished result page here,
but DriveLook has been running all
morning on a spare system. So don't
launch this and expect to finish up your
World of Warcraft session in the
meantime, but consider giving it a go
overnight, or during a stretch away from
the computer.
DriveLook is a free download, with
registration information available on the
app's download page. For tips on using its
complementing backup software, check
our guide to hot-imaging your PC's hard
drive with DriveImage XML.
DriveLook[Runtime Software via gHacks]
Sudoku 1,152 medium
(From the Guardian: G2 |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Fill the grid so that every row, every
column and every 3x3 box contains the
numbers 1 to 9.
For a helping hand call our solutions line
on 09068 338 228.
Calls cost 60p per minute at all times.
Service supplied by ATS.
Buy the Guardian tomorrow or subscribe
to our Digital Edition to see the completed
puzzle. guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
Feeds
Daily Digital Newspaper
The Guide is a Portable, Open-Source UEatCheap Finds You Grub for Under
Hierarchical Note Organizer $10 [Restaurants]
By Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) Vietnamese cuisine. Bigger cities, of
[Featured Windows Download]
By The How-To Geek (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:30:00 AM
Windows only: Portable note-taking and
outlining application The Guide organizes
your notes and projects complete with rich
text in a hierarchical view.
The Guide has a similar feature set to
previously mentioned ActionOutline Lite,
lacking the ability to use tabs but making
up for it with lighter resource usage, no
restrictions on sub-items and the great
price tag of free. Once installed, the
Catch the Inauguration from Your Desk [Inauguration]
By Adam Pash (Lifehacker)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:30:00 AM
If you'd love to catch today's historic
inauguration but you're stuck at your desk
The interactive living room of 2009
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 3:39:51 PM
There's an interesting piece on
TechCrunch today that's in part about
using laptops while watching TV,
course, make it easier to drill down
specifically to, say, Taiwanese food. For
preferences panel has a setting for
switching the application into portable
mode, which stores all settings in an INI
file instead of the registry so you can copy
the entire folder to a USB drive.
Enabling icons and checkboxes can be
done in the preferences pane, and icons for
nodes can be changed through the context
menu. The Guide is a free download for
Windows systems only. Thanks
MarsalaAnteater! The Guide
for—*gasp*—work, check out our guide
to catching the inauguration from
anywhere, including a handful of sites
offering live streaming footage of the
event.
something a lot of people do, and more
will certainly do in the future.
Submitted at 1/20/2009 6:30:00 AM
You're hungry and unfamiliar with the
area but would like a little more variety
than simply looking for a cluster of fast
food places around an off-ramp.
UEatCheap will find you some novel grub.
You can search by city, state, or zip
code, and there's a fairly substantial filter
to select everything from American to
If you've been trying out every option
This is the system I like. I've explained
how it works over on Flickr. Click on the
pic to go there.
Tech Tips* Web Tech* Special*
other good and cheap eats finding, check
out Where the Locales Eat, or at least help
yourself feel better about those sub-$10
fast-food meals with five fast-food
restaurants to feel good about.
UEatCheap[via MakeUseOf]
looking for the best stream you can find,
let's hear what stream you're watching and
how it's working out.
15
Tag Clouds of Obama's
Inaugural Speech
Compared to Bush's
By Marshall Kirkpatrick
(ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:58:53 AM
Barack Obama was just sworn in as
President of the US and though he
stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech
that followed was delivered flawlessly and
was widely praised around the web.
(Several readers have told us that it wasn't
Obama that stumbled, it was Justice
Roberts.) There were quite a few concepts
discussed that we suspect haven't been a
part of past inaugural speeches. What
words were used most often? We ran the
full text of the speech through tag cloud
generator Wordle.net for one view of the
event, and just for the sake of historical
context we ran George W. Bush's second
inaugural speech through as well.
The most common words in the two
speeches were dramatically different.
Sponsor
Obama's Speech
Bush's Speech 2005
Feeling Inspired by the Events Today?
See also our post from last night 7
Online Things You Can Do to Help
Obama Restore America. Check out the
new WhiteHouse.gov, where the face of
Presidential technology has changed
dramatically as well. Discuss
16 Web Tech* Apple*
7 Online Things To Do To Help Obama Restore
America
By Alex Iskold (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 6:50:00 PM
On Tuesday, January 20th, 2009,
America and the whole world will gather
to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated as
the 44th President of the United States of
America. Many have called Mr. Obama the
Internet President because of the
unprecedented way his campaign used the
medium to raise funds, raise awareness,
and ultimately outmaneuver John McCain.
But what can we do now to help turn this
country around? Read on for 7 things
every one of us can do on the Internet to
help Obama restore America.
Sponsor
As Obama rolls into a very tough job to
restore America, it is very clear that the
Internet is going to be the #1 channel for
read/write communication with the people.
Change.gov not only features an elegant
design, but has useful content that connects
you to the President-Elect and solicits your
opinion and ideas. And the seemingly
small things like the iPhone application or
support of OpenID and Creative Commons
show that people on Obama's team are
intimately familiar with the latest
technologies and trends on the web.
If Obama and his team are going to use
the Internet to help change America, so
should we. The Internet is the most
powerful information technology ever
invented, and it has already changed the
way we elect the President of the United
States. Next, it just may help us restore
America to its true self. How? One person
at a time, starting with you and then
passing it along. Here are 7 things you can
do on the Internet to help President Obama
turn this great country around. 1. Read
About and Know the Issues
The least you can do is be aware. In this
day and age, ignorance cannot be excused.
All the information is out there, and
whether you are Democrat or Republican
or independent, the least you can do is find
it. Maybe you prefer the Huffington Post
or the New York Times or Fox News or
CNN or independent local media;
whatever your channel, spend at least 1
hour a week learning what is going on in
America and around the world. 2. Join the
Conversation
Obama is not a one-way president. If he
was, he would never have assembled such
a diverse, opinionated cabinet. Mr. Obama
knows that our strength is in our diversity,
and he wants to hear from you. We've been
living in the age of the read/write web for
the past 5+ years, and we have recently
seen a decline in user participation. The
time is now to re-engage, particularly
around the conversation on how to turn
this country around. You can directly help
shape the future of America, one comment
at a time. Find the blogs and online
newspapers that you like and comment on
the issues that matter. 3. Spread the News
The social explosion on the web created
a wonderful way to disseminate news.
Before, news was broadcast through
centralized hubs; now, through Twitter,
Facebook and other social networks, the
news is spread by individuals. The
implication is that your tweet matters.
When you tweet news, it does not matter if
it reaches thousands or dozens of people.
What matters is that it reaches the people
who want to hear the news from you. By
spreading the news, you are leveraging our
social fabric, helping the right information
travel through the right channels. 4. Learn
American History
To change the future, it is important to
know the past. Even if you are well versed
in American history, there is always more
to learn. Learning history is both
educational and patriotic. It is the subject
that all of us should turn to in tough times.
A good starting point is the Wikipedia
page on American history, packed with
links to historical figures and events.
About.com features a whole subdomain
dedicated to American history. You can
find articles on subjects ranging from the
Civil War to presidential elections to
biographies. For more in-depth learning,
head over to Kindle books on Amazon.
Over four thousand books on American
history come up. 5. Get Your Finances in
Order
Let's face it, the latest financial crisis is
partially our fault. Sure, Wall Street execs
were greedy and went too far, but so did
we. Many people were not disciplined and
lived beyond their means. If you haven't
yet, start using financial software such as
Mint and Wesabe, and get your finances
under control. Getting organized is the
most important step to getting your
finances in order. And like news
dissemination, fixing the financial crisis is
also done one person at a time. 6. Learn
about Green Tech
The issues of global warming and green
technologies are going to be at the
forefront of Obama's presidency. Yes, the
current economic crisis and the needless
war in Iraq are the issues of the day, but
global warming and green tech are the
issues for decades to come. The first step
you need to take in 2009 is to educate
yourself. What is this all about? What is
my energy consumption? What are " green
homes"? Which products are green? What
is the state of the solar energy industry?
The web is full of green tech information;
you just need to pick a source to start
learning. And for a deeper look at the
profound issues facing us, read Thomas
Friedmans' Hot, Flat, and Crowded. 7.
Engage Locally
There is one place where Obama needs
your help more than anywhere else: your
community. Federal government can't
reach out to each corner of America, and
frankly, that is not its job. This is why you
can really make a difference by engaging
in local politics, buying regional produce,
taking your kids to a local history museum.
Every township is online these days. You
can connect through the Internet and
engage in local issues. From spring to fall,
you can shop at your local farmers' market,
helping make things a little greener.
Stepping up and doing just a little locally
really goes a long way. Conclusion
We are living in troubled yet exciting
times. Electing Barack Obama was only a
first step to turning America around. Now
the tough work, the heavy lifting, begins.
Mr. Obama is ready, but he needs your
help. Take the time to think about things
you can do on the Internet to help The
Change. It's patriotic, it is right, and it is a
lot of fun. Ready? Let's do this together!
See also: ReadWriteWeb Guide to
Celebrating Inauguration Day Discuss
Daily Digital Newspaper
iPhone Dev
101:
Introduction
By Cory Bohon (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:00:00 AM
Filed under: Features, How-tos,
Developer, iPhone Welcome to the iPhone
Dev 101 series. This series on TUAW is
designed to tell readers about iPhone
development, and give potential iPhone
developers a look at the iPhone. In this
introductory post, I'll walk you through
some of the most asked questions about the
iPhone & App Store. These posts will be a
little geeky, but I will try to explain
anything that you might not already know
about.
Where do I start?
If you already have an Apple ID (either
from iTunes/MobileMe/.Mac/etc.), then
the first place to start would be to join the
iPhone DevCenter. The basic (free) access
will allow you to download the SDK
(Software Development Kit), look at
documentation, download example code,
and test your applications in the iPhone
Simulator (a Mac application that emulates
the iPhone OS).
You will not be able to test and debug
your application on your actual iPhone or
iPod touch hardware, however. For that
you will need to purchase a paid
development membership.
Once you attempt to sign in to the
DevCenter with your Apple ID, you will
be presented with some terms and
conditions that you will need to accept.
Once you accept them, you will be taken to
the main DevCenter -- this is the place
where you will be able to download the
SDK and access some other important
information about iPhone development.
Read on to learn more about iPhone
development.
Continue reading iPhone Dev 101:
Introduction
TUAW iPhone Dev 101: Introduction
originally appeared on The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Jan
2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
Public Sentiment: Taking the True Pulse Finally - Get RSS Support
of the Public with Farewell W, Aloha for Google Chrome
Obama
By Rick Turoczy (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 2:30:16 AM
There was a time not so long ago when
traditional media provided the primary
vehicle for voicing "public opinion," how
the average person felt about the world at
large. But, today, as more and more people
move online and begin sharing opinions,
the "man on the street" has largely been
subsumed by "the man or woman on the
Web." Which is a step in the right
direction. The problem now? Finding and
aggregating those opinions. Public
Sentiment, a new site designed to help
provide an unfiltered view of opinions on a
specific topic, could be the very lens
needed to accurately analyze those varied
opinions. Its inaugural experiment,
"Farewell W, Aloha Obama," demonstrates
the potential of the service.
Sponsor
Designed to solicit opinions about the
change in the United States presidency and
make them accessible without editing or
additional bias, "Farewell W, Aloha
Obama" allows anyone to compose a short
message that wishes outgoing President
The Next Android Smartphone
By Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 6:04:08 AM
Here in the U.S., your choices in phones
running Google's new Android operating
system have been limited. If you weren't a
fan of the T-Mobile G1 form factor - a
design best for heavy texters thanks to its
slide-out keyboard - you were pretty much
out of luck. No more. Word has it that
Samsung will soon be releasing their own
Android smartphone for use on both the T-
Mobile and Sprint carriers.
Sponsor
According to TechRadar, a company
representative for Samsung confirmed that
they will be speeding up the development
of their own version of an Android-
powered device in order to stay
George W. Bush farewell or welcomes
incoming President Barack Obama into
office. The response format allows for both
positive and negative sentiments to be
directed at either politician.
What is the site hoping to accomplish
with this offering?"[W]e hope to reveal
and share the spectrum of people's
unedited, raw opinions about certain
current events. We hope you will
participate by contributing your own
sentiments and reading the sentiments of
others.... This is not intended to be an
authoritative source or official opinion
poll, but we do hope that this venue can be
an outlet and repository for individual,
independent voices."
And what better time to begin soliciting
this feedback than the changing of the
resident of the White House?
Users can submit short messages to the
service via Twitter, by composing a
message directed to@georgewbush
competitive in the mobile phone market.
The phone will debut sometime in 2009
and will be available for T-Mobile and
Sprint customers.
Beyond that, everything else about the
news appears to be speculation, including
the phone's supposed June 2009 launch
date. However, we're inclined to believe
the rumor about the phone's form factor (or
perhaps we just want to believe it). Some
sources report that the new phone will
resemble the Samsung Instinct, a currently
popular touchscreen phone that features
Power Vision Services, Sprint's over-the-
air TV offering. Other rumors point to the
phone being a closer match to the Omnia, a
phone initially made available in Asia and
Europe, and is now with Verizon. Either
way, the rumors point to the device being a
containing the word "farewell" or
to@barackobama containing "aloha." But
it's not only Twitter users who get to
participate. By visiting Public Sentiment
and using the submission form- which
offers both a short message or long letter -
anyone can share their sentiment on the
topic. The form also offers the opportunity
to declare political leanings and for whom
the respondent cast his or her vote, if
desired.
While this version of Public Sentiment
focuses on the United States political
process, the concept could be easily
extrapolated to any number of subject
areas. It will be interesting to watch how
the first Public Sentiment experiment
proceeds - and which topics they select for
soliciting opinions in the future.
At the very least, spending even a short
amount of time browsing through random
sentiments provides a far more interesting
assessment of public opinion than a
"satisfaction poll" ever could.
To read what others are saying, visit
Farewell W or Aloha Obama. To submit
your own sentiment, send a note via Public
Sentiment. Discuss
touchscreen with no slide-out keyboard.
That seems plausible enough to us since
the keyboard-equipped G1 is already
already available on T-Mobile, one of the
carriers which would sell the new Samsung
device. The company probably wouldn't
want to launch a phone that was too similar
to the other Android phone. It's also likely
that they would want to capitalize on the
success of their previous models, too.
If any of the rumors are true, there's a
good chance that the new phone will be
introduced at next month's Mobile World
Congress, the world's largest exhibition for
the mobile industry, held in Barcelona.
Until then, we'll just have to cross our
fingers and wait. Discuss
By Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:06:54 AM
Although many of us have been enjoying
the speedy new browser from Google,
Google Chrome, it's far from perfect.
Despite being released from beta status in
December, the browser still lacks a handful
of features that would make it more of a
complete product. One such feature is the
browser's lack of support for RSS feeds.
Sponsor
Along with lack of support for RSS, the
Chrome browser's Mac version is still
underway and there is not a good extension
architecture in place. As we discovered
earlier, the best way to use add-ons in
Chrome is via browser bookmarklets.
Along those same lines, there are now two
new ways to work with RSS, also by
employing the use of browser
bookmarklets. Auto-Detect RSS in
Chrome
On the web page
http://www.feeds.ramisp.org, there are two
bookmarklets available: "View RSS Feed"
and Auto-Detect RSS." Drag each of these
bookmarklets to Chrome's bookmark bar.
Then, whenever you're on a page that has
an RSS feed, you just have to hit the "Auto
-Detect RSS" button. This will take you to
a page where the feed is displayed along
with several auto-subscription links up at
the top. Alternately, you can just hit "view
RSS feed," if you want to see the RSS feed
in the browser, but this option didn't
always work in our tests.
One of the problems with the ramisp.org
bookmarklets, though, is the limited choice
of RSS readers they offer underneath the
"Subscribe Now!" section. Currently, you
have the option to subscribe using Google,
Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, and Netvibes.
Although that covers many of the popular
readers, there are still several that were left
Web Tech* 17
out.
Luckily, a commenter on LifeHacker has
modified the scripts to include a few more.
If you use Newsgator, Podnova, or Odeo,
you should grab his bookmarklet instead
from http://savanttools.com/feedhelp-
bookmarklet.asp. For Google Reader
Users, Google Bookmarklets are Best
However, for Google Reader fans, the
best bookmarklets for subscribing to feeds
still come from Google themselves. Unlike
the above options, Google addresses the
issue of sites offering more than one feed.
Google provides two bookmarklets to
choose from for simple RSS subscribing:•
Subscribe- View the first available feed in
Google Reader.
• Show all feeds- Lists all feeds and links
them to Google Reader.
Google also offers ways to note and
share items using bookmarklets, too.
As handy as all these options are, at best
they are still a workaround for what should
be a built-in feature. Why wouldn't Google
at the very least include an RSS button in
Chrome that integrates directly with their
own RSS Reader? We don't understand the
delay on this design decision - we just
hope they are working on correcting this
oversight. Discuss
18 Web Tech* Apple*
Dipity: Visualizing the Passage of Time
By Rick Turoczy (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 11:45:16 PM
For many of us, our tributaries of social
data find their way into our lifestream, an
aggregated collection of our online
activities. More often than not, that stream
appears as a collection of text entries: the
most recent item followed by the second
most recent, and so on. While the
progression is obvious, what's not so clear
is the passage of time. Those data points
could be seconds apart - or months apart.
Enter Dipity, a service that takes those
moments in time and plots them along
along a timeline, providing an entirely new
take on the activities we're pursuing and
how they relate.
Sponsor
We first encountered Dipity, last year, at
the Graphing Social Patterns West
AppNite where it was demoed as a
Facebook app. Since then the site has
added a number of new features - most
recently an import tool for now-defunct
circaVie data- and dealt with some uptime
Cisco in The Cloud: Application Extension Platform
(AXP)
By Bernard Lunn (ReadWriteWeb)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:00:00 PM
One doesn't tend to associate Cisco with
Web 2.0, social media or cloud computing.
Cisco equals routers, the plumbing of the
web. In other words, vital and hugely
profitable; but not the 'new, new thing' of
the Internet. It turns out we have written
before about how Cisco is using social
media to reach enterprise clients and
playing in the enterprise social networking
space. Now Cisco wants to position its
Application Extension Platform (AXP) in
the cloud platform space and is
encouraging developers with $100,000 in
prizes for the most innovative applications.
Sponsor
The product AXP is not new. Cisco
launched it about 4 years ago. But it is now
issues. We thought it was worth taking a
second look.
Getting started with Dipity is easy.
Simply start feeding the service your data:
photos from Flickr or Picasa, blog entries,
RSS feeds, music from Last.fm or
Pandora, videos, or microbloging feeds.
Anything that offers a publicly accessible
feed is fair game.
And that means, that it's not just your
data. It's any publicly accessible data. If
you want to add data from other RSS feeds
- say you wanted a timeline showing when
the top tech blogs publish stories - you can
do that, as well. Or maybe you'd like to
add content from a Google alert or Yahoo!
Pipes? Or build something with Dapper to
populate your timeline? All viable options.
Suffice it to say, there are any number of
ways to feed Dipity.
But, the true value of Dipity is how it lets
ramping up the marketing. Read on for a
rundown of AXP's positioning in the
market. The Networking Problems In
Branch Offices
On the consumer Internet, we connect
directly to big server farms running our
favorite services. In the Enterprise world,
most users connect via a branch network.
In this more complicated world, there are
three concerns that are not well addressed
by the platforms that emerged in the Web
2.0 era:
• Security at the branch level. Security at
the data center or server farm may be
great, but the branch is often a back-door
threat.
• Performance. If a hundred people are
working in a branch, dealing with some
network traffic locally would improve
performance.
you visualize that data. Once the sources
are added, the service plots each discrete
element along a timeline. And that view of
the data provides a very different
perspective of "what's happening when."
You can also zoom in and out of the
timeline - down to hours or out to years -
to help provide additional perspective.
It's a like a graphing engine for your
lifestream - or any combined stream of
reference data.
After only a few minutes, I was working
to push all sorts of random collections
through the tool. No doubt, you're already
thinking of some very interesting data sets
to run through it, as well. And if you're
short on ideas, the folks at Dipity have
compiled some interesting timelines to
inspire you.
Interested in taking a different view of
the data you're producing? Visit Dipity and
register for a free account.
Discuss
• Survivability. Losing connectivity to the
cloud is still a significant issue. If it
happens to a single consumer, you shrug it
off and say "Oh well." If it stops a bank
branch from functioning, well, that's
another story.
Cisco AXP aims to address these
challenges in branch networks. The
$100,000 contest is part of this, as it asks
50+ Semantic
Web Pros to
Follow on Twitter
By Marshall Kirkpatrick
(ReadWriteWeb)
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we find the
Semantic Web fascinating. We write about
Submitted at 1/19/2009 6:48:45 PM
developers to think of what apps can run at
the branch level within a Cisco network
router (aka "the box") - which is really a
Linux server with the network services
exposed via an API. February 27th is the
final deadline for submissions, if you're a
developer interested in this challenge.
Finalists will be announced in May and the
winners will be announced in
August/September.
For more on the technology, current
usage cases, and competition rules see
Cisco's presentation on Slideshare.
Cisco Media Briefing Developer Contest
V4.3
View SlideShare presentation or Upload
your own. Discuss
Daily Digital Newspaper
Illusion Labs
wants you to
Sway with them
By Mike Schramm (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/19/2009 9:00:00 PM
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming,
Software, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, iPod
touch
Illusion Labs is probably best known for
their first app, iPint, but have been making
splashes since then with interesting apps
that make great use of the iPhone's features
and touchscreen. I tried out their
Touchgrind app, and while it was a
fascinating demo of how to combine an in-
game physics system with the sensitive
touchscreen controls, it was a little too
tough for me to use (you have to really be
a skateboarder, since the app really is a
fingerboard, basically).
But Sway looks much more casual, and
still puts the touchscreen and tilt abilities
to great use. Like Rolando, it's a cartoony,
physics-based platformer, but unlike
Rolando, the mechanic here isn't rolling,
but swinging. You swing the little
characters around, and then use the
touchscreen to grab onto various parts of
the environment while exploring it.
Very intriguing. Like Touchgrind, the
controls might be a little too sophisticated
to appeal to all players (it looks tough
coordinating which hand is which and
exactly when to grab and let go), but we'll
have to see how it works out -- if it starts
out in an accessible way, Sway might be
really impressive. Illusion Labs didn't tell
us a price yet (their two other paid games
are $5 and $7), but the game is set to hit
the App Store soon.
TUAW Illusion Labs wants you to Sway
with them originally appeared on The
Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
50+
continued from page 18
it a lot. What is the semantic web? The
way we explain it is that it's a paradigm
advocating that the meaning of content on
the web be made machine readable.
Why would you want to do that?
Because once the "meaning" of text is
automatically discernible, there's a whole
new world of things we can do with
content on the web. Far out things that full
text search for the mere presence of
keywords would never be able to
accomplish. Who's working on the
semantic web and how can you meet
them? Read on.
Sponsor
In November, 2007 we published a list of
10 Semantic Web companies to watch.
Then, one year later, we published a new
list for 2008 of Semantic Web companies
to watch.
Based on those lists, and reader
suggestions in comments of other
companies that should be watched, we
present to you a list of 50+ Twitter users
Greek shipping tycoon freed after family pays ransom
By Jo Adetunji (World news |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 5:32:22 PM
A prominent Greek shipping tycoon who
was kidnapped at gunpoint near his home
in broad daylight was freed today after his
family paid a ransom, Greek police said.
Pericles Panagopoulos, 74, the founder
of Greek ferry operator Superfast Ferries,
was abducted in broad daylight by three
armed men with AK47s near his home in
Kavouri, a coastal suburb of Athens, on 12
who work at Semantic Web companies. If
you find this sector as interesting as we do,
you might want to add some of these
people to your microblogging community.
You can click through the arrows in the
iframe below to scroll through all the
accounts and add the people listed. RSS
readers who'd like to see the list should
click through to the full post.
A handful of these are company
accounts, but most are accounts from
individual employees. Want to suggest
anyone we missed? (We know there are
lots we've missed!) Let us know in
comments. You can also meet the RWW
crew on Twitter.
If this iFrame is driving you batty, see
also this old list of links to all the accounts
displayed below.
Discuss
January.
Panagopoulos, who police said was
suffering from serious medical problems
requiring daily medication, was pulled
from his Mercedez-Benz while being
driven to work and handcuffed before
being bundled into a van, which was later
found burnt out by police. His driver, who
was also seized during the abduction, was
released in a nearby town.
The shipping magnate, who also founded
and later sold the hugely successful ferry
operator, Attica Group, and the Royal
Barack Obama sworn in as US president
By Mark Tran, Daniel Nasaw (World
news | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:10:00 AM
Barack Obama, the first African-
American to be elected to the White
House, today called for a "new era of
responsibility" as he was sworn in as the
44th president of the United States.
In front of a crowd of more than 1
million people, he acknowledged in his
inauguration speech that times were
fraught, with the US fighting two wars and
grappling with the worst economic crisis
since the 1930s.
"That we are in the midst of crisis is now
well understood," he told a crowd that
stretched out for miles before him.
"Our nation is at war, against a far-
reaching network of violence and hatred.
Our economy is badly weakened – a
consequence of greed and irresponsibility
on the part of some, but also our collective
failure to make hard choices and prepare
the nation for a new age."
But Obama said he was ready to meet the
challenges confronting the US as he called
for a return to traditional values of hard
work and honesty.
"What is required of us now is a new era
of responsibility – a recognition on the part
of every American that we have duties to
ourselves, our nation and the world ..."
The handover to a new US
administration began its ritual unfolding
when Obama and his wife, Michelle,
arrived at the White House to be met by
George and Laura Bush on a red carpet.
The four posed for the cameras after
Cruise Line, had been kept in an industrial
estate outside Athens, police said.
A police official, who declined to be
named, said: "The police picked up Mr
Panagopoulos at about 1.30am this
morning after being informed of his
whereabouts."
He added: "The kidnappers called his
wife and told her of his location, and she
then called us. He was taken to hospital to
undergo health checks."
Although there have been suspected links
to organised crime, the abduction was
Michelle, in a pale gold outfit, handed a
giftwrapped box to the Bushes.
After the short traditional pre-
inauguation coffee, the incoming and
outgoing presidential entourages made
their way in their armoured motorcades to
the ceremony.
As Bush arrived at the Capitol, a
smattering of boos could be heard. Dick
Cheney, Bush's vice-president, who had
pulled a muscle in his back, attended the
ceremony in a wheelchair. Bush later left
the White House by helicopter for the last
time.
Planners expected attendance easily to
top the 1.2 million people who attended
Lyndon Johnson's 1965 inauguration, the
largest crowd the national park service has
on record.
Trains were crowded, and passengers
were in jubilant and expectant mood,
despite the early hour and the cold.
Thousands of charter buses from across the
country are in the capital, packing car
parks and streets, many of which closed
last night to accommodate the surge of
overnight visitors and day-trippers.
For the great gathering, Washington was
locked down, with street closures,
checkpoints, camouflage-clad soldiers at
main intersections, air patrols and police
boats in the harbour.
As the crowds packed into the US
Capitol grounds and nearby parkland to
witness Obama take the oath of office, as
many as 40,000 military, civilian and
private security officers were on duty,
roughly one for every 50 people in
attendance.
investigated by anti-terrorism police and
sparked fears of a resurgence of domestic
terrorism.
The kidnappers were reported to have
demanded a ransom of €40 million for his
release.
Panagopoulos's abduction is one of three
high-profile kidnappings in the country
since June 2007. Industrialist Giorgos
Mylonas was taken from his home in
Thessaloniki, northern Greece, in June, and
released two weeks later after his family
paid a reputed ransom of €12m. A
World* 19
Just before Obama was sworn in, the
homeland security department said it was
investigating a potential threat "of
uncertain credibility". Law enforcement
and intelligence officials said they had
received information that people associated
with a Somalia-based group, al-Shabaab,
may try to travel to the US with plans to
disrupt the inauguration.
Obama took his oath on the same Bible
Abraham Lincoln used at his 1861
inauguration, when he proclaimed the end
of slavery.
Tomorrow, on his first working day in
office, Obama is expected to fulfil his
campaign promise to begin the withdrawal
of US forces from Iraq under a 16-month
timetable. Aides said he would summon
the joint chiefs of staff to the Oval Office
to order the pullout.
Before the inauguration, the Vatican
released a message from Pope Benedict
XVI in which the Pontiff said he was
praying that God would grant Obama
"unfailing wisdom and strength" in
carrying out his responsibilities. Benedict
also said attention must be paid to the
poor, the outcast, the hungry and "those
who have no voice".
• Obama inauguration
• Barack Obama
• Obama White House
• US elections 2008
• United States
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prominent doctor kidnapped near his home
on the outskirts of Athens in December has
yet to be released.
• Greece
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20 World* Apple* Entertainment*
Gaza doctors struggle to treat deadly burns consistent
with white phosphorus
By Rory McCarthy (World news |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:11:29 AM
Doctors in Gaza described today how
they had struggled to treat dozens of
patients with terrible and unusually deadly
burns consistent with white phosphorus
weapons, during Israel's three-week war in
Gaza.
Nafiz Abu Shabaan, head of the burns
unit at Shifa hospital and the most senior
burns surgeon in Gaza, said 60 to 70
patients had died in his unit during the war
from severe burns that were unlike any
injury he had previously seen.
Patients with only relatively small burn
injuries, which ought to be survivable,
were dying unexpectedly.
His account, along with evidence from
survivors, corroborates mounting evidence
from groups such as Human Rights Watch
and Amnesty International that the Israeli
military fired phosphorus shells into
populated areas of Gaza in direct violation
of international humanitarian law.
Amnesty said it believes Israel is guilty of
a war crime.
White phosphorus is allowed to be used
as a smokescreen on the battlefield in
certain situations, but its use in civilian
areas is prohibited under United Nations
conventions.
The Israeli military has at times denied
using white phosphorus, and at other times
has said only that it uses weapons "in
compliance with international law".
Yesterday the military said it would
launch an internal investigation. Israel's
Ma'ariv newspaper reported yesterday that
the Israeli military had now admitted using
phosphorus munitions, but only in open
areas.
Abu Shabaan, who was trained in Egypt,
Britain and the United States and has been
24: 12:00PM - 1:00PM
By Jonathan Toomey (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:30:00 AM
Filed under: OpEd, 24, Episode Reviews,
Reality-Free
( S07E05)"If you trust me, I will get you
head of the Shifa burns unit for 15 years,
said he and his staff had been stunned by
the "unusual wounds" they found.
"It starts with small patches and in hours
it becomes wide and deep and in some
cases it reaches the point where even the
general condition of the patient
deteriorates rapidly and unexpectedly," he
said.
Doctors had noticed a "very bad odour
from the wound," he said. In many cases
patients also suffered unexpected and
severe toxicity, and had to be rushed into
intensive care. In one case, a consultant
anaesthetist suffered minor burns on his
chest after burning material sprayed from
within a patient's wounds during an
-operation.
Small burns were causing death. "A
patient with 15% burns should not die, but
we are seeing cases with 15% burns where
they are dying," Abu Shabaan said. He
believed, based on what he had read and
what foreign doctors helping at the hospital
had told him, that the wounds were
consistent with phosphorus.
He described one patient, a three-year-
old girl, who was sent for a scan because
of a head wound: "After about two hours
she came back, we opened the wound, and
smoke came out from the wound," he said.
Surgeons used forceps to pull out a
substance from the wound that was "like
dense cotton and it started to burn," he
said. "The piece continued to burn until it
disappeared." The child, who was from
Atatra, in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza,
died.
In the Shifa burns unit yesterday, Sabbah
Abu Halima described how her house, also
in Atatra, had been hit early in the war by
several shells which killed her husband,
Sa'ad Allah, and four of their children:
Abdul Rahim, 14, Zayid, 10, Hamza, eight,
and Shahed, who was 15 months old. She
through this alive." - Jack
Over the span of any given season of 24,
it's inevitable that as different plots
emerge, the "real time" aspect of the show
forces them to jockey for the top spot. One
week, Plot-X might be the most exciting
herself suffered severe burns to her right
arm, abdomen, left leg and her feet, burns
which doctors said appeared to be
consistent with white phosphorus.
There were 16 members of the family in
the house when an Israeli shell landed
outside, close to a bedroom. Sa'ad Allah
gathered his four children around him and
they ran to another part of the house. A
second shell then hit their living room,
killing Sa'ad Allah and the three boys
immediately. Another shell then landed,
knocking Sabbah to the ground. "I fell on
the ground and there was a fire. The room
was full of smoke and it smelt very bad.
Three times I heard my daughter say
'Mama, mama, mama', but I couldn't see
her," she said. The infant daughter,
Shahed, collapsed and died.
Sabbah's own clothes were burning and
she rolled on the floor trying to put out the
fire before she was pulled out of the house
and rushed to hospital by her relatives. Her
wounds were smoking for several hours.
Two others from the family were killed
as they tried to retrieve the bodies. Their
corpses, along with the body of Shahed,
were recovered on 8 January by medics
from the Red Cross and the Palestinian
Red Crescent. The decomposing bodies of
Sa'ad Allah and his three sons were only
found a week later.
The Israeli strike on the warehouses in
the main UN compound in Gaza City last
Thursday was also believed to be the result
of three white phosphorus shells. Small
pieces of burning material were seen at the
site hours after the blast. Yesterday the
remains of hundreds of tonnes of food and
aid in the warehouses were still
smouldering. The jagged remains of
155mm artillery shell lay outside.
Doctors at the Shifa are now keeping two
tissue biopsies from each patient. "We are
asking for international organisations to
part of the hour and the next week, Plot-Y
send experts to investigate and test to
know the type of weapons that have been
used, and to tell us how to deal with this
type of injury," Abu Shabaan said. "I have
been here since 1985 working in the burns
unit and head of department for 15 years
and I have never seen something like this."
What is white phosphorus?
White phosphorus weapons are 155mm
artillery shells containing 116 white
phosphorus wedges. When the shell
explodes it spreads the wedges over
several hundred square metres. They ignite
on contact with the air and burn at more
than 800C. When they touch human skin
they burn to the bone, causing terrible
injuries and forcing doctors to excise large
areas of flesh to prevent the burn
spreading.
Using white phosphorous is not illegal. It
can be used as an incendiary weapon, to
set fire to military targets, to mark military
targets, or to spread smoke. However, its
use is strictly limited under UN
conventions and international humanitarian
law.
Fundamental rules stipulate civilians
must be protected, and that attacks must
not cause "disproportionate" damage to
civilians and civilian objects. Particular
care must be taken when using white
phosphorus weapons and they cannot be
used as an incendiary weapon against a
military target that is not clearly separated
from civilian areas.
• Gaza
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Middle East
• Weapons technology
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is.
With all that being said, this season of 24
is shattering that expectation. For six
seasons that's been the norm, but not so for
Day 7. All three major threads (Jack and
Tony, Sangala, Roger Taylor) have been
Daily Digital Newspaper
Video: Working
iControlPad adds buttons
to the iPod touch
By Mike Schramm (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/19/2009 7:00:00 PM
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming,
Odds and ends, Mods, iPhone, App Store,
iPod touch
It's pretty wild to have seen the
iControlPad go from idea to concept to
production, and here's the final step
straight from Engadget: video of the device
working just as planned. ZodTTD is
playing quake4iphone on it, and while the
naysayers will probably still have some
nays to say, I'm convinced. If Apple is as
serious as it seems about turning the
iPhone and the iPod touch into serious
gaming devices, it would be worth selling
something like this as an official
accessory. It's fine and good to say that the
multitouch screen works even for
traditional controls, but so far, we haven't
seen a developer that's been able to put
"buttons" on the screen and still be able to
make worthwhile use of screen space.
As Engadget says, there's still no price or
release date on the iControlPad, and given
that it's working on jailbroken games right
now, there's no sign yet that we'll have any
official App Store support. But it's an idea
for which the time, in my humble opinion,
has come.
TUAW Video: Working iControlPad
adds buttons to the iPod touch originally
appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog
(TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:00:00
EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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thrilling since the clock first started ticking
and this episode was a prime example.
Continue reading 24: 12:00PM - 1:00PM
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Journalist and human rights lawyer shot
by masked gunman in Moscow
By Oliver Luft (World news |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 3:27:00 AM
A Russian freelance journalist was killed
yesterday as she attempted to intervene
when a human rights lawyer, renowned for
his work on abuses in Chechnya, was also
murdered by a masked gunman.
Lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot in
the back of the head at close range in broad
daylight yesterday in Moscow by a
gunman who followed him from a news
conference, the Associated Press reported.
Journalist Anastasia Baburova was also
killed as she attempted to help Markelov.
According to the AP, the state-run RIA-
Novosti Russian news agency reported that
Markelov's attacker wore a stocking-style
mask and had a silencer on his gun. Local
police reportedly said there were several
witnesses.
The murders drew comparisons with the
2006 killing of investigative journalist
Anna Politkovskaya, a client of Markelov's
and a fellow opponent of human rights
abuses in Chechnya and across former
president Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Baburova, a freelance journalist in her
Clemency and conversation in George Bush's last day
By Ewen MacAskill (World news |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
President George Bush yesterday issued
last-minute acts of clemency to two US
border guards and made a final round of
calls to world leaders, including Gordon
Brown, to say goodbye.
Ignacio Ramos and José Compeán were
sentenced to 10 years for trying to cover up
the shooting in 2005 of a Mexican drug
dealer, Osvaldo Alderete, as he tried to
escape across the Rio Grande, abandoning
a van loaded with marijuana.
The sentencing at the time produced an
outcry, with supporters saying the pair
were just doing their job.
A US administration official said Bush
agreed the sentence was excessive.
mid-20s, had worked for the Novaya
Gazeta newspaper, also Politkovskaya's
employer.
Andrei Lipsky, a deputy editor with the
paper, told AP that Baburova tried to
intervene after Markelov was attacked. A
colleague at the paper confirmed later that
she had died on the operating table after
being rushed to hospital.
Billionaire Russian businessman
Alexander Lebedev, who is close to buying
the London Evening Standard, holds a
stake in Novaya Gazeta, along with former
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
A Chechen parliament deputy, Isa
Khadzhimuratov, said yesterday he
believed Markelov's killing was likely to
be connected to the case of a former
Russian army officer who was freed early
last week after being convicted in 2003
and sentenced to 10 years for murdering a
Chechen woman, Heda Kungayeva.
According to AP, Markelov, who was
instrumental in a number of cases
involving alleged atrocities by the Russian
military, told reporters he was considering
filing an international court appeal against
the early release of the killer, Colonel
Budanov.
Compeán and Ramos, who have served
about two years, are expected to be
released from prison within two months.
The president can make pardons up till
11.59 am today, but Bush advisers said
there would be no more. There had been
expectations Bush might offer protection
for US officials involved in torture
at Guantánamo, and offer pardons in a
raft of high-profile political and financial
scandal cases.
One of the biggest cases involved former
White House adviser, Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, who became caught up in a CIA
leak scandal. Although Bush has already
commuted his jail sentence, his supporters
had hoped for a full pardon.
Bush, who returned to the White House
after a final weekend with his family at
Camp David, phoned some leaders to
Kungayeva's father, Visa Kungayev, who
has taken refuge in Norway with his
family, said Markelov told him last week
he had been threatened with death if he
refused to drop the case, the Interfax news
agency reported.
The Budanov case was being watched as
a bellwether of Russian authorities'
approach to dealing with human rights
abuses in Chechnya.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news
desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or
phone 020 3353 3857. For all other
inquiries please call the main Guardian
switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for
publication, please mark clearly "for
publication".
• Newspapers
• Russia
• Chechnya
• Newspapers & magazines
• Human rights
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thank them for their support during the
eight years of his presidency. Among those
he called was Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian
prime minister, who along with Tony Blair
was one of his strongest supporters in
Europe of the invasion of Iraq.
Other leaders to receive a call included
Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, Lee
Myung-bak of South Korea, and former
president Vicente Fox of Mexico.
Bush has one final act as president:
handing over power to Barack Obama at
noon tomorrow. But the press corps in
Washington will also be watching to see
whether, in spite of White House claims,
he will make any further last-minute
pardons, as his predecessors have done.
With the new acts of clemency
yesterday, Bush has granted a total of 189
pardons and 11 commutations, fewer than
iLife '09 hardware up-to-date
program
By Dave Caolo (The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:00:00 AM
Filed under: iLife, Software Just as we
saw them do in 2007, Apple has instituted
an up-to-date program for iLife '09.
According to Apple, customers who
purchased a qualifying Mac "... on or after
January 6, 2009, that does not include iLife
'09, [may] upgrade to iLife '09 for
$9.95US."
What exactly is a "qualifying computer?"
You'll find the full list here, but the short
answer is you'll have to check your
machine's model number. There's even a
half as many as Bill Clinton or Ronald
Reagan. Reagan issued 406 in eight years.
The White House has been inundated
with hundreds of pleas for clemency,
including one from US senator Lisa
Murkowski for the disgraced former
Alaska senator Ted Stevens, a veteran
Republican who was convicted in
Washington in October of seven charges of
felony for failing to declare gifts from an
oil company.
• George Bush
• Obama inauguration
• United States
• Mexico
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World* Apple* 21
list of qualifying refurbished machines.
This offer will end on March 28, 2009,
so you've still got time to upgrade for ten
bucks.
TUAW iLife '09 hardware up-to-date
program originally appeared on The
Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see
our terms for use of feeds.
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Use your iPhone
to navigate
Inauguration Day
By Michael Rose (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/19/2009 9:45:00 PM
Filed under: Features, Odds and ends,
iPhone, App Store Second Update: You
can also use the free SHOUTcast Radio [
App Store link] to listen to WTOP for
Inauguration Day coverage on your iPhone
or iPod touch. The stream works great with
EDGE, 3G, and WiFi.(SHOUTcast is
published by AOL, the parent company of
this blog.)
Update: Late word is that the Ustream
video viewer has made it to the App Store
today, so you might be able to stream the
inaugural coverage after all. We're
downloading it now and will have a full
review up tomorrow morning. Joost is also
planning to stream the CBS coverage, so
that should work on your iPhone as well.
Among the hundreds of thousands of
celebrants descending on Washington,
D.C. for tomorrow's big day, there must be
at least a few iPhone owners. What might
they find in the App Store, we wonder, to
improve the visit?
The Inauguration Guide iPhone app(all
app links open iTunes), developed by
PointAbout and sponsored by a D.C. law
USE page 22
22 Apple*
Tick tick tick... significant number of
Seagate hard drives failing
By Mel Martin (The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/19/2009 8:30:00 PM
Filed under: Hardware, Peripherals It
hasn't been a great year so far for care
companies and banks. Now, add Seagate to
the list of enterprises facing unexpected
challenges. The big manufacturer of hard
disks reports that a 'small' number of
Barracuda 7200.11 drives are failing. Once
they fail, the data on them is supposedly
still intact but can't be accessed without
expert recovery procedures. Seagate has
promised to expedite data recovery for
affected users, which is nice enough but
cold comfort if you're among the unlucky.
Seagate offers a software utility that will
tell you if your drive is at risk, but that
only works on Windows PCs. The firm is
providing some firmware updates for the
affected, but at this point they do not
appear to have an updater that will run
under OS X.
The problem drives also extend to the
Barracuda ES.2 SATA units and the
DiamondMax22. The flaky drives could be
internal models, or drives installed in
external cases.
Wondering if you have one of these
drives? You can use the 'more info' button
when you select 'About this Mac' from the
Apple menu (or just run the Apple System
Profiler utility from your Utilities folder --
Ustream viewer makes it to app store just in time
By Mel Martin (The Unofficial Apple
Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/19/2009 11:15:00 PM
Filed under: Multimedia, Software,
Video, Freeware, Internet, iPhone, iPod
touch There has been quite a bit of
excitement over the last few weeks with
the announcement that Ustream would be
offering a live video viewer so people
could watch the Obama inauguration on
their iPhones and iPod touches. It didn't
look like it was going to make it, but the
free application[app store link] slipped into
iTunes today with just hours to spare.
While the Joost app should also allow
same result), and click on the Serial-ATA
label in the left column. You'll get all your
drive model numbers, and the firmware
revisions. If the numbers match the bad
news provided by Seagate, you'll know
you may be living on borrowed time.
Lots of people around the 'net are
reporting failures, and others say their
drives match the numbers and aren't sure
what to do without a viable firmware
updater. I tried to call Seagate myself this
morning and after navigating the inevitable
phone tree a recording said they were too
busy to take my call. I'll bet they are.
Seagate did say today they will fix any
defective drives and they will provide a
streaming of the festivities, the Ustream
viewer is unique because it allows live TV
streams, and registered viewers can join a
chat room creating a community around
any video stream.
Video can be viewed horizontally or
vertically, but many of the sources are not
16 by 9 so it won't make a great deal of
difference. The app appears to be WiFi
only, which is a bit of a drag. My cell
reception here in the wilds of Arizona is
not too great, but I got an error message
trying to run the video streaming under 3G.
With WiFi most of the channels looked
pretty good. I even got a quick look at
Chris Pirillo doing his live bit from his
free data recovery service. That is nice but
it's a time consuming and troublesome
process.
There is some talk of a class action
lawsuit(of course) but clearly something is
amiss with some Seagate drives so if you
have one or more check them out, and
hope the company comes up with some
Mac friendly answers. If anyone has tried
updating the firmware of a drive via Boot
Camp, please advise (no, before you ask,
trying to use a virtualization tool like
VMware or Parallels to modify your drive
firmware is neither advisable nor
particularly feasible). Note that back in
2007 we reported on some problems
involving Seagate drives and Apple
laptops.
Here's how to contact Seagate, but I
suspect they are pretty busy. No telling
how many Macs have these drives in them.
Apple uses a lot of different vendors,
including Seagate. Check your backups,
folks.
[via Engadget& The Register]
TUAW Tick tick tick... significant
number of Seagate hard drives failing
originally appeared on The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Jan
2009 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds.
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desk at home. The real test will be
tomorrow with the swearing in ceremonies.
It will be a good test of the Ustream
USE
continued from page 21
firm and communications consultancy,
aims to give visitors to the District
everything they need to find their way
around the city in the midst of the crowds
and commotion. Although the front screen
of the app is a simple countdown and
distance-to-the-Capitol readout, the data
gallery includes parking, public transport
and restaurant info. The app is free, so it's
certainly worth adding to your toolbelt if
you're attending the festivities.
If you already know your way around but
you'd like an easy tool to relay your
experiences, the Inauguration Report app
(also free) might be your ticket. You can
send your impressions in text, picture or
audio form to the coverage team at CBS
News and NPR for possible inclusion in
the reporting of the event.
For $0.99 each, you could pick up a
guide to the inaugural event schedule, a
comprehensive photo and speech gallery or
a countdown clock that includes press
coverage and citations from the US
Constitution (awful handy). Still don't have
a place to sleep? It's probably far too late
to make a difference, but the free Crash the
Inauguration app provides links to room
listings, places to eat, video links and
more. If you want a pocket reference to the
country at large, you've got a $2.99 option
with America Deluxe, a reference app that
promises rapid updates immediately after
the inauguration is complete.
While you've got a full range of options
for audio coverage of the inauguration on
distribution system.
Ustream wants lots of players out there,
because they are creating a content
network and are actively courting people
who will create videos on their home
computers and laptops. The firm says they
will soon have an app that allows live
streaming of video and audio from the
iPhone, in the same vein as the Qik tool
currently running on jailbroken phones. If
so, that will be a very big game changer for
the iPhone. The big question is, will Apple
allow it into the app store?
Looking toward the future, Ustream will
need more and better content deals, and
streaming via the 3G network. Tonight is a
Daily Digital Newspaper
your iPhone ( NPR Mobile, Public Radio
Tuner, TalkRadio, moodio.fm), video is a
bit more challenging -- many sites are
streaming, but few if any will work for
your handheld. The official YouTube
channel will work, but that won't have live
feeds. The recently TechCrunch'ed/pre-
announced uStream app for the iPhone
isn't in the store yet (you can send in a
request for an ad-hoc build, but they're
probably well past the 100-device limit by
now), although it looks very tempting.[See
update above.]
Comments report that Joost will offer
streaming of the ceremonies, and there's a
page up on the site for the stream. The
SlingPlayer app for iPhone is still a month
or two away, so for live TV -- if you
happen to have a Windows PC with the
Orb tuner card -- you're looking at
the$9.99 OrbLive app for streaming some
C-SPAN to your spot on the National Mall.
Got your iPhone in Washington? Send a
tweet our way and let us know how the 3G
coverage holds up from your iPhone. Oh,
and don't forget to take a few pictures.
TUAW Use your iPhone to navigate
Inauguration Day originally appeared on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:45:00 EST. Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
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great first step, and I expect by swearing-in
time a lot of iPhones will be tuned in, if
you'll pardon the archaic term.
Here are some screen shots hot off the
presses (thanks AppleUniverse):
Gallery: Ustream Screen shots
TUAW Ustream viewer makes it to app
store just in time originally appeared on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:15:00 EST. Please
see our terms for use of feeds.
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Clippy brings copy/paste to Inaugural prayers, sermons and
jailbroken iPhones controversies
By Megan Lavey (The Unofficial
Apple Weblog (TUAW))
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:00:00 AM
Filed under: iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage
Those with jailbroken iPhones who use the
Cydia package manager discovered a new
add-on in the past day or so -- Clippy, from
iSpazio, which introduces a method for
copy and paste to the iPhone.
According to users, the add-on inserts
two buttons into the system keyboard --
one for copying and another for pasting.
Those who have tried it out say that it only
accepts user-entered text and copies over
one line at a time, which can get
cumbersome.
Sebastien over at the iPhone Download
Blog gives a detailed overview of how the
application works. "After installing the
application, type any text you want and
simply hit the "123 button on your
keyboard to show the copy/paste buttons.
Tap "copy" and start selecting the text you
want to copy. Tap "copy" again to end the
selection. Then tap "paste" to paste this
text where you want it to be." This
implementation isn't up to Apple's
standards for grace and ease, but it seems
workable.
My iPhone isn't jailbroken, so I haven't
had the chance to try out Clippy. If you've
Radio pick of the day
By Phil Daoust (From the Guardian:
G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Sixty-odd years ago, the Glasgow
shipbuilder Yarrow & Co produced an
awesome self-assembly kit. The MV Ilala -
620 tons, 172ft long, designed to carry 358
passengers and 100 tons of cargo - was
destined for Lake Malawi in southeast
Africa, but couldn't simply sail there
because the lake has no navigable outlet to
the sea. So it made the journey in pieces:
780 cases of components, the heaviest
weighing 18 tonnes, were shipped to
Mozambique and transported overland to
Monkey Bay. Once reassembled, they
were blessed by the Bishop of Nyasaland.
downloaded and had a chance to try out the
app, please let us know your impression in
the comments.
Thanks to all who submitted this!
TUAW Clippy brings copy/paste to
jailbroken iPhones originally appeared on
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see
our terms for use of feeds.
Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments
The Ilala is a bit rusty now, but it still
sails the lake, ferrying maize, bicycles,
people and more around Malawi and
Mozambique. "I feel that the construction
was superb," says the present captain.
Adam Lusekelo spends a few days in first
class for A Voyage On Livingstone's
Lake(11am, Radio 4).
If that doesn't float your boat (I know:
pathetic), File On 4(8pm, Radio 4) is back
for a new series. The subject couldn't be
more topical - Britain's insolvency laws.
Julian O'Halloran presents.
• Radio
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By Mollie
Submitted at 1/19/2009 6:51:16 AM
My sick daughter/frozen pipes/burst pipes
trifecta-of-chaos this weekend prevented
me from fully enjoying the pre-inaugural
festivities here in Washington. But I
watched a bit of the celebrity concert that
got things going (I can’t get enough of
Mary J.) and was sorry to see that HBO did
not broadcast the opening prayer by
Bishop Gene Robinson.
Friends who went down to the Lincoln
Memorial reported that the microphone cut
out just as Robinson began his prayer and
only came back on as he said “Amen.”
I haven’t seen any substantive media
coverage of the prayer, although religion
journalists made sure to mention it on their
blogs. Jeffrey Weiss at the Dallas Morning
News called it the Obama Prayer
Controversy #1. Here’s how the Boston
Globe post begins:
In the invocation offered by Bishop V.
Gene Robinson of New Hampshire at
today’s inaugural welcoming ceremony,
the openly gay bishop called on God to
“bless us with anger — at discrimination,
at home and abroad, against refugees and
immigrants, women, people of color, gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.”
Not surprising for Robinson but certainly
interesting. Perhaps we’ll see more stories
in the next day or so. Not that all the
stories about, say, the pre-inaugural rush
for Botox aren’t important. But when the
Associated Press is allocating 87 words for
entire stories about pre-inaugural sermons
of note, I guess I shouldn’t be too hopeful.
One great religion news story was filed
by Nikita Stewart and Hamil Harris at the
Washington Post. They covered the Obama
family’s visit to a local church on Sunday:
Barack Obama and his family attended
services yesterday at one of the oldest
historically black churches in Washington,
Apple* Religion* International*
thrilling a congregation that honored the
president-elect for advancing the legacy of
such civil-rights icons as Rosa Parks and
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The story is packed with details about the
church and the Obamas’ visit. We learn
that the church originated in 1802 as a
congregation of slaves and whites who
worshiped together. Later it was sold to
Black Baptist ministers. It is known for its
progressive politics, in which it is very
active. Former attorney general John
Ashcroft is one of many notables who has
attended services there.
Early on we are told that the Rev.
Derrick Harkins focused his sermon on
how God prepares people to do incredible
things in challenging times:
After learning that the Obamas were
coming yesterday, Harkins said, he
agonized about his sermon, which he titled
“For Such a Time as This.” Whatever
23
nervousness he felt, he said, was dispelled
once he met the Obamas just before the
service. And, indeed, Harkins exuded a
confidence, almost as if counseling
Obama. From time to time, he would get
fiery and loud and then speak in a hushed
tone.
Obama appeared pensive, sitting with his
hands folded at his chin. At least twice, he
took a pen out of his pocket and jotted
down a note.
In his sermon, the pastor talked of the
biblical heroes Mordecai and Esther, who
met the challenge and saved themselves
and their fellow Jewish people. He cited
another event that has dominated headlines
in recent days: the heroic actions of the
pilot of a faltering US Airways jet that
safely landed in the Hudson River. The
pilot had years of training before that
moment when he had to save the plane.
You never know, Harkins said, when the
experiences you accumulate in daily life
will be put to a test.
And so it is with Obama. “You are aware
that you are here for such a time as this,”
Harkins said. He urged the president-elect
to remember two things when times grow
difficult. “First, look to your wife as an
encourager,” he said. And second, “God is
in the transformation business.”
So often these visit to church stories
neglect to include any of the actual
substance of the service. This story did a
great job of providing some color — they
hymns, the general scene, the sermon. It’s
a welcome change.
And if you’re looking for an upcoming
prayer controversy story, the Politico
reports that one of the participants at the
Wednesday prayer service heads an
Islamic group that federal prosecutors say
is linked to Hamas. Who says the religion
beat isn’t exciting?
24 Religion*
C11: Reporters get some religions
By tmatt
Submitted at 1/20/2009 2:35:42 AM
It would be hard to pick up the big
newspapers right now and try to argue that
the major, elite media are not trying to “get
religion” right now. It’s like the editors
have all walked the aisle at the President
Barack Obama revival and made
professions of faith.
Which leads me to another review of that
new book from the Oxford Center for
Religion and Public Life’s new book, “
Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get
Religion.” This book is directly linked to
the mission of this weblog and, as you can
tell from the title, we know that there are
reporters who do get religion, because we
are focusing on case studies linked to times
when journalists failed get religion.
However, the crew over at the Culture11
website ran an edgy essay the other day by
the conservative journalist Les Sillars, who
teaches journalism at Patrick Henry
College in Purcellville, Va. The headline:
“Target Practice — Why journalists won’t
get religion anytime soon.” At one point,
Sillars voices an argument often heard in
conservative religious circles, which is that
journalists tend to mess up religion news
because they are prejudiced against
religion and, to be specific, against
Christianity.
This viewpoint was voiced at a forum
promoting the book, which led to an
exchange with Amy Sullivan of Time, who
argued that her success at that magazine
shows that there is a new openness and
respect for Christians in many newsrooms.
Sillars notes:
In a way, her answer misses the point —
not to question Ms. Sullivan’s talents as a
journalist, but I suspect TIME hired her in
part because she is the right kind of
evangelical: pro-choice, pro-gay rights,
and a former Democratic operative best
known for a recent book on how
Democrats can sell the Democratic Party
platform to evangelicals. In any case, her
rise does not prove how media elites feel,
one way or another, about evangelicals
whose beliefs are more conventional.
This isn’t to say that the average editor is
actively “anti-religion” or even “anti-
Christian.” As Mark Silk pointed out more
than a decade ago in a book called
Unsecular Media, religion that is tolerant
and non-judgmental and not inclined to
disrupt society gets very positive coverage.
(For example, “United Methodist Church
Opens Soup Kitchen.” Or, “American
Anglicans Take Stand in Favor of Gay
Marriage.”) The religion journalists prefer,
he wrote, “is domestic and generous and
friendly, not revolutionary or hostile to the
culture at large.”
Indeed, many reporters share with
“progressive” denominations and faiths a
vision of the nature of God (loving,
tolerant and non-judgmental), the nature of
humanity (basically good), and how
society should be (open, malleable, and
inclusive).
But many reporters are deeply suspicious
about certain brands of religion,
particularly those asserting that a loving
God saves sinners but also punishes sin;
that Scriptures are authoritative and that
trust in them is reasonable; and that
humanity is created in God’s image but
that the human heart can be the source of
great evil. Such people, they suspect, are
not merely wrong, but dangerous, as if
being religious is perfectly fine, but
actually believing in its tenets is
objectionable.
Now, take a deep, cleansing breath and
read on. You see, this point actually
reminded me of a rather famous essay on a
related topic, Jay Rosen’s “Journalism Is
Itself a Religion” at his PressThink
website. The New York University
professor wrote this piece to mark the birth
of The Revealer, another blog that looks at
mainstream coverage of religion news.
Rosen takes a look at at column I wrote
for Scripps Howard News Service in which
I interviewed veteran journalist William
Proctor, author of a book entitled “ The
Gospel According to the New York
Times.”
This gets rather complex, so read
carefully. Better yet, click here and go to
Rosen’s text to read this passage, with the
advantage of his many hyperlinks to source
material (most of which still work). To
make matters more complex, this passage
opens with a reference to a much debated
New York Times article by David
Samuels, entitled “The Making of a
Fugitive,” which can still be read by
clicking here.
So we have layers on top of layers. But
here goes. It helps to know that the
subhead on this section of the essay reads,
“The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy.” This is
long, but essential reading (with me
changing some punctuation in a futile
attempt to capture the bloc quote
structure):
Here and there in the discussion of
religion “in” the news, there arises a
trickier matter, which is the religion of the
newsroom, and of the priesthood in the
press. A particularly telling example began
with this passage from a 1999 New York
Times Magazine article about anti-abortion
extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken
premise of the world that most of us
inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that
people who claim to have found them are
crazy,” wrote David Samuels.
This struck some people as dogma very
close to religious dogma, and they spoke
up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a
syndicated columnist of religion:
“This remarkable credo was more than a
statement of one journalist’s convictions,
said William Proctor, a Harvard Law
School graduate and former legal affairs
reporter for the New York Daily News.
Surely, the ‘world that most of us inhabit’
cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of
the New York Times and the faithful who
draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”
Yet here is the part that intrigued me:
“But critics are wrong if they claim that
the New York Times is a bastion of
secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the
newspaper is crusading to reform society
and even to convert wayward
‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the
Daily Digital Newspaper
‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the
Times, he deliberately did not claim that it
rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the
world’s most influential newspaper
condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’
In other words, it’s against newsroom
religion to be an absolutist and in this
sense, the Isaiah Berlin sense, the press is a
liberal institution put in the uncomfortable
position of being ‘closed’ to other
traditions and their truth claims —
specifically, the orthodox faiths. At least
according to Mattingly and his source:
“Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda
the Times advocates is based on a set of
absolute truths,” said Proctor. Its leaders
are “absolutely sure that the religious
groups they consider intolerant and
judgmental are absolutely wrong,
especially traditional Roman Catholics,
evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And
they are just as convinced that the religious
groups that they consider tolerant and
progressive are absolutely right.”
The apparent orthodoxy of forbidding all
orthodoxies is a philosophical puzzle in
liberalism since John Locke. Journalists
cannot be expected to solve it. However,
they might in some future professional
climate (which may be around the corner)
come to examine the prevailing orthodoxy
about journalism — how to do it, name it,
explain it, uphold it, and protect it — for
that orthodoxy does exist. And it does not
always have adequate answers.
Now, I am sure that Sillars and Rosen
would disagree on many matters related to
religion and journalism. However, I think
Sillars would say a hearty “amen” after
reading that passage.
Is Rosen right? Are many journalists
driven by the “Orthodoxy of No
Orthodoxy,” a creed that makes it hard for
them to do fair, accurate, balanced
coverage — note, not public relations — of
the religious beliefs and actions of
traditional religious believers?
Read both essays again. There is much
here to chew on, looking for common
ground between these voices on the
journalistic left and right.
Daily Digital Newspaper Religion* International* 25

“Orthodox” journalism in Russia?

By tmatt
Submitted at 1/19/2009 2:32:33 AM
Let’s reach a few weeks back into tmatt’s
infamous “folder of guilt” to look at an
interesting New York Times piece about
the growth of “religious media” in modern
Russia.
Now, what precisely, are “religious
media”? That’s the question, isn’t it? I say
this as the leader of a journalism program
here inside the Washington Beltway that
spends quite a bit of time caught between
warring camps of people who have
clashing definitions of a related term,
which is “Christian journalism.”
So, as you would expect, I was
immediately interested in that New York
Times feature late last month that ran
under the headline, “With Orthodoxy’s
Revival in Russia, Religious Media Also
Rise.” I mean, I am a journalist, I am
Orthodox and there’s a chance I may be
visiting greater Russian in a few months.
You know I am going to read this story.
Here’s the lede:
By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution
in 1917, there were nearly 600 newspapers
and magazines throughout Russia devoted
to Orthodox subjects. They were all shut
down by the Soviet regime by 1918.
Today, in a country that was officially
atheist about two decades ago, there are
again hundreds of newspapers, magazines
and newsletters covering the world’s
largest Orthodox church. There are about
3,500 Russian Orthodox Web sites, and
some priests are even blogging.
On a wing
The Russian Orthodox media, like the
church itself, have not always fallen into
step with the Kremlin line. The Moscow
Patriarchate, its official newspaper and
and a prayer
most Orthodox media have addressed the
war with Georgia over the breakaway
region of South Ossetia as a tragic
misunderstanding between two countries
that share an Orthodox Christian heritage.
That’s interesting. But I have a question.
What are “Orthodox media”? I mean, I
understand that there are official
newspapers and websites. That’s normal.
However, the trend covered in this article
seems broader than that. For example:
When Sergei Chapnin, editor of the
Moscow Patriarchate’s official newspaper,
Tserkovny Vesnik, organized the first
Russian Orthodox media festival in 2004, a
government bureaucrat called to inquire
about the event.
“I could tell he thought we would have 50
people or so attending,” Mr. Chapnin said
about the first festival, which brought
together 400 journalists. “I said there are
about 500 publications with up to 10,000
journalists connected to them. There was
silence at the end of the line.”
Once again, here is my question: Are
these official “Orthodox publications,” or
are they journalistic publications about
Orthodoxy and religion, produced by real
journalists who happen to be Orthodox?
Might these publications feature the work
of journalists, as opposed to church
officials or public-relations professionals?
That’s what I want to know and, after
reading this interesting article, I cannot
figure out the answers to these basic
questions.
There are clergy involved in some of
these publications, but there are also
professionals with mainstream
backgrounds. Some of the publications
focus on church affairs. Others are
controversial because they focus on how
faith affects the style of public life,
including the lives of celebrities. What is
going on here? Who are these scribes? I,
for one, would like to know.
How awesome is Chesley B.
Sullenberger, the heroic pilot who saved
By MollieSubmitted
everyone’s at 1/19/2009 12:18:00 PM
life in his daring landing in the

Watch this: The Inauguration of Barack Obama, President Obama: Hudson? I just can’t read enough about the

The Inauguration, Battlestar Galactica and Cowards

By Gareth McLean (From the
Guardian: G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
The Inauguration of Barack Obama
3pm, CNN
As president-elect Obama prepares - at
5pm our time and at noon in Washington
DC - to solemnly swear that he will
faithfully execute the office of president of
the United States of America, news
organisations everywhere are wheeling out
guns almost as big as the howitzers that
will subsequently give a 21-gun salute.
Ruffles and flourishes ready and hail, then,
to the chief as Wolf Blitzer and Anderson
Cooper lay it on thick in true American
style for this genuinely momentous
moment made more illustrious by razzy
graphics, ponderous pundits and hours and
hours of hyperbole.
President Obama: The Inauguration
4pm, BBC1, BBC HD
Over on Sky News Adam Boulton,
Jeremy Thompson and Robert Nisbet front
their channel's coverage in glorious high
definition - and who could resist Adam
Boulton in HD, hmm? Meanwhile the
BBC unleashes Huw Edwards, again in
HD. Among his guests are legendary
journalist Bob Woodward. On BBC2 at
7pm, Clive Myrie, one of the few non-
white faces in the coverage, gets to present
something all on his own: a profile of
Obama from his Hawaii childhood to his
triumph in the November election. If you
still haven't had your fill later, Jeremy
Paxman hosts an extended Newsnight from
Washington DC.
Battlestar Galactica
9pm, Sky1
The best drama on television returns as
bold, brilliant and pertinent as ever with
the remnants of humanity and their
erstwhile Cylon enemies coming to terms
with the fact that the object of their quest -
Earth - is a radioactive wasteland. Gutted
doesn't even begin to describe it. But even
in such a downbeat episode, there's no
relenting in the drama as the identity of the
final Cylon is revealed in vintage jaw-
dropping BSG fashion. It isn't who you
think it is. Unless you think it's ... Oh,
come now, I wouldn't do that to you.
Cowards
10pm, BBC4
How to up the hit rate of a sketch show?
Make every episode 15 minutes long? Cut
the usual run of six in half? Those behind
this rather strange collection of skits have
opted for the latter, making this the first of
three, although they still need to work on
the laughs-to-sketch ratio. If I were you, I'd
listen to Radio 4's Recorded for Training
Purposes instead.
• Television
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26 International* World Sport*
WING
continued from page 25
perfect landing and the brilliant rescue
operation. Of course, I’m one of those
people who can’t drive across a bridge
without contemplating what I’d do if, say,
the bridge suddenly collapsed and I ended
up in the middle of the icy Potomac.
Even the earliest interviews with
survivors mentioned how many passengers
prayed as they prepared for their water
crash. This New York Times story about
the heroism and comedy of the rescue
operation led with that angle:
Some passengers screamed, others
tucked their heads between their knees,
and several prayed over and over, “Lord,
forgive me for my sins.” But a man named
Josh who was sitting in the exit row did
exactly what everyone is supposed to but
few ever do: He pulled out the safety card
and read the instructions on how to open
the exit door.
There are a few things that are interesting
with this lede. The first is the juxtaposition
— the use of the word “but” to set apart
the people who screamed (something
disputed by other reports) and prayed from
Michael Landy: How Tony Hart gave me
my big break Football: I am happy at
By Michael Landy (From the
Guardian: G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
When I heard about Tony Hart's death at
the weekend, I immediately thought of the
artwork I sent into his BBC show, Take
Hart, in 1980. I was 15, and I'd watched
the show every week for years - mainly for
the gallery towards the end of the
programme when they showed the viewers'
own artwork. I must have been pretty
competitive even then, because I remember
being absolutely sure that my own work
was a lot better than most of the stuff on
there.
The picture I sent in was of a clown,
made out of abstract patterns etched on to a
Scraperboard - a pre-made piece of stiff
backboard with a layer of silver under a
layer of black. I was immensely proud
the person who did what he was supposed
to do. I have no idea if the two writers of
the story intended to oppose people who
pray from people who do what they are
supposed to do, but it’s somewhat
humorous to read. I mean, I think praying
is precisely what people are supposed to do
in event of a crash landing of a plane, but I
see no conflict between asking God to
forgive our sins and being familiar with
how to get out of a plane in an emergency.
I would quote from the rest of the story,
which sums up various survivors’ stories,
to show you how the religious angle in the
lede was fleshed out except that it was in
no way explored outside of the beginning
of the story.
I noticed this a bit with other stories, too.
Every time I read a lede with a religion
angle, it would just vanish into thin air.
Religious beliefs tend to become more
important when people are faced with life
and death situations. While there are many
interesting angles to write about, religion
has to be one of them.
This story in the Fayetteville Observer
when the BBC said they'd chosen it for the
gallery. They sent me a book token, a
sticker signed by Hart, and a letter telling
me which day the programme was going
out.
On the day itself, my entire family sat in
front of the television, waiting for my
clown to come on. When it did, the camera
zoomed up close, to show all the detail on
the clown's face. I'm not sure this
immediately convinced my family that I
was going to be a serious artist, but it was
definitely the first step on the road.
When I started at Goldsmiths, I got
respect from everyone for the fact I'd had a
piece in Take Hart's gallery. And I kept the
token, the letter and the sticker in a
cupboard in my parents' house for more
than 20 years - until 2001, when I
destroyed all my possessions at an old
branch of C&A on London's Oxford Street
didn’t begin with religion. Instead, it ended
with it. The reporter interviewed the
parents of one survivor via e-mail and
included their religious views at the end of
the story:
But the Grays, who are active in outreach
ministries at Village Baptist Church,
believe that Sullenberger was co-piloting
the plane when it hit the water.
“As thankful as we are for the … pilot’s
skills to be able to land a plane in the water
with no casualties, we know who the real
pilot was during that time,” Mary Gray
wrote.
“We give God the glory, praise and
thanks for looking after our boy, his sweet
fiancee and all the others on that flight.”
And on the other hand, Patton Dodd over
at Beliefnet says journalists should tread a
bit more carefully with the miracle
language.
Do let us know if you see any
particularly good or bad efforts with
religion angles.
for an art piece called Break Down.
I didn't know that Damien Hirst had also
tried as a boy to get something into the
Take Hart gallery - and failed. I guess I
must have been ahead of the game. Hart
managed to get a generation of kids
picking up materials and making things,
which gets you halfway towards being an
artist. Who could replace him? None of the
artists I know. Not one of us can draw like
he could.
• Tony Hart
• Art
• Television
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Obituary: Zafar Noman
By Alex Duncan (News: Main
section | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:27:39 PM
Zafar Noman, who has died aged 26,
reflected much of what is best about
Britain. He was both British and
international; he had British, Pakistani and
South African roots, and had lived and
worked in the UK, the US and Pakistan; he
was sparky, idealistic, purposeful and
capable; and he observed with humour -
but never cynicism - the foibles of his
elders. His capacity to give and receive
friendship left behind a diverse and far-
flung following.
Zafar was born in Oxford. His parents,
Akbar Noman and Ann Duncan, both
worked for the World Bank, so Zafar's
childhood was largely in Washington, with
a spell in Islamabad. He spent his gap year
writing for the Friday Times, that
courageous voice in Lahore, and soon had
his own column, Zafar Noman's Week.
He studied at University College London
and the London School of Economics, and
then joined the Treasury, where his talents
were well recognised: Nick Macpherson,
Manchester City, says
Robinho
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:25:00 AM
Robinho insists he is happy at Manchester
City and that he left the club's training
camp in Tenerife to return to Brazil for
family reasons. The City forward departed
the Canary island yesterday amid
speculation that he had stormed out
following the club's failure to complete a
deal for the Milan star Kaka.
But Robinho has spoken out to quash the
speculation. "I had made Manchester City
aware that I needed to return to Brazil
because of a family matter. I will return to
the club and hope to sort this out as soon as
possible."
"I feel it is important to underline that I
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the permanent secretary, wrote of him
(after noting his vital missionary work in
Washington for the game of cricket): "He
was enthusiastic, entertaining, committed
and a joy to work with... a fine economist
who was hugely committed to the
Treasury." At the time he became ill, Zafar
had been given the choice of continuing
there or taking up a secondment in the
Foreign Office to work on the economics
of climate change.
The brain tumour was diagnosed only
two months before he died. The courage
and calm with which he faced his death
were inspirational. He made plans for the
future, even while ensuring that
arrangements were in place for his organs
to be available for others. He said his only
regret was leaving his sister, Natasha, to
face life without him; she and his parents
are setting up a trust in his memory to
benefit children in developing countries.
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did not return to Brazil because of the
Kaka deal. He is one of my good friends
and it would have been great to see him at
Manchester City – but it had nothing to do
with his decision to stay in Milan. I am
committed to helping Manchester City
become the force the owners assured me
they will become," he told BBC Sport.
Robinho, who has scored 11 goals in 16
league appearances to date, celebrates his
25th birthday this Saturday, after which he
is expected to return to the UK.
• Manchester City
• Kaka
• Premier League
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Obituary: Martin Luther King's genius was to waken the energy that
slumbered in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and send it out into
the streets of the South, marching for justice and social change
By Jonathan Steele (News: Main
section | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 5:12:25 AM
"He was the first Negro minister whom I
have ever heard who can reduce the Negro
problem to a spiritual matter and yet
inspire the people to seek a solution on this
side of the Jordan not in life after death."
So wrote the Negro author Louis Lomax,
catching the crucial spark that made Martin
Luther King, jun., stand out head and
shoulders from his fellow-ministers in the
South and step into the ranks of the world's
martyrs.
King was above all a man of the Negro
South. He knew for himself the deep and
hopeless fatigue, the age-long tiredness,
that hangs like a dark cloud over the whole
communities in the black belts of Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi. He knew the
energy and power that slumbered there, but
which only made itself felt in the feet of
the few who migrated to the North in the
hope of better things, or the voices that
turned to the blues and the hymns and the
spirituals. King's genius was to waken that
energy and send it out into the streets of
the South, marching for justice and social
change. Unforgettable
To anyone who was ever there when
King spoke, the experience was
unforgettable. A small man, barely five
foot seven, he dominated the pulpit or the
podium. In a slow but sonorous voice, the
biblical cadences rolled out, and the crowd
would sway with them, and punctuate
them with the answering calls that are the
special feature of Negro churches. "There
comes a time when the cup of endurance
runs over" ... "Amen" from the crowd, " ...
and men are no longer willing to be
plunged into an abyss of injustice where
they experience the bleakness of corroding
despair ... " " Yes, Lord." " ... For years
now we have heard the word 'wait' ... 'help
him, Jesus'" " ... but we are tired of
waiting, tired of being humiliated and
denied. We have waited for more than
three hundred and forty years for our
constitutional and God given rights." "Yes,
Lord."
And the church doors would open and
the crowd would surge out into the hot and
dusty Southern street, and down to the
court house in the city hall with its
petitions, its banners and its faith that
change at last was on the way.
What a contrast this was to the old-style
Southern minister. I remember going with
other student workers on the Mississippi
summer project in 1964 to a tiny, white-
washed, wooden church on the edge of a
cotton field on the first Sunday after the
1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the Act
that outlawed segregation in public
facilities throughout the country. We
thought there must be some reference to
this historic milestone In the sermon; but
the minister only touched on it once and
then merely to dismiss it as a mundane
irrelevancy: "And they can pass Civil
Rights Acts from now until kingdom
come, but our faith In the Lord is the
same." The small congregation called out
"Amen" as they had done all along, and
stumbled out again into the sunshine , and
off to their pitiful homes until next Sunday.
King came from a family of ministers
himself. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia,
on January 15, 1929. His parents were
comfortably off, but during his late teens
he took a job, against his father's wishes, in
a factory that hired both Negroes and
whites. "Here," he wrote later, "I saw
economic injustice at first hand, and
realised that the poor white was exploited
as much as the Negro. Through these early
experiences I grew up deeply conscious of
the varieties of injustices in our society."
Thus early In his life King saw, beyond
the issue of individual need, the larger
problem of group injustice. He was fond of
quoting the words, "A religion that ends
with the individual, ends." And he wrote
later in his famous letter from Birmingham
City gaol, in answer to eight clergymen -
bishops, pastors, and rabbis - who
disagreed with his tactics of direct action
in the street:
"History is the long and tragic story of the
fact that privileged groups seldom give up
their privileges voluntarily. Individuals
may see the moral light and voluntarily
give up their unjust posture, but groups are
more immoral than individuals."
When he was 15 King went on to
Storehouse, a Negro college in Atlanta.
There he read Henry Thoreau's "Essay on
Civil Disobedience," written in 1846 when
Thoreau was protesting against American
intervention in Mexico. It made a great
impression on him, as it had done on
Gandhi and Tolstoy.
Nonviolence as a philosophy and a
strategy for social change is often thought
of as a late import into American-life,
brought there by Martin Luther King. But
just as violence runs deep in the American
system, so too does the tradition of
nonviolence. There is a distinctive
American tradition which runs back to the
Quakers in the seventeenth century. From
them it goes to the abolitionists and peace
crusaders of the years before the Civil
War, the anarchists and pacifists at the
beginning of this century, the sit-down
strikers of the 1930s and the conscientious
objectors of two world wars. King knew
this, as he knew his Hegel, Kant, and
Gandhi.
King was ordained, did a doctoral degree
at Boston University, and then in 1955
became pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church, an upper-income Negro
church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was
here that almost by chance he was given
the opportunity to put his study of
nonviolence into action. For the civil rights
movement began by accident. Modest
campaign
A Negro seamstress, Mrs Rosa Parks,
was going home one day. She was tired,
and sat down in the bus, and when asked to
get up for a white man, as any Negro was
liable to be, she simply refused. She was
arrested. News of the arrest spread and the
Negro community was angry. King found
himself leading a modest campaign for
decent treatment on the buses. After more
white provocation and more Negro arrests,
including that of King himself, the
campaign grew into a mass boycott of the
buses, with the demand for total
desegregation.
The boycott lasted for several months,
received world-wide publicity, and ended
in victory. King founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, to rally
his fellow-Negro ministers throughout the
South. After that he led march after march,
in Albany, Georgia, in 1861; the March on
Washington, in 1963, and in Birmingham,
Alabama later that summer; Selma to
Montgomery in 1965; and the March
through Mississippi after James Meredith
was shot in 1966. He spent the next few
months in the suburbs of Chicago, his first
major project in the North. He opposed the
war in Vietnam, and the cuts in the poverty
programme which it inevitably brought.
And later this month he was to have led a
march of poor people on Washington.
Death was always near him, and he
survived several previous attempts on his
life. But he never let this weigh too long on
his mind. He had, as he said, to go on. His
last sentence to the crowd before he swung
out on the first Selma march, in defiance of
a court injunction and in the teeth of a
hostile police force, was this: "I would
rather die today on the highways of
Alabama than make a butchery of my own
conscience."
In cold print, that reads, histrionically,
perhaps. King knew, and has now made
others know, that it was a real and
conscious choice.
• Martin Luther King
• Race issues
• United States
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International* 27
Editorial: In
praise of ...
Pete Seeger
By Editorial (News: Main section |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Moments of historical symbolism do not
rate higher than Barack Obama's
inauguration in Washington today. Yet on
Sunday, with Obama listening,
Washington witnessed another small sign
of the mood of change and hope that will
swathe the US Capitol today. More than 50
years ago, the leftwing folk-singer Pete
Seeger was - a bit like many African-
Americans - a second-class citizen in his
own land. Summoned to give evidence
about his political leanings and contacts to
the House Un-American Activities
Committee, Seeger refused to testify. This
led to an indictment for contempt, a prison
sentence and a travel ban. In America's
cold war blacklisting and red-baiting years,
Seeger was unable to perform in many
halls, was excluded from college campuses
and banned from the airwaves. All the
while, though, he kept writing and singing,
mostly for good causes and sometimes,
naively, for less defensible ones. He sang
with Woody Guthrie at the start, then with
the Weavers, later in the 1960s folk revival
with Bob Dylan and, more recently, with
Bruce Springsteen. This week, the 89-year-
old Seeger stood on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial singing Guthrie's This
Land is Your Land with Springsteen at the
pre-inauguration concert. Seeger's
judgment on politics and music has not
always been right, but he is a man of his
times and he has been the troubadour of
the American left for more than half a
century. His return to the spotlight is
another sign that things are changing for
the better in America this week.
• Obama inauguration
• United States
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28 International*
Ian Black: Gaza has exposed the Arab leaders to fury
and contempt
By Ian Black (News: Main section |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
It was Monday, so it had to be Kuwait.
And there they were, 17 leaders and five
senior representatives of all 22 members of
the Arab League, gathered to discuss the
impact of the global economic crisis,
though the original agenda was hijacked by
the end of Israel's devastating three-week
onslaught against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday's summit of kings, presidents
and emirs did produce one piece of good
news for the battered Palestinians: a Saudi
cheque for $1bn that will certainly help
rebuild bombed mosques, schools and
homes. But it raises the wider question of
what Arabs can and should do to help the
cause they hold so dear - when they cannot
even agree an agenda and when or where
to meet.
On Sunday the heads of state of Egypt
and Jordan, both stalwarts of the so-called
moderate or western-backed camp, were
the only Arabs to attend the Sharm el-
Sheikh conference.
Last Friday there was an Arab majority
in the Qatari capital Doha - though still not
the required two-thirds quorum for a
formal Arab League summit. Bashar al-
Assad, Syria's president, was the star of
that show, along with the leaders of Hamas
and Islamic Jihad, his Palestinian guests in
Damascus. Non-Arab Iran's President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the other
special invitee. This is the core of jabhat al
-mumana'a - the Arab "refusal front".
Thursday saw leaders of the smaller Gulf
states summoned to the Saudi capital
Riyadh to upstage the next day's gathering
in Doha. It all brings to mind Gandhi's
smart response to a question about his
view of western civilisation: Arab unity
would be "a good idea" too.
Arab disarray was a fact of life before
Israel's Operation Cast Lead. But the crisis
has put it on cruel and very public display,
drawing the contempt and fury of what is
so condescendingly called the "street" from
Algeria to Yemen. The league may be a
bad joke, but its members still represent
320 million people. "In the fog of war,"
commented the Egyptian scholar Mamoun
Fandy in the Saudi-owned daily al-Sharq al
-Awsat, "everything was suddenly crystal
clear".
Anger with Israel and solidarity with the
Palestinians are still natural instincts across
the Middle East and North Africa. The
memory of the 1948 nakba (catastrophe)
has never faded; the humiliation of the
1967 defeat lives on. Yet sympathy for the
martyred children of Gaza does not equate
automatically with support for Hamas,
which is often attacked for recklessly
believing it can defeat Israel.
Very few imagine a return to the unified
Arab military efforts of the past. Most
Arabs, including most Palestinians, accept
Israel as a reality, though there are those -
with whom Ahmadinejad agrees - who
take the longer view. That sees Israel as a
modern Crusader state that may yet endure
for a century or more but is an artificial,
colonialist implant that is destined to
wither. This may be no more than wishful
thinking. But it ignores Israel's evident
strengths and the fact that the majority of
its now native-born, Hebrew-speaking
Jewish citizens have no other homeland to
go "back" to. Still, the perception that it is
a fundamentally illegitimate entity
combines with resentment at its
unassailable (nuclear-armed) regional
hegemony.
Not surprisingly, the most strident voice
of the "refusal front" has been that of
Seyyid Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic
leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah, who
blundered into war with Israel in 2006 and
served as a model for Hamas in Gaza -
though this time he kept his powder dry.
Islamists elsewhere mocked the impotence
and passivity of "treacherous" Arab
governments they scorn as US puppets or
Zionist stooges.
Egypt's Hosni Mubarak has been the
target of much fury. Now 80 and serving a
pharaonic fifth consecutive presidential
term, he has been attacked for refusing to
open the Gaza border. It has all been grist
to the mill of the Muslim Brotherhood,
Egypt's largest (but outlawed) opposition
movement and supporter of the like-
minded Hamas - whose election was so
uncomfortable for Cairo. But criticism of
Egyptian policy has been spun as an
affront to the nation, reviving the argument
that, in four wars with Israel, Egypt made
great sacrifices for the Palestinians. It was
Mubarak who inherited the original "sin"
of recognising Israel from his predecessor
Anwar Sadat, gunned down in 1981 by
homegrown jihadis who emerged from the
torture chambers to found al-Qaida a few
years later.
In the same boat is Jordan's King
Abdullah, the other Arab neighbour with a
peace treaty with Israel - though like his
father Hussein, Abdullah is ever mindful
of the Palestinians who make up the
majority of his subjects.
Facing them is the canniest, but perhaps
also the most pliable, of the "refusers",
Syria's Assad, a weaker version of his
famously iron-willed father Hafez. Hopes
of seeing him press Hamas or Hezbollah or
abandon his alliance with Iran ensure a
steady stream of western supplicants to his
Damascus palace. Barack Obama's envoy
may well be next. Another semi-partner is
Qatar, the super-wealthy Gulf maverick
which manages the extraordinary feat of
commercial ties with Israel, support for
militant groups, and hosting both al-
Jazeera TV - whose images of death and
destruction in Gaza have done so much to
horrify Arab viewers - and the largest US
military base in the Middle East.
So against this complex, deeply fissured
background, whither Israel and the Arab
world after Gaza? Israel makes much of
Saudi and other conservative Arab fears of
Iran's nuclear ambitions and its promotion,
in Iraq, Lebanon and beyond, of Sunni-
Shia divisions. But this ignores the crucial
importance - symbolic and real - to all
Arabs of finally resolving the Palestinian
issue.
Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former head of
Israeli military intelligence, wrote a classic
and deeply pessimistic book in the 1960s
suggesting Arab attitudes to Israel were
immutably hostile. But he revised his view
after the 1967 war to insist that a
withdrawal from the occupied territories
and the creation of a Palestinian state
would turn the tide. The brief blossoming
of Israeli ties with Arab states after the
1993 Oslo agreement with the PLO proved
his point.
Saudi King Abdullah told the Kuwait
summit that the 2002 Arab League
initiative, offering Israel the recognition of
all 22 Arab states in return for a return to
the 1967 borders and the creation of an
independent Palestinian state, remains on
the table, but warned that it will not remain
there indefinitely. The Arab "refusers"
wanted it withdrawn after the pounding of
Gaza. It is hard to see it surviving another
bloodletting like that.
ian.black@guardian.co.uk
• Gaza
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Middle East
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Film picks: Rob Roy, Lady
Vengeance and 4 Months,
3 Weeks and 2 Days
By Paul Howlett (From the
Guardian: G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Rob Roy
8.05am & 7.35pm, Sky Movies Action
Thriller
(Michael Caton-Jones, 1995)
Historical romance as meaty as a good
haggis, seasoned with a salty, intelligent
script. Based loosely on the Highland
legend, it pits Liam Neeson's noble crofter
against Tim Roth's effete Cunningham, a
rapier-sharp English gentleman-rapist:
glorious landscapes, and powerful
performances from Jessica Lange, John
Hurt and Brian Cox.
Lady Vengeance
11.05pm, Film4
(Park Chan-wook, 2005)
In this final part of Park's revenge trilogy
a beautiful young woman (Lee Yeong-ae)
is released after serving 13 years for the
kidnap and murder of a boy, and sets about
finding and killing the paedophile who
framed her. The convoluted flashback
structure and funereal-dark photography
add disquieting tones to a gruesome,
gripping tale.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
12midnight, Sky Movies Premiere
(Cristian Mungiu, 2008)
This riveting Romanian drama is set
during one day in 1987, at the end of the
Ceausescu era, with Otilia (Anamaria
Marinca) agreeing to help her fellow
student Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) seek an
abortion. It's illegal and dangerous, and as
Gabita puts herself in the hands of a cold
doctor (Vlad Ivanov), the tension grows
unbearably.
• TV pick of the week
• Television
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Polly Toynbee: We will all remember where we were
today - even in lazily cynical Britain
By Polly Toynbee (News: Main
section | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
There has never been a day like it for
Britain's postwar generations. As that
inauguration speech echoes out, the globe
itself seems to inhale a mighty, collective
intake of breath, frighteningly audacious in
its hope.
A BBC World Service poll shows a tidal
wave of optimism about what Obama will
do, spread out across a rainbow of nations.
Here is the world's wish list: first save
global finance from ruin; next get out of
Iraq; then fix the climate and bring peace
to the Middle East. Yes he can, is the
world's expectation.
How does the man's arrival feel here? A
day like no other, in a time of multiple
crisis like none other. In the years of
plenty, the British since the war have
known little political excitement. Novelists
and playwrights scrabble about for drama:
the miners' strike, the three-day week,
Aldermaston and Greenham vie with the
IMF's humiliating bailout or Margaret
Thatcher's greed-is-good big bang years,
alongside the day we crashed out of the
ERM, or Labour's glory night in May
1997. But these are meagre political
offerings through the years of fluctuating
affluence.
The IRA and now Islamist terror terrify -
but they feel external, not integral to
domestic politics, even if both are bloody
paybacks from our past. The cold war
came and went without the nuclear
apocalypse we grew up expecting any day.
When the Berlin wall came down, the great
rejoicing was primarily a drama belonging
to other people; it was not the end of
history either. We fought a surprising
number of small wars, hardly ruffling the
phlegmatic British body politic: the
Conservatives did not fall over the Suez
debacle, and Blair was re-elected despite
his Iraq disaster.
We have not lived in the interesting
times of the Chinese curse - but in banal
times where politicians needed to be no
better than they were. No great crisis
summoned a Winston Churchill or a
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That
uneventfulness has blunted our politics:
people barely vote or express a view, while
blase cynicism substitutes for thought,
passion or partisanship. Parties clustered in
the dead centre are dead on their feet, and
no one cares much, except to sneer at
politicians' expenses. The bitter truth of
deep inequality has been disguised by an
era of cheap imported goods and the
anyone-can-make-it celebrity myth. An
American model of each individual citizen
for himself, each individual citizen the
architect of his own life's trajectory, has
conquered old notions of solidarity, not
needed in good times.
Look across Europe and little comfort
can be drawn from any country's
leadership, rendering its collective voice
feebly uninspiring. In crisis, the EU risks
pulling apart, not together, with rising
nationalism and protectionism. Who do
you call? The Czech Republic's current EU
presidency? There has been little here to
inspire political hope.
But now Obama comes out of nowhere
just when good politics has never mattered
more. A complete collapse of the global
financial system is not unimaginable. In
uncharted waters, billions and trillions
gush from governments everywhere,
frantically shoring up banks that
squandered trust. One thing looks grimly
certain, however we get out of this: future
deep debts threaten public services, long-
lasting unemployment, real pay cuts and
changed prospects in need of a new
politics.
The climate crisis is seen to be
worsening with every new report, but
worldwide action is still negligible and
negligent: the Nasa scientist and leading
climate expert Jim Hansen last week
warned that only four years remain before
an irreversible threshold is crossed, leading
to raised sea levels that will drown many
major cities.
In Gaza, the horror of so many dead
Palestinian children is a monstrous
challenge to greet Obama. If ever the
world needed saving, it's now.
So here comes the man who says he can.
It's an American mystery that this great
pool of genius has usually thrown such
minnows into the White House. But the
monumental present danger has summoned
forth a man who promises the intellect,
character and power of persuasion to
match the hour.
On this day all alive will remember
where they were when they saw Obama
sworn in, when they heard him speak. I
shall be in a Commons meeting room -
where Dawn Butler, the black MP for
Brent, will be launching "Bernie's list" to
promote black candidates - with crowds of
mainly ethnic-minority young Brent people
gathered to watch Obama's speech. Since
the rise of Obama, the MP says, throngs
have come forward to join her campaign.
I shall also see Chuka Umunna, the
exceptional Labour candidate for
Streatham, south London, address students
in Brixton - students whom he finds are as
eager as never before to think and do
politics. "Obama has changed everything.
You can't overestimate the effect," he says.
After time on the Obama campaign,
Umunna says that the man's blackness is
only one wonder: "He has changed the
possibilities of politics itself." Winning
while promising to tax the rich, cut tax for
the poor, tackle the climate and reverse
Bush's foreign policy, he has made the
impossible possible.
Let whoever will be cynical do so today:
they will have their I-told-you-so
moments. Political passion is
unfashionable, risky, naive and destined
for disappointment. Enthusiasm is rare in
British politics, but today is a reminder that
it is always worth celebrating the better
over the worse. The hope is not just for
what the man will do, but that his brand of
politics rubs off on politicians everywhere.
It wasn't until Obama was elected on a tax-
the-rich ticket that Brown and Darling
dared to follow suit, 11 years late. This is a
day for politicians to take heart and dare to
challenge recycled focus group prejudice.
Copying Obama needs to become a global
habit.
In a revealing unpublished interview
with the Obamas more than a decade ago,
Michelle feared that he was "too much the
good guy for the kind of brutality and
scepticism" of politics. Ruthless
calculation is indeed a necessary part of
the art, but he seems to have that steely
determination too. There is a limit to how
moral any effective politician can be: ask
that nice Jimmy Carter. Yet this is the day
to honour the practice of politics as a high
calling, where the power to inspire can
swell the hearts of the world. Here at
home, a respite from Britain's lazy political
cynicism is in order.
polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
• Obama inauguration
• Barack Obama
• United States
• Credit crunch
• Global recession
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International* 29
Weatherwatch:
20 January
2009
By Victoria Kettley (News: Main
section | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
While many areas experienced heavy rain
and flooding last week, others endured
heat waves. Heavy rain also caused
flooding and landslides in the Philippines:
the death toll was reported to have risen to
28 by Sunday, with thousands still
displaced.
In the US, strong Santa Ana winds swept
through southern California, with
temperatures reaching 31C in LA on
Monday, well above average. However, it
was a different picture across the upper
midwest as a winter storm brought heavy
snow and strong winds, creating blizzard
conditions in much of Iowa. By early
Wednesday, 3ins to 7ins of snow had
fallen in eastern areas. In Maine at Big
Black river on Friday morning a
temperature of -44C was recorded, the first
state record since 1999.
The United Arab Emirates had varied
rain last week, ranging from a sprinkling in
Abu Dhabi and Dubai to thunderstorms in
the northern Emirates. On Wednesday,
parts of Dubai were hit by heavy rain and
hailstorms, with accumulations of
hailstones giving some areas a wintry
appearance.
Meanwhile, Australia was enduring a
heat wave. In Adelaide on Tuesday,
temperatures touched 41C, while in
Victoria, a total fire ban was declared as
firefighters struggled to keep blazes under
control. In comparison, northern
Queensland was still experiencing flooding
at the start of last week, which was
associated with ex-tropical cyclone
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30 International* World Sport* Entertainment*
Michele Hanson: Is it all that surprising that Tesco
employees posted offensive remarks about customers
on Facebook?
By Michele Hanson (From the
Guardian: G2 | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
Terrible goings-on both in the shop and
behind the scenes in Tesco. Things are
getting rather personal. One customer,
fresh from a ride on her horse, was asked
to leave a store in Essex for smelling, and
staff from branches around the country
have been posting offensive remarks about
customers in a Facebook discussion forum.
But who can blame them? As anyone will
know who has worked with the public, day
in, day out - trying to make their lives
easier, cleaning their hotel rooms, making
their beds, doing their laundry, giving them
their dinners, cleaning their lavatories,
looking after their ancient relatives - it can
be a grisly experience. Far too many
people have no manners and seem to feel
that service personnel may be bossed
around and treated as subhuman slaves.
I noticed it myself while waitressing
decades ago. I started off cheerily, smiling
at customers and being polite, but noticed
that all other staff were surly, sneering and
rude. One inoffensive customer
approached the counter. "I am alone," he
said, in halting English, probably wanting
a table for one. "We all have our
problems," snapped a waitress. I wondered
why. Soon I knew. Over the years the
customers had worn her down. No
"pleases" or "thank-yous", orders and
commands rather than requests, outrageous
complaints and demands, fusspots, drunks,
measly tips, or no tips at all, wasted food,
staggering greed. She had seen it all, and
grown bitter. Soon my little smile faded
House: Painless
By Hemal Jhaveri (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 10:09:00 PM
Filed under: OpEd, House, Episode
Reviews, Reality-Free
(S05E12) This episode was a perfect
teaser to what House fans can look forward
to for the rest of the season. It was well
too.
But there are better and braver responses
than Facebook. There I was, serving
customers with my friend Josephine, a
history teacher, when along came the nth
offensive fellow of the day. "What's that?"
he said, glaring and pointing at a salad on
the counter. Josephine had had enough.
She responded strictly, using her
classroom skills.
"There are three ingredients in the bowl,"
she said. "Now see if you can tell me what
they are." Customer obeyed like an infant.
"Celery?" "Well done," said Josephine.
"You've got one right. Now the next?"
"Apple?" "Correct. One more?" "Dates?"
"Excellent. Three out of three. Now what
are they all mixed up in?" "Mayonnaise?"
"Well done." "How much?" "You've done
very well so far. The price is on the board.
Have a look and see if you can tell me."
Customer did as he was told. He almost
curtsied before the dominatrix. I think he
even said thank you. The whole episode
was much more rewarding than secret
poison on Facebook. But we weren't so
worried about getting the sack in those
days, and I suppose methods, technologies
and circumstances change. Unfortunately,
customers don't.
• A bumper crop of bad science plopped
out of our universities and hospitals this
week. Three lots at once, and all about
relationships. The first gang, from UCL,
LSE and Warwick Medical School, have
"developed a mathematical model of the
mating game to help explain why courtship
is often protracted". Or as every girl's
mother has probably told her, "Don't do it
on the first date. If he can't wait, he's not
done, though not excellent, and set up a
couple of key narrative threads that are
sure to be slowly unraveled as we move
forward.
This week's patient's comes to House
courtesy of Cameron, who insists that the
team help a man suffering from severe
chronic pain that has no known cause. It's
worth it." Next comes Newcastle
University psychologist Dr Thomas Pollet,
declaring that "women's orgasm frequency
increases with the income of their partner".
And, doziest of all, Dr Malcolm Brynin,
"leading" sociologist at the University of
Essex, advises us to avoid an intense and
passionate first relationship, or at least
forget about it, or it will make future
partners seem "boring and a
disappointment".
I would like to tear my hair out. I ought
to be used to professors churning out this
sort of old-hat, inapplicable drek, time
after time, but for me the shock never
fades. How do they get away with it? Has
Professor Robert Seymour, of UCL, been
shut away in the groves of academe since
birth, and does he really think that we don't
know that "longer courtship is a way for
the female to acquire information about the
male". Has he ever met a female person?
Or a male from the outside world? Did he
not know already that we know that you
can't get to know someone all that well in
the course of a quick bang?
Out here in the real world, when one is in
the thick of it, things are even more
complicated than Seymour suspects.
Fielding had a fearfully difficult time in his
youth trying to work out what girls wanted.
He knew they didn't want too much too
soon (well, not with him anyway), but
couldn't quite work out why. "She knew
what I wanted, and she knew that I knew
that she mustn't want to do it too soon, and
that even if she did, she shouldn't, because
I might think she was a bit of a loose
woman, which I would have done,
although I was secretly hoping she was. It
gotten so bad that the patient, even with a
beautiful wife and kid, tries to kill himself.
was a bit of a bind, really. I'm glad it's all
over."
How do they do this research? "Is the
professor in the bed?" asks Fielding. No,
Pollet from Newcastle glued himself to the
Chinese Health and Family Life Survey,
counted up orgasms, studied the
influencing factors and found that size of
wallet did matter. And Brynin spoke from
another planet, failing to explain how we
might avoid first passions and ideally
"wake up already in [our] second
relationship". Are they mad? Or are they
trying to drive us mad? Because some of
their conclusions are rather dispiriting.
"From a female's point of view, males are
not all equal," says Dr Peter Sozou wisely,
from his cocoon at Warwick. "She cannot
eliminate this risk [of ending up with a bad
male] completely unless she decides never
to mate." And we used to think media
studies was a waste of time.
• This week Michele read: From the
Holocaust to the Highlands by Walter
Kress: "One long, unedited, Pooterish chat,
with an upbeat, adventurous, Jewish,
Scottish mechanic, who escaped Vienna as
a child and was treated with great kindness
in Aberdeen." She watched The Secret Life
of Elephants on BBC1: "Upsetting. What
happened to the baby with the bad leg? I
daren't find out."
• Tesco
• Facebook
• Food & drink
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Multiple times. While his kid is watching.
Yeah, it's a bit brutal.
Continue reading House: Painless
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Rugby league: Huddersfield
unsuccessful in their pursuit
of half-back Nathan Fien
By Andy Wilson (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 5:22:11 AM
Huddersfield have failed in their attempt
to sign the New Zealand half-back Nathan
Fien as a replacement for Todd Carney, the
Australian who was unable to secure a visa
because of his criminal record.
The Giants offered a three-year contract
to Fien, the player at the centre of the
Grannygate controversy in the 2006 Tri-
Nations series when it emerged midway
through the tournament that he was
ineligible for the Kiwis because his great-
grandmother, rather than grandmother, was
from New Zealand.
They were hoping that Fien's current
employers, the New Zealand Warriors,
would release him from the remaining year
of his contract with them having tempted
Stacey Jones out of retirement for the
forthcoming NRL season. However, the
Warriors chief executive, Wayne Scurrah,
has confirmed that Fien will not be
released. "We've had a meeting with
Nathan and it was made clear to him by
Ivan Cleary [the Warriors' coach] that he
will be an integral player in the Warriors'
plans this year," said Scurrah.
Meanwhile Hull KR have moved quickly
to appoint a new assistant coach following
the resignation of the former Great Britain
forward Lee Crooks one year into a three-
year contract. Chris Chester, who left
Rovers to join the Castleford coaching
staff after being forced to retire last season
because of persistent neck problems, has
now returned to Craven Park. Crooks is
expected to cross the city to Hull FC,
despite their denials this week that they
have played any part in his resignation
from Rovers.
• Huddersfield Giants
• Hull KR
• Super League
• Rugby league
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Nils Pratley: Bank insurance scheme
smells like nationalisation by stealth to
markets
By Nils Pratley (News: Main section
| guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 4:01:00 PM
That was not meant to happen. Royal
Bank of Scotland's shares were not meant
to fall by two-thirds. Lloyds, now
incorporating HBOS, was not supposed to
lose almost a third of its value. Barclays,
shouting about how well it is doing, was
not meant to decline 10%.
The financial markets were meant to see
in yesterday's government proposals a path
towards the resumption of normal lending
to a recession-hit economy. What we saw
instead was open speculation on the
chances of further nationalisation.
Three factors explain what happened.
First, the presentation was awful. Gordon
Brown used the occasion to decry
"irresponsible" risk-taking at RBS. Forget
the fact that RBS's former chief executive,
Sir Fred Goodwin, the man who oversaw
that lending, was knighted under Labour.
Brown, in the opinion of many in the
City, preferred to look backwards because
he didn't like what he saw ahead. Nor did it
help that Stephen Hester, Goodwin's
replacement, sounded less bullish than he
did a few weeks ago. RBS's new leader
spoke about big losses and big problems
and the lack of a silver bullet.
Second, there was an enormous hole in
the government's proposals. The most
significant measure in yesterday's package
was the scheme whereby banks will be
able to buy insurance from the government
to indemnify themselves against losses.
What price will the banks pay for this
insurance? Does the need to protect the
taxpayer imply that the banks will be
paying through the nose? How much
insurance will be available?
It would be wrong to be too critical of
the lack of detail. The UK government,
like all governments, is in new territory.
The only certain way to implement this
type of insurance scheme is to plough
through the banks' highly complex loan
books and make a cold assessment of risk.
The Treasury is promising a further
statement by the end of February.
Stockmarkets, however, do not wait that
long to react and yesterday's instant
judgment was that the insurance scheme
could become a form of nationalisation by
stealth. By the time the banks have bought
insurance against catastrophe, how much
value will be left for shareholders? Will
the remaining value in RBS simply be
sucked out in the form of insurance
premiums? Will the bank ever be able to
pay a dividend on its ordinary shares
again? To judge by yesterday's share price
fall, RBS's remaining non-government
shareholders (now down to 30% of the
total) are ready to throw in the towel. They
see a bank that will be paying for past
mistakes for a decade and they see the
taxpayer's ownership increasing.
The third factor behind the market's
reaction was simply the size of RBS's
losses last year. At a possible £8bn - plus
write-downs that could reach £20bn - the
figure was beyond levels that would have
been considered plausible even a few
weeks ago. The crazy, top-of-the-market
acquisition of ABN Amro in 2007 takes
part of the blame, but RBS was also
confirming a pattern seen with the US
banks last week - the last few months of
last year were dreadful in the banking
industry.
Barclays, in stating that it will achieve
profits of at least £5.2bn for 2008, is
claiming to have escaped the latest
carnage. But the overwhelming impression
is left that the banks, as a group, still
haven't come clean about the risks on their
books. While that remains the case, and
while recession creates more losses,
private-sector investors are likely to pass
on any offers to pump in more capital.
Another reason, then, why further
nationalisation could creep in under the
radar.
For all that, there was much to cheer in
the proposals themselves. They were
mostly sensible and carefully crafted, nor
can they be dismissed as slight - the
£250bn credit guarantee scheme is being
extended and £50bn will be directed at the
corporate lending market. These are
serious sums; maybe not enough to replace
the so-called £700bn funding gap that
appeared when the securitisation market
collapsed, but they should be large enough
to be felt on the ground.
The Financial Services Authority also
played its part, making clear that banks had
no need to hoard capital to protect their
capital ratios. Bank chief executives have
created much fuss about this supposed
difficulty and clarity is welcome.
Restarting lending at Northern Rock also
makes sense: winding down the bank's
lending capacity ran counter to every other
government policy.
The U-turn, though, also betrays the new
realisation in government that imploring
the banks to lend more enthusiastically is
not a policy that will get far on its own. As
Hester said, there is no silver bullet. So
what we got yesterday was a package of
measures that is designed to work whether
or not the government's direct holding in
the banks increases or not. The ambition of
limiting the state's involvement is well
intentioned - the further we go in, the
harder it will be to get out. But to plan for
further nationalisation is also to recognise
which way the breezes are blowing.
nils.pratley@guardian.co.uk
• Banking
• Royal Bank of Scotland
• Economic policy
• Banks and building societies
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International* World Sport*
Cycling: Armstrong finds
the going tough on his
return to cycling
By Richard Moore (The latest
football news and comment plus
rugby, tennis, cricket and horse
racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:10:00 AM
Lance Armstrong had promised to attack
in his comeback race, the Tour Down
Under, but he showed little inclination to
do so during today's first stage. In stifling
heat and on roads not quite challenging
enough to split the race, that wasn't
surprising. But Johan Bruyneel, his long-
time director, voiced doubts at the finish as
to whether the seven-time Tour de France
winner will be capable, at 37, of
recapturing his best form.
The 140km stage, from the Adelaide
suburbs into the undulating roads of the
Barossa Valley, was "tough" admitted
Armstrong. "That was the easy day?" he
asked at the finish. "The course, combined
with a temperature in the forties, meant it
was tough. On the steep little hills I felt
pretty strong, but now I'll have to see how
the recovery is."
Armstrong finished 120th, close to the
back of the 133-man peloton, as the
German sprinter Andre Greipel claimed
the stage and the race leader's jersey, as he
did last year, on his way to winning four
stages and the overall victory. "In the
bunch sprints I get out of the way and let
those big guys do their thing," said
Armstrong, who was introduced to the
Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, at
the finish.
Sean Yates, the British assistant director
of Armstrong's Astana team, said that
Armstrong had "taken up where he left off
– every time we looked up we saw Lance
near the front, surrounded by five team-
mates". But Bruyneel's assessment was not
quite so upbeat. "He's the same rider, the
same person," the Team Astana director
said, "but after today I think he'll realise
that he needs races.
31
"You can train as hard as you like, but
you can't simulate race conditions. There's
a fast rhythm here. I think his base
condition is very good; but he's three years
older and we'll have to see if the motor is
the same as before. In terms of his
endurance, I have no doubts. Whether he
has the power and speed, we'll find out."
Armstrong maintained that the heat would
be his enemy. "That dry heat affects
performance a lot," he said. "There's no
way you can perform at a high level. I
went through 15 to 20 bottles."
The bunch sprint that decided the stage
was notable not only for Greipel's victory,
after a well-drilled lead-out from his
Columbia team, but for a clash between
Robbie McEwen's arm and a spectator's
camera. The Australian rider, who won
Sunday's Cancer Council Classic in
Adelaide, was just unleashing his sprint,
and leading Greipel, when he collided with
the camera. Remarkably he managed to
stay upright and finish fourth, his arm
already swelling as he crossed the line.
"Some genius in the crowd decided they
wanted to get an action photo and reached
right out over the barriers with a really big
camera," an angry McEwen said. "I saw it
but couldn't do anything. It hit me straight
on the forearm. It's broken the skin and I
have a wound the shape of the camera
lens."
McEwen, who was optimistic of
continuing in the race, offered a
memorable, if idiosyncratic, description of
the moment of impact: "When you hit
something at 70 kph it's like a golf swing
at sixty per cent power hitting you in the
arm like a baseball bat."
• Lance Armstrong
• Cycling
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32 World Sport* Entertainment*
Basketball: NBA draft period crucial for NBA
managers
By Mark Woods (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:27:25 AM
"The hour for change has come. To forget
the mistakes of the past and move forward.
To make us great again. Can we do it?"
"Yes, we can!" The mantra of incoming
US president and basketball junkie Barack
Obama. But also of those other renowned
and highly scrutinised visionaries: the
NBA's general managers.
Yup, it's almost trade deadline time
again. Thirty days and counting. And while
the wheels are being put in motion for a
radical overhaul in Washington DC,
around the league stock has been taken and
remedial measures drawn up.
One deal can make a difference. Such as
12 months ago when Pau Gasol's move
from Memphis to the Lakers propelled
them to the finals. Or Detroit's 2004 grab
for Rasheed Wallace, which was the
missing piece in their title puzzle. Or when
Clyde Drexler's switch from Portland to
Houston in 1995 reignited the Rockets to
defend their championship. The hard work
may be done in the summer but January is
the month for cunning and craft.
It might also be the moment when this
season's NBA champions are decided.
Because if you look around the top of the
standings, there are probably six teams
with a legitimate shot at ending up with an
A-List banner come the summer. And
that's disregarding Orlando – currently
with the best record in the Association
after their 9–1 winning streak.
All of them are capable of beating the
Football: I am happy at Manchester City, says Robinho
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:25:00 AM
Robinho insists he is happy at Manchester
City and that he left the club's training
camp in Tenerife to return to Brazil for
other. The Lakers beat Boston on
Christmas Day. They also crushed
Cleveland on Monday night. The Cavaliers
picked the Celtics apart a fortnight ago.
Yet the reigning champions have since
gone on a five-game run to re-assert their
status as the ones to beat.
The Hornets have split their series with
Denver 1–1 so far but lost twice to Los
Angeles. And while the Spurs squeezed
past the Lakers last Wednesday, it is
Hollywood's favourites who have the best
record against the rest of the West.
In short, it's all to play for. And don't
think for a second that general managers
aren't already assessing potential play-off
match-ups, then looking at the rosters and
asking not what they can do for their
players but what their players might do for
them? So with one eye on June, who looks
ready to roll the dice?
Boston: There have been reports that the
Celtics offered little used back-ups Bill
Walker and Gabe Prutitt to Orlando in
exchange for JJ Redick. While the Magic
have played that down, general manager
Danny Ainge may want someone to spread
the floor more during the repeat charge.
Odds on making a trade: Medium.
Cleveland: The Cavalierss have two
pieces who are perfect trade fodder.
Neither Ben Wallace nor Wally Szczerbiak
is contributing enough to justify his loaded
contract. Wall-e's expiring deal would be
an attractive proposition to one of the
many teams looking to reduce their salary
budget come the off-season although Big
Ben's $14m per annum would be harder to
shift. What they could usefully acquire is
another shooter with Delonte West out for
the next six weeks. That could bring
family reasons. The City forward departed
the Canary island yesterday amid
speculation that he had stormed out
following the club's failure to complete a
deal for the Milan star Kaka.
But Robinho has spoken out to quash the
speculation. "I had made Manchester City
aware that I needed to return to Brazil
Milwaukee's Michael Redd into the centre
of general manager Danny Ferry's radar.
Odds on making a trade: high.
Denver: The Nuggets addressed their
need for some extra size with last week's
trade, which brought French big Johan
Petro to Mile High City in exchange for
Chucky Atkins and some draft picks. That
was their most urgent requirement.
Another shooting guard would be a nice
plus. Odds on making a trade: slim.
LA Lakers: Reports in Toronto suggest
that the Lakers are looking to swap Lamar
Odom's soon-to-expire contract for the
Raptors' Jermaine O'Neal. It's a move that
makes a lot of sense. LA haven't forgotten
Odom's post-season foibles while O'Neal
hasn't really worked out for Canada's
finest. There's a sense that the Lakers aren't
quite good enough to go one better than
last year and it's the frontcourt that needs a
minor upgrade. Odds on making a trade:
high.
San Antonio: The Spurs aren't one to
panic buy in the new year sales. They
signed Austin Croshere this week as a free
agent, which is hardly a difference maker.
But with Fabricio Oberto in the doghouse,
what they really need for June time is
another centre. With no major contracts
heading to a close, and the dependence on
their core, they may have to run with what
they have. Odds on making a trade: slim.
New Orleans: The Hornets might need
one more big to solidify a challenge,
particularly with injuries to Tyson
Chandler and David West. Antonio
Daniels, who has only one year left on his
deal, is their best bait. Odds on making a
trade: slim. Offensive Rebounds
• Great Britain forward Pops Mensah
because of a family matter. I will return to
the club and hope to sort this out as soon as
possible."
"I feel it is important to underline that I
did not return to Brazil because of the
Kaka deal. He is one of my good friends
and it would have been great to see him at
Manchester City – but it had nothing to do
Bonsu could return to the NBA, as a free
agent, by the spring. The Londoner has
been receiving treatment on a shoulder
injury since parting with Spanish side
Joventut Badalona last month. Now
mended, he has had five workouts with
NBA teams and is set to join the D-League
side, Utah Flash, a move that would give
their affiliates, the Utah Jazz and Boston
Celtics, first call on his services.
• It was widely reported last week that
GB centre Andy Betts was joining Chinese
outfit Guangdong Southern Tigers. Not so.
In fact, the offer for the currently club-less
Betts was an intricate hoax. The papers
that arrived for his signature even sported a
Chinese postmark but were completely
fake. Consequently, the former Hornets
Draft pick is continuing to train with
Malaga's junior side while awaiting an
acceptable offer. He is understood to be
taking the joke well, however.
• It was probably just as well Sunday's
BBL Cup final wasn't covered by either
television or national radio, such was the
nature of Everton Tigers' supremacy. As
this chunk of cyberspace has reported
previously, the British League has a
standing offer to have its games broadcast
on Sky Sports, if a sponsor can be found to
cover the production costs. "We've had
some interesting talks with a third party in
recent weeks," a league official said. "It
might get us back on TV sooner rather than
later."
• US sport
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with his decision to stay in Milan. I am
committed to helping Manchester City
become the force the owners assured me
they will become," he told BBC Sport.
Robinho, who has scored 11 goals in 16
league appearances to date, celebrates his
25th birthday this Saturday, after which he
is expected to return to the UK.
Daily Digital Newspaper
The Big Bang
Theory: The
Friendship Algorithm
By Kona Gallagher (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:15:00 AM
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-
Free, The Big Bang Theory
(S02E13) This episode was much better
than last week's, which made me really
uncomfortable. It was a Sheldon-centric
episode, and while those can be hit or miss,
I thought this one was pretty good. I
enjoyed the subject of the episode, Sheldon
trying to make a friend, because I'm sure
that everyone who watches BBT has at
some point wondered how this guy has any
friends at all.
Sheldon has no idea how he has any
friends either, so he has to invest a lot of
time in research in order to come up with
some sort of answer: the friendship
algorithm. He's got some pretty strong
science behind it; I may just have to
reference it the next time I'm in the market
for a friend.
Continue reading The Big Bang Theory:
The Friendship Algorithm
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• Manchester City
• Kaka
• Premier League
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Daily Digital Newspaper
Basketball: NBA draft period crucial for NBA
managers
By Mark Woods (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:27:25 AM
"The hour for change has come. To forget
the mistakes of the past and move forward.
To make us great again. Can we do it?"
"Yes, we can!" The mantra of incoming
US president and basketball junkie Barack
Obama. But also of those other renowned
and highly scrutinised visionaries: the
NBA's general managers.
Yup, it's almost trade deadline time
again. Thirty days and counting. And while
the wheels are being put in motion for a
radical overhaul in Washington DC,
around the league stock has been taken and
remedial measures drawn up.
One deal can make a difference. Such as
12 months ago when Pau Gasol's move
from Memphis to the Lakers propelled
them to the finals. Or Detroit's 2004 grab
for Rasheed Wallace, which was the
missing piece in their title puzzle. Or when
Clyde Drexler's switch from Portland to
Houston in 1995 reignited the Rockets to
defend their championship. The hard work
may be done in the summer but January is
the month for cunning and craft.
It might also be the moment when this
season's NBA champions are decided.
Because if you look around the top of the
standings, there are probably six teams
with a legitimate shot at ending up with an
A-List banner come the summer. And
that's disregarding Orlando – currently
with the best record in the Association
after their 9–1 winning streak.
All of them are capable of beating the
The 24-minute news cycle
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 8:28:48 AM
I woke up early this morning, about
4AM.
Went downstairs, turned on the radio to
KQED-FM. They're interviewing Newt
Gingrich, talking about the 24-hour news
cycle, a major innovation they're adjusting
other. The Lakers beat Boston on
Christmas Day. They also crushed
Cleveland on Monday night. The Cavaliers
picked the Celtics apart a fortnight ago.
Yet the reigning champions have since
gone on a five-game run to re-assert their
status as the ones to beat.
The Hornets have split their series with
Denver 1–1 so far but lost twice to Los
Angeles. And while the Spurs squeezed
past the Lakers last Wednesday, it is
Hollywood's favourites who have the best
record against the rest of the West.
In short, it's all to play for. And don't
think for a second that general managers
aren't already assessing potential play-off
match-ups, then looking at the rosters and
asking not what they can do for their
players but what their players might do for
them? So with one eye on June, who looks
ready to roll the dice?
Boston: There have been reports that the
Celtics offered little used back-ups Bill
Walker and Gabe Prutitt to Orlando in
exchange for JJ Redick. While the Magic
have played that down, general manager
Danny Ainge may want someone to spread
the floor more during the repeat charge.
Odds on making a trade: Medium.
Cleveland: The Cavalierss have two
pieces who are perfect trade fodder.
Neither Ben Wallace nor Wally Szczerbiak
is contributing enough to justify his loaded
contract. Wall-e's expiring deal would be
an attractive proposition to one of the
many teams looking to reduce their salary
budget come the off-season although Big
Ben's $14m per annum would be harder to
shift. What they could usefully acquire is
another shooter with Delonte West out for
the next six weeks. That could bring
to in DC.
I went upstairs with my coffee, did a few
hours work, came downstairs for a break,
turned on the radio, exactly the same bit is
playing. Gingrich talking about the 24-
hour news cycle.
Then I thought back to a moment, on
Wednesday, when Twitter was carrying the
instant news of Steve Jobs's leave of
Milwaukee's Michael Redd into the centre
of general manager Danny Ferry's radar.
Odds on making a trade: high.
Denver: The Nuggets addressed their
need for some extra size with last week's
trade, which brought French big Johan
Petro to Mile High City in exchange for
Chucky Atkins and some draft picks. That
was their most urgent requirement.
Another shooting guard would be a nice
plus. Odds on making a trade: slim.
LA Lakers: Reports in Toronto suggest
that the Lakers are looking to swap Lamar
Odom's soon-to-expire contract for the
Raptors' Jermaine O'Neal. It's a move that
makes a lot of sense. LA haven't forgotten
Odom's post-season foibles while O'Neal
hasn't really worked out for Canada's
finest. There's a sense that the Lakers aren't
quite good enough to go one better than
last year and it's the frontcourt that needs a
minor upgrade. Odds on making a trade:
high.
San Antonio: The Spurs aren't one to
panic buy in the new year sales. They
signed Austin Croshere this week as a free
agent, which is hardly a difference maker.
But with Fabricio Oberto in the doghouse,
what they really need for June time is
another centre. With no major contracts
heading to a close, and the dependence on
their core, they may have to run with what
they have. Odds on making a trade: slim.
New Orleans: The Hornets might need
one more big to solidify a challenge,
particularly with injuries to Tyson
Chandler and David West. Antonio
Daniels, who has only one year left on his
deal, is their best bait. Odds on making a
trade: slim. Offensive Rebounds
• Great Britain forward Pops Mensah
absence. At the exact same moment, came
news of the death of Ricardo Montalban. I
should have taken a screen shot, because
there were constant tweets from people
saying Did you hear about Steve Jobs. Did
you hear about Ricardo Montalban.
I thought at the time, forget about the 24-
hour news cycle, we have a new concept --
a news cycle measured in minutes. What
World Sport* Special* Special Feature 33
Bonsu could return to the NBA, as a free
agent, by the spring. The Londoner has
been receiving treatment on a shoulder
injury since parting with Spanish side
Joventut Badalona last month. Now
mended, he has had five workouts with
NBA teams and is set to join the D-League
side, Utah Flash, a move that would give
Inaugural
their affiliates, the Utah Jazz and Boston
Celtics, first call on his services.
preparations
• It was widely reported last week that (The Big Picture)
GB centre Andy Betts was joining Chinese
Submitted at 1/19/2009 7:39:27 AM
outfit Guangdong Southern Tigers. Not so.
In fact, the offer for the currently club-less Preparations for the inauguration
Betts was an intricate hoax. The papers ceremony tomorrow for the 44th President
that arrived for his signature even sported a of the United States of America have been
Chinese postmark but were completely taking place for months now. Security,
fake. Consequently, the former Hornets transportation, logistics, sanitation,
Draft pick is continuing to train with everything you can think of to accomodate
Malaga's junior side while awaiting an the predicted millions of attendees
acceptable offer. He is understood to be descending on Washington, D.C. President
taking the joke well, however. -elect Obama arrived in Washington by
• It was probably just as well Sunday's train, starting in Pennsylvania, passing
BBL Cup final wasn't covered by either through Wilmington and Baltimore. Here
television or national radio, such was the are some photographs of the various events
nature of Everton Tigers' supremacy. As and preparations taking place heading into
this chunk of cyberspace has reported tomorrow. ( 31 photos total)
previously, the British League has a Chris Bullock, of Landover, Md., checks
standing offer to have its games broadcast to see that the letters on a three
on Sky Sports, if a sponsor can be found to dimensional inauguration seal are fitting
cover the production costs. "We've had tightly, in preparation of Barack Obama's
some interesting talks with a third party in inauguration, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009, at
recent weeks," a league official said. "It Hargrove Inc. in Lanham, Md. (AP
might get us back on TV sooner rather than Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
later."
• US sport
guardian.co.uk© Guardian News &
Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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made me think of it was in the midst of all human ability to notice things.
this I saw a lonely tweet from a company I We may be lining up to eat at soup
know announcing a contest for developers. kitchens in 2009, but we'll have the fastest
I thought "too bad, no one's going to notice news cycle ever to keep us informed.
that." Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.
This is what we're all working on -- have
been for a couple of years -- how to make
sense of news that flashes by at such a
rapid rate that it pushes the envelope on
34 World Sport* Entertainment*
Barney Ronay: Brentford's fortunes have been revived
at long last
By Barney Ronay (The latest
football news and comment plus
rugby, tennis, cricket and horse
racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:19:32 AM
It's amazing what a little success can do.
Currently Brentford are sitting second in
League Two, a club on course for its first
promotion in 10 years. You can tell too.
There's a buzz around the club's Osterley
training ground and a sense of bustle
among the echoey changing rooms, the
random items of weight-training
-apparatus, the boots and bandages and
cups of tea. This is a club ever so
-cautiously going places.
Last season I got to spend a morning
here as Brentford's acting assistant coach:
mucking in on the training pitch, stacking
the cones, standing around with my hands
on my hips, tripping over my great
flapping XXXL Brentford tracksuit
bottoms. That kind of thing. So it's with a
certain sense of pride that I can report the
lads have obviously taken a lot from that
experience, and are currently six points
behind leaders Wycombe with a game in
hand. Really, I'm proud of them all.
"We're probably a little bit ahead of
where we felt we would be," Bees manager
Andy Scott says, scanning his early-
morning emails in his office before
training. Terry Bullivant, my successor as
permanent assistant coach, isn't in today
and it's with a vague sense of regret at
what might have been that I take his empty
seat. "We've changed a lot of personnel,
but the players that have come in have
gone from strength to strength."
This time last season Scott was picking
Where have you been watching today's inaugural coverage?
By Richard Keller (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 12:01:00 PM
Filed under: News, Programming, Reality
-Free
By the time you read this the most
important part of today's inaugural shebang
will be over and the pomp and
circumstance will be in full swing. Being
up the reins following a disastrous
interlude under Terry Butcher and looked
like a tyro manager with a thousand
pressing tasks to attend to: hastily Blu-
Tacking a playing and coaching staff into
place with one hand, clearing Butcher's
half-eaten sandwiches off his desk with the
other and, above all, desperately hunting
for time to stabilise a club that had
nosedived through relegation, heavy debt
and four managers within the previous
year.
A period of rapid turnover was in train,
with 22 players passing through the
Brentford first-team squad in a year via a
tornado of loans, cheap purchases and off-
loadings. The most impressive Scott
signing so far has been Charlie McDonald,
a 27-year-old striker sneaked on a free
from Southend, who has 11 goals so far
this season. But this is basically
management on the hoof, an ad hoc, day-to
-day affair at the very sharpest end of the
Football League.
Scott does at least seem much more
settled. This season, after a start that saw
Brentford lose their first two matches,
there has even been time for a little
managerial tinkering "We have adapted
our playing style a bit. We were playing
good stuff at the start of the season and not
picking up points. We had a couple of
defeats and after that we had a good look
at how we were playing and the mistakes
we were making."
Does this mean he's given in to the
lurking temptation of the lower tiers to
play the percentage ball, stick it in the
mixer and find out if they like it up 'em?
"We kept the same formation, we just
changed the mindset. We looked at what
such an important event for both America
and the world, second only to the season
finales of American Idol, every single
media outlet known to man is covering
every single minute of the day. Heck, I
hear Spice is even covering this with a
bunch of naked women correspondents in
the crowd at the Mall ( NOTE: That's a
joke. Do not rampage around the area
the successful sides who had come up out
of this division were doing, compared to
what we were doing. We made it a lot
more solid."
There's a resilience about the team,
demonstrated most recently by last
Saturday's 1-1 home draw with Notts
County, a game decorated with another
hair-tearing decision by the referee Stuart
Attwell – he of the "ghost goal" at Watford
earlier in the season. This time Atwell sent
off Nathan Elder after eight minutes for a
perceived elbowing offence, a decision that
left many observers bemused, Scott
included.
"The ball was in the air, my player was
back-peddling, not looking at their player,
there was a coming together, he's a 6ft 3in
centre-forward and their defender went
down.
"There was nothing malicious or
intentional. You just want to be able to
play the game. We had a good crowd of
paying customers in. If it was a bad tackle,
then fair enough. Refs are quick to get
their cards out now."
Elder, who was also sent off on his last
appearance last year, now faces the
prospect of a five-match ban. Scott isn't
alone in finding it slightly bizarre that a
referee who makes an obvious mistake
should be "punished" by being sent to
referee matches at this level.
"Our rules are exactly the same as the
rules in the Premier League. It's still three
points at stake and our livelihood still
depends on it. If a ref makes a mistake and
they're punished by being sent to League
Two, is it possible for them to have a clear
head in that situation? I think they should
be taken out of it for a bit."
looking for these naked women.)
Because there are so many places to
Brentford's success this season has been
built around a youthful and extremely fit
squad of players. "We've got a young
squad and we want to keep it together
without too much chopping and changing
form season to season. If we do go up it's a
money thing what you do from there.
Leicester, Leeds, Peterborough, maybe
even Charlton or Norwich if they come
down, there are a lot of clubs with money
in League One. Pushed to name his most
promising youngsters, Scott plumps for his
energetic left-flank of Karleigh Osborne
and Sam Wood: "They're good players and
they want to improve all the time. Sam
Wood came to us form Bromley and he's
done very well with his first chance in the
League."
Much like, so far, his manager. Scott
played at a higher level. He was part of
Howard Wilkinson's Sheffield United team
that reached the 1997 play-off final for a
place in the Premier League (they lost to
Crystal Palace). It's quite possible his
ambitions reach beyond away trips to
Macclesfield, Brentford's next destination
this coming Saturday. "I'd be a liar if I said
I didn't want to manage at a higher level,"
he shrugs. "But the players are ambitious
too and hopefully we can have success as a
group. That's what you build your
reputation on."
• Brentford
• League Two
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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watch these festivities I would like to
know where you are watching them from
and who, if anyone, you are viewing them
with. Myself, I'm dividing my time
watching it on television with my wife and
2-year-old twins and via Internet
(CBS.com) as I work from home. I know
that my compatriots at the office are
watching it via laptop hookup on the video
Daily Digital Newspaper
Barney Ronay:
Brentford's fortunes have
been revived at long last
By Barney Ronay (The latest
football news and comment plus
rugby, tennis, cricket and horse
racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:19:32 AM
It's amazing what a little success can do.
Currently Brentford are sitting second in
League Two, a club on course for its first
promotion in 10 years. You can tell too.
There's a buzz around the club's Osterley
training ground and a sense of bustle
among the echoey changing rooms, the
random items of weight-training
-apparatus, the boots and bandages and
cups of tea. This is a club ever so
-cautiously going places.
Last season I got to spend a morning
here as Brentford's acting assistant coach:
mucking in on the training pitch, stacking
the cones, standing around with my hands
on my hips, tripping over my great
flapping XXXL Brentford tracksuit
bottoms. That kind of thing. So it's with a
certain sense of pride that I can report the
lads have obviously taken a lot from that
experience, and are currently six points
behind leaders Wycombe with a game in
hand. Really, I'm proud of them all.
"We're probably a little bit ahead of
where we felt we would be," Bees manager
Andy Scott says, scanning his early-
morning emails in his office before
training. Terry Bullivant, my successor as
permanent assistant coach, isn't in today
and it's with a vague sense of regret at
what might have been that I take his empty
seat. "We've changed a lot of personnel,
but the players that have come in have
gone from strength to strength."
conference screen.
So, let us know. And, if you're watching
the ceremonies on one of the big
Jumbotrons in Washington DC we'd like to
hear from you.
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
Daily Digital Newspaper
BARNEY
continued from page 34
This time last season Scott was picking
up the reins following a disastrous
interlude under Terry Butcher and looked
like a tyro manager with a thousand
pressing tasks to attend to: hastily Blu-
Tacking a playing and coaching staff into
place with one hand, clearing Butcher's
half-eaten sandwiches off his desk with the
other and, above all, desperately hunting
for time to stabilise a club that had
nosedived through relegation, heavy debt
and four managers within the previous
year.
A period of rapid turnover was in train,
with 22 players passing through the
Brentford first-team squad in a year via a
tornado of loans, cheap purchases and off-
loadings. The most impressive Scott
signing so far has been Charlie McDonald,
a 27-year-old striker sneaked on a free
from Southend, who has 11 goals so far
this season. But this is basically
management on the hoof, an ad hoc, day-to
-day affair at the very sharpest end of the
Football League.
Scott does at least seem much more
settled. This season, after a start that saw
Brentford lose their first two matches,
there has even been time for a little
managerial tinkering "We have adapted
our playing style a bit. We were playing
good stuff at the start of the season and not
picking up points. We had a couple of
defeats and after that we had a good look
at how we were playing and the mistakes
we were making."
Does this mean he's given in to the
lurking temptation of the lower tiers to
play the percentage ball, stick it in the
mixer and find out if they like it up 'em?
"We kept the same formation, we just
changed the mindset. We looked at what
the successful sides who had come up out
of this division were doing, compared to
what we were doing. We made it a lot
more solid."
There's a resilience about the team,
demonstrated most recently by last
Saturday's 1-1 home draw with Notts
County, a game decorated with another
hair-tearing decision by the referee Stuart
Attwell – he of the "ghost goal" at Watford
earlier in the season. This time Atwell sent
off Nathan Elder after eight minutes for a
perceived elbowing offence, a decision that
left many observers bemused, Scott
included.
"The ball was in the air, my player was
back-peddling, not looking at their player,
there was a coming together, he's a 6ft 3in
centre-forward and their defender went
down.
"There was nothing malicious or
intentional. You just want to be able to
play the game. We had a good crowd of
paying customers in. If it was a bad tackle,
then fair enough. Refs are quick to get
their cards out now."
Elder, who was also sent off on his last
appearance last year, now faces the
prospect of a five-match ban. Scott isn't
alone in finding it slightly bizarre that a
referee who makes an obvious mistake
should be "punished" by being sent to
referee matches at this level.
"Our rules are exactly the same as the
rules in the Premier League. It's still three
points at stake and our livelihood still
depends on it. If a ref makes a mistake and
they're punished by being sent to League
Two, is it possible for them to have a clear
head in that situation? I think they should
be taken out of it for a bit."
Brentford's success this season has been
built around a youthful and extremely fit
squad of players. "We've got a young
squad and we want to keep it together
without too much chopping and changing
form season to season. If we do go up it's a
money thing what you do from there.
Leicester, Leeds, Peterborough, maybe
even Charlton or Norwich if they come
down, there are a lot of clubs with money
in League One. Pushed to name his most
promising youngsters, Scott plumps for his
energetic left-flank of Karleigh Osborne
and Sam Wood: "They're good players and
they want to improve all the time. Sam
Wood came to us form Bromley and he's
done very well with his first chance in the
League."
Much like, so far, his manager. Scott
played at a higher level. He was part of
Howard Wilkinson's Sheffield United team
that reached the 1997 play-off final for a
place in the Premier League (they lost to
Crystal Palace). It's quite possible his
ambitions reach beyond away trips to
Macclesfield, Brentford's next destination
this coming Saturday. "I'd be a liar if I said
I didn't want to manage at a higher level,"
he shrugs. "But the players are ambitious
too and hopefully we can have success as a
group. That's what you build your
reputation on."
• Brentford
• League Two
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
Feeds
Cycling: Armstrong finds
the going tough on his
return to cycling
By Richard Moore (The latest
football news and comment plus
rugby, tennis, cricket and horse
racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:10:00 AM
Lance Armstrong had promised to attack
in his comeback race, the Tour Down
Under, but he showed little inclination to
do so during today's first stage. In stifling
heat and on roads not quite challenging
enough to split the race, that wasn't
surprising. But Johan Bruyneel, his long-
time director, voiced doubts at the finish as
to whether the seven-time Tour de France
winner will be capable, at 37, of
recapturing his best form.
The 140km stage, from the Adelaide
suburbs into the undulating roads of the
Barossa Valley, was "tough" admitted
Armstrong. "That was the easy day?" he
asked at the finish. "The course, combined
with a temperature in the forties, meant it
was tough. On the steep little hills I felt
pretty strong, but now I'll have to see how
the recovery is."
Armstrong finished 120th, close to the
back of the 133-man peloton, as the
German sprinter Andre Greipel claimed
the stage and the race leader's jersey, as he
did last year, on his way to winning four
stages and the overall victory. "In the
bunch sprints I get out of the way and let
those big guys do their thing," said
Armstrong, who was introduced to the
Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, at
the finish.
Sean Yates, the British assistant director
of Armstrong's Astana team, said that
Armstrong had "taken up where he left off
– every time we looked up we saw Lance
near the front, surrounded by five team-
mates". But Bruyneel's assessment was not
quite so upbeat. "He's the same rider, the
same person," the Team Astana director
said, "but after today I think he'll realise
that he needs races.
World Sport* 35
"You can train as hard as you like, but
you can't simulate race conditions. There's
a fast rhythm here. I think his base
condition is very good; but he's three years
older and we'll have to see if the motor is
the same as before. In terms of his
endurance, I have no doubts. Whether he
has the power and speed, we'll find out."
Armstrong maintained that the heat would
be his enemy. "That dry heat affects
performance a lot," he said. "There's no
way you can perform at a high level. I
went through 15 to 20 bottles."
The bunch sprint that decided the stage
was notable not only for Greipel's victory,
after a well-drilled lead-out from his
Columbia team, but for a clash between
Robbie McEwen's arm and a spectator's
camera. The Australian rider, who won
Sunday's Cancer Council Classic in
Adelaide, was just unleashing his sprint,
and leading Greipel, when he collided with
the camera. Remarkably he managed to
stay upright and finish fourth, his arm
already swelling as he crossed the line.
"Some genius in the crowd decided they
wanted to get an action photo and reached
right out over the barriers with a really big
camera," an angry McEwen said. "I saw it
but couldn't do anything. It hit me straight
on the forearm. It's broken the skin and I
have a wound the shape of the camera
lens."
McEwen, who was optimistic of
continuing in the race, offered a
memorable, if idiosyncratic, description of
the moment of impact: "When you hit
something at 70 kph it's like a golf swing
at sixty per cent power hitting you in the
arm like a baseball bat."
• Lance Armstrong
• Cycling
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
Feeds
36 World Sport* Special*
Rugby union: Bath's England prop Matt
Stevens fails drug test
By Paul Rees (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:18:54 AM
Matt Stevens was today suspended by
Bath and withdrawn from the senior
England squad after failing a drug test. The
26-year-old, who has won 32 caps,
admitted that he was hooked on a
recreational drug and said he had started
counselling.
The former Australia wing Wendell
Sailor was banned for two years after a
drug test showed he had been taking
cocaine and Stevens faces a lengthy period
on the sidelines after failing a test
following a Heineken Cup victory over
Glasgow last month.
"I was tested for a prohibited substance,"
said Stevens on Sky Sports News. "It was
not a performance-enhancing substance:
you can make of that what you will. It is a
very serious substance and something that
over a period of time I have realised that I
have an issue with. It is something that has
basically ruined my life up until this point.
"It is pretty distressing talking about this
when I think how much time and effort so
many people have put into my career. I
have thrown it away through irresponsible
behaviour. Like any drug problem, you do
not know it is happening and then it
mounts up. Before you know it, you are
FriendsOfDave in XML
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 6:23:04 AM
First, a common request -- people have
asked for an OPML subscription list for
the FriendsOfDave Twitter/ Identi.ca/
FriendFeed feed. Done.
http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsO
fDave.opml
sitting there with an illness."
Stevens, who struggled to get out a
number of words during the interview,
went on: "It started off a couple of times
after big nights out with friends ... It was
not a big deal, but the problem with drugs
is that it quickly becomes a big deal. I owe
it to everyone to admit that and I want to
say I am truly very sorry.
"I had a few counselling sessions before
the drugs test result came out but I was not
serious about it. I had a session with a
counsellor today and I am going to a
meeting tonight.
"This is something I am serious about
changing. I want to change my life and get
back the faith that people had in me."
His club issued a statement that ran:
"Bath Rugby has been made aware of the
initial positive test given by Matt Stevens
following the Heineken Cup match against
Glasgow Warriors in December. The
procedure for potential doping offences is
clearly laid out in both the player's contract
and the European Rugby Cup Regulations.
The player is immediately suspended from
competition and has been suspended by
Bath Rugby until the case is resolved.
"Bath Rugby condemns the use or
distribution of prohibited substances or
methods as defined by the World Anti-
Doping Agency Prohibited List. Bath
Rugby is considering the implications and
has no further comment to make at this
time."
But while I was doing this I had a
thought that it's a micro-nano version of
weblogs.com before it became a ping-
server. If you recall, it used to poll for
changes among a small set of weblogs.
This method became unworkable because
there were eventually too many blogs to
poll. But FriendsOfDave is, by design,
always going to be a small number of
blogs. So I thought what the heck, let's
Stevens is a member of the 32-strong
England elite squad, but a ban would see
his contract torn up.
The RFU said in a statement: "The
Rugby Football Union has been made
aware by European Rugby Cup (Ltd) of
the positive doping test given by Matt
Stevens following the Heineken Cup
match against Glasgow Warriors in
December 2008.
"The procedure for potential doping
offences is clearly laid out in the ERC
Regulations and as such the player is
immediately provisionally suspended from
all competition. Matt has been removed
from the England Elite Player Squad and
will not travel to the training camp in
Portugal on Sunday or be involved in the
squad until the resolution of the case when
a further decision on his inclusion in the
England squad will be made.
"A decision on a replacement for Matt in
the EPS squad is being considered by the
England team manager Martin Johnson
and an announcement will be made in due
course."
• Bath
• England rugby union team
• Guinness Premiership
• Rugby union
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subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
Feeds
have it generate a changes.xml file of its
own.
http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsO
fDaveChanges.xml
An old friend!
Now, why this is interesting? It's a key
feature of the "real time web" that so many
of us are thinking about. If every feed had
someone watching out for them, along
Cricket: England captain Andrew
Strauss encourages players to
take more responsibility
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:42:30 AM
Andrew Strauss has urged England to
"think on their feet" as his team prepared
to leave for a tour in the West Indies.
"We want to get back to doing what do
we best, playing cricket and winning Test
matches," said Strauss, who was appointed
captain this month after the debacle
involving the former captain Kevin
Pietersen and sacked coach Peter Moores.
"My belief is we want to see players think
on their feet out in the middle, take
responsibility for the situation and not
leave it to someone else.
"The only way we can do that is to give
them more responsibility off the field as
well. I'm challenging my players to start
thinking a bit more about what they need
to do in terms of preparation and I'm
giving them a lot more flexibility to do
that."
England fly to the West Indies without a
head coach, with Andy Flower – formerly
assistant to Moores – acting as a stand-in,
and supported by the operations manager,
Phil Neale.
"I suppose the coaches will play more of
an advisory or consultancy role," Strauss
said. "It's vitally important the players are
challenged to think for themselves."
Pietersen had his first net at Lord's last
week since stepping down as captain and
with 100 or so other blogs, then if a
subscriber wanted to know if you changed,
it would just have to watch the changes
file. Of course if only one person they
followed was represented in that file, no
economy would be achieved, but if you
group similar sites, ones that are likely to
be followed by the same people, then you
do get the economy.
Somehow the feed has to tell followers
Daily Digital Newspaper
Strauss was confident that he would score
"millions of runs" for England. He has not,
however, been named on the team's
management committee for the Tests
against West Indies, which will instead
comprise Andrew Flintoff, Paul
Collingwood, Alastair Cook and Stuart
Broad, with Pietersen coming in for the
ODIs when Cook goes home after the
Tests.
"Kevin was his normal self when we met
up," said Strauss. "I've never seen Kevin
show a negative side to him since the first
day I met him. He's very positive, he
doesn't dwell on the past and I'm sure he's
already plotting ways of spanking the West
Indies bowlers all over the place.
"We want to win both the Test and one-
day series and start building some
momentum before an important summer.
The West Indies are now a very dangerous
side. The likes of Ramnaresh Sarwan,
Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Chris Gayle and
Fidel Edwards are all very dangerous
cricketers."
• Andrew Strauss
• Kevin Pietersen
• Peter Moores
• England in West Indies 2009
• England Cricket Team
• Cricket
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where their collection point is. Way back
in time we used a category element at the
top level of the feed to create this linkage.
As far as I know no one build features on
this, but they could have.
Will anything become of it this time
around? Probably not, but it's still kind of
interesting, if only for the nostalgic value.
Daily Digital Newspaper
Rugby union: Bath's England prop Matt
Stevens fails drug test
By Paul Rees (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 9:18:54 AM
Matt Stevens was today suspended by
Bath and withdrawn from the senior
England squad after failing a drug test. The
26-year-old, who has won 32 caps,
admitted that he was hooked on a
recreational drug and said he had started
counselling.
The former Australia wing Wendell
Sailor was banned for two years after a
drug test showed he had been taking
cocaine and Stevens faces a lengthy period
on the sidelines after failing a test
following a Heineken Cup victory over
Glasgow last month.
"I was tested for a prohibited substance,"
said Stevens on Sky Sports News. "It was
not a performance-enhancing substance:
you can make of that what you will. It is a
very serious substance and something that
over a period of time I have realised that I
have an issue with. It is something that has
basically ruined my life up until this point.
"It is pretty distressing talking about this
when I think how much time and effort so
many people have put into my career. I
have thrown it away through irresponsible
behaviour. Like any drug problem, you do
not know it is happening and then it
mounts up. Before you know it, you are
New pilots from Fox
By Brad Trechak (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:02:00 AM
Filed under: Industry, Pickups and
Renewals, Reality-Free Fox has inked a
deal for a bunch of new pilots for next
season. They include such titles as The
Station, Walorsky, Two Dollar Beer, Sons
of Tucson and Human Target.
Among them, Human Target is of the
sitting there with an illness."
Stevens, who struggled to get out a
number of words during the interview,
went on: "It started off a couple of times
after big nights out with friends ... It was
not a big deal, but the problem with drugs
is that it quickly becomes a big deal. I owe
it to everyone to admit that and I want to
say I am truly very sorry.
"I had a few counselling sessions before
the drugs test result came out but I was not
serious about it. I had a session with a
counsellor today and I am going to a
meeting tonight.
"This is something I am serious about
changing. I want to change my life and get
back the faith that people had in me."
His club issued a statement that ran:
"Bath Rugby has been made aware of the
initial positive test given by Matt Stevens
following the Heineken Cup match against
Glasgow Warriors in December. The
procedure for potential doping offences is
clearly laid out in both the player's contract
and the European Rugby Cup Regulations.
The player is immediately suspended from
competition and has been suspended by
Bath Rugby until the case is resolved.
"Bath Rugby condemns the use or
distribution of prohibited substances or
methods as defined by the World Anti-
Doping Agency Prohibited List. Bath
Rugby is considering the implications and
has no further comment to make at this
time."
most interest to me. It's an adaptation from
a DC Comics character. He's a bodyguard
named Christopher Chance that assumes
the identity of the person he is supposed to
protect. Properly done, this could become a
companion show or successor to
24(particularly since Prison Break is
ending).
This isn't even the first television
adaption for The Human Target, as Rick
Stevens is a member of the 32-strong
England elite squad, but a ban would see
his contract torn up.
The RFU said in a statement: "The
Rugby Football Union has been made
aware by European Rugby Cup (Ltd) of
the positive doping test given by Matt
Stevens following the Heineken Cup
match against Glasgow Warriors in
December 2008.
"The procedure for potential doping
offences is clearly laid out in the ERC
Regulations and as such the player is
immediately provisionally suspended from
all competition. Matt has been removed
from the England Elite Player Squad and
will not travel to the training camp in
Portugal on Sunday or be involved in the
squad until the resolution of the case when
a further decision on his inclusion in the
England squad will be made.
"A decision on a replacement for Matt in
the EPS squad is being considered by the
England team manager Martin Johnson
and an announcement will be made in due
course."
• Bath
• England rugby union team
• Guinness Premiership
• Rugby union
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
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Springfield starred in a brief series about
the same character in 1990. However,
World Sport* Entertainment*
Cricket: England captain Andrew
Strauss encourages players to
take more responsibility
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 8:42:30 AM
Andrew Strauss has urged England to
"think on their feet" as his team prepared
to leave for a tour in the West Indies.
"We want to get back to doing what do
we best, playing cricket and winning Test
matches," said Strauss, who was appointed
captain this month after the debacle
involving the former captain Kevin
Pietersen and sacked coach Peter Moores.
"My belief is we want to see players think
on their feet out in the middle, take
responsibility for the situation and not
leave it to someone else.
"The only way we can do that is to give
them more responsibility off the field as
well. I'm challenging my players to start
thinking a bit more about what they need
to do in terms of preparation and I'm
giving them a lot more flexibility to do
that."
England fly to the West Indies without a
head coach, with Andy Flower – formerly
assistant to Moores – acting as a stand-in,
and supported by the operations manager,
Phil Neale.
"I suppose the coaches will play more of
an advisory or consultancy role," Strauss
said. "It's vitally important the players are
challenged to think for themselves."
Pietersen had his first net at Lord's last
week since stepping down as captain and
things were different then. The
environment is better for such a program
now, assuming they take it seriously and
don't make it too cartoon-like (although I
could argue that 24 is cartoon-like in its
presentation).
So which of the new Fox pilots do you
find interesting?
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
37
Strauss was confident that he would score
"millions of runs" for England. He has not,
however, been named on the team's
management committee for the Tests
against West Indies, which will instead
comprise Andrew Flintoff, Paul
Collingwood, Alastair Cook and Stuart
Broad, with Pietersen coming in for the
ODIs when Cook goes home after the
Tests.
"Kevin was his normal self when we met
up," said Strauss. "I've never seen Kevin
show a negative side to him since the first
day I met him. He's very positive, he
doesn't dwell on the past and I'm sure he's
already plotting ways of spanking the West
Indies bowlers all over the place.
"We want to win both the Test and one-
day series and start building some
momentum before an important summer.
The West Indies are now a very dangerous
side. The likes of Ramnaresh Sarwan,
Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Chris Gayle and
Fidel Edwards are all very dangerous
cricketers."
• Andrew Strauss
• Kevin Pietersen
• Peter Moores
• England in West Indies 2009
• England Cricket Team
• Cricket
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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38 World Sport* Special*
Rugby union: Rookie
Ruaridh Jackson earns
Scotland call-up
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:24:00 AM
The Scotland head coach, Frank Hadden,
has handed a maiden call-up to the
Glasgow Warriors player Ruaridh Jackson
for the Six Nations opener against Wales
on 8 February. Jackson, 20, is one of two
uncapped players in a 33-man squad for
the clash at Murrayfield.
Jackson, who has impressed at club level
as a versatile back, has been selected as a
fly-half where he has made only one senior
start for Glasgow.
The Edinburgh prop Geoff Cross, who
was named in a provisional squad for the
autumn internationals, is the other rookie,
while the flanker Jason White makes the
selection, with Hadden expecting him to
recover from hand surgery in time.
"I'm delighted by the number of players
who are putting up their hands as genuine
candidates for international selection,"
Hadden said. "Momentum is vital in such a
short round of matches, so we know the
importance of starting well and getting a
big Scottish crowd behind us."
Scotland's squad will meet on Monday
for a three-day training camp.
Scotland squad
Backs: Mike Blair (Edinburgh), Ben
By dawn's early tweet
(Scripting News)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 4:21:51 AM
My first tweet of the day, unedited:
"Really feely unhinged this morning.
There was some security in GWB's
mediocrity. Now, there won't be an excuse,
it' s now -- not later."
It's true. I've had an unsettled feeling.
Can't deny it, can't wish it away.
On the radio this morning, while the
coffee is brewing, news that the milk
market has collapsed and dairy farmers are
Cairns (Edinburgh), Chris Cusiter
(Perpignan), Simon Danielli (Ulster), Nick
De Luca (Edinburgh), Max Evans
(Glasgow), Thom Evans (Glasgow), Phil
Godman (Edinburgh), Ruaridh Jackson
(Glasgow), Sean Lamont (Northampton),
Rory Lawson (Gloucester), Graeme
Morrison (Glasgow), Dan Parks
(Glasgow), Chris Paterson (Edinburgh),
Hugo Southwell (Edinburgh), Simon
Webster (Edinburgh).
Forwards: John Barclay (Glasgow),
Kelly Brown (Glasgow), Geoff Cross
(Edinburgh), Alasdair Dickinson
(Gloucester), Ross Ford (Edinburgh), Scott
Gray (Northampton), Dougie Hall
(Glasgow), Craig Hamilton (Edinburgh),
Jim Hamilton (Edinburgh), Nathan Hines
(Perpignan), Allister Hogg (Edinburgh),
Allan Jacobsen (Edinburgh), Alastair
Kellock (Glasgow), Euan Murray
(Northampton), Alasdair Strokosch
(Gloucester), Simon Taylor (Stade
Français), Jason White (Sale).
• Six Nations rugby
• Scotland rugby union team
• Rugby union
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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selling their cows.
China is asking for immediate talks with
the new US president, about security and
the shape of the world economy.
Everything is up for grabs in the latter.
This time it's not about the power of the
military, but which economy will emerge
in what kind of shape after the reshaping
that's going on. Profound changes ahead.
At stake is the western style of life. The
inaugural could be our last great party with
all the bells and whistles? I don't know.
After dinner the other day, driving down
Rugby union: Rookie
Ruaridh Jackson earns
Scotland call-up
(The latest football news and
comment plus rugby, tennis, cricket
and horse racing | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 7:24:00 AM
The Scotland head coach, Frank Hadden,
has handed a maiden call-up to the
Glasgow Warriors player Ruaridh Jackson
for the Six Nations opener against Wales
on 8 February. Jackson, 20, is one of two
uncapped players in a 33-man squad for
the clash at Murrayfield.
Jackson, who has impressed at club level
as a versatile back, has been selected as a
fly-half where he has made only one senior
start for Glasgow.
The Edinburgh prop Geoff Cross, who
was named in a provisional squad for the
autumn internationals, is the other rookie,
while the flanker Jason White makes the
selection, with Hadden expecting him to
recover from hand surgery in time.
"I'm delighted by the number of players
who are putting up their hands as genuine
candidates for international selection,"
Hadden said. "Momentum is vital in such a
short round of matches, so we know the
importance of starting well and getting a
big Scottish crowd behind us."
Scotland's squad will meet on Monday
for a three-day training camp.
Scotland squad
Backs: Mike Blair (Edinburgh), Ben
a main street in the East Bay, I asked my
date if she thought this street would look
more or less the same in a year's time. She
said yes. I said was not so sure. I wanted to
believe it would.
But for the next few hours it's time to
measure all we've accomplished. Aretha
will sing America The Beautiful from the
steps of the Capitol in a few hours. Do you
need any more symbolism than that?
We've come of age, my generation. We're
running the world now, what's left of it.
This may be the apex, the climax of
Cairns (Edinburgh), Chris Cusiter
(Perpignan), Simon Danielli (Ulster), Nick
De Luca (Edinburgh), Max Evans
(Glasgow), Thom Evans (Glasgow), Phil
Godman (Edinburgh), Ruaridh Jackson
(Glasgow), Sean Lamont (Northampton),
Rory Lawson (Gloucester), Graeme
Morrison (Glasgow), Dan Parks
(Glasgow), Chris Paterson (Edinburgh),
Hugo Southwell (Edinburgh), Simon
Webster (Edinburgh).
Forwards: John Barclay (Glasgow),
Kelly Brown (Glasgow), Geoff Cross
(Edinburgh), Alasdair Dickinson
(Gloucester), Ross Ford (Edinburgh), Scott
Gray (Northampton), Dougie Hall
(Glasgow), Craig Hamilton (Edinburgh),
Jim Hamilton (Edinburgh), Nathan Hines
(Perpignan), Allister Hogg (Edinburgh),
Allan Jacobsen (Edinburgh), Alastair
Kellock (Glasgow), Euan Murray
(Northampton), Alasdair Strokosch
(Gloucester), Simon Taylor (Stade
Français), Jason White (Sale).
• Six Nations rugby
• Scotland rugby union team
• Rugby union
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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America, the top of the mountain Martin
Luther King dreamed of. Where can we go
from here?
It's a potent moment.
Shortly after our previous President took
office I wrote: "Now I'm not a Republican,
far from it, most of the things Republicans
stand for are things I'm against. But there's
something satisfying about the Bush
Presidency, and for a time I couldn't put
my finger on exactly what it is. Now I
think I get it. If this guy could be president,
anyone could. He bumbles along twisting
Daily Digital Newspaper
Rugby league: Huddersfield
unsuccessful in their pursuit
of half-back Nathan Fien
By Andy Wilson (The latest football
news and comment plus rugby,
tennis, cricket and horse racing |
guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 5:22:11 AM
Huddersfield have failed in their attempt
to sign the New Zealand half-back Nathan
Fien as a replacement for Todd Carney, the
Australian who was unable to secure a visa
because of his criminal record.
The Giants offered a three-year contract
to Fien, the player at the centre of the
Grannygate controversy in the 2006 Tri-
Nations series when it emerged midway
through the tournament that he was
ineligible for the Kiwis because his great-
grandmother, rather than grandmother, was
from New Zealand.
They were hoping that Fien's current
employers, the New Zealand Warriors,
would release him from the remaining year
of his contract with them having tempted
Stacey Jones out of retirement for the
forthcoming NRL season. However, the
Warriors chief executive, Wayne Scurrah,
has confirmed that Fien will not be
released. "We've had a meeting with
Nathan and it was made clear to him by
Ivan Cleary [the Warriors' coach] that he
will be an integral player in the Warriors'
plans this year," said Scurrah.
Meanwhile Hull KR have moved quickly
to appoint a new assistant coach following
the resignation of the former Great Britain
forward Lee Crooks one year into a three-
around his mouth when he speaks, with his
Texas accent that I don't believe. I imagine
him on the scene of The West Wing,
reading his lines, and sipping his coffee
saying "Oh this is really good coffee,
thanks." He gets his cues from Dick
Cheney, but he could just as easily get
them from a TV series director. Smile
here. Say something nice about America.
Good job Dubya. Excellent."
Suffice to say I have higher hopes for his
successor.
Daily Digital Newspaper
RUGBY
continued from page 38
year contract. Chris Chester, who left
Rovers to join the Castleford coaching
staff after being forced to retire last season
because of persistent neck problems, has
now returned to Craven Park. Crooks is
expected to cross the city to Hull FC,
despite their denials this week that they
have played any part in his resignation
from Rovers.
• Huddersfield Giants
• Hull KR
Hulu is streaming the
inauguration... watch it here! -
VIDEO
By Joel Keller (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 10:38:00 AM
Filed under: News, Video, Web, Reality-
Free Have you gotten Inauguration Fatigue
yet (I capitalized it because I hope to make
it an official, WebMD-listed affliction)?
Hopefully, you haven't, because it's going
to be "All Obama, All The Time" today, so
you might as well sit back, get a cup of
coffee, and enjoy the pomp and
circumstance.
Thanks to our friends at Hulu, you don't
even have to leave the computer. They're
streaming Fox News' coverage of the
ceremonies (hopefully, Sean Hannity is
being kept in a safe location so we don't
see him sobbing and rending his
garments). For convenience, I've added the
stream after the jump ( Warning: it plays
automatically, so put those headphones on
now).
Ah, life in the near-teens is good, isn't it?
• Super League
• Rugby league
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Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is
subject to our Terms & Conditions| More
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You can watch the inauguration and slave
away at your soon-to-disappear job
without even having to get up from your
desk. Now get back to work, people!
Continue reading Hulu is streaming the
inauguration... watch it here! - VIDEO
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
How I Met Your Mother: Three
Days of Snow
By Joel Keller (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 11:17:00 PM
Filed under: OpEd, How I Met Your
Mother, Episode Reviews, Reality-
Free(S04E13) Something that's been
missing for most of this season of HIMYM
is the unique Bays-Thomas method of
storytelling. If you're a fan of the show,
you know what I'm talking about: you
think the story is going one way, you even
think that you're keeping up with the time-
shifting and story fragments. Then, when
the guys finally reveal where they were
going with the story, you get a surprising
but funnier or more emotional impact. This
year, we saw a lot of the time shifting, but
not many stories where everything came
together at the last minute to make you
smile.
Until this week, that is. We got the kind
Veronica Mars movie is a go, says
Rob Thomas
By Debra McDuffee (TV Squad)
Submitted at 1/20/2009 1:04:00 PM
Filed under: Other Drama Shows,
Celebrities, Reality-Free If you are a
Veronica Mars fan like I am, then you are
probably still mourning the loss of the
series; well, the first two seasons anyway.
I'm sure the series hadn't run its course and
that it would have rebounded from the
fiasco known as season three, otherwise
known as Piz.
OK, so maybe Piz grew on me a little,
and he did keep Logan nice and angry,
because nobody likes a happy Logan. And
besides, would you want to see that sappy,
insipid Logan in a feature film?
Did you like the way I slipped that in
there? Feature film? Yep, Rob Thomas has
confirmed that since the order on Cupid
has been slashed from thirteen to eight
episodes, he'll have time to write the
Entertainment* Copy Right*
of episode that HIMYM die-hards have
been craving all year. I just wish the stories
that all came together at the end were just a
skosh stronger.
Continue reading How I Met Your
Mother: Three Days of Snow
Permalink| Email this| | Comments
Veronica Mars movie. And he spills the
beans on some other juicy tidbits about the
film too:
Continue reading Veronica Mars movie
is a go, says Rob Thomas
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39
Copyright 2.0
Show - Episode
94
By Jonathan Bailey
(PlagiarismToday)
Submitted at 1/19/2009 12:03:48 PM
It is Monday again and that means that it
is time for another episode of the
Copyright 2.0 Show.
It was a busy week for copyright new
with the politicians, not the lawyers, taking
the lead. Some rumblings about copyright
reform both in the U.S. and the UK have
everyone’s attention. However, not to be
outdone, YouTube makes a splash this
week with a series of silent vids and MGA,
Prince and Web Sheriff all make it back in
the news.
All in all, there were twelve stories this
week including news from all over the
copyright world including our “Weird
Story of the Week”.
This week’s stories include:
• UK Legislation Raises Privacy
Concerns
• Dems Lay Out Copyright Plans in the
U.S.
• YouTube Videos Go Silent
• Prince Loses Plagiarism Lawsuit
• Stripper Idol Draws a Lawsuit
• And Many more…
You can download the MP3 file
here(direct download). Those interested in
subscribing to the show can do so via this
feed.
Show Notes
Need a Copyright or Plagiarism
Consultant? I am Here to Help.
jonb1324cdr