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At the crest of a wave of highly anticipated 7-inch tablets, you may have missed Huawei?s T-Mobile Springboard 4G. It lacks the hype of the Amazon Kindle Fire?($199, 4 stars) or the Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet?($249, 4 stars), but the Springboard is worth considering if you're looking for a tablet with 3G connectivity?something those other tablets are missing. Unlike the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet?s heavily modified Android 2.3 software, the Springboard runs Android Honeycomb 3.2, joining the Acer Iconia Tab A100 ($329.99, 4 stars) in a growing lineup of smaller-screen Honeycomb tablets. The Springboard outclasses the Iconia Tab A100, with its slick aluminum chassis, beautiful IPS display, and above-average battery life. But with a new version of Android coming and competition stepping up, it's just harder to get a four-star rating than it was when we reviewed the A100 this summer.
Pricing and Design
The Springboard comes in a 16GB model that T-Mobile offers for $179.99 with a two-year contract, or $429.99 sans contract. The contract price requires you to pay at least $50 per month for your first 20 months, which gets you 2GB of data with no overages, but reduced speeds if you go beyond 2GB. For many users, a simple Wi-Fi connection will be enough, and any additional data can be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis. T-Mobile offers no-contract prepaid plans in MonthPass and WeekPass options, ranging from $10 for 7 days with 100MB, to $50 for 30 days with 3GB. The $429.99 off-contract price is higher than the Springboard's main competitors, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus ($399), the Acer Iconia Tab A100, the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and Kindle Fire. However none of those offer a cellular data option, and all but the Galaxy Tab have less onboard storage.
Fitting comfortably in a single hand, the Springboard feels solidly built and substantial. Its aluminum body is reminiscent of the iPad 2 ($499, 4.5 stars), using a smooth nearly-unibody construction with two plastic pieces attached to the back. At 7.5 by 5.1 by 0.4 inches and 14.1 ounces, the tablet is heavier than the 13.9-ounce Iconia Tab A100 and on par with the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet.? When held in portrait mode, the top edge of the tablet houses two small speakers and a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack.? The speakers are fair and produced decent audio output in my tests, but like with most tablets, to get the best results, you'll need headphones or an external speaker.
The Power button and volume rocker sit towards the top of the right edge. A power jack, micro HDMI port, and micro USB port for connecting to computers can be found on the bottom edge. The Springboard comes with 16GB of onboard storage, expandable up to 48GB with up to a 32GB microSD card. The microSD slot and SIM card slot can both be found under the bottom plastic panel on the back. ?
?Though T-Mobile touts it as a 4G tablet, we class the Springboard's HSPA+ 14.4 connection as 3G. But that's OK. It's still fast. (More on speed and performance in a minute.) The tablet also supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and I was able to connect to protected networks easily. The Springboard also supports Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, which made it easy to connect to wireless headphones or speakers. The Springboard can double as a mobile hotspot and I had no trouble browsing the Web, streaming Netflix, and downloading files on multiple devices.
The 7-inch 1280-by-800-pixel IPS touch-screen display is a pleasure to look at. Colors are vivid, with deep blacks and very sharp text. The viewing angles were considerably wider than on the Iconia Tab A100. I found the screen to be brighter than the Kindle Fire with both at max brightness. The Kindle Fire?s 1024-by-600 display is good, but the Springboard?s higher pixel density made reading on the screen easier. The screen is responsive and I rarely had to press more than once to register touches. One minor problem I found was that the bottom bezel, in portrait mode, is touch sensitive, causing a good amount of accidental clicks, inadvertently exiting apps or going back in the browser.
OS and Performance
The Springboard runs stock Android Honeycomb 3.2, with a few preloaded, removable apps and widgets from T-Mobile. This includes apps such as T-Mobile TV, Lets Golf 2, and Blockbuster, none of which were very useful. Other than that, if you've seen Honeycomb, there's nothing new here to note. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus has a smoother interface and apps run more fluidly on Samsung?s 7-inch tablet.
As far as third-party apps go, the Android-tablet-specific app selection still pales in comparison with Apple?s iPad app collection, and those tablet-specific apps are tougher to find in the Android Market. Given the smaller screen size, phone apps scale well on the Springboard, but until Google overhauls its app store to cater to tablet users, Android is at a distinct disadvantage. Tablet-specific apps such as StumbleUpon look great and took advantage of the screen real estate. Phone-specific apps like Facebook worked well enough, but there was a lot of room for improvement.
Under the hood, Huawei went with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 S3 Snapdragon processor.? Overall the Springboard felt very snappy and responsive, though I did notice some occasional choppy scrolling during my testing.? Apps loaded quickly and I was able to seamlessly switch between multiple running apps with ease. In our benchmarks the Springboard bested the Iconia Tab A100 on all but the Browsermark test. The HSPA+ 14.4 wasn?t what we consider 4G, but it turned in respectable speeds averaging 6.6Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up in Ookla?s Speedtest.net app. ?
The Springboard has a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. The front-facing camera is on the top right corner when you hold the tablet in portrait mode, and its placement makes for odd video-chatting angles. Both still photo and video quality were disappointing. Even in good lighting conditions, there was noticeable noise in images. Test shots were grainy, with color speckles obscuring fine details when zoomed in. Outdoor shots were also problematic, with overexposed bright backgrounds and underexposed shadows. The rear-facing camera shot 720p video, but at jerky frame rates ranging from 15-25 frames per second. Video recorded with the front-facing camera had an out-of-sync audio track, rendering it video almost completely useless. Using Google?s Talk app to video chat produced choppy and out-of-sync video, ruling it out as a viable means for communication.
T-Mobile rates the Springboard's 4100mAh battery at up to 7 hours of continuous use and 12 hours on standby.? In our battery test, a continuous looping video with Wi-Fi on and screen brightness at 100 percent, the Springboard lasted 5 hours, 16 minutes. That's better than the Iconia Tab A100?s 3 hours, 53 minutes and more than the Kindle Fire?s 4 hours, 55 minutes, but shorter than most 10-inch tablets with bigger batteries, such as the iPad 2, which lasted 7 hours, 30 minutes.
Conclusions
The T-Mobile Springboard 4G offers a great 7-inch tablet experience in a high-quality design, as long as you're willing to write off the camera. The aluminum construction and excellent display outclass the Acer Iconia Tab A100. But at $430 without a contract, the Springboard is pricier than most other 7-inchers, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus at $400. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 is lighter, but it also has a lower-resolution 1,024-by-600-pixel display. Whether that's enough to justify the higher price tag will depend on consumers, but with the price of the Springboard approaching iPad levels, T-Mobile may have a hard time moving its newest tablet.
We gave the Acer Iconia Tab A100 four stars this summer, but competition has stepped up since then, especially in the form of the low-cost Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. Those two tablets are considerably less-expensive options, with solid features, tighter ecosystems, and more-user-friendly interfaces. If media consumption and light Web browsing are all you are looking for, our Editors' Choice for small tablets, the Amazon Kindle Fire is a better choice. The Springboard isn't a bad tablet especially if you need one with 3G, but at its $430 off-contract price, it falls in a gray area between the high-end iPad 2 and the budget-friendly Kindle Fire. It is well made and feature-rich, but ultimately it doesn't provide enough to draw consumers away from either end of the spectrum.?
More Tablet Reviews:
??? T-Mobile Springboard 4G
??? Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet
??? Amazon Kindle Fire
??? HTC Jetstream (AT&T)
??? Archos 101 G9
?? more
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LOS ANGELES ? A woman suspected of showering Black Friday shoppers with pepper spray surrendered to authorities but was released pending further investigation after she refused to discuss the incident, police said Saturday.
The woman, whose name was not released, is suspected of firing pepper spray into a crowd in order to clear a path to a crate of Xbox video game players that were being unwrapped late Thanksgiving night at a Walmart in the upscale Porter Ranch section of the San Fernando Valley.
The suspect got away in the confusion, and it was not known if she bought one of the Xboxes. Ten people suffered minor injuries from the spray and 10 others sustained cuts and bruises in the ensuing chaos.
"Last night at 8:30 the suspect involved in the pepper spray incident at the Porter Ranch Walmart turned herself in," police Sgt. Jose Valle said Saturday. She immediately invoked her right against self-incrimination, however, and refused to discuss the incident further.
Police released her pending further investigation.
Valle said investigators still have nearly a dozen witnesses to interview, including several spraying victims. He added it would likely be at least two days before an arrest in the case could be made.
If the woman who surrendered is indeed the person who sprayed the crowd she could face battery charges.
The attack took place about 10:30 p.m., shortly after the Walmart opened its doors for the traditional Black Friday sales that kick off the Christmas shopping season. A crowd of people had gathered to wait for store employees to unwrap the crate of discounted Xboxes.
The incident was one of several across the nation that marred this year's Black Friday.
In the most serious case, a robber shot a shopper who refused to give up his purchases outside a Walmart in the San Francisco suburb of San Leandro. The victim was hospitalized in critical but stable condition.
San Leandro police said the victim and his family were walking to their car around 1:45 a.m. Friday when they were confronted by a group of men who demanded their shopping items. When the family refused, a fight broke out, and one of the robbers pulled a gun and shot the man, said Sgt. Mike Sobek.
___
Associated Press Writer Terry Tang contributed to this story.
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Online video is booming and the are tons of small video companies across production, advertising, distribution, and technology. ?Yet we have yet to see a serious attempt to roll up the industry. ?The reasons, I submit, boil down to egos and greed. What is a Rollup? Historically, large private equity firms have ?rolled up? various small companies in a given market through mergers or acquisitions in order to reach economies of scale.? A rollup is different than a simple merger in that it involves multiple parties, oftentimes taking place in a mature industry where growth can?t occur organically, but rather, through financial engineering or cost cutting. This is partially why we haven?t seen that many rollups of Internet companies, because usually a merger is all it takes to reach considerable market dominance.? Sometimes rollups make sense because building a product or business would take too long to build internally and grow organically.? Ask Jeeves bought Interactive Search Holdings for $343M in March 2004 to double market share and then sold to IAC a year later for $1.8 billion.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Xn7NXto9bZU/
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Penguin eBooks are once again available for library lending to owners of Amazon Kindle devices, at least through libraries using OverDrive?s ebook lending service. Penguin withdrew all its titles from library lending to Kindle owners through OverDrive earlier this week citing ?security concerns,? and said it would stop making new titles available to library lending on any platform. Penguin?s reversal returns makes existing ebook titles available for lending to Kindle owners; however, new titles will still not be available for library lending. And the reversal may be temporary: Penguin says it?s merely restoring availability of existing titles through December until a solution can be worked out.
?Penguin titles are available for check out by Kindle users and the Kindle format will be available for patrons who are currently on a waiting list for a Penguin title,? OverDrive?s Brianne Carlon wrote in the company?s blog. ?Upcoming releases remain unavailable.?
Penguin will, of course, still continue to publish print versions of new titles, which the company will continue to make available to libraries. Penguin will also offer new titles as ebooks?they just aren?t available for library lending.
Penguin has not elaborated on the nature of its security issues with library ebook lending to Kindle owners, saying only that it is working with Amazon and OverDrive to address the concerns. In a statement, Penguin indicated Amazon claims it had not been ?consulted by OverDrive? regarding the nature of Penguin?s agreement with OverDrive.
?Amazon has undertaken to work with Penguin and Overdrive between now and the end of the year to address Penguin?s concerns,? Penguin said in a statement.
This article was originally posted on Digital Trends
More from Digital Trends
Will piracy kill e-book lending?
Penguin halts Kindle library lending: Will more publishers disable the feature?
Rewriting the rules: How Amazon could cut e-book prices by cutting out publishers
Amazon?s tablet will be named the Kindle Fire
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BAMAKO (Reuters) ? Gunmen kidnapped three Westerners and killed a fourth in the historic northern Mali town of Timbuktu Friday, the second hostage-taking in the region in two days, Malian government and local sources said.
One government source and a local tourist guide identified the person who was killed as a German. The guide said two of those taken hostage were Dutch and one South African, though there was no official confirmation of their nationalities.
Thursday two French nationals were kidnapped from their hotel in the same remote desert region, where local agents for al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operate.
Mohamed Ag Hamalek, a local tourist guide contacted by telephone by Reuters, described Friday's abduction. "They were taking a stroll when the armed men forced them into four-wheel-drives, they shot the German dead on the spot because he tried to resist," he said.
Hamalek said the attackers sped off as security forces put up roadblocks and set off in pursuit.
"The whole town is in a state of shock, because that never happened here. Most of the people in Timbuktu live off the tourism ... but already that was getting scarcer. I reckon it is finished now," he said.
Timbuktu, founded a thousand years ago and famous as a major trading center for gold and salt, was one of the centers of a tourist sector that includes a famous festival of Malian music.
The increased risk of kidnappings, either by Islamists or by local gunmen cooperating with them, has made large tracts of Mauritania, Mali and Niger no-go areas for Westerners.
Western nations led by France and the United States are trying to improve regional cooperation, but their efforts have been undermined by a lack of resources, regional rivalries and a degree of local complicity.
There has been no claim of responsibility for either kidnapping. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said it was behind the abduction last year of seven mine executives in neighboring Niger. Four of them remain in captivity, widely thought to be somewhere in northern Mali.
Doubts surfaced Friday over the identity of the two French nationals initially described as geologists who were kidnapped Thursday in the town of Hombori, close to the border with Burkina Faso.
France's Europe 1 radio said the two were known to French secret services. One, of Hungarian extraction, took part during the 1990s in the recruitment of Yugoslavian mercenaries to fight in then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The second was arrested in September 2003 in the Indian Ocean archipelago island Comoros for his part in an attempted coup d'etat, it said.
The French Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the report, saying only it was doing all it could for their release.
(Additional reporting by Gerard Bon in Paris; Writing by Mark John; Editing by Tim Pearce)
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NEW YORK ? Metals prices slid Friday on renewed fears that the European debt crisis could slow global economic growth.
Italy became the latest country to see its costs for borrowing money skyrocket, entering the territory of nations that have required massive bailouts from the European Union. Italy must pay an average yield of 7.814 percent in two-year bonds, nearly double what the country had to pay only a month ago.
The revelation comes on the heels of a disastrous bond offering from Germany, which saw little demand for investment in the continent's strongest economy. The inability to raise cash inexpensively could drastically hurt sales of industrial metals that are closely tied to economic growth. Metals like copper and palladium are used as raw materials to make everything from automobiles to home computers.
Friday's trading session in metals was shortened following the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the U.S.
Platinum for January delivery dropped $25.20, or 1.62 percent, to settle at $1,533.10 an ounce. December palladium fell $19.75, or 3.4 percent, to close at $570.10 an ounce. Copper for December delivery fell 0.9 cent to close at $3.27 per pound.
Precious metals were also down. Gold for December delivery fell $10.20 to settle at $1,685.70 per ounce. December silver lost 87 cents, or 2.73 percent, to close at $31.014 an ounce.
Crop prices rose Friday. Corn for March delivery fell 5.50 cents, or nearly 1 percent, to settle at $5.90 per bushel. January soybeans fell 16 cents to close at $11.0650 a bushel. March wheat fell 5.25 cents, or less than 1 percent, to finish at $5.89 per bushel.
In energy trading, benchmark crude oil rose 60 cents to end at $96.77 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Heating oil fell 3.09 cents to finish at $2.94 per gallon. Gasoline futures lost 4.45 cents to close at $2.5205 per gallon and natural gas gained 5.7 cents to close at $3.665 per 1,000 cubic feet.
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AMMAN, Jordan?? Syrian tanks bombarded hideouts of army defectors near the central town of Rastan on Thursday, a resident and activists said, two months after the authorities said they had regained control of the important region.
Only on msnbc.com
Activists said around 50 tanks and armored vehicles fired anti-aircraft guns and machine guns into farmland on the edge of Rastan, 12 miles north of the restive city of Homs.
The town was the scene at the end of October of the first major fighting between troops loyal to President Bashar Assad and army defectors in the eight-month uprising against his rule.
"The shelling is concentrating on Rastan's western farms," said a resident of the town, who gave his name as Abu Salah. "I have called several people who live there and loyalist officers answered their mobile phones instead. They were either killed or arrested."
Thousands of soldiers have bolted from the regular army since it started cracking down on an the eight-month popular protest movement to remove Assad. They have formed armed units loosely linked to the umbrella "Free Syrian Army", led by officers now hiding in neighboring Turkey.
Story: 5 children among 23 civilians killed in Syria, rights group saysMeanwhile, France has called for a "secured zone to protect civilians" in Syria, the first time a major Western power has suggested international intervention on the ground during the uprising.
'Legitimate partner'
Foreign Minister Alain Juppe also described Syria's exiled opposition National Council as "the legitimate partner with which we want to work", the biggest international endorsement yet for the nascent opposition body.
A spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the EU was ready to engage with the Syrian National Council (SNC) and other opposition groups, but stressed the need for them to maintain a peaceful, non-sectarian approach.
Asked at a news conference on Wednesday after meeting the SNC president if a humanitarian corridor was an option for Syria, Juppe ruled out military intervention to create a "buffer zone" in northern Syria but suggested a "secured zone" may be feasible to protect civilians and ferry in humanitarian aid.
"If it is possible to have a humanitarian dimension for a secured zone to protect civilians, that then is a question which has to be studied by the European Union on the one side and the Arab League on the other side," Juppe said.
Story: Army defectors threaten to transform Syrian uprising into civil warFurther details of the proposal were not immediately available. Until now, Western countries have imposed economic sanctions on Syria but have shown no appetite for intervention on the ground in the country, which sits on the fault lines of the ethnic and sectarian conflicts across the Middle East.
The U.S. Embassy in Damascus has urged its citizens in Syria to depart "immediately."
Nearly 4,000 people have been reported killed in the military crackdown on the popular uprising since March.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to his report.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45426952/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/
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Lily Allen has given birth to her first child, according to a report out of the UK.
The singer, 26, who now goes by Lily Cooper since her summer wedding to Sam Cooper, reportedly gave birth to her little girl on Friday, the UK's Daily Mail first reported.
PLAY IT NOW: Lily Allen Talks Katy Perry Feud On ?The Billy Bush Show?
"Totes Amaze," Lily Tweeted earlier in the day, although it was not known if her Tweet was directly related to the birth.
Singer Boy George was one of the many who wished Lily well on Twitter.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Brit Pack: Hot Shots Of Stars From The UK!
"Congrats to Lily Allen on her sprog," the singer wrote.
DJ Seb Chew, a former boyfriend of Lily's-turned-friend, Tweeted, "sending out love to lily, sam and mini cooper...... YES."
A rep for Lily didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Access Hollywood.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood?s Hottest Moms & Their Loveable Little Ones
Lily and Sam, a builder, became engaged last Christmas, before marrying in June.
The birth of Lily's baby comes a little over a year after her tragic miscarriage in October 2010, which occurred when she was 6-months pregnant. The singer also had a miscarriage in January 2008.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Celebrity Baby Bumps
Copyright 2011 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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You can take these Windows Phones now and you can just pick...
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Listen to simulations of our ancestors' first sounds
YOU may think humanity's first words are lost in the noise of ancient history, but an unlikely experiment using plastic tubes and puffs of air is helping to recreate the first sounds uttered by our distant ancestors.
Many animals communicate with sounds, but it is the variety of our language that sets us apart. Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac - a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises.
All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. Palaeontologists can date when our ancestors lost the organ, as the tissue attaches to a skeletal feature called the hyoid bulla, which is absent in humans. "Lucy's baby", an Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, had a hyoid bulla; but by the time Homo heidelbergensis arrived on the scene 600,000 years ago, air sacs were a thing of the past.
To find out how this changed the sounds produced, Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands created artificial vocal tracts from shaped plastic tubes. Air forced down them produced different vowel sounds, and half of the models had an extra chamber to mimic an air sac.
De Boer played the sounds to 22 people and asked them to identify the vowel. If they got it right, they were asked to try again, only this time noise was added to make it harder to identify the sound. If they got it wrong, noise was reduced.
He found that those listening to tubes without air sacs could tolerate much more noise before the vowels became unintelligible.
The air sacs acted like bass drums, resonating at low frequencies, and causing vowel sounds to merge; Lucy's baby would have had a greatly reduced vocabulary. Even simple words - such as "tin" and "ten" - would have sounded the same to her.
Observations of soldiers from the first world war corroborate de Boer's findings. Poison gas enlarged the vestigial air sacs of some soldiers, who are said to have had speech problems that made them hard to comprehend.
De Boer's study provides clear evidence supporting the idea that the need to produce complex sounds to communicate better made air sacs shrink, says Ann MacLarnon of the University of Roehampton in London. More sounds meant more information could be shared, giving those who lacked air sacs a better chance of survival in a dangerous world.
De Boer found that air sacs also interfered with the workings of the vocal cords, making consonants trickier. Only once they had gone could words like "perpetual", requiring rapid changes in sound, be produced.
What, then, might our ancestors' first words have been? With air sacs, vowels tend to sound like the "u" in "ugg". But studies suggest it is easier to produce a consonant plus a vowel, and "d" is easier to form with "u". "Drawing it all together, I think it is likely cavemen and cavewomen said 'duh' before they said 'ugg'," says de Boer.
Listen to simulations of the vowel sounds with and without air sacs:
a without an air sac.
a with an air sac.
? without an air sac.
? with an air sac
y without an air sac
y with an air sac.
Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.07.007
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Move to the head of the class with the Brilliant Creations Advanced Notebook from VTech. This innovative educational toy laptop inspired by the real thing teaches your child essential skills for success.
The Brilliant Creations Advanced Notebook measures 1.6 by 10.6 by 7.2 inches (HWD) and runs on four AA batteries. This realistic looking laptop features a 4.5-inch LCD color screen with high-quality animations. It has everything your grade school child needs to get ahead in school including 120 learning activities that teach language arts, science, math, foreign language, creativity and more! For added interactivity, this electronic learning toy also has a real computer mouse and touch pad.
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CAIRO (Reuters) ? An overnight truce between Egyptian riot police and protesters succeeded on Thursday in calming violence that has killed 39 people in five days, but demonstrators occupying Cairo's Tahrir Square vowed to stay until the army gives up power.
Egypt's ruling military council, which has vowed to start parliamentary elections as scheduled on Monday, said it was doing all it could to "prevent the repetition of these events."
In a statement, it apologized, offered condolences and compensation to families of the dead, and promised a swift investigation into who was behind the unrest.
Demonstrators in Tahrir said the truce had taken hold from midnight. At dawn the area was quiet for the first time in days.
"Since about midnight or 1 a.m. there were no more clashes. We are standing here to ensure no one goes inside the cordon," said Mohamed Mustafa, 50, among a group barring a street leading to the Interior Ministry, flashpoint for much of the violence.
They were guarding a barricade made of a broken metal fence, a telephone booth laid on its side and part of a lamp post.
At the other end of the street, littered with shattered glass, lumps of concrete and heaps of rubbish, at least two army armored personnel carriers blocked the route. Mustafa's group said police were on the front line, and behind them the army.
Lines of Tahrir protesters manned similar barriers to block access to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, scene of repeated fighting.
"We have created a space separating from the police. We are standing here to make sure no one violates it," said Mahmoud Adly, 42, part of a human cordon four ranks deep.
CHALLENGE TO ARMY RULE
The sustained protests in Cairo and some other cities pose the gravest challenge to Egypt's army rulers since the council led by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi took over from Hosni Mubarak, overthrown on February 11 by a popular uprising.
The demonstrations appear to have polarized Egyptians, many of whom worry that unrest will prolong economic stagnation that has deepened the poverty of millions. A few streets from Tahrir, Egyptians went to and from work as normal.
A banner in Tahrir read: "The marshal and the police want to ignite the country. The people want to topple the marshal."
The thousands who thronged the square were undeterred in their determination to rid Egypt of army rule. "He goes, we won't," declared another banner referring to Tantawi.
Al Jazeera television said Interior Minister Mansour el-Essawy had proposed to the military council that it postpone the election. It was not immediately possible to verify the report.
"So far elections are on schedule, but this could change if the truce falls apart," a security source told Reuters. "Saturday will be the final day to turn back on the elections."
The United States and European nations, alarmed at the violence of the past few days, have urged Egypt to proceed with what has been billed as its first free vote in decades.
The army and the Muslim Brotherhood, which expects to do well in the polls, say it must go ahead, but many protesters do not trust the military to oversee a clean vote and scorn the Brotherhood for its focus on gaining seats in parliament.
The military council originally promised to return to barracks within six months, but then set a timetable for elections and drawing up a new constitution that would have left it in power until late next year or early 2013.
Tantawi pledged this week to hold a presidential vote in June that could pave the way for a transfer to civilian rule, but the demonstrators, angered by army attempts to shield itself legally from future civilian control, are unconvinced.
"The military council must leave and hand power to civilians. They don't want to leave so that their corruption isn't exposed," said 23-year-old student Ahmed Essam.
He said he joined the protests when he saw riot police raining blows on peaceful demonstrators on Saturday. "Everything is like in Mubarak's time," he said.
URBAN BATTLE ZONE
For now, the front lines near the Interior Ministry, a symbol of Mubarak's hated security police, have fallen quiet.
"We want to stop these clashes, people are dying," said 30-year-old protester Osama Abu Seree.
Before the truce took hold, riot police fired barrages of tear gas at hardcore protesters, amid bursts of gunfire. Scores of young men, coughing and gasping for air, stumbled into dark side streets off Tahrir Square to escape the acrid smoke.
At a makeshift clinic near Tahrir, doctor Tareq Salem said four people had died there on Wednesday, two from bullet wounds and two from asphyxiation. He said three volunteer doctors had been killed since the violence began.
"They were fresh graduates," he said, splashing his face with saline fluid to counter the effects of the latest barrage of gas. One died of suffocation, the other two of bullet wounds sustained while assessing injuries outside, he said.
Essawy, the Interior Minister, told state television earlier that security forces had only fired tear gas, but said unidentified people had been shooting from rooftops near Tahrir.
Protesters like Abdel Salam Roshdy said it was time to end military rule viewed as no better than the Mubarak era.
"I want to have a better life and feel safe. Since the military council took power, it has been worse," he said.
(Additional reporting by Ali Abdel Atti and Yousri Mohamed; Writing by Tom Pfeiffer; Editing by Peter Graff)
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Vince Gilligan has only 16 episodes left of his critically acclaimed AMC series ?Breaking Bad,? but the creator/showrunner has some bad, breaking news: He has no idea how the show is going to wrap up.
?Wish I did,? he told TODAY.com before he and his writers headed back into plotting out how chemistry teacher-turned-meth dealer Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) is going to end his days in the upcoming fifth and final season. ?I have certain hopes and dreams for how the characters will wind up, but I don?t have anything nailed down plot-wise.?
In the course of four seasons, Walter has slowly morphed from cancer victim with a brilliant (if terrible) idea for raising money to provide for his family once he?s shuffled off the mortal coil, into a hard-edged, murderous drug lord. All that can make for problems in figuring out to wrap things up in a nice bow.
Though there will undoubtedly be plenty of nastiness and gore in episodes to come, Gilligan said contriving scenes like the one from October?s season finale where (SPOILER ALERT!) a fellow drug lord ended up with half of his head missing are not the point of the series.
Blame the bickering. Blame the reality TV stars. Blame the judges (and then some). The truth is this isn?t the first time ...
?We don?t set out to make the show shocking,? he said. ?I know you?re rolling your eyes when you?re (reading) this, but it?s true. We?re telling a very dark story and we?re involved in a very dark world, and to paint it as anything less than unpleasant would be disingenuous. We?re looking to be showmen and women, trying to give the audience something to talk about the next day around the water cooler. But the ultimate goal isn?t to be gruesome or bloody ? it?s to be dramatic.?
Gilligan, whose other key TV job was working as a producer/writer/director on ?The X-Files? from 1996 to 2002, said he will miss the series once it?s over. ?It?s been the best job I?ve ever had, and I suspect I?m going to look back on it with a great deal of nostalgia. But after 16 more episodes, it will be time to end it all. It was always intended to be a finite, closed-ended show. You have to know when to hold ?em and when to fold ?em.?
So what?s next? Gilligan said he?s keen to do a Western, and he?ll probably return to feature films, where he got his start. (He wrote the scripts for ?Home Fries? and ?Hancock.?) He?s enjoyed his time in television, but feels it ?sidetracked? him from why he really got into the business.
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But before he can head back to Hollywood, there?s the little issue of Walter White. Not since Tony Soprano has an irredeemable killer been so, well, identifiable. And we all know just how ?The Sopranos? ended: by irritating most of its core fans with a non-ending.
Not ticking off the viewers, said Gilligan, ?keeps me awake at night. It gives me nightmares. The closer we get to the final episode, I assume the worse it?ll be. But that?s why we?re ending after 16. You want to go out with fans of the show still being fans. The best we can do is be disciplined and honest in our storytelling, and not go for the bells and whistles. Let the chips fall where they may.?
How would you like to see Walter's story end? Share your suggestions on the Facebook page for our TV blog, The Clicker.
? 2011 MSNBC Interactive.? Reprints
Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45407448/ns/today-entertainment/
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Astronaut Jim Lovell's notes, including a 70-page check list, from the famous Apollo 13 flight are up for auction at Heritage Auctions in Texas. Most expect the final price to go to six figures.
Who is Jim Lovell?
Lovell was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered an accident in space and returned home with its astronauts safe and sound only due to great efforts by the crew and the members of mission control in Houston. Lovell also flew on the Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the moon during the Christmas holidays in 1968, and on Gemini 7, which established a long duration space flight record of 14 days in orbit, and on Gemini 12.
Why was the Apollo 13 mission significant?
Apollo 13 actually never made it to the moon, thanks to an exploding fuel tank in the Apollo spacecraft service module. The crew was forced to return to Earth, after having powered down the command module, by riding in the attached lunar module, which was undamaged and service as a kind of life boat.
The Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to transfer the data from the guidance computer of the command module to that of the lunar module by hand. The Apollo guidance computers in that era had less power than modern pocket calculators and data had to be entered by hand. Lovell's notes, written in the margins of the check list, consisted of the data that had to be entered into the lunar module computer.
The prospect of the crew of Apollo 13 dying in space was very real and their successful return to Earth, celebrated in a Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, provided the Apollo program some unexpected drama for a world that had become jaded with moon landings less than a year after Apollo 11.
Why is the check list so valuable if it never went to the moon?
Besides having been on board an iconic and, because of the accident, unique Apollo mission, the check list has hand written notes from an actual Apollo astronaut, recently signed and authenticated. Among space related collectables,. Apollo artifacts are considered the most valuable.
Why is Lovell letting go of the check list after so long?
Lovell has donated quite a few artifacts to museums and for auction. He is, as are all of the Apollo era astronauts, in the winter of his life, being past 80 years of age. It is time to pass the checklist, an undoubted historical artifact, to a new custodian.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times and The Weekly Standard.
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COMMENTARY | In what's considered by most to be little more than symbolism, former U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been convicted of war crimes by a Malaysian court for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The "Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War" [sic] charged that both men knowingly ordered the invasion of Iraq, under a false pretext of former dictator Saddam Hussein having stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
Part of the Malaysian court's ruling stated that both men forged documents intended to support their claims and that during the invasion more than a million Iraqi citizens were killed. The 5-panel war crimes tribunal took a mere four days to come to their verdict. The Malaysian judges also expressed their desire the two leaders names be listed on the war criminal's register, under the Rome Statute.
While most Americans will refuse to accept the convictions as legitimate, even the most staunch conservative must find President Bush joking about the missing WMD, during a Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in 2007, in bad taste. How he found humor over the topic, which so many soldiers gave their lives for is beyond comprehension. Bad taste? Yes, but criminal? We'd have to let a fair trial work that out.
Neither Bush or Blair will face any sort of imprisonment for their actions here in America or in the United Kingdom, especially when we consider that neither man was present at the trial and allowed to defend themselves. The very idea of a conviction "in absentia" is offensive to civilized people. Even those 24 men serving under Adolf Hitler, whom the Nuremberg Trials convicted of war crimes, were allowed to offer up a defense before the international court. I'm no fan of George Bush or Tony Blair. But I am a huge supporter of the idea of fair trials.
Malaysia seems to be posturing, but for what purpose? What exactly would the goal be in making such a gesture? Will their tin horn justice system be recognized by anyone outside of their nation? It's not likely. It's hard to imagine the U.S. or the U.K. respecting this conviction.
If former President Bush and former PM Blair have any charges to answer to, let those charges be made in a court where the two men have a chance to offer a defense. It's the least anyone else would deserve.
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Enlarge iStockphoto.com Anthropologists say early humans who hunted and gathered had longer jaws to hold all those teeth.
iStockphoto.comAnthropologists say early humans who hunted and gathered had longer jaws to hold all those teeth.
Got a mouthful of metal and stack of orthodontic bills? You can thank your farmer ancestors for them.
That's according to an anthropologist who says the switch from chewing wild game to eating corn, rice and wheat could have shortened the human jaw so that teeth don't fit in it as well.
When agriculture took off in some parts of the world, it had a lot to offer people: Farmed foods are a more reliable source of calories, and are easier to chew and digest. But they also may have helped transform the jaw bone before the teeth could catch up.
?To test this theory, Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, a lecturer at the University of Kent in England, compared the shape of modern human jaws and skulls from 11 different cultures around the world. Included were places like Italy and Japan, with many centuries of agriculture as the primary food source, and Alaska and Australia, where people fed themselves by hunting and gathering.
While diet didn't affect the shapes of people's skulls, it had a big impact on their jawbones. The hunter-gatherers had longer, narrower jaws which left more room for adult teeth, while the farmers had shorter, wider jaws. That difference persisted independent of genetics, climate, and geography.
"The hunter-gatherer diet would have been very different, depending on where you lived in the world," says von Cramon-Taubadel. She's the author of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "What you're eating on a daily and annual basis is very variable."
But farmers tend to eat the same thing over and over, and easy-to-chomp cooked grains such as corn, wheat and rice make up the bulk of the diet.
People's teeth haven't changed much over the centuries, the anthropologist says. "It's interesting that there's this mismatch between teeth and bone." And these days, if you live in a country with dental care and the money to pay for it, that may mean orthodontia.
"Our behavior has such a dramatic effect on our biology," von Cramon-Taubadel concludes. "Some parts of our bodies are just more plastic. They're more prone to change."
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MIAMI?? Police say a South Florida woman posed as a doctor and gave a series of toxic injections to a woman who wanted a bigger backside and curvier body.
Sgt. Bill Bamford is with the Miami Gardens Police Department. He says Oneal Ron Morris was arrested Friday after a yearlong hunt. Morris, who was born a man but identifies as a woman, has been charged with practicing medicine without a license with serious bodily injury.
Morris was released from jail on bond, and a telephone listing for her could not be found.
Police say Morris injected cement, mineral oil and a sealant used to fix flat tires into another woman's rear end in May 2010. Investigators believe Morris performed this same procedure on herself and possibly on other people.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45376490/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
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A "nocturnal" orchid that blooms only under the cover of darkness has been discovered on a tropical island in the South Pacific ? a first for the orchid world, scientists say.
The new night-flowering species, Bulbophyllum nocturnum, was described by researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in England, and the Center for Biodiversity Naturalis in the Netherlands.
Dutch researcher Ed de Vogel collected specimens of the mysterious plant from a logging site while conducting fieldwork in New Britain, a large, volcanic island that is part of Papua New Guinea.
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However, the plant's surprising nighttime habits weren't discovered until much later.
De Vogel and his colleagues cultivated the plants back in the Netherlands, and the orchids appeared to thrive in their new greenhouse home. Soon, one plant produced buds.
The researchers had established the orchids belonged to a particularly rare and bizarre group of the genus Bulbophyllum, and eagerly awaited the strange showing that would surely come when the plant bloomed.
However, much to the researchers' disappointment, the buds withered and died without opening.
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Perplexed, de Vogel took a plant home with him one evening. Two hours before midnight, a bud began to open, revealing an exotic bloom as yet unknown to science.
Subsequent observations revealed that the other orchids bloomed at 10 p.m. and, the next morning, about 12 hours later, the flowers withered and died.
Other plant species bloom at night ? the aptly named corpse flower, whose massive bloom stinks of rotting flesh, typically begins its malodorous display around midnight. Yet once opened, the plant stays that way for about a day.
In addition, other plant species, such as the queen of the night cactus (Selenicereus grandiflorus) and the midnight horror tree (Oroxylum indicum) open in the dark and close shortly before or after sunrise.
However, the newly identified Bulbophyllum nocturnum is the only orchid known to open at night and close when daylight returns.
It's not clear why the plant flowers in the dark, and researchers say more investigation is needed. However, the scientists said it could be that midge flies that forage at night pollinate the orchids.
The discovery is published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
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? 2011 OurAmazingPlanet. All rights reserved. More from OurAmazingPlanet.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45394895/ns/technology_and_science-science/
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