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Where disaster and compensation intersect youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find Kenneth Feinberg Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington)

tries to develop consensus with the companies. "I'm the pay mediator, I'm the negotiator." Submitted at 4/29/2010 12:12:31 PM Although with his next breath You can call him mediator, or he does acknowledge having the you can call him negotiator, but power. "I must say the statute don't call him pay czar. ultimately gives me final Kenneth Feinberg says he authority so if you don't work doesn't like the shorthand title something out I'm obligated by that's used to describe his role as law to make the decision. But the administration's supervisor I'm not looking to impose my of compensation practices at will on these companies." firms that received money under But one of the wonders of the government's Troubled Feinberg is that he seems to end Asset Relief Program. up in the middle of the "A very unfortunate term," he c r o s s r o a d s o f m o n e y a n d said at the Reuters Global disaster, sometimes trying to Financial Regulation Summit. make unthinkable equations as "Pay czar implies that I'm when he had to determine issuing some sort of imperial payments to the families of edicts, arbitrary edicts on pay, S e p t e m b e r 1 1 v i c t i m s o r without regard to consensus or distributions from a fund setup the input of the beneficiaries of in the aftermath of the Virginia these decisions." Tech shootings. Au contraire. Feinberg says he So why does he keep ending up

at that intersection? "That's a question for a psychiatrist and a political scientist I guess. It just so happens in the last decade there have been some thorny public policy problems where one way or another I've been asked to get

involved," Feinberg said. And how does supervising compensation at government bailed-out firms compare with putting a price on the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? (Yes he was involved in that

too). "It's altogether different. In the Zapruder case it was a fascinating issue: what is the market value of that grainy 8 millimeter original black-andwhite film of the Kennedy assassination, not as a commercial vehicle but as a historical artifact?" he said. After a three-day arbitration the determination was $16 million. "And you can go over and see that 8 millimeter film, sitting there in a humidor glassenclosed case and you marvel that that piece of celluloid is worth $16 million, but it's part of American history," he says. Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Feinberg at Reuters Summit)

Foreclosure Quiz (HowStuffWorks Daily Feed) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM

Foreclosure is a legal course of action in which nobody really comes out on top. Think you

have some foreclosure fortitude? The Art of Looking Prime Take this quiz and find out. Ministerial - The 2010 UK Five Filters featured article: General Election. Available

tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Angelides: People make mistakes, Greeks face tax, take Alan Greenspan and Captain of pensions and pay misery Titanic in austerity plan Tabassum Zakaria (Front Row Washington) Submitted at 4/29/2010 1:24:40 PM

Phil Angelides, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chairman, says he'd rather see some taking of responsibility than hear another "I'm sorry." "Personally I don't see my role as ... to obtain apologies. What I don't hear is a sense of responsibility and selfassessment about what occurred. There seems to be a disconnect between the practices that people undertook and the financial collapse," he said at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit. "I'm struck by the extent to which all fingers point away generally from the person testifying," Angelides said. And it's not just Wall Street executives that he's talking about. "When Alan Greenspan came in front of us he said he'd been 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong. Well, you know, the captain of

(World News from Times Online)

by political infighting in Germany, where opponents of Angela Merkel’s Government Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:13:00 AM threatened to block a Bill An increase in the retirement a u t h o r i s i n g t h e c o u n t r y ’ s age from an average ago of 53 participation in a three-year to 67, a three-year wage freeze package. and cuts in public sector pay are The Greek debt crisis escalated understood to be among the to panic levels this week after its austerity measures agreed to by g o v e r n m e n t b o n d s w e r e the Greek Government in downgraded to junk status, exchange for a €24 billion (£21 sending markets and the euro billion) rescue package. spiralling downwards. Figures The measures include severe have shown that the Greek cuts in Civil Service wages, national debt is bigger than its with public servants losing their GDP. the Titanic was probably 99 conscious decision to turn his “13th and 14th” months’ salary George Papandreou, the Prime percent right and one percent back, one of the two. I mean, and pension entitlements, a Minister, said that he expected wrong. It's the enormity of the there's two answers, and neither reduction of state benefits and the aid to be agreed within days mistake that matters," he said. are particularly good ones," tax increases on alcohol and but warned that Greece faced a (He is of course referring to the Angelides said. tobacco to help cut the deficit. battle for survival. “We will do former chairman of the Federal (OUCH! If he throws punches in Final details were still being whatever it takes to save the Reserve who could do no wrong the commission report like he decided last night with officials country,” he said. until the financial crisis hit, does in interviews, it might f r o m t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Five Filters featured article: sinking his star along with the make for an interesting read...) Monetary Fund, the European The Art of Looking Prime markets). Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Commission, and the European Ministerial - The 2010 UK Was Greenspan asleep at the Reed (Angelides at Reuters Central Bank. A final draft General Election. Available wheel? Summit) should be ready for approval by tools: PDF Newspaper, Full "Well certainly on subprime the Greek Parliament next Text RSS, Term Extraction. lending. He was either asleep at week. the wheel or he made a Any deal could still be derailed

April 2010's Most Popular Posts [[this Is Good]] Adam Pash (Lifehacker) Submitted at 4/30/2010 5:30:00 AM

This month we helped you access blocked stuff on the web, sifted through the tech-focused

April Fools' pranks, backed up and played Wii games from an external hard drive, and a whole

lot more. Here's a look back at April at Lifehacker. More »

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Live updates: Louisiana oil spill disaster (World News from Times Online) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:10:31 AM

3.06pm BP Plc will clean up an oil spill from one of its wells in the Gulf of Mexico and compensate those affected, its Chief Executive said, accepting that the disaster could hit plans to open new areas off the U.S. coast to drilling. “We are taking full responsibility for the spill and we will clean it up and where people can present legitimate claims for damages we will honour them. We are going to be very, very aggressive in all of that,” Tony Hayward said. President Barack Obama has proposed opening offshore areas of the U.S., where oil exploration is currently barred, to drilling. Oil executives fear the oil slick will scupper these plans. Mr Hayward said it was only right that the accident should influence the debate but added that he hoped an effective response would reassure people about the risks. “There may be an industry issue around what may or may not be opened,” he said. “It would be bizarre to say it shouldn’t influence the debate. How the debate will come out, I think ultimately will be judged by the success we have in dealing with this incident”.

3.01pm The Earth Observatory at Nasa has these images of the spill from space. 2.58pm Top ten worst oil spills 2.53pm How fast is the oil coming ashore? The National Ocean Service says When an oil spill happens, it spreads very rapidly unless it is contained by something (like a boom or a boat slip in a harbor). The lighter (less dense) the oil, the faster it spreads out to form a very thin sheen. For example, gasoline spreads faster than a heavy black oil, such as #6 fuel oil. Faster currents and winds can make oil spread faster. Temperature can sometimes make a difference in how fast an oil spreads. Colder oil is more viscous (doesn't flow as well) and spreads more slowly. If it gets cold enough, oil doesn't flow like a fluid anymore, but acts more like a solid (like tar or silly putty). We have to remember that when responding to oil spills in arctic areas. But under most conditions, within a very short period of time (minutes to a few hours for large spills), even very heavy oil has usually spread out enough that it is about as thin as a coat of paint on the wall. 2.44pm

The US Coast Guard has some dramatic footage of the rig alight. 2.19pm From Associated Press Two Air Force planes have been sent to Mississippi and are awaiting orders to start dumping chemicals on the oil spill threatening the Gulf Coast. Master Sgt. Bob Barko Jr. said Friday that two C-130s specially modified for aerial spraying were sent [on] Thursday from the Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Ohio. Air Force spokesman Maj. David Faggard at the Pentagon says the planes stand ready in case they're needed to spray oildispersing chemicals. The Navy also has sent equipment for the cleanup. Pentagon officials are talking with the Department of Homeland Security to figure out what other help the military can provide. 2.15pm President Obama has said that he will use "every available resource including the department of defence" to deal with the spill. 2.01pm The Delta National Wildlife Refuge, home to thousands of species of fish and fowl, is in the line of sight of the spill. Along with other national parks. The most commonly observed species include American

kestrels, northern harriers, redtailed hawks and turkey vultures. Black vultures, Cooper's hawks, merlins, redshouldered hawks and sharpshinned hawks have also been seen on the refuge. Ospreys are common winter visitors to the refuge. Untold numbers of passerine birds (songbirds) utilize the refuge as a resting and staging area during the spring and fall migrations. Deer are frequently observed by the refuge staff on the natural pass banks, manmade spoil banks, and the marshes associated with these features. Swamp rabbits are found over much of the refuge, and populations appear to be stable 1.59pm Greenpeace warns that a large part of the country's wetlands are in danger. All efforts to stem the flow have so far failed. Weather forecasters are warning that changing winds could drive the slick ashore by Friday night. The Louisiana coast, which has around 40% of the nation's wetlands - key spawning grounds for countless fish and bird species - will be hardest hit. 1.50pm There are reports of traces of oil on the coast of Louisiana. Earlier fishermen were given special dispensation to begin harvesting shrimp before the slick destroys their catch.

1.45pm The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. Navy said it will send more than 12 additional miles of inflatable oil booms to the Gulf, as well as seven towable skimming systems and 50 contractors with experience operating the equipment, according to military officials at the Pentagon. The Navy is making two large facilities available to the Coast Guard personnel and BPemployed contractors who are currently taking the lead in fighting the spill. Military officials said the booms and skimmers were being sent to a Naval construction base in Gulfport, Miss. The Navy also opened its air base in Pensacola, Fla., to the effort. Booms work by scooping oil off the water. But there are doubts they will be able to cope with the massive influx. 1.37pm Storms are threatening to hit the coast which could push tide waters higher than normal through the weekend, the National Weather Service warned. 1.29pm The White House said today that new domestic offshore oil drilling will be on hold until the investigation of the Gulf of Mexico disaster is complete. David Axelrod, White House LIVE page 4

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US bans offshore drilling as Deepwater Horizon slick hits land (World News from Times Online)

company, is already facing a deluge of litigation after the disaster. Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:26:31 AM Lawsuits naming BP have been The US today banned all new filed by the family of the offshore drilling as crude oil missing oil worker Shane from the sunken Deepwater Roshto, as well as by Louisiana Horizon rig began lapping at the fishing companies. shores of sensitive marshland at Last month President Obama the mouth of the Mississippi lifted a ban on offshore drilling River. and oil and gas exploration, Speaking on US television, saying that it was vital to David Axelrod, a White House America’s energy independence. senior adviser, declared that no Charlie Crist, the Republican company would be allowed to Governor of Florida, called the proceed with exploration in new slick was frightening and said areas off the US coast until an that it had forced him to investigation into the cause of reconsider his support for the disaster h a d b e e n offshore drilling. completed. “It’s the last thing in the world I He said: “No additional drilling would want to see happen in our has been authorised and none beautiful state,” he said. will until we find out what “Until you actually see it, I happened ... and whether there d o n ’ t k n o w h o w y o u c a n was something unique and comprehend and appreciate the preventable here.” shear magnitude of that thing.” BP, Britain’s second-largest The first fingers of oily sheen

Chelsea Clinton admonishes Bill to lose 15 lbs. for her summer wedding (The Newsroom) (Yahoo! News: Most Viewed)

30T07:40:23-07:00 Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime ARUN buzzed up: China: Ministerial - The 2010 UK Diplomat beaten, injured by General Election. Available Houston police (AP) tools: PDF Newspaper, Full 25 seconds ago 2010-04- Text RSS, Term Extraction. Submitted at 4/29/2010 3:26:16 PM

reached the mouth of the Mississippi River on Thursday evening local time, 24 hours ahead of previous estimates by the US Coast Guard. As the sun began to set over the fragile wetlands surrounding the Mississippi, the oil was slipping into the South Pass of the river and already lapping at the shoreline in long black lines. Although US government agencies and BP set up 100,000ft of booms to protect coastal areas from the slick, rough seas sent 5ft (1.5m) waves of oily water over the top of the booms into the river. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

LIVE continued from page 3

senior adviser, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that President Barack Obama “is not going to continue the moratorium on drilling but... no additional drilling has been authorized and none will until we find out what happened here and whether there was something unique and preventable here." Mr Obama proposed earlier this year a new policy that open tracts of waters off the Virginia, Alaska and Florida coasts to exploration. Officials said this was a longterm process that was already set to include years of environmental, commercial and scientific study. 1.22pm This map from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, show the spread of the oil since the disaster and its projected dispersal today. 1pm There are 210,000 gallons of oil are leaking into the water every day. BP is upping its efforts to stop a massive oil slick from sliding into Louisiana’s waterways, marshlands and coastline. But they want volunteers to help out. The oil company and

the federal government have established an official hotline for volunteers in the US at 1866-448-5816. You can also find information on getting i n v o l v e d a t volunteerlousiana.gov. If you have a boat in Louisiana and want to help with the oil spill response, BP is telling volunteers to contact Vince M i t c h e l l a t vince.mitchell@lamor.com or 425-745-8017. Updates on the state response can be found at Emergency.Louisiana.gov. To report oiled wildlife, call 1866-557-1401 and leave a message. Messages will be checked hourly. To discuss spill related damage, call 1-800-440-0858. To report oil on land or for general community and volunteer information, call 1866-448-5816. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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The missing men of Deepwater Horizon oil rig (World News from Times Online)

children, Kaylee, 3, and 3month-old Maddison, with his wife, Courtney. Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:06:00 AM He loved fishing and the Eleven men were missing outdoors and attended a Baptist p r e s u m e d d e a d a f t e r t h e church in Jonesville, Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon oil rig where a memorial service for exploded last week. him will be held today. Dale Burkeen, 37, was a crane Jason Anderson, was a father of operator on the platform and two from Bay City, Texas. was trained to lower crew Stephen Curtis was an assistant members to boats in an driller on the rig from emergency. Georgetown, Louisiana. He had returned to the rig from Gordon Jones, 28, of Louisiana, Neshoba, near Philadelphia, was expecting to become a a b o u t a w e e k b e f o r e t h e father to a second son with his explosion. He and wife, Rhonda, wife, Michelle. have two children, Aryn, 14 and Karl Kleppinger, 38, of Timothy, 6. Natchez, Mississippi was a D o n a l d C l a r k , 4 9 , o f Desert Storm veteran who spent Newellton, Louisiana, was more than ten years working on expected to leave the rig the day oil rigs. He was a floorman who after the explosion for a three- made about $75,000 a year week break. He was an assistant working off the Louisiana coast. driller. Blair Manuel, 56, resident of Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, has two Gonzales, Louisiana, was a

chemical engineer on the rig. Dewey Revette, 48, from State Line, Mississippi, was a father who had worked for the company as an oil driller for 29 years. Shane Roshto, 22, was from Franklin County, Mississippi. His family were named on law suits filed by Louisianaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fisheries industry, accusing BP and Transocean, the rig operator, of negligence. Adam Weise, 24, of Yorktown, Texas, came straight from high School to work on the rig in 2005. He loved to hunt and fish and play football. He was the youngest of four children. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

BP CEO says will pay oil spill claims (Reuters: Top News) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:16:36 AM

Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to

an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests. NYSE and AMEX quotes delayed by at least 20 minutes. Nasdaq delayed by at least 15 minutes. For a complete list of exchanges and delays, please click here. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Science Of The Deep Videos (HowStuffWorks Daily Feed) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM

(more info) Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime

Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

iPhone apps make up 21% of Gameloft sales in 1Q Ken Ray (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:00:00 AM

Filed under: iPhone Gameloft's emphasis on iThings seems to be paying off. The French developer, one of the world's biggest publishers of games for mobiles, says iPhone apps

accounted for 21% of its sales in the first quarter of 2010. That's a decent percentage considering that, for all of 2009, iPhone games only represented 14% of the company's sales. While Gameloft still makes noise about other phones and platforms, including those from Palm, Samsung, Nokia and

company had cut back on developing for Android because buying apps for Androids was "not as neatly done as on the G o o g l e ' s A n d r o i d , t h e iPhone," and that companies company's focus seems to be on weren't making significant Apple devices. Late last year, revenue on Google phones. Gameloft finance director [via iPodNN] Alexandre de Rochefort said his TUAW iPhone apps make up 21% of Gameloft sales in 1Q

originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Man who found — and sold — the missing iPhone unmasked (Ben Patterson) (Yahoo! News: Most Viewed)

Gizmodo's gigantic iPhone scoop last week and the Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:50:21 PM subsequent fallout, including a Twenty-one-year-old Redwood raid on Gizmodo editor Jason City, California, resident Brian Chen's house by San Mateo J. Hogan, the man identified by sheriff's deputies armed with a Wired.com as the guy who search warrant. found — and later sold — Hogan has now lawyered up, Apple's missing iPhone in a bar and in a statement released last month, has a message for through his attorney, the young A p p l e , t h e e n g i n e e r w h o man says he "regrets his mistake originally lost the precious in not doing more to return the gadget, and the tech world at phone," and that he thought his large: Sorry about that. $5,000 deal with Gizmodo was Following a trail of "clues" on only "so that they could review social-networking sites and the phone," Wired reports. confirming his ID with a source According to Hogan's attorney's "involved in the iPhone find," statement, Hogan didn't see the W i r e d n a m e d H o g a n o n lost iPhone until another patron Thursday as the bar patron who at the Redwood City bar came made off with Apple's top-secret up and asked him if it was his; iPhone prototype and then sold Hogan apparently then asked a it to Gizmodo for $5,000 after few other patrons if they'd lost an Apple software engineer left the device before heading out, the precious phone on a bar iPhone in hand, according to stool. Wired. Up until now, Hogan's identity Initial reports had it that the has been a mystery to the public, man who'd taken the iPhone but the 21-year-old college tried repeatedly to call the Apple student (or at least, he was a Care support line to return the college student as of 2008) may phone, but according to the have sensed that he was in statement in the Wired story, trouble after all the hoopla over Hogan never personally called

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a lost item and keep it without making "reasonable" efforts to find the real owner, you could be charged with a crime.) Gizmodo's Jason Chen also has yet to be charged; lawenforcement officials have reportedly said they'll hold off on searching the computers and servers seized from Chen's house until they decide whether California's shield law for journalists applies to him. Wired: iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’ CNET: The people involved in sale of iPhone revealed — Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News. Follow me on Twitter! Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter! Join Yahoo! News on Facebook! (Click "Like.") Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Nokia sticks to its stylus roots, offers telescopic SU-36 for capacitive screens Vladislav Savov (Engadget) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:04:00 AM

You know what, we're not gonna make that joke. You can, but we'll just move right along to the meat of this story -- Nokia has listed a telescopic stylus for capacitive screens, the SU-36, which seems to have come out right alongside the N8 to serve as its Symbian^3 assistant. Compatible with the N8, X6, and any other phone with a proper touchscreen on it, this retractable accessory will substitute your fingers when they are either too cold or too imprecise to do the job themselves. It's not yet been priced or made available, but you'll be fine using that sausage stylus for another few weeks, won't ya? [Thanks, Zabavan] Nokia sticks to its stylus roots, offers telescopic SU-36 for capacitive screens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. cook, shrimp is a high-protein, Five Filters featured article: tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Permalink| Nokia| Email this| low-calorie alternative to other The Art of Looking Prime Text RSS, Term Extraction. Comments meats and fish. It stars here Ministerial - The 2010 UK in twenty 20-minute recipes. General Election. Available

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Apple, although a friend of his offered to. The owners of the bar where the iPhone was lost also told Wired that Hogan never bothered to call them about the lost hardware, although the anguished Apple engineer who mislaid the iPhone "returned several times" to see if it had turned up. Meanwhile, CNET is reporting that Hogan had help in finding a buyer for the lost iPhone. The "go-between," according to CNET: 27-year-old Sage Robert Wallower, a UC Berkeley student who "contacted technology sites" about the handset. Wallower told CNET that he "didn't see it or touch it in any manner" but knows "who found it," adding, "I need to speak to a lawyer ... I think I have said too much." No one has been charged yet in the case of the lost iPhone, but a deputy district attorney for San Mateo County tells Wired that Hogan is "very definitely ... being looked at as a suspect in theft." (In California, finding a piece of lost property isn't a case of "finders keepers"; if you find

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WEATHER continued from page 6

eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor. Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells tap deposits that hold many times more oil than a single tanker. BP has requested more resources from the Defense Department, especially

underwater equipment that might be better than what is commercially available. A BP executive said the corporation would "take help from anyone." That includes fishermen who could be hired to help deploy containment boom. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency so officials could begin preparing for the oil's impact. He also asked the federal government if he could call up 6,000 National Guard troops to help. ___ Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr in Mississippi,

Phuong Le in Seattle, Janet McConnaughey, Kevin McGill, Michael Kunzelman and Brett Martel in New Orleans, and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge also contributed to this report. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

7 Step Plan for Healthy Living (HowStuffWorks Daily Feed) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM

Nowadays, our busy schedules make it hard to find time to take care of ourselves by eating healthfully and exercising. We consulted nutrition, health and fitness experts to come up with seven simple steps to take for better health. Our tips keep hectic lifestyles in mind and promote the two basics of a healthy diet: balance and

variety. You can find more information like this in the book, Great Adventures in Food(St. Martin's Press, 2000), by FoodFit founder and CEO Ellen Haas. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Mendeley Throws Open the Doors to Academic Data Curt Hopkins (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 4/29/2010 10:30:00 PM

Innovations in communications software and websites can be quite exciting. After the dust dies down, however, it's really not clear how much more information has been made available, how much more people can communicate, how much more thinking has been enabled. London-based Mendeley's offering up an Open API and making a vast catalog of academic publications searchable, well, that might make the cut. Sponsor Mendeley is a popular

academic and scientific research cross-platform management tool, usable both desktop and online. The tool automatically extracts bibliographic data from a user's document library and stores that information, and the papers and studies it helps builds, on their computer or on the cloud. It is that information that is now available with its API and on its search. Prior to making the API catchas-catch-can, Mendeley is asking researchers and developers to send in proposals by May 14 and will announce who among them will have immediate access on May 21. The quantities of data in aggregate (the API also offers

you your own data) and the varieties in type of research, from cancer studies to the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on early American democracy, beggars the imagination. On a more practical level, Jason Hoyt, the company's Research Director, writing on the Mendeley blog, pointed out the number of features that company gets requests for are too many to handle. Perhaps developers, both general and niche, will invent some interesting tools.

in ranking your results. We have also taken care to prevent artificial enhancement of the results, i.e. gaming the readership. Over time, we hope The catalog has basic search to refine this algorithm by starting today, but Hoyt said the t a k i n g i n t o a c c o u n t o t h e r c o m p a n y a l r e a d y h a s a n measures of quality such as the advanced search function ready reputation of who you trust and that will be implemented in two follow on Mendeley." weeks. Although the combination of Hoyt promises the relational Open API and search should in elements of Mendeley will be itself be a powerful source of expressed in its search results. information, inside academe and " A n a l g o r i t h m c a l l e d out, it might also inspire 'ReaderRank'...will adjust results academic publishers, who are based on the level of readership n o t o r i o u s s t i n g y w i t h for an article. This doesn't mean information, to loosen their the most read articles will stranglehold on knowledge. always appear at the top, only Discuss that it is an additional measure

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Germany sees private sector helping Greece (Reuters: Top News)

euros, which investors hope will stop the debt crisis from sinking other fragile EU economies. ATHENS(Reuters) - European But it faces a battle with unions banks will contribute to a multi- who have been angered by the billion euro Greek bailout, scale of the cutbacks. Germany said on Friday, as A senior banking source told talks to secure European Union Reuters that Deutsche Bank AG and IMF aid to Athens in return C h i e f E x e c u t i v e J o s e f for draconian budget cuts edged Ackermann, at the request of toward a deal. Germany's finance minister, was Germany| Greece helping coordinate German Negotiations on the aid package private sector efforts to support c o u l d b e w r a p p e d u p b y the rescue package. S a t u r d a y , t h e E u r o p e a n The consortium has already Commission said, and private pledged to contribute between 1 sector involvement could make billion euros ($1.3 billion) and 2 it easier for EU governments to billion, which could involve persuade skeptical taxpayers to buying Greek government debt, rescue Greece from its debt although no formal agreement crisis. has been struck, the source said. German Vice Chancellor Guido The hope is that once the Westerwelle compared the need markets see the private sector is for private sector support for t a k i n g t h e G r e e k r e s c u e Athens with Berlin's plans for a seriously, other companies may l e v y o n b a n k s t o p r o t e c t follow, helping to stabilize taxpayers from future financial nervous markets. crises. Although political barriers "I expect that, just as in remain, the rescue package is Germany banks will participate likely to win the unanimous in the consequences of the approval required from euro economic and financial crisis zone countries for it to go ahead. through the famous bank levy Germany had expressed deep that we agreed upon in the reservations about bankrolling a government, so also in Europe profligate Greece because banks will want to make their Athens misled partners over its contribution and will do so," catastrophic finances. But Westerwelle said. Finance Minister Wolfgang Greece is preparing severe S c h a e u b l e s a i d o n F r i d a y austerity measures to cut around supporting Greece was vital to 24 billion euros of budget deficit all euro members. and unlock European Union and "And that's why it's important -IMF aid of up to 120 billion not only to help Greece to Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:26:49 AM

prevent the Greece crisis turning into a danger for the euro -- but at the same time to fight speculation," he said. The German government will meet on Monday to give approval to a draft law on providing loans to Athens. The government will then try to push the law through the lower house of the German parliament by Friday. WHAT ABOUT THE LONGER TERM? Despite the good short-term prospects for euro zone approval, there are still serious doubts over whether European governments will sustain their commitment to Greece over the longer term, especially if Greece fails to meet its budget cut targets. Social unrest could prevent socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou's government from pushing through the planned austerity measures, and Greek unions have called a series of strikes in protest at the cuts. Unions say the International Monetary Fund asked Athens to raise sales taxes, scrap bonuses amounting to two extra months pay in the public sector and accept a three-year pay freeze. Papandreou said the measures were vital to securing aid. "Many talk about red lines. The only red line is the country's interest. Today the top priority is the survival of the nation. This is the red line," he told

parliament. "The measures we must take, which are economic measures, are necessary for our country's protection, for our future, for us to be able to stand on our feet." German politicians have said the aid package could be worth 100-120 billion euros ($133-160 billion) over three years, against an original plan for 45 billion euros of aid in 2010. Euro zone finance ministers will meet on Sunday to discuss Greece and held a preliminary conference call on Friday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Reuters. Ratings agency Moody's downgraded nine Greek banks on Friday, briefly pushing their shares into negative territory after they rallied as much as 7.7 percent earlier on hopes of a quick deal. Those hopes helped push up global equities on Friday. In morning trade in New York, the euro had risen 0.8 percent to stand at $1.3335. The spread between Greek and German 10year government bond yields narrowed. But the euro was still on track to fall some 1.3 percent for the month and concerns remained over euro zone debts. NO CONTAGION European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said on Friday the Greek rescue package will prevent the crisis from spilling over to other

countries. "It is about safeguarding the overall financial stability of the euro zone," he said, adding it would "prevent further possible effects of contagion." Economists said euro zone states could end up footing a bill of half a trillion euros ($650 billion) to save several nations if they failed to engineer a Greek bailout that calmed markets. Markets have worried that nations like Portugal and Spain - whose debts were downgraded by ratings agencies this week -could be threatened unless they tackle their deficits swiftly. Portugal's main opposition leader, Pedro Passos Coelho, said his Social Democratic Party (PSD) supports the government's austerity plan and hopes to agree a pact that may allow a cut of this year's budget gap by an additional 1 percentage point. His comments were likely to reassure investors concerned about Lisbon's ability to tackle its deficit. In Spain, unemployment rose to a record high above 20 percent in the first quarter, stifling attempts to recover from recession, but Economy Minister Elena Salgado said Spanish debt was under control and Madrid would not have to seek aid. "Our debt is clean, and we will GERMANY page 13

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Massive oil spill in Gulf of Mexico heads to shore (Reuters: Top News)

put a hold on politically sensitive plans to expand offshore U.S. oil drilling. He VENICE, Louisiana(Reuters) - unveiled plans in March for a A massive oil spill in the Gulf of limited expansion, in part to try Mexico washed up to wildlife to win Republican support for refuges and seafood grounds on climate change legislation. the Louisiana coast on Friday, The White House said on as authorities struggled to avert Friday that no new drilling what could become one of the would be allowed until a review worst U.S. ecological disasters. was conducted of the oil spill, U.S.| Green Business| COP15 which happened after an With leading edges of the huge offshore rig exploded and sunk slick lapping up to outlying last week. marshes and waterways on the Obama has pledged to "use fringes of the Mississippi Delta, every single available resource," the U.S. Coast Guard prepared including the U.S. military, to protective booms along the contain the 120-mile (193-km) coast in Louisiana and other at- wide slick, while making clear risk states in a desperate bid to that London-based BP, the prevent oil from soiling the majority owner of the ruptured shore. well, was responsible for the "We continue to bring every cost of the clean-up. asset to bear to fight this spill," The spill has pounded BP's Coast Guard Rear Admiral Sally share price and those of other Brice-O'Hara told CNN. companies involved in the At President Barack Obama's project. urgent request, Department of As alarm over possible Homeland Security Secretary contamination spread along the Janet Napolitano, Interior U.S. Gulf Coast, the Louisiana Secretary Ken Salazar and Department of Health said E n v i r o n m e n t a l P r o t e c t i o n residents in coastal cities, Agency Administrator Lisa including New Orleans, were Jackson were due to fly over the likely smelling the sulfurous affected Gulf area on Friday to odor from the spill. assess the situation. The last flight by a Coast Guard The leak from a blown-out oil plane on Thursday had situated well on the ocean floor off the thin surface "rainbow sheen" Louisiana is pouring out crude of the slick just 10 meters (33 oil at a rate of up to 5,000 feet) from the Pass-a-Loutre barrels (210,000 gallons or wildlife reserve in Louisiana. It 955,000 liters) a day. seemed inevitable that some of The accident forced Obama to the oil would reach shore, Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:51:11 AM

although the Coast Guard was awaiting fresh information from its aircraft and vessels. THREAT TO FOUR STATES The escalating threat has deepened fears of severe damage to fisheries, wildlife refuges and tourism in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. So far, efforts to stop the flow of oil have failed. If unchecked, it will take about 50 days for the leak to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, the worst U.S. oil spill on record that sent 10.8 million gallons (49 million liters) of crude oil into Prince William Sound. The Gulf Coast and its marshlands are home to hundreds of species of wildlife, including manatees, sea turtles about to nest, dolphins, porpoises, whales, otters, pelicans and other birds. The wetlands are also a stopover for millions of migrating birds now transiting through the area. The Gulf is also one of the world's most fertile seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters, mussels, crabs and fish. It supports a $1.8 billion industry second only to Alaska. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose state is still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, declared a state of emergency and asked the Defense Department for funds to deploy up to 6,000 National Guard

troops to help. Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano declared it "a spill of national significance," meaning that federal resources from other regions could be used to fight it. Shrimp fishermen in Louisiana have filed a class-action lawsuit against BP, Swiss-based rig company Transocean Ltd, Halliburton and Cameron, accusing them of negligence. None of the companies had an immediate comment on the lawsuit. The Navy said it was supplying the Coast Guard with inflatable booms and seven skimming systems. In Mobile, Alabama, U.S. Coast Guard Captain Steve Poulin, said authorities were preparing for "shoreline impact", although it was not possible to predict exactly when. "We have a booming strategy for coastal Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle," Poulin said. BP and the Coast Guard have mounted what the company called the largest oil spill containment operation in history, involving dozens of ships and aircraft. BP admitted struggling to control the spill, which is 5,000 feet under the sea off Louisiana's coast, and appealed for help. It has asked the Pentagon for access to military imaging technology and remotely operated vehicles to

try to help it plug the ruptured well. Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead after the rig exploded 11 days ago. PAUSE IN DRILLING? There are signs the spill may be worse than one in 1969 off Santa Barbara, California, which prompted a moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts -- a ban Obama has said he wants to modify. Bill Nelson, a Democratic senator from Florida, said he was filing a bill to temporarily prohibit the administration from expanding offshore drilling, citing the risk of a potential "environmental and economic disaster" from the latest spill. Underwater robots failed to activate a cutoff valve on the ocean floor to stop the leak and BP is now hoping to cover the well with a giant inverted funnel that would capture the oil at the sea floor and channel it directly to a tanker ship at the surface. But that will take four weeks to put in place, by which stage over 150,000 barrels could have been spilled. If the funnel does not work, BP will have to rely on stemming the flow by drilling a relief well, which would take two to three months. The White House said Obama had been briefed on how the MASSIVE page 12

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Consumers step up spending, bolstering growth (Reuters: Top News) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:21:05 AM

WASHINGTON(Reuters) - The U.S. economy expanded at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter as consumers stepped up spending, the strongest sign yet a sustainable recovery is taking hold. While growth slowed from the fourth quarter's rapid 5.6 percent pace and was a touch weaker than economists expected, the details of the report from the Commerce Department on Friday were fairly upbeat. Consumer spending, which normally accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, added nearly 2.6 percentage points to U.S. gross domestic product last quarter, the biggest contribution since the fourth quarter of 2006. "Once you take a quick look under the hood you see some very positive signs there," said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies & Co. in New York. "This is just the latest piece of evidence to suggest that the recovery is sustainable." Still, markets showed some disappointment. U.S. stock markets were lower, while prices for U.S. government debt edged up. The dollar was little changed. Analysts had expected GDP, which measures total goods and services output within U.S.

borders, to grow at a 3.4 percent rate in the first three months of 2010. The economy has now grown for three straight quarters, although it still has a lot of lost ground to make up after its deepest and longest recession since the 1930s. The report showed consumer spending rose at a 3.6 percent rate in the January-March period, more than double the 1.6 percent pace in the fourth quarter and the biggest gain since the first quarter of 2007. "Retail sales are up, people are spending money," said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at BNY Mellon in New York. "We're seeing the beginning of the process of a broad-based recovery." The United States has emerged from recession more swiftly than Europe or Japan. Euro zone first-quarter GDP data is due in mid-May and is expected to show annualized growth of roughly 0.8 percent. Japan, which has been struggling with deflation, does not report its data until later in May. Analysts said the welcome but moderate pace of U.S. growth meant the Federal Reserve could bide its time before raising benchmark interest rates from their current levels near zero, particularly with unemployment hovering near 10 percent. The U.S. central bank on Wednesday noted activity had

strengthened in recent weeks and that the labor market was starting to improve. Still, it said it expects a modest recovery and renewed its vow to keep rates low for an extended period. BUSINESSES RESTOCK SHELVES Business inventories increased $31.1 billion in the first quarter, adding 1.57 percentage points to GDP, as businesses restocked to meet firming demand. It was the first increase in inventories since the first quarter of 2008. Businesses also continued to spend on software and equipment, though a bit less vigorously than in the prior quarter, boding well for the economic recovery. "If they are spending on equipment already, it shows a lot of confidence for the future hiring which supports consumer spending. If we continue to have employment growth, we will have a good year," said Kurt Karl, head of economic research at Swiss Re in New York. Last month the economy enjoyed the strongest jobs growth in three years as private employers stepped up hiring. New home construction was a drag on growth in the first quarter after two quarters of gains. Residential investment contracted at a 10.9 percent rate. Business spending on structures subtracted from GDP for a sixth straight quarter. Export growth slowed sharply

to a 5.8 percent pace in the first quarter from a 22.8 percent rate in the prior period, while imports rose at an 8.9 percent rate. That left a trade deficit that chipped off 0.61 percentage point from GDP. A separate report from the U.S. Labor Department showed employment costs rose 0.6 percent in the first quarter as benefit costs posted their biggest gain since the second quarter of 2002. Wages advanced just 0.4 percent. Other reports showed business activity in both New York city and Chicago grew in April, providing additional signs the economy's recovery was growing more durable. T h e T h o m s o n Reuters/University of Michigan's Surveys of Consumers showed sentiment falling in April from March as consumers saw the recovery as well under way, but slow. However, their view on how the economy will look 12 months from now improved from the prior month. (Additional reporting by Chris Reese in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci) Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

MASSIVE continued from page 11

slick may interfere with shipping channels, which it said could affect tankers delivering petroleum to the U.S. market. While the Mississippi is a major export route for U.S. grains and the region is a significant importer of crude oil, there were no reports of disruptions. Shares in BP and Transocean continued to fall on Friday as investors feared a significantly higher cleanup cost. BP is down around 12 percent and Transocean down nearly 15 percent since the rig explosion on April 20. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which handles more than one million barrels a day of crude imports and is connected by pipeline to the biggest U.S. refining region, said it did not expect any effect on its operations, which remained normal. (Additional reporting by Joshua Schnyer and Rebekah Kebede in New York and Kelli Dugan in Mobile, Alabama; Writing by Christopher Wilson and Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Stacey Joyce) Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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GERMANY continued from page 10

not have to ask for help," she said. The Greek talks are being closely watched for details on whether the aid will start in time for Greece to refinance an 8.5billion-euro bond coming due on May 19 and if the deal will be big enough to handle Athens' 300-billion-euro debt pile. The planned austerity measures include cuts aimed at Greece's system of public wage allowances, which often include generous extra pay for activities such as using computers or getting to work on time. These are primarily meant to

keep base salaries and pensions low, and a 5-15 percent cut could save the state about 300 million euros a year. More measures are bound to meet resistance. Opinion polls show a majority of Greeks oppose outside aid and expect the rescue package to hit living standards "Armageddon is coming. The situation caused by speculative mechanisms will be tackled only because the Germans have realized the domino effect that would have followed," Greece's conservative daily newspaper Eleftheros Typos said.

"But the lenders are setting the terms, and they are incredibly tough. At least for three years they will drink our blood. And this is not an exaggeration." (Writing by Dominic Evans; editing by Sonya Hepinstall) Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Lighter Spaghetti Bolognese (Cooking Light: Editor's Picks)

This lightened Italian classic features a slowly simmered meat sauce that is rich, hearty, and delicious. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Submitted at 4/29/2010 9:30:00 PM

On its European Public Policy Blog (yeah, there's one), Google spent some column-inches explaining how and why it runs around in special cars spying on you in the shower. Officially known as the "Google Street View Cars," they zip about gathering, "photos, local WiFi network data and 3-D building imagery." Here is how Google's Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, laid out the company's use of the various types of information. Sponsor

Spoilers Anonymous: '24,' 'NCIS,' and much more! Isabelle Carreau (TV Squad) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:29:00 AM

This is Spoilers Anonymous, a weekly column here at TV Squad where we supply you with the dirt on some of the more popular shows on the air. We'll never put spoilers up here on the main page in order to help the reformed stay unspoiled. If you have anything to add to the group, feel free to step up and let yourself be • Photos: so that we can build l o c a t i o n s . H o w e v e r t h e heard, either with our tips form Street View, our 360 degree information Google pulls, or by emailing us at tvsquad at street level maps. In addition, including SSID (the network gmail dot com, or call and leave we use this imagery to improve name) and the MAC address a message at(775) 640-8479. the quality of our maps, for ( d e v i c e n u m b e r ) c a n n o t Your anonymity is guaranteed, example by using shop, street TeleAtlas and Bing (as well as currently be linked to human if you wish to remain as such. and traffic signs to refine our something called the Fraunhofer identifies without a great deal This week we have spoilers local business listings and travel I n s t i t u t e , S k y h o o k * a n d more effort than Google seems f o r : ' 2 4 , ' ' 3 0 R o c k , ' N a v T e q ) h a r v e s t s i m i l a r to be putting into it. 'Californication,' 'Desperate directions. • WiFi network information: i n f o r m a t i o n . F o r t h o s e As with a lot of privacy Housewives,' 'Eureka,' 'Glee,' which we use to improve c o n c e r n e d w i t h e x c e s s i v e thought, it is not so much what 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'How I Met location-based services like gathering of invasive personal is going on now, or what a Your Mother,' 'Lost,' 'NCIS,' information, or aggregated company, or other agency ' P r i v a t e P r a c t i c e , ' ' T h e search and maps. • 3-D building imagery: we information that can, with wants, but what would be M e n t a l i s t , ' a n d ' V . ' Continue reading Spoilers collect 3D geometry data with massaging, become invasive, possible in the future, given Anonymous: '24,' 'NCIS,' and low power lasers (similar to I'm not sure the fact that others what is being done now. those used in retail scanners) are doing it will be terribly *Didn't this thing start the much more! Filed under: Spoilers which help us improve our comforting. Terminator wars? Discuss The major fear seems to be A nonymous, Reality-Free maps. using technical data to link Permalink| Email this| | Comments He pointed out, repeatedly, that geographical data with personal

Google Attempts to Explain Its Spy Cars. Again. Curt Hopkins (ReadWriteWeb)

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The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man MG Siegler (TechCrunch)

plugin because the standards were so weak. Also, I am looking at you, There are few people who developers who bitch whenever know the ins and outs of the a browser offers “non-standard” web as well as Joe Hewitt. For but innovative APIs. the past decade, he’s had his Browser makers need to go nuts hands deep in everything from with non-standard APIs and let Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to the W3C standardize later. Facebook (where he currently Waiting for the committee to works). Hewitt also knows a innovate is suicide. thing or two about the iPhone. So basically, Hewitt’s take is He’s the one who first built that Flash (and all plug-ins) only Facebook’s excellent iPhone exists because the W3C(the web app (before there were g o v e r n i n g b o d y f o r w e b native apps on the iPhone), and s t a n d a r d s ) i s t o o s l o w t o then the native app — which is f o r m a l i z e a n d a p p r o v e one of the best apps on the innovative new technologies. He platform. So when he rants urges browser-makers to break about something (as he does away from the W3C constraints from time-to-time), people and start going crazy with new listen. And today he went on APIs. one such rant. He then comes in defense of Following Apple CEO Steve Microsoft, the company that Jobs’ post about Flash this once all-but destroyed (through morning, Hewitt went on what just about everyone Twitter and started going off including the U.S. government with some of this thoughts. I thinks were unsavory means) asked Hewitt if I could recap the company Hewitt started his them; his response, “ sure, why career at (Netscape). not.” Hewitt, some may recall, 10 years ago we bullied quit iPhone development over M i c r o s o f t i n t o s t o p p i n g his distaste for some App Store innovation on IE so the W3C policies. Today, seeing a wave could take over. How’d that of anti-Flash talk on Twitter work out? spurred by Jobs’ post, Hewitt For those too young to started out: remember, IE was innovating Redirect your hatred of Flash to like crazy from 4.0 -6.0, right up the W3C, whose embarrassingly until the DOJ and web standards slow pace forced devs to use a commies intervened. Submitted at 4/30/2010 2:19:24 AM

@jeff_lamarche Oh c’mon. Aside from ActiveX, Microsoft moved the web forward faster from 96-00 than any other browser maker has. I don’t know why MS abandoned IE, but I do know that web developers were begging them to stop innovating and just follow the committee. Hewitt’s take here is that the antitrust action against Microsoft halted innovation in Internet Explorer. In 1996, when Hewitt says IE innovation really started, that browser didn’t even have 10% share of the market, while Netscape had nearly 90%. As an underdog, IE had to innovate. Until, of course, they took over the web, and then Microsoft inexplicably all-but abandoned the product. Hewitt then turns to the rise of the app stores (including, yes, the App Store). Why are app stores threatening the web and luring developers

like me away from it? “Evil” proprietary tech is blowing the web away. I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait. The “‘Evil’ proprietary tech is blowing the web away” quote is pretty compelling (I’m still kicking myself for not using it in the headline). Again, Hewitt’s point here is that the web is nowhere near where non-web technologies like Cocoa are — and won’t be for a decade. @KuraFire Did Microsoft patent their non-standard html/javascript/css extensions, preventing other browsers from implementing them? @johnfoliot True, they [w3c] don’t dictate, but developers shame others who use nonstandard APIs. That’s the problem. He wonders here why some of Microsoft’s standards weren’t adopted by the W3C? Then blames the web developers for shaming other developers who use tech not sanctioned by the governing body. I am ranting because I want to drop Cocoa and go back to the web, but I am upset about how much power I have to give up to do that. How it should go: browsers

innovate differently, users pick the best one, later W3C standardizes what users chose, losing browsers conform. The core of Hewitt’s argument. Web technologies aren’t moving fast enough, and why should he have to use a less powerful language to conform to web standards? Again, he hopes that browsers will start to innovate and force the W3C to conform to them. @joseph_wanja I love what Cocoa can do, I just don’t like C -based languages for UI programming. The reason why Hewitt doesn’t just stick with Cocoa if he finds it superior to web-based languages. @eston Users might be aware of their choices if more developers wrote browser-specific sites. Developers really pick the winner. An urging for developers to take action to reverse the trend. @JamesWatch IE6 was fucking amazing in 2000. It’s not fair to compare it to modern browsers. A word of caution for those who bash IE6 — remember what it was like when it came out. @joseph_wanja unfortunately I would recommend Cocoa [rather than web languages] at STATE page 20

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Favorite Mobile Apps of RWW Staff Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 4/29/2010 10:35:00 PM

Every now and then we publish the favorite mobile apps or sites of the ReadWriteWeb staff. The last time we did this was November 2009, however with our Mobile Summit just around the corner we wanted to give you an updated list. We're all early adopters of mobile technology here at ReadWriteWeb, so have a scan of our favorite apps and see what catches your eye. We'd also love to know your current favorites, because that's a great way to keep our finger on the pulse. Please note your favorite mobile apps or sites in the comments. Sponsor Join us at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7, in Mountain View, CA, to discuss the hottest mobile apps and the latest mobile trends. If you're in town for the Web 2.0 Expo that week, our Mobile Summit is the day after. We'd love to see you there! Register here. Richard MacManus(iPhone) • ReadWriteWeb iPhone App (of course) • Diamedic • Evernote • Insight (Basecamp app) • Google Voice • Google Reader • Shazam • Facebook

• • • • • • • •

Tweetie Woopra Flicks (movies) Art Words With Friends WorldMate NYTimes The Onion

Marshall Kirkpatrick • Facebook • Portland Business Journal • Cinch • Gowalla • Tweetie • NYT • WSJ • Rachel Maddow • Yelp • Pandora • SimpleMindX (mind mapping) • AroundMe • Instapaper • Shazam • AppsFire • BaseBall '10 • Etsy Addict • Newser • Crop For Free • The Guardian • Plancast • Mobile Safari Mobile web apps: Techmeme, MediaGazer, Quora, EveryBlock Sarah Perez iPhone: • Google Reader (web app) • Facebook • WeatherBug • Flashlight

app!) • Desktop • iMahjong

• Tweetie • Brizzly • TweetDeck • Siri • Flickr • Bump • Phone Flicks • Pandora • Foursquare (why am I doing this?) • WhiteNoise (baby app) • Instapaper • NYT • Yelp • Google Maps • Amazon • Babies R Us • Notifications • iScrobble iPad: • Google Reader (web app) • NYT • BBC • NPR • USA Today • Netflix • AP News • ABC Player • Instapaper • Pandora • Twitterific • StreamToMe • Facebook (web shortcut! no

Frederic Lardinois • Instapaper • Reeder • Gowalla • Tweetie • WorldMate • Boxcar • PicPosterous • NYTimes

• Other: TripIt & Chipotle. And the RWW app of course!! (Actually I use it every day to share my stories on Twitter/Facebook easily).

Audrey Watters I like mobile apps that allow me to move easily between iphone and laptop, so Evernote and RememberTheMilk. Also Marvel and ComiXology's comics apps. And the Kindle app for when I need words to go Mike Melanson(iPhone) with my picture books. :) • Facebook Abraham Hyatt • Tweetdeck Goodreads, Stanza, Thompson • Evernote Reuters, ReadItLater, NYT, • Public Radio Echofon, CameraPlus, Words • Gowalla With Friends, RWW, Pandora • Google Maps Sean Ammirati • Boxcar Twitterific, RWW App, • MapMyRide (when I'm out Encamp, Kindle, Zipcar App riding) Elyssa Pallai • Pandora Where's Wally - entertainment • ReadItLater for children of every age. Jared Smith("The Lone Alex Williams Blackberrier") • Pandora • Twitter for BlackBerry • Twitdroid official app--direct message • Facebook push via the BlackBerry system • Google Maps is an awful nice touch • The Hangover ("for weekend • Seesmic for BlackBerry--fills m i n d l e s s l a u g h s w i t h t h e a big gap in the official Twitter teenage son.") client by letting me support multiple accounts; probably the Chris Cameron program that's easiest on my • Social: Foursquare, Tweetie, resources aside from the official Facebook. client • Games: Words With Friends • MyKite--still my go-to to & Charadium. check in on Brightkite on • Photography: AutoStitch, FAVORITE page 16 TiltShiftGen & ColorSplash.

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Opera Software Acquires Email Service Provider FastMail.FM (Updated) Robin Wauters (TechCrunch)

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FAVORITE continued from page 15

BlackBerry • Rowmote (I use it on an iPod touch)--extremely inexpensive and powerful alternative to the Apple Remote for controlling a Mac. • RadarScope (on iPod touch)-still the best mobile radar viewer on any platform.

interoperable standards. Since the release of Opera 4 in 2000, Opera’s desktop browser The Norwegian software has included its own innovative company has yet to make any e-mail client. Following this announcements of its own, but acquisition, Opera will be able Opera has acquired email to offer a consistent e-mail See also: POLL: Which service provider FastMail.FM, experience across all products. wish to NOT transfer their acquisition this year – it had Location-Based Mobile App Do according to a message posted Opera currently has more than on the latter’s company blog. accounts over to Opera have to earlier spent$8 million in cash to 50 million users of its desktop You Use Now? Discuss The terms of the agreements are go into settings and indicate just buy mobile advertising startup browser and more than 55 not disclosed, but the Australia- that. Not acting upon the email AdMarvel. million users of Opera Mini, a based company in a notice said the company sent out to its users Update: the official release just mobile Web browser that works it will continue to run its email or actively accepting the transfer hit our inbox: on almost all handsets available service, which has been in will result in Opera assuming Oslo, Norway – April 30, 2010 today. operation for over 10 years. control over the mailbox and the – O p e r a S o f t w a r e t o d a y “The newest generation of Web account registration details. announced that it has acquired users will discover the Web Here’s the announcement: Some exciting changes will be As to the reason for selling, Web-based e-mail provider through a mobile device. Having occurring with FastMail.FM. FastMail says the market was FastMail.fm. The acquisition w o r l d - c l a s s m e s s a g i n g FastMail.FM has been acquired getting increasingly competitive will enable Opera to expand its capability alongside a rich and b y O p e r a S o f t w a r e , t h e and that Opera’s expertise in current messaging product compelling Web experience is developers of the Opera web web browsers and especially the portfolio and deliver cross- essential. By combining forces, browser. For more information mobile market would help the platform messaging to a wide Opera and FastMail.fm can offer a b o u t O p e r a , p l e a s e v i s i t company grow and take on the range of devices, including messaging on any device. This next big challenges in running computers, mobile phones, TVs will enhance the value Opera www.opera.com. Wax.fm Catalogs T h i s i s g r e a t n e w s f o r and building an email service. and gaming consoles. provides to consumers, while Current and Historical FastMail.FM u s e r s . Some FastMail.FM staff will be Headquartered in Australia, assisting our operator partners in FastMail.FM will continue to making the move to Norway, F a s t M a i l . f m h a s f o r g e d a reducing customer churn,” says Vinyl Record Offerings run and grow as the reliable and the company says it has reputation for responsiveness Rolf Assev, Chief Strategy [Music] email service you’ve known for already been working with and reliability. The company O f f i c e r , O p e r a S o f t w a r e . Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) o v e r 1 0 y e a r s . W e ’ l l b e Opera’s technical teams to already offers some of the most CrunchBase Information Opera combining forces with Opera’s exchange expertise, and to advanced Web-based e-mail Software Information provided Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:00:00 AM technical teams, expertise and develop new products. It will be platforms for consumers and by CrunchBase If you're a fan of keeping your products to develop new and i n t e r e s t i n g t o s e e w h a t small business customers and music old school and vinyl, eventually comes out of this has been lauded for its approach innovative products. you'll want to check out wax.fm, deal. to security, focus on innovation, FastMail has included a FAQ, a site focused on cataloging This is Opera’s second a n d s u p p o r t f o r o p e n , in which it says that users who vinyl records old and new and helping you find places to buy them. More » Submitted at 4/30/2010 4:15:03 AM

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IMVU’s Virtual Cash Cow: Doubling Revenues, Focused On Gaming (Video) Evelyn Rusli (TechCrunch) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:00:06 AM

Just three years ago, IMVU was burning cash at a rate of half a million per month and still not profitable. The 3D virtual world, where souped-up avatars run amok, was gaining users but not on a path to sustainability. Fast forward to 2010, IMVU is increasing its staff by 50% (going from 60 to 90 employees) and is on track to double sales this year. Currently, the company is at an annual revenue run rate of$40 million— and according to CEO Cary Rosenzweig the Palo Alto based company should hit a$60 million annual revenue run rate by the end of this year. For the last two years, revenues have roughly doubled from $11 million in 2008 to $22 million in 2009 and now $40-plus million in 2010. That’s a lot of real world dough for a company whose fortune is based on virtual currency and an endless factory of avatar accessories. The key in 2007, Rosenzweig says, was a basic two-prong strategy: simplify the service and concentrate on creating new payment options. “Before, a lot of the activity was both on the IMVU website and then we had a downloaded client and our users had to go back and

forth. And especially for someone who’s new, just coming in, they were a little bit confused, in fact many of them weren’t even sure that they could buy virtual goods. The second thing is we had a lot of users who had money in their pockets and they wanted to buy virtual goods but we weren’t providing mechanisms to do it. Because at that time we offered credit cards and Pay Pal.”(See Video Above) IMVU started selling pre-paid

cards at outlets like Target and Wal-Mart and offering SMS payments abroad. The payments change alone, according to Rosenzweig, has accounted for roughly 30% of all growth. Like its closest competitor, Second Life, IMVU is a 3D world where avatars congregate, chat in a variety of settings and make new connections. The company makes the bulk of its profits from users buying credits for IMVU’s virtual catalog, a digital warehouse of some 4

million items including pet dragons, clothes, and new eyebrows. A normal payment is $19.95 for 20,000 credits— to give you an idea of how far that goes in IMVU land: something described as a vampire corset outfit will run you 699 credits. In recent years, many virtual worlds have receded (like There.com, which hit the deadpool March 2010 and shares a mutual co-founder with IMVU, Will Harvey), overshadowed by traditional

social networks and bogged down by the recession. However, strangely, both Second Life and IMVU have thrived this past year, Second Life logged a record first quarter with user-to-user transactions up 30% to $160 million. Looking ahead, IMVU’s CEO says the next stage of growth will be driven by three catalysts: the company’s expansion into several new languages, the IMVU’S page 19

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Palo Alto Researchers Create Tool for Dealing with Twitter's "Information Overload" Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:09:40 AM

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) are developing a new Twitter client application that aims to derive meaning from the next-ending influx of tweets. The application, called "Eddi," automatically groups tweets for you into topics mentioned either explicitly or, unlike most Twitter clients that also provide topic browsing, implicitly. The end result is a Twitter app you can use to quickly find the popular discussions within your own personal Twitter stream, either by search, tag cloud, timeline or category list. It even suggests tweets you might be interested in reading, helping you sort the signal from the noise. Sponsor Project "Eddi" Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, told MIT's Technology Review that the way people use Twitter is that they "dip in" to the Twitter stream from time to time, but don't want to consume it all at once. The Eddi Project was created so that those brief dips into Twitter are more valuable to the end users.

The tool, Eddi, a Twitter client application named after the idea of eddies in a stream, has the barebones look of something built by data researchers as opposed to web designers. But its user interface isn't the most important aspect - it's the algorithms behind the facade that are its standout feature. In order to filter Twitter's content, Eddi provides two tools: a topic browser that shows tweets broken down into categories and a recommendation engine. Twitter Topics - And Not Just the

Popular Ones The idea of browsing Twitter by topic is not unique - plenty of Twitter apps do the same, as does Twitter's own search interface at search.twitter.com. But the problem with most of these systems is that they rely on keywords or hashtags - the latter being the annotations preceded by the pound sign (#) which users add to their tweets to make them searchable. When there is a major event, such as the Icelandic volcano eruption, Michael Bernstein, a researcher at the Computer

Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT who is involved with the project, explained, the sheer volume of tweets provides a lot of information for an algorithm to use. What's harder is to figure out are the topics attached to tweets that are more unique. "The essence of the approach is to coerce a tweet to look more like a search query and then get a search engine to tell us more," says Bernstein. After cleaning up the tweet, the tool feeds them into Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service interface in an

effort to surface web pages related to the tweet in question. This helps the system to appropriately categorize the tweets into topics. Recommendation Engine The second aspect to the system is a recommendation engine that ranks tweets by how interesting they are to you. To determine this, Eddi's algorithms look at your own tweets and interactions with other Twitter users. The new system will go live on PALO page 19

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Messenger Connect: A New API Strategy for Microsoft to Build its Own Social Graph Alex Williams (ReadWriteWeb) Submitted at 4/29/2010 9:21:03 PM

The new Windows Live Messenger Steve Ballmer previewed in Brazil today represents again how a loosely joined ecosystem is developing in the cloud computing world. They are growing through a network of service providers connected through open API's. Windows Live Messenger represents a re-emergence of a veteran Web product, revitalized by a loosely coupled network that is fostering a new ecosystem of open, connected communities. What it provides is Microsoft new opportunity to develop its own social graph by connecting with social networks and third-party services. Sponsor It's demonstrative of a new wave of platforms that seem to emerge with each passing week. Google Apps Marketplace, VMforce, SnapLogic - the list

goes on. But it's also an example of a much deeper movement that you see as a common thread in both new and old service providers. These are newer companies like ZenDesk that are finding a place in the SaaS ecosystem. And there are older ones such as Hoovers that are playing on the emergence of open systems and the social Web to re-architect and create their own social CRM communities. What all these companies have in common is a renewed priority on engagement across multiple networks through platforms, SaaS providers and data services. Messenger Connect In Sau Paulo, Ballmer previewed an upgrade to its instant messaging service. Its one of the most significant upgrades the service has seen in a while. Ballmer focused on the social aspects of the service which allows users to create a centralized hub for their various social networks. For example,

the service will support Facebook Chat, allowing people to connect to Facebook from within the Microsoft Connect environment. In Amsterdam, Microsoft developers unveiled Messenger Connect, the new API service that connects to Windows Live Messenger. From the Inside Windows Live blog:"Messenger Connect brings the individual APIs we've had for a long time (Windows Live ID, Contacts API, Messenger Web Toolkit, etc.) together in a single API that's based on industry standards and specifications (OAuth WRAP, ActivityStrea.ms, PortableContacts) and adds a number of new scenarios." The new Messenger Connect

We'll write more about ZenDesk and Hoover's in a later post. They are part of continuing thread we will see in the market as open API's proliferate. But for now, the moves by companies like Microsoft show that a loosely coupled ecosystem is growing fast and will be one of the most significant trends in 2010. Discuss

hundreds of millions, becoming a real player in gaming unlocks a multi-billion dollar market. Gaming and by extension Facebook are also critical to fostering user loyalty, which has been one of IMVU’s

continued from page 18

Please Pass The Bong, Carol

Yahoo CEO page Carol PLEASE 20 Bartz Michael at Arrington bristles outsiders opining on

continued from page 17

footprint on the site is a relatively young profile page. Rosenzweig says the gaming component is critical to the long term strategy. He estimates that the domestic virtual world market is worth roughly in the

PALO

the web for public testing sometime this summer. In the meantime, you can sign up for provides developer partners with another of PARC's experimental Twitter recommendation three big things: • Create a user profile and e n g i n e s , t h i s o n e c a l l e d social graph: Allows users to ZeroZero88. Information on sign in and access friends lists. sign up is here. • A web-oriented architecture Discuss that exposes a RESTful interface. This provides developers with easier technical integration with the service. • Social distribution of the chat service: Real-time chat and the integration of Message Connect services into third-party sites.

IMVU’S debut of a Mac product (and possibly an iPad client) later this year and a shift to gaming that will be tied to a more aggressive Facebook campaign. IMVU has been late to Zuckerberg’s party— the company’s only

weaknesses. As of today, the company has 2 million active users, just 4% of its 50 million registered users. CrunchBase Information IMVU Information provided by CrunchBase

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PLEASE

STATE

continued from page 19

what Yahoo should be doing and not doing. An example – just a couple of days ago, when asked about our post saying that Yahoo shouldn’t buy Foursquare, she told TechCrunch EU editor Mike Butcher“I think it’s very easy for people to talk about what somebody else should do, but when confronted about it themselves they look at it a little differently.” Along with lots of swearing, that’s been her key message since day one. Her first day on the job, in January 2009, she said“It’s been too crazy. People outside Yahoo deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn’t do. That’s got to stop.” But that didn’t stop her from giving out a little advice of her own yesterday. Her target? That one-trick pony Google. Says Bartz to the BBC: Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search…It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do…Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be

continued from page 14

interesting. An interesting argument. But even if all of Google’s non search endeavors are ignored, like Apps, Android, Chrome, YouTube, etc., they still beat her test. In the last year, Google’s share price has gone from about $393/share to $532/share. That’s about $44 billion in market cap gain. Yahoo’s market cap, including those fat Asian assets, stands at a little under $24 billion today. By my math, Google grew by almost two Yahoo’s in the last twelve months. And my guess is they aren’t sweating growing one or two more Yahoo’s in the next twelve months, either. Bartz also isn’t afraid of Facebook dominating all that social stuff: “They certainly are taking people’s attention and time,” she said. “But what is kind of wrong about the conversation is that social just means Facebook. “Social is interaction. Social is commenting on news stories. It’s blogging. It’s sharing photos. “So there are social capabilities running throughout

all of our sites, including Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds.” I actually wonder if Bartz has ever visited Facebook. She certainly doesn’t understand what the core of Facebook is all about. And I don’t see a whole lot of social going on at Yahoo, and the stuff I do see is being brought in from as Bartz says, Facebook and Twitter. The yelling and the rhetoric are entertaining, certainly. And trashing competitors that are crushing you is probably cathartic. But Rome is burning, and words won’t put out that fire. So pass the bong, Carol, because I want some of whatever it is that you’re smoking. We can watch Rome burn together and laugh and laugh about how uninteresting Google and Facebook are. CrunchBase Information Carol Bartz Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase

Strawberry Recipes (Cooking Light: Editor's Picks)

The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail

us. An asterisk* indicates a required field. Your Name Your Comment* 500 characters remaining Five Filters featured article:

The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

this point. Wish I didn’t have to say that. Cocoa, while not perfect, is better than web languages. @michaelvillar So launch a different browser. Not a big deal. Know what is a big deal? Having to buy a different phone for each app store. An interesting point. Hewitt is saying that while it may seem like a hassle to have the web coded for different browsers, it’s much more of a hassle to have apps coded for different phones. @jjathman I’m not justifying ActiveX, but the html/css/javascript side of IE which at one time was state of the art. Again, more defense of IE back in the day. From here, Hewitt goes into a series of thoughts on web vs. native apps. @ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser sites. @ppk That’s sort of what is happening with mobile web vs. native mobile apps, except app stores don’t extend the browser, they replace it. @slauriat “best viewed in X” was not as bad as “buy another phone”, which is what we got for letting the web go to shit so apps could rise. @ppk As someone who has

tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa. App stores replace the web, simply because their languages are better, in Hewitt’s mind. And it’s our own fault for letting the web go to shit, and letting this happen. His last tweet is particularly powerful: Hewitt does have a lot of experience on both sides, and considers iPhone Safari to be a “joke” compared to what you can do natively. This is a sentiment a lot of developers whisper about, but seldom say publicly. Finally, Hewitt qualifies some of his statements a bit. I’ve been hard on Flash, but we should all thank Macromedia/Adobe for 10 years of picking up the slack of the W3C, Microsoft, and Mozilla. And really, how screwed would we be if the WebKit team weren’t so god damn competent? Ok, signing off now, thanks for listening. :) Fair enough, plenty of juicy post-worthy comments for one day. CrunchBase Information Apple Microsoft App Store Information provided by CrunchBase

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Direct-drive turbines to propel offshore wind (CNET News.com) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:27 AM

With projected growth in offshore wind farms, turbine makers are adopting direct-drive generators, a technology which could help address concerns over cost and reliability of offshore wind. Siemens Energy last week said that its first direct-drive turbine is now available for both onshore and offshore applications. The company has been testing a prototype since last year and the results have been good, according to the company. Inside the nacelle of Siemens' 3 megawatt direct-drive wind turbine.(Credit: Siemens Energy) Rated at three megawatts of capacity, the SWT-3.0-101 is a lower height and weight than Siemens' 2.3 megawatt machine and has half the number of parts. It more compact than generators that use a gearbox and is efficient at low wind speeds. In a traditional wind turbine, a gearbox and a rotor are

a utility-scale turbine rated at 2.2 megawatts. Another company entering the field is Boulder Wind Power, notes Technology Review. That company was founded by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories who studied gearboxes and predicted that many will fail before their anticipated life. Although there are technical advantages to direct-drive turbines, using permanent magnets rather than copper coils and gearboxes does pose a materials problem. Permanent connected to a generator to get a General Electric, too, is magnets require rare earth flow of current. The Siemens pursuing direct-drive turbines metals, most of which are direct-drive technology has a s p e c i f i c a l l y f o r o f f s h o r e sourced in China, and there are permanent magnet attached to applications in Europe. GE last growing concerns over the t h e r o t o r w h i c h c o n n e c t s year purchased ScanWind, a availability of supply. d i r e c t l y t o a g e n e r a t o r , Norwegian company which Five Filters featured article: eliminating the need for a specialized in direct-drive The Art of Looking Prime gearbox. generators for wind turbines. Ministerial - The 2010 UK Siemens has been working on Direct-drive turbines are General Election. Available the direct-drive turbines for over already used in smaller turbines. tools: PDF Newspaper, Full t e n y e a r s a n d e x p e c t s t o Northern Power, for example, Text RSS, Term Extraction. commercialize it for large specializes in turbines with a turbines in the coming years. ( capacity of 100 kilowatts, which Offshore wind developer Cape is sized to power a school or Wind has a contract to use office building. Later this year, traditional GE turbines.) though, it's planning on building

Amazing Photos Of The Deepwater Oil Explosion Courtney Comstock (The Money Game) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:27:00 AM

A source with connections in the Gulf energy scene has forwarded us some amazing, movie-like pictures of the deepwater oil explosion. Seriously, they look like something out of a Bruckheimer film. Now: Don't Miss Image: Unified Command Center Everything you need to know about the oil spill > Join the conversation about this story Âť

Market Slips After Rising Briefly, Dendreon Still Soaring (GS, DNDN) Vince Veneziani (The Money Game)

downgrades on Greek banks by Moody's soured the mood quickly. After a brief spurt Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:25:24 AM upward, the Dow fell and is Despite the GDP growth we've currently down 45 points at experienced here in the US, 11,121.

Goldman Sachs (GS) is down 7.3% to $148 and Dendreon

(DNDN) - chart below -is still climbing after yesterday's FDAapproval, currently up 8.5% to $54.48. Join the conversation about this story Âť

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Nissan Leaf projected to be in the black

New Chrome fires up geolocation ability

(CNET News.com)

will start in California, Arizona, Washington, Tennessee, and Oregon. The automaker also is Nissan Motor is on track to launching the car in Japan and book 25,000 U.S. orders for its Europe in late 2010. Leaf electric vehicle by year's Production of the Leaf will start end and will be making money in Japan and later at plants in the on the green car, the carmaker United States and the United said Thursday. Kingdom. Nissan has taken 8,000 U.S. Leaf sales will be capacity reservations for the hatchback, restrained in the first two years set to go on sale in the United until the U.S. plant comes on States in December, since it line, Perry said. started taking orders on April The five-passenger car will be 20, Mark Perry, Nissan's North the first fully electric car America director of product launched by a major automaker. planning and strategy, told It is designed to provide a 100 Reuters on the sidelines of an mile range on a full charge and industry conference. is priced at $32,780 not "We are on a double-time including federal tax credits or march" for launch, Perry said. other incentives. "We are on our way to have "We are making money at the 2 5 , 0 0 0 f i r m o r d e r s b y price that we announced," Perry December." said. "We priced the car to be Nissan's U.S. launch of the car affordable. We priced it for Submitted at 4/30/2010 7:44:36 AM

mass adoption." Nissan is counting on electric cars to help it close the gap on rivals led by Toyota Motor and its gasoline-electric Prius, the world's most popular hybrid. Federal tax credits of $7,500 will cut the Leaf's retail price to $25,280--about 10 percent more than the $23,000 starting price for a Prius. Federal tax credits have been phased out for the Prius. State incentives could cut the cost further. In California, the top U.S. alternative car market, credits could reduce the Leaf price to $20,280. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

not in a prompt, you can disable it for good. Every time I get on the map from work or home, I Ya Sayed Mahmoud :) ususaly want to go somewhere I believe we should be more a r o u n d o r s e a r c h i n t h e appreciative to what google surrounding area, isn't it great offers. First, gmail is the best that this can be the default free mail around, they told you b e h a v i o r ? T h e y a r e n o t Yes there will be ads, just like b r e a c h i n g y o u r p r i v a c y any other 'Free' system, they Mahmoud they are asking your keep it very non-intrusive and permission nicely if you want to relevant to your life; so it's as leverage a more convenient win win as it gets, any other free 'Free' way to use their services. mail system will spit ads in your Finaly, I'm not sure how super face just like watching TV and unappreciative the community getting ads on Liquor during a have been, again these are 'F R football match which is a lose - E E' services, do you expect lose scenario. If you really don't them to pay you money as well, like their ads or features, then and not ask to politely push you can either pay them $50 a some relevant ads... let me know year and use gmail with no ads, what you think.... or pay for any other service. But Five Filters featured article: eventualy, you have no reason The Art of Looking Prime to complain about their email ! Ministerial - The 2010 UK Also, I absolutey would love General Election. Available this geolocation feature, first.. tools: PDF Newspaper, Full they are nice enough to tell you Text RSS, Term Extraction. whether you want to use it or Submitted at 4/30/2010 7:39:59 AM

Friday Poll: What's your stance in the Flash fight? (CNET News.com) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:00:00 AM

quote: "That's misinformation at it's best" speaking of "misinformation" flash using H264 has just now happened recently, it took them years to adopt, THAT is the

problem, adobe is slow and buggy when coming out with updates, and saying HTML5 is a container, is laughable at best, what do you think Flash is? do you think HTML5 can not use H264? where in the world did you think Flash copied it from? flash is already obsolete you

just don't know it yet, not because if finally came out with H264, or that it finally has a beta out that helps support mobile touch devices, but because IT IS SO SLOW WITH IT's updates.... that is it's killer, that is why open source projects are already overtaking it... that

is why Youtube and facebook and hulu are upgrading... so mobile devices with touch actually work with their sites... if flash were not obsolete, why are these sites using the newer tech? hello???? Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime

Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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The App Store Now Counts 4,870 iPad Apps Leena Rao (TechCrunch) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:36:43 AM

App store analytics startup Distimo has taken a deep look at Apple’s App Store today. The number of iPad apps are growing rapidly since the release of the device nearly a month ago, with the App Store now counting 4,870 iPad apps. That’s a 32.7% increase in apps over the past two weeks. To break down the stat further, there are now 3,437 iPadspecific apps, with 1,433 universal apps that work on both the iPad and iPhone. You can download the report here. Unsurprisingly, the largest application category on the iPad is Games with 1,577 titles (32%), followed by Entertainment and Books with 455 and 396 titles, respectively. From the launch of the iPad, gaming apps dominated the iPad

App Store. In terms of pricing, the iPad is still seeing the majority of its nearly 5000 apps as paid offerings. Of the 186,414 applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone, 73% are paid, while 80% of the 4,870 applications in the Apple App

Store for iPad are paid. An application in the Apple App Store for iPhone costs $3.82 on average, as opposed to $4.67 in the Apple App Store for iPad. In fact, on the Apple App Store for iPad, Medical and Finance applications are the most expensive at $42.11 and $18.48

on average, respectively. This is significantly more than the average price for applications in these categories on the Apple App Store for iPhone ($10.74 and $5.74). Steve Jobs wrote in a post yesterday that there are now 200,000 apps in the app store, but Distimo evaluated these numbers as of April 26, which could account for the discrepancy in the number of total apps. Of course, we expect the app store to continue to grow steadily as developers flock to the platform. In fact, there are still any major apps missing from the iPad, such as those for Facebook and Foursquare. CrunchBase Information iPad App Store Distimo Information provided by CrunchBase

Use Virtual Desktops to Create Instant Focus [Focus] Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) Submitted at 4/30/2010 7:00:00 AM

If you have a ton of applications and files open but you want to focus on a single thing without the hassle of shutting the rest of the apps and files down, use a virtual desktop. More »

Content company raises $2 million to develop for iPad Mike Schramm (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 4/30/2010 11:00:00 AM

Filed under: iPad Thinking Screen Media is a content platform developer, putting together a content delivery system designed to bring information to "millions of connected screens worldwide." Now, it seems that many of

those screens might be iPads. TechCrunch reports that they've raised a whopping $2 million just to switch their development aim to the iPad. They currently have an iPad app up and running in the store, and they've got a number of other investment sources already. However, according to the report, this Of course, in the larger scheme money is specifically for the of things, this is small potatoes. iPad.

A content channel is pretty useless unless it's delivering content that people actually want, and $2 million is loose change for some of the larger content companies. This is a significant investment in terms of its scope, though. Even a smaller company like this is heavily investing in the iPad and Apple's platform as a major part of their business.

TUAW Content company raises $2 million to develop for iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Patent: Invisible button on future MacBook Pros Megan Lavey (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM

Bye-bye, Lala: Apple-owned streaming service to shut down Michael Rose (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

music in your Lala collection through May 31, 2010. Any mp3 songs purchased and Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:30:00 AM downloaded from Lala will Filed under: Music continue to play as part of your It's a long-familiar story: local music library. You can i n n o v a t i v e s t a r t - u p g a i n s continue to purchase mp3 songs traction, gets major search deal, through May 31st using your earns attention from bigger wallet balance or other payment companies, is gobbled up... and methods." No new purchases then takes down the primary can be made at this point and the service that got it so much buzz service is no longer accepting in the first place. Google signups. Outstanding credit acquisitions Etherpad and balances on the site will be Jotspot, welcome your new club transferred to iTunes store member from the Apple side: credit, and loyal users are due a Lala is shutting down its bonus: "In appreciation of your streaming and music purchase support, you will receive a operation on May 31. credit in the amount of your Lala's site notes that users "will Lala web song purchases for use be able to access and play all on Apple's iTunes Store." How

thoughtful. As we bid farewell to the Lala of yesterday, what's coming for the streaming-enabled iTunes of tomorrow? Check out our past Lala posts for the rest of the story. Thanks to everyone who sent this in. [H/T to Ars Technica] TUAW Bye-bye, Lala: Appleowned streaming service to shut down originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

Filed under: Macbook Pro AppleInsider has the story of a patent application that would turn any place on the aluminum shell of a MacBook Pro into a disappearing input space by utilizing invisible backlit holes. The application describes an input device made of the same material as the computer housing, so when not in use, it disappears. Light, combined with a capacitive sensor, would enable it to work. The patent example showing this in action displays a control wheel that's similar to the iPod's. Comparisons are made in the patent to the iPhone's touchscreen surface and its drawbacks -- mainly the seams and the fragility. Indeed, something made of aluminum would be a lot tougher and not look as tacked-on as plastic or rubber. Other uses for such a device would be a trackpad, external

Street Chic: New York ELLE.com (ELLE Fashion Blogs) Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:00:00 AM

A printed scarf and roughed-up

boots are versatile accessories to complete any outfit. Photo: Kelly Stuart Think you are Street Chic? Email us your photo and you

Street Chic Daily. Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan! could appear in ELLE.com's

button, a display when the computer lid is closed, Wi-Fi signal/battery indicators and more. [via Techcrunch] TUAW Patent: Invisible button on future MacBook Pros originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read| Permalink| Email this| Comments

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TUAW's Daily App: Space Miner: Space Ore Bust Mike Schramm (The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW))

various parts of your space ore business. And while the gameplay is tight Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:00:00 AM and fun, the best part of Space Filed under: App Store Space Miner (in my humble opinion) is Miner: Space Ore Bust is a the brilliant and hilarious script. terrific game for the iPhone -- Not only does the story of the it's an arcade game that's game give you great reasons to basically a one-stick shooter, keep going out there and where you move a ship around a blasting ore, but it's legitimately 2D field (rendered in colorful creative and funny. Chicago 3D), collecting asteroid ore and poet and performer Robbie Q. taking down alien robots. But Telfer is listed in the credits as though the basic premise of the story editor, and that really paid game is quite simple, there's off for the game -- some of the actually a lot of depth that dialogue is just perfect. builds up over time, as you So yes, the game is worth a buy navigate around various zones, even at the normal $4.99 price -and upgrade your ship, your ore but wait, there's more. Starting collector, and all of the other tomorrow, Space Miner: Space

Ore Bust is going on sale for just 99 cents for a limited time to help promote the Venan Arcade's upcoming second game, the strangely titled Ninjatown: Trees of Doom. At that price, it's worth a purchase just to play through the tutorial. Definitely be sure to grab it. TUAW TUAW's Daily App: Space Miner: Space Ore Bust originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

Hanvon suffers the tablet curse, delays multitouch B10, talks up cheaper F10 model Tim Stevens (Engadget) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:31:00 AM

Manufacturers just can't seem to figure out this whole tablet deal. The poor things get delayed, canceled, or just make you fear that you've been ripped off. Hanvon's TouchPad B10 hasn't suffered the worst of those fates, but it is going to be a little later than planned. The last we heard they were due to ship on March 25, but according to jkkmobile the devices have just entered volume production and will instead ship to Chinese buyers sometime toward the end of May, while Europeans (and maybe lowly Americans) won't see theirs until June. Meanwhile, Hanvon is also

talking about its H10 model, which uses a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor and lacks the multitouch of the B10, instead offering a stylus-based electromagnetic panel like the WISEreader. Cost is said to be "much less" than the B10, which is estimated to cost around $877 -- a figure that hopefully won't get any larger in the coming weeks. Hanvon suffers the tablet curse, delays multitouch B10, talks up cheaper F10 model originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| jkkmobile| Email this| Comments

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BallP bowling ball 'bot puts your sense of balance to shame (video)

Snack Smart: I'm All About the Chocolate

Joseph L. Flatley (Engadget)

WomansDay.com Editors (Daily Woman's Day Blog)

lot less intrusive than CMU's Ballbot-- our previous favorite robot butler (yes, in the end it all We've seen robots play Soccer, comes down to who can get us a Tennis, and Battle Ball, and now cold one the fastest). Video after Dr. Masaaki Kumagai, director the break. of Tohoku Gakuin University's Continue reading BallP Robot Development bowling ball 'bot puts your Engineering Laboratory, brings sense of balance to shame us BallP (or Ball Inverted (video) Pendulum): a 20-inch, 16.5BallP bowling ball 'bot puts pound robot that derives its your sense of balance to shame name from the bowling ball that (video) originally appeared on it balances on. Using three omni Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 -directional wheels, the robot a l l o w s t h e t h i n g t o c a r r y 09:57:00 EST. Please see our can stand still, move in any equipment -- either on its own, t e r m s f o r u s e o f f e e d s . direction, and pivot along its or with the help of a human Permalink| IEEE Spectrum| vertical axis. A combination of operator (sort of like a high-tech Email this| Comments motors, micro-step controllers, wheel barrow). If anything, it's a gyroscopes, and accelerometers Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:57:00 AM

enough, a small study showed that a little bit of dark chocolate can help curb appetite.) Two of Submitted at 4/29/2010 2:00:56 PM my favorites are Green&Black's My name is Amy, I'm a health o r g a n i c b i t t e r s w e e t d a r k editor and I eat dark chocolate chocolate that's 70% cocoa and every day. Yes, every day! And D o v e S i l k y S m o o t h D a r k no, I'm not overweight. I always Chocolate that comes in 190keep a small (no more than 190 calorie bars that are neatly calories) bar of dark (at least divided into five squares. 60% cocoa) chocolate around. - A m y B r i g h t f i e l d , H e a l t h When I get that craving for D i r e c t o r something sweet, I break off a Five Filters featured article: piece. Often I'll have it as my The Art of Looking Prime mid-morning snack, and in fact, Ministerial - The 2010 UK I've found that it helps tide me General Election. Available over when I know I'll be eating tools: PDF Newspaper, Full a late lunch. (And coincidentally Text RSS, Term Extraction.

HP Slate killed? Rumor mill says 'yes' Laura June (Engadget)

Slate -- which was officially unveiled in January by Steve Ballmer himself -- had a Last night TechCrunch reported rumored price of $549, and was that, according to an unnamed supposedly launching in June. "source briefed on the matter," So, what should we make of all HP had stopped development of this? Well, there's probably the Slate in its tracks, killing off some major chaos over at HP the project entirely. Why? Well, with the news of the Palm according to the source, HP isn't acquisition, so we wouldn't be thrilled with Windows 7's surprised to hear some shaky -performance on the tablet. The or even incorrect -- information

hear something more concrete. HP Slate killed? Rumor mill says 'yes' originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| TechCrunch| Email this| Comments

Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:46:00 AM

coming out of the company right now. On the other hand, HP killing off the project doesn't sound completely out of the

realm of possibility to us. We've reached out to HP for comment, but they've yet to get back to us. We'll let you know when we

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It's a Boy and a Girl for Mark McGrath and Fiancée (TVGuide.com: Breaking News) Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:46:00 PM

Mark McGrath Mark McGrath and his fiancée welcomed twins — a boy and a girl — Thursday in Los Angeles, People reports. Son Lydon Edward arrived first, weighing 5 pounds, 7 ounces, followed by 4-pound, 8ounce daughter Hartley Grace. Mark McGrath engaged and expecting twins "We are so lucky," the 42-yearold Sugar Ray singer told People. "I don't think you can prepare for the love we are Tim Stevens (Engadget) the Limited Edition will set you feeling." back, but has indicated it'll McGrath and Carin Kingsland, Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:19:00 AM launch on May 7 in Korea, the 37, got engaged on New Year's Some cameras just beg to be Netherlands, China, Taiwan, Eve after dating on and off for taken out in the sun, and such is and the good 'ol US of A -- 16 years and announced their the new Limited Edition NX10 making us think it perhaps isn't engagement earlier this month. from Samsung, a Silas-inspired so terribly limited after all. Watch videos of Mark McGrath model that looks quite good in G a l l e r y : S a m s u n g N X 1 0 "These two kids will be the white and is perfect for Limited Edition luckiest kids in the world in documenting your selfSamsung announces pasty terms of their mom, that's for flagellation techniques. This white Limited Edition NX10 sure," he said. "They'll get a lot special edition will come as a kit originally appeared on Engadget with a slinky 30mm pancake on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:19:00 lens and a leather case. (Yes, EST. Please see our terms for folks, leather. No flimsy vinyl use of feeds. Permalink Wired| enclosure for this bad boy.) Samsung Imaging| Email this| Samsung isn't saying how much Comments

Samsung announces pasty white Limited Edition NX10

'FlashForward' 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' Recap Jason Hughes (TV Squad) Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:45:00 AM

(S01E18) Dyson Frost is a bad man. He's been doing stuff related to the flashforwards for years now. The whole situation is far more complicated than we ever imagined, and yet almost everyone we've met who's a part of whatever was behind the global incident seems to be a reluctant participant. of love." Certainly Gabriel ( James McGrath hits the road with Callis) was reluctant to be as Sugar Ray in June and will host involved as he was. It's not clear Don't Forget the Lyrics! next what his mental state was before fall on Fox. the blackout, though we know Five Filters featured article: he's a savant and was already The Art of Looking Prime hospitalized, but he's agitated, Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available nervous and very frustrated right tools: PDF Newspaper, Full now. Perhaps that comes from Text RSS, Term Extraction. knowing too much. Continue reading'FlashForward' - 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' Recap Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, FlashForward Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Dancing's Tony Dovolani: Motivating a Demoralized Kate Was the Hardest Part (TVGuide.com: Breaking News)

don't have anything to say to those people because I don't waste my energy on them. Submitted at 4/29/2010 9:22:00 PM Those people are going to hate Tony Dovolani, Dancing With no matter what. Dancing is The Stars something that's so beautiful. Tony Dovolani didn't get the Kate was a perfect example of Kate Gosselin hate before their a n e v e r y d a y p e r s o n w h o Dancing with the Stars time wondered what it would be like started â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and he still doesn't. "I to be on Dancing with the Stars really just do not understand and she tried it. She was why people pick on someone challenged, but so what? So is they don't know and someone everybody else in their own who is doing the best she could way. Do you think everybody do to provide for her kids. It's who walks into the studio is a truly amazing to me that more great dancer? No, if they were, people pay attention to the then studios wouldn't exist. negative comments," he tells You're supposed to learn. TVGuide.com. "If they really Dancing's Tony Dovolani: t a k e t h e t i m e t o h a t e o n What's with all the Kate hate? somebody else, I wonder what TVGuide.com: There were a their lives are like." Contrary to ton of reports and cover stories reports claiming otherwise (and about you hating her and his infamous rehearsal walkout), wishing you were off the show. the pro says he and Gosselin got Dovolani: Why would I ever along famously on Dancing with want to be off the show? I love the Starsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and still do. Find out our show. I love being able to what else Dovolani had to say to teach. I love being able to show Gosselin's haters, what the that I can take somebody who's hardest part of teaching the never taken a dance step in her mom of eight was and his picks life and teach her to dance. I had for the final three. to teach her how to walk in the TVGuide.com: There are a lot first lesson! Kate and I get along of viewers who wanted Kate to wonderfully. get eliminated earlier, like the TVGuide.com: Your walkout first week. How does that make during rehearsal didn't help you feel? things. What happened there? Tony Dovolani: Why would Dovolani: That was a fivethey want that? That's just mean. minute clip that I wish I could I don't even understand. ... I have back. That's one thing I

country's turned into, that saddens me. TVGuide.com: In your last rehearsal package, you said you have to motivate her every day and it's exhausting. What did you mean by that? Dovolani: It's because of everything she has to read about herself every single day. Dancing was supposed to be a positive experience for her, and it seems like everybody put a bull's-eye on her and started shooting. That demoralizes everybody no matter who you are. How am I supposed to regret. Everybody's walked out motivate her when she looks at of rehearsal, but no one had said me and goes, "Every media "I quit." I said "I quit." I quit for outlet hates me." I have to give the day! [ Laughs] I didn't look her props. She's an incredible upset. It was like, "Let me relax mom and she's an example for for a little bit." Then I came single moms out there. She back and said, "Let's do this handles herself to the best of her again." Ten seasons, we've had ability because she's constantly someone walk out almost every under fire by everybody. ... episode, and no one has made a People hang on every word she big deal out of it until now. Now says. I experienced that for the they're making a big deal first time when [reporters] because it's Kate Gosselin? would ask me questions in a C'mon! It's sad because this is provoking way to get me to say s o m e b o d y w h o j u s t w e n t something negative about her. I through a publicized divorce. don't have anything negative to Her ex-husband's in the media; say about her. I had a great time she's in the media. Their kids teaching her. Whatever drama have to read all kinds of stories you saw on TV, that's exactly about their parents. While she's how long it lasted. Five minutes, down, people are still kicking that's it. We laughed until I had her? I just don't think that is her in stitches. She was on the right. If this is what our floor laughing.

Dancing's Derek Hough: I have to top last season's mambo head -bob TVGuide.com: We never saw any of that, though. Does it bother you your fun moments weren't included? Dovolani: Well, that's why I'm a dance teacher; I'm not a producer, but obviously our show is successful for a reason. Those producers are doing an incredible job. They brought drama. Everybody was talking about the show, so they did their job. The truth be told, the hardest part of teaching her was keeping her motivated because of all these things that everyone was saying about her. She was demoralized. Every 15 minutes, somebody would send her a new article that was written about her in a bad way. You have no choice but to read it because you want to know what is being said about you so you can protect yourself when questions come up in interviews. I don't blame her. I would look at her and go, "I'm so sorry you have to read that." When tabloids took my words and twisted it, I told her, "I have no idea what you deal with!" Being followed by paparazzi so you're afraid to play with your kids in your yard because God forbid you make a DANCING'S page 29

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DANCING'S continued from page 28

serious face and people misconstrue that as you being a mean mom? What parent hasn't had a serious face in front of their kid at one point or another? TVGuide.com: Maks said he thinks Kate resisted you. Do you feel that way? Dovolani: No. Every couple has struggles and everybody resists in the early weeks because you're doing something completely new with someone you just met. Maks [Chmerkovskiy] and Erin [Andrews] had some issues, so did Derek [Hough] and Nicole [Scherzinger]. We don't know anything about the other person, so of course there's going to be resistance. You just have to earn trust and learn to trust, and eventually, Kate started doing better. Her tango was good. Even though they picked the foxtrot apart, she did a good job. TVGuide.com: Have you been keeping in touch? Dovolani: Pretty much every other day we're on the phone with each other. I ask how she's doing, how the kids are doing.

She asks about all the meetings I've been taking. ... The timing hasn't worked out, but we are going to have a playdate because I want our kids to meet and her kids are just adorable. My daughter and her kids would just have a blast. Read Maks' Dancing blog TVGuide.com: What are you going to perform on the finale? Dovolani: We don't know yet. The producers are going to have a meeting with me in a couple days to let me know what we're dancing. It'll just be fun to have her around again because she was a lot of fun to be around. I just want to see her smile because when she smiles, she lights up a room. TVGuide.com: What are you predictions for the rest of the season? Dovolani: I can probably predict the final, but as far as winning, I have no idea. I think the final would be Nicole, Erin and Evan [Lysacek]. That would be a very entertaining final three. ... [Maks] is my best buddy, so of course I'm pulling

for him. I want one of us to win! [ Laughs] Derek's already won! So Anna [Trebunskaya] or Maks. TVGuide.com: You're doing some acting now? Dovolani: Yeah, I'm taking some meetings for a few things. I'm really excited. ... People are starting to realize that I have acting experience. It sets me a little apart because I've actually studied it. I'm kind of glad they're trying to recognize that. We're working out which direction we want to go. As long as I'm performing and providing entertainment, that's all I care about. I'm not afraid to make fun of myself. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Google to Introduce Android-Based TV Software Brad Trechak (TV Squad) Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:15:00 AM

In another step towards competing with the ubiquitous iPhone and other smartphone operating systems, Google will be introducing television-based software in May that will run Google Android. The software is said to open up television, settop boxes and devices to more content from the Internet. Google is essentially trying to develop a television set operating system. It will be tough to make it work, since many of the television manufacturers will likely be protective of whatever software goes on their hardware. However, it sounds like Sony, Intel and a few other companies are already on board. This is just another step

towards the eventual merger of your home television and computer systems. If Google can succeed in this, Android could become a major player in operating systems, competing with the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Linux. Filed under: Industry, OpEd, Software Permalink| Email this| | Comments

'The Vampire Diaries' - 'Blood Brothers' Recap Jane Boursaw (TV Squad)

and a trusting girlfriend all played into this episode of'The Vampire Diaries.' We also got (S01E20) "You're back on some flashbacks that revealed Bambi blood, and I'm a badass more of the Salvatore brothers' big brother again. All is right in backstory and why Damon hates the world." - Damon to Stefan Stefan so much. Although, A jealous brother, an evil uncle, really, if he hated him that m u c h , h e w o u l d n ' t h a v e Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:38:00 AM

organized the rescue mission to extract Stefan out of the vampires' farmhouse lair. Maybe he did it more for Elena than anything else. And is it just me, or are Damon and Elena getting awfully chummy lately? I'll answer my

own question: yes, they are. Continue reading'The Vampire Diaries' - 'Blood Brothers' Recap Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Vampire Diaries Permalink| Email this| | Comments

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Rielle Hunter Tells Oprah: I Am Not a Home Wrecker (TVGuide.com: Breaking News) Submitted at 4/29/2010 8:43:00 PM

Rielle Hunter, The Oprah Winfrey Show In her first TV interview since John Edwards claimed paternity of her 2-year-old daughter, Rielle Hunter told Oprah Winfrey she is not a home wrecker. "It is not my experience that a third party wrecks a home," Hunter said on The Oprah Winfrey Show Thursday. "I believe the problems exist before a third party comes into the picture." Oprah Winfrey lands TV interview with Rielle Hunter "A lot of people bought into the myth of the marriage. I mean, the Edwards marriage as being a storybook story and it was so perfect and so wonderful," she said. "He wanted to be with me, and their marriage had problems for many, many years." In her sit-down with Winfrey, the 46-year-old Hunter recalled meeting the former presidential

May 2007. John and Elizabeth Edwards legally separate Since admitting he was Frances Quinn's father in January, Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, have separated. "Do I think I hurt Elizabeth? You would have to ask Elizabeth that," Hunter said. "I don't know the answer to that." Hunter said that Edwards regularly visits their child and provides both mother and daughter with financial support. Although Hunter stated she loves Edwards and believes that candidate for the first time in Hunter would not say if she did he loves her, she would not say February 2006 and running into or did not spend the night, she if they are in a relationship. "I'm him again later that night. had no personal intentions. "I a private person. It's hard," she Edwards' former mistress wants had no plans, none at all," she said. "Right now, I need a "private" tape back said. "Just my heart felt I could boundary on my personal life." "He came around the corner and help him." Five Filters featured article: saw me standing on the street, After that, she and Edwards The Art of Looking Prime and he lit up. He was just so began talking on the phone daily Ministerial - The 2010 UK excited â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I mean, just lit up," for four hours at a time and General Election. Available she said. "I just turned to him Hunter was hired in July 2006 tools: PDF Newspaper, Full and said, 'You're so hot.' And he as a videographer for Edwards' Text RSS, Term Extraction. practically jumped in my arms." campaign. Hunter said Edwards Edwards, 56, later invited her to was aware she was not using his hotel room to discuss how he birth control when daughter could help her and, although Frances Quinn was conceived in

Nothing to Sneeze At - from Consumer Reports Press Room (Consumer Reports) Submitted at 4/29/2010 9:00:59 PM

Nothing to Sneeze At - from

Consumer Reports When it comes to allergy relief, there's no silver bullet - though you may find relief in some OTC and prescription products. From

Consumer Reports May issue. Allergy Relief - Podcast Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert

Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

VIDEO: Who Are Hollywood's Hottest Moms? (TVGuide.com: Breaking News) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:36:00 AM

Nicole Richie, Gwen Stefani Let's be honest, Hollywood isn't filled with your typical suburban moms. They're stylish, have smokin' hot bodies, and have some of the coolest jobs ever. In honor of Mother's Day, TV Guide Network pays homage to the A-List moms of Tinseltown in an upcoming special, Hollywood's Hottest Moms. From hip rocker mom Gwen Stefani to reformed bad-girl Nicole Richie, get a sneak peek of who topped our list. Hollywood's Hottest Moms airs Sunday 8/7c on TV Guide Network. Watch the video: Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Five TV Weddings That SAC Capital Made $100 Million Didn't Happen Yesterday On The Dendreon Trade (DNDN) Jane Boursaw (TV Squad) Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:03:00 AM

If you love bridal shows and haven't checked out'Say Yes to the Dress' yet, now is a perfect opportunity. The reality series returns Friday, April 30, 9PM ET on TLC, and it's all about the inner workings of Kleinfeld Bridal, a premiere bridal salon whose goal is to make every bride completely happy with her wardrobe for the big day. In honor of the show's return, I've compiled a few TV weddings that didn't happen for various reasons. Maybe if the brides had gone to Kleinfeld Bridal, things would have turned out differently ... or not. For top TV weddings that actually did happen, check out Memorable TV Weddings. Jim and Pam, Niles and Daphne, and

Courtney Comstock (The Money Game) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:47:47 AM

Luke and Laura made the list. Continue reading Five TV Weddings That Didn't Happen Filed under: OpEd, Grey's Anatomy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, TV Squad Lists Permalink| Email this| | Comments

Yesterday one desk at SAC Cap made $100 million. Hours after the FDA approved a new prostate cancer drug, Provenge, yesterday, shares of Dendreon spiked. The news was fantastic for SAC Cap, which reported a 5.5% stake in the pharmaceutical company on April 2. The SEC 13G filing means that the firm owned 7,369,801 in the Dendreon Corp as of 10 days before April 2. So let's just say SAC bought DNDN at the highest possible price before yesterday's spike, $40. That's a little under a $300 million investment. When the stock jumped $10 yesterday, those shares were worth $368.5 million. And SAC made at least $68 million in one day. Awesome. Now just for fun, let's calculate

the max they could have made. No one is required to report a company stake until it tips 5%. So let's say SAC bought 4.9% of Dendreon in January, when it was trading below $30 ($190.4 million). Then let's say he bought the remaining 1.6% at ~$35 in late March ($75 million). He would have made $177.6 million. So yeah, a $100 million profit

is a conservative estimate. Makes those 62% who said they wouldn't invest in SAC look silly. Also check out: What it's like to work for Steve Cohen and What's on the desk at SAC Capital. Join the conversation about this story »

Wise Words: Move Your Feet WomansDay.com Editors (Daily Woman's Day Blog) Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:30:00 AM

Here's a little bit of inspiration to make your day fun, fabulous

and full of joy. Today's quote was submitted by Beth Marsh. Don’t ask God to guide your footsteps if you aren’t willing to move your feet. -English Proverb

When do you call on God for guidance? Have a favorite quote? Send it t o u s a t wdwisewords@gmail.com with your name, city and state. You

m i g h t b e f e a t u r e d i n a n tools: PDF Newspaper, Full upcoming Wise Words post!. Text RSS, Term Extraction. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available

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Moody's Just Downgraded A Slew Of Greek Banks Gus Lubin (The Money Game) Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:40:00 AM

Moody's just dropped ratings on nine Greek banks(note: we originally reported that 11 banks were downgraded) From Moody's: Moody’s Investors Service has today downgraded the bank financial strength ratings (BFSRs) as well as the deposit and debt ratings of nine Greek banks to reflect their weakening stand-alone financial strength and the anticipated additional pressures stemming from the country’s challenged economic prospects. The banks’ deposit and debt ratings remain on review for possible downgrade and will be concluded at the same time as Moody’s ongoing review of the country’s sovereign rating, which serves as a reference point with which to impute bank rating uplift as a

result of possible systemic support. The banks affected by today’s rating action are: National Bank of Greece, EFG Eurobank Ergasias SA, Alpha Bank AE, Piraeus Bank, Emporiki Bank of Greece, Agricultural Bank of Greece, General Bank of Greece, Marfin Egnatia Bank and Attica Bank.

Goldman Sachs Is Getting Bludgeoned On News Of This Criminal Probe (GS)

The country's A3 sovereign bond is still under review, but you can guess where that's going. S&P made the downgrade on Tuesday. Check out: Who's Getting Smashed In A Greek Collapse > Joe Weisenthal (The Money Join the conversation about this Game) story » Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:44:40 AM

real. Bonus: The complete Goldman Sachs winners and losers > Join the conversation about this Our gut says the reports of a story » criminal probe into Goldman See Also: Sachs (GS) are kind of hot-air, • Goldman Selling Off On and that all that's going on is a Goldman Criminal Probe News, perfunctory examination of what But Is The Story Just Hype? the SEC has charged the bank • Warren Buffett Says He's with. Ready To Fire Away On GUI to navigate to the file than But on such things we like to G o l d m a n S a c h s Federal Prosecutors to type out a long path name. defer to the market, and the • market seems to think this is a Conducting CRIMINAL Probe This clever trick will pull up a Of Goldman Sachs file browser on demand. More » big deal. The stock is getting creamed, and is down over 8%. That's

Open a File Browser from the Command Prompt [Command Line] Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:30:00 AM

Even if you're a command-line devotee, sometimes it's just way

easier to use the mouse and a

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April 30, 1939: The Future Arrives at New York World's Fair Chris Baker (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 4/29/2010 11:00:00 PM

1939: The New York World’s Fair opens in Flushing Meadow Park. It will give visitors a glimpse of “the world of tomorrow” and shape industrial design, pop culture and the way the future would envision the future. The fair ran two seasons, from 1939 to 1940. The most memorable exhibit was the General Motors Pavilion, and the most memorable feature in the General Motors Pavilion was a ride called the Futurama. People stood in line for hours to ride it and experience the exciting possibilities of life in the distant future — the year 1960. The Futurama ride carried fair visitors past tiny, realistic landscapes while a narrator described the world of tomorrow. The effect was like catching a glimpse of the future from the window of an airplane. As you might expect from a ride sponsored by GM, the focus was on what roadways and transportation might look like in 20 years. “Detailed miniatures are always compelling,” says Dan Howland, editor of the Journal of Ride Theory. “It doesn’t matter whether they are dollhouses or model trains or it’s Legoland, something about

them just sucks you in. The 1939 Futurama had two other factors that compounded the fascination: first, a promise of personal car ownership (and after the Great Depression that sounded pretty good), and second, a grand vision of the future. Up until the Futurama,

manufacturers had exhibited at fairs to show how they made their products. Then the Futurama came along and said, Here is how the future will feel. The 1939 audience wasn’t used to having a company selling optimism, and it made their hearts sing.”

GM’s ride presented a utopia forged by urban planning. Sophisticated highways ran through rural farmland and eventually moved into carefully ordered futuristic cities. “You have to understand that the audience had never even considered a future like this,”

says Howland. “There wasn’t an interstate freeway system in 1939. Not many people owned a car. They staggered out of the fair like a cargo cult and built an imperfect version of this incredible APRIL page 34

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APRIL continued from page 33

vision.” The Futurama wasn’t so much about the cars GM intended to build. Visitors were told about certain features these future cars might have — such as radio controls that help them maintain proper distance from each other — but the vehicles themselves were so tiny that they could barely be distinguished. What the Futurama ride was really selling was a highway system — a taxpayer-funded highway system. “I think the best take on it was in E. L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair,” says Howland. “A family exits the ride, and the father says, ‘General Motors is telling us what they expect from us: We must build them the highways so they can sell us the cars.’” The original Futurama left an indelible imprint on popular culture, visible in everything from the art design in sci-fi films to forward-looking marketing campaigns to the widespread use of the suffixarama. It’s no wonder that when New York hosted another World’s Fair in 1964, a second Futurama exhibit was mounted. The original Futurama had presented the brave new world of 1960. Many of the predictions had already been disproven by the time Futurama II debuted. “This is always a recurring

problem — the times catch up with science fiction visions,” says Howland. “That’s why Steampunk is so popular, because it can’t become obsolete. But the Futurama, man, that was Dieselpunk!” Futurama II looked even further into the future, presenting predictions of a time that most fair visitors won’t live to see. In this world, mankind had dominion over the entire universe. Six-wheeled moon buggies (pictured above) moved easily over the lunar surface, ritzy hotels had been built deep beneath the ocean, treedevouring machinery carved highways through jungles. The point of view wasn’t quite as distanced as the original Futurama. The far-fetched vehicles were much larger, and they were piloted by tiny human puppets. The overall look was strikingly similar to the campy TV show Thunderbirds, which premiered as the 1964-1965 World’s Fair was closing. At the end of the first Futurama exhibit, fair visitors were given a pin. At the end of the second, it was a pocket tab, but the simple message was the same: I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. It’s easy to laugh at the datedness and the overoptimism of these futurist exhibits. But we should resist the urge to dismiss them. “These things aren’t just

quaint,” says Cory Doctorow, a Boing Boing contributor and science fiction writer. “They’re a caution and an inspiration. They show us just how faulty our intuition about the future use of new inventions can be. Most of this stuff was utterly plausible when the rides opened, and it’s only in hindsight that we can see how weirdly wrong they got it.” “It’s an inspiration too, though,” Doctorow adds. “They show us that we’re pretty good at figuring out what’s going to be important to the future, but not why. Networks are important, but not for videophones. Space is important — for weather satellites, Google Earth, spying, GPS. But not colonizing — at least not so far.” Howland points out that we might be better off if we’d followed the designs of the original Futurama to the letter. “The designer, Norman Bel Geddes, did a lot of research on how to build technological solutions to traffic problems,” says Howland. “And he did it decades before the problems even manifested themselves. Unfortunately, nobody paid any attention to the problems Geddes anticipated, so we ended up with all these fantastic freeways and they’re all gridlocked by 5 p.m. every weeknight. If we lived in the Futurama, we’d be home by now.”

Adapted from an article that appeared on Wired.com Nov. 27, 2007. Photo: Daniel Salo See Also: • Photo Gallery: 1939’s ‘World of Tomorrow’ Shaped Our Today • ‘Futurama’ Is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In • Aug. 3, 1803: Crystal Palace Architect Born • April 30, 1897: J.J. Thomson Announces the Electron … Sort Of • April 30, 1916: Information Theory, Who’s Your Daddy? • April 30, 1945: New Generation U-Boat Too Little, Too Late • Feb, 11, 1939: Lise Meitner, ‘Our Madame Curie’ • May 14, 1939: A 5-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Mother on Record • June 19, 1939: Dreaded ALS Gets a New Name • Sept. 1, 1939: Wehrmacht Puts the Blitz in Krieg Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Shop Whitney Port’s California Cool Look from The City ELLE.com (ELLE Fashion Blogs) Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:14:23 PM

On Tuesday’s season premiere of The City, the pressure was on as Whitney hustled to prepare for her debut runway collection at Bryant Park. During the fashion show, Whitney’s own light, easy, pastel-colored outfit was unruffled despite the madness going on backstage. Get the look with a feminine striped skirt from Forever 21 paired with a nude caged sandal by L.A.M.B. Top it off with a Mawi flourescent necklace, Topshop cotton tank and lightweight Karen Millen jacket.

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Alt Text: Chimps Mourn Like Humans, Maybe a Bit Too Much Lore Sj&amp;#246;berg (Wired Top Stories) Submitted at 4/29/2010 7:00:00 PM

“Chimpanzees mourn their dead like humans do, research finds” — Los Angeles Times headline --Eechee hadn’t been gone for more than an hour and everyone was already arguing over his stuff. Cheecha claimed that Eechee promised her his favorite termite-poking stick when she was protecting him from that leopard a couple of weeks ago, and Chirree was having none of it. “I happen to remember hearing a very familiar screech from inside the hollow tree when the leopard came around, and I know the hollow tree isn’t anywhere near Eechee’s nest,” she said. “I imagine you would know where the hollow tree is,” replied Cheecha. “That is where you go to pick lice off Grungrun’s mate, isn’t it?” So that’s how Cheecha ended up with claw marks on her face and Chirree ended up missing a few patches of hair — a few more patches of hair, if I’m being honest — and Eechee hadn’t been dead for more than an hour. I’ve always been considered the responsible one in the troop, so

it fell to me to make funeral arrangements. Nobody actually asked, of course — they just all assumed that I’d handle it, the same way I handle it every time we see a snake in the area, or like when the big nesting tree fell over. Not a word of gratitude, not a piece of fruit or a hint of ritual submissiveness. Luckily, chimp funerals aren’t much to speak of. I just sat by the body for a day or so and

hooted a couple of times. It would have been nice if someone else offered to pitch in with the hooting duties, but they were too busy arguing over who got to claim Eechee’s foraging spot and “secret” stash of fermented berries. Old wounds got opened freshly as troop members reminded each other who borrowed nesting materials from Eechee and never paid them back, and

who never seemed to be around when Eechee needed a grooming but showed up scratching pointedly just as everyone else was fully groomed. From all the fighting and noise, you’d think that Eechee was a beloved and treasured member of the troop. But to be honest, this was the most attention anyone paid to him since the Time of the Great Rains. Only

one chimp ever really checked in on him, made sure he was getting enough grubs to eat, made sure to sit on the side with his one good eye when hanging out with him. Guess who? Was it Cheecha, who now has the termite stick and is suggesting that Eechee’s favorite sunning spot should be reserved for her from now on? ALT page 37

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Heated Wetsuit Stokes Your Fanny When Hanging 10 Steven Leckart (Wired Top Stories)

preferable for colder climates), we found the artificial heat more than adequate for making 52Submitted at 4/29/2010 7:00:00 PM degree water a lot more Heated Wetsuit Stokes Your tolerable. During our first hourFanny When Hanging 10 and-a-half session, we toggled The balance, timing and core between low and medium strength required by surfing take without ever feeling like we time to acquire. But a Zen-like needed the boost. tolerance of the elements? Well, Even better, the battery has e v e n t h e p r o s g e t c o l d , some serious stamina. Even especially in chilly conditions when we were surfing hood- and like San Francisco's coastal bootie-free in 53-degree surf, waters. That's why Rip Curl's cranking the heater up all the self-heating wetsuit is a real way regularly, we still left the boon. water after an hour with juice to The H-Bomb features two 7.4- s p a r e . I t ' s w o r t h n o t i n g , volt lithium-ion batteries that however, that the suit did not power a titanium-lined warming fully make up for bare feet, panel that stretches from your hands and head. shoulder blades down to your Considering you're toting 120tailbone. gram battery packs and the A switch on the lower left wiring is visibly embedded in allows you to move between the neoprene, we found the Hthree settings: low, medium and Bomb surprisingly comfortable high, the latter of which is and more or less as flexible as intended to provide a short the Billabong B9 Platinum suit. "boost" of up to 124 degrees While the indicator light is Fahrenheit. A color-coded (blue, great for quickly assessing the purple, or red) indicator light s e t t i n g s , i t ' s a d e f i n i t e tells you how much heat it's distraction. Learning to surf is giving off. difficult enough. Fiddling with Although this suit is only 3/2 buttons or just having to explain m i l l i m e t e r s t h i c k ( 4 / 3 i s "Yes, that's a light on my

wetsuit" while you're out in the water is a surefire way to prime yourself for a wipeout. That said, as the novelty began to wear off, we appreciated the added warmth. WIRED As plug-and-play as a portable desktop heater. Relatively unobtrusive battery placement. Subtle styling. Allows you to ditch thicker, less flexible 4/3 suits. TIRED Each battery requires a separate three-prong outlet. Heat indicator light makes you feel a bit like Tron Guy. Batteries and plugs hate saltwater and, therefore, need additional rinsing after surf. No zippered hood attachment. More expensive than a decent surfboard. Essentially transforms you into a sharkfriendly hot pocket. • Manufacturer: Rip Curl • Price:$1,000

Accessories News: Lydia Courteille Capsule Collection ELLE.com (ELLE Fashion Blogs)

The collection retails from $1200-$3000 and is available Submitted at 4/29/2010 9:04:00 PM now at the Lydia Courteille Famed French jeweler, Lydia boutique in Paris, France (please Courteille, built a legacy on her call 00 33 1 42 61 11 71 for tongue-in-cheek approach to more information). fine jewelry. In what she Lydia Courteille “Third eye” commonly refers to as her Sterling silver, black and brown 'Cabinet of Curiosities', Madame diamonds (Price available upon Courteille's small 19th century request) Rue St. Honore storefront Lydia Courteille “Scarab” houses the most decadent Sterling silver ring, rubies, displays of rare gemstones black diamonds (Price available reworked into everything from upon request) Jerome Bosch-inspired diamond Lydia Courteille “Heart” Sterling silver ring (Price -encrusted reptiles, re-set vintage cameos, African tribal available upon request) pieces, and an extensive archive Lydia Courteille “Rose” Sterling silver ring (Price of vintage treasures. For the first time this Fall, available upon request) M a d a m e C o u r t e i l l e i s Lydia Courteille “Dragon” Sterling silver ring (Price introducing a lower-price point available upon request) line, for U.S. distribution, in a chic collection of etched skull Lydia Courteille “Spider” Five Filters featured article: Sterling silver ring, black rings. Speaking to the The Art of Looking Prime diamonds (Price available upon inspiration behind the line and Ministerial - The 2010 UK her ironic treatment of a gothic request) General Election. Available skull motif, Mdme Courteille Lydia Courteille “Ankh Cross” tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Sterling silver ring, black explains her aim to explore how Text RSS, Term Extraction. diamonds (Price available upon to 'tame death by associating it to symbols of eternal life, hope request) and love.'

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Is there a link between exercise and happiness? (HowStuffWorks Daily Feed)

more conducive to long-term happiness: exercise. When we walk, run, bike or If you've ever been stressed out, engage in some other form of you may have attempted to physical exercise, we generally relieve your anxiety in a number seem to feel happier and less of ways: eating, logging hours anxious. People who are in poor in front of the television, or physical condition are certainly increasing your use of tobacco, no strangers to happiness, and alcohol or drugs (both legal and one study of Stanford University illegal). All of these represent student-athletes found that attempts to take your mind off happiness for this group was y o u r w o r r i e s , o r i n s o m e more a result of their personality instinctual way to alter your and temperament than it was of brain chemistry a bit. And a t h l e t i c p r o w e s s [ s o u r c e : sometimes it works. Denny]. However, there are However, many of our go-to certainly aspects of physical strategies -- like gorging on fitness that grease the skids of chocolate ice cream or having happiness. an extra glass or two of wine -- In addition to increased energy, a l s o h a v e n e g a t i v e physically active people may consequences, especially when feel a sense of accomplishment carried out repeatedly. In the in meeting personal fitness long run, some behaviors goals. Also, they may feel proud u n d e r t a k e n t o i n c r e a s e of the improved physical happiness can actually decrease appearance that those hours in it. the gym have produced. And There is another strategy for getting outdoors on a nice day -reducing stress and improving or even working out indoors mood that not only seems to around a bevy of strangers -make people happier, but also stimulates the mind and shakes yields positive long-term effects up what may be for some people Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM

an otherwise monotonous and cubicle-centric daily existence. But is there a direct link between exercise and happiness? We know that exercise has been shown to improve the sleep patterns of insomniacs, as well as lower their anxiety [source: American Academy of Sleep Medicine]. Studies on rats indicate that exercise mimics the effects of antidepressants on the brain. Exercise is also responsible for the creation of new brain cells in the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory [source: Karolinska Institutet]. Interestingly, happiness and exercise are similar in two notable ways: both are independently associated with a boost to the immune system, and also with the release of endorphins. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

ALT continued from page 35

No, it’s the guy who’s doing the funeral-hooting. This is why I keep suggesting that we all file end-of-life directives, but that would require both a writing system and a sense of personal mortality, neither of which have really taken off in our little troop in spite of my efforts. In the end, Eechee was really the only thing keeping me with this troop. I’ve been checking out the strange tall hairless creatures that keep hiding at the edge of the clearing, pointing boxes at us. They seem nice. I have yet to see any of them fling feces at each other, but maybe they’re just showing company manners. Still, I’m thinking of asking to join their troop. It can’t be worse than mine, and whatever else, I’m sure they deal with death in a more dignified manner than we do.

--Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a primate, a Primarch and a primrose. See Also: • Alt Text: Going Green Into Death's Eternal Blackness • Alt Text: Ashes to Caches — Cremation Services for Dead Geeks Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Dinner Diary: Roast Chicken Breast Tool: Electric Lock Pick and Steamed Artichokes Is an All-Access Pass WomansDay.com Editors (Daily Woman's Day Blog) Submitted at 4/29/2010 3:00:00 PM

Today, purely by chance, I present two feats of culinary acrobatics that once intimidated me but now appear beautifully simple: roasting a chicken breast and steaming a whole artichoke. I found a reliable source on how to do each ( here and here) and ended up with a simple meal that made me very happy. First the artichokes. Clearly these things are not going to win any beauty contests, particularly not after they've been cooked. But every time I eat one of these prickly-looking things, I am amazed. The first bite, I'm kind of confused. Why would anyone bother with this? As I work my way through, however, the leaves get more tender and sweeter with each layer. By the time I scrape my teeth against the inside of the last few leaves, a pile of discarded ones testifying to the work I've put in, they're melting in my mouth. I scrape the hairy part off the

handle it. Too much bland, rubbery meat. Leave on the skin and bone, though, and you've got something entirely different: juicy, tender, with crackly skin and flavorful meat. The technique I used was easy. Spread olive oil over the chicken, then season with salt and pepper. Sear breast side down for 3 minutes in a hot oven-proof skillet, then turn heart and then just bite into over and transfer the skillet to a what's left, the payoff. preheated 450-degree oven. It They're not that hard to prepare, took about 25 minutes for my either. You trim about the top chicken to reach an internal third of the leaves and all but an temperature of 160 degrees, then inch of the stem, tear off the I took it out and let it rest 5 outer 2 or 3 layers of leaves, minutes. then steam in a big pot over More classics: water that has some lemon and a Spaghetti and Meatballs bay leaf in it. I steamed mine How to BBQ Steaks and about 40 minutes and they were Burgers kind of big ones; the leaves The Best Meat Loaf should pull out easily when the — Kim Walker artichokes are done. I like to dip Five Filters featured article: mine in mayonnaise. The Art of Looking Prime Next, the chicken. The last time Ministerial - The 2010 UK I bought chicken, I bought General Election. Available skinless, boneless breasts, far tools: PDF Newspaper, Full and away the most popular Text RSS, Term Extraction. chicken cut, but I couldn't

Bob Parks (Wired Top Stories)

turning; E500XT slams those pins up and out of the way. To use the 10-inch-long device, Submitted at 4/29/2010 7:00:00 PM place the picking needle and Photo: Tom Schierlitz tension tool — basically an LWhat it is shaped stainless steel bar — SouthOrd E500XT Electric inside the keyway. Pulse the Lock Pick 8,000-rpm motor to deliver Who uses it powerful vibrations that knock Locksmiths, detectives, military the pins clear, allowing the personnel tension tool to turn the lock YouTube is full of videos mechanism. The whole process demonstrating how to pick a takes about 20 seconds. Just lock with everything from a don’t think the SouthOrd pick is paper clip to a wiper blade. But an easy ticket to a career as a cat most of these rudimentary burglar: It sounds like gears techniques work on only a grinding on an ‘86 Yugo. limited number of pin-tumbler Five Filters featured article: locks. If you want to be sure you The Art of Looking Prime can compromise all of them, Ministerial - The 2010 UK you need SouthOrd’s $170 General Election. Available electric pick set. Pin-tumblers tools: PDF Newspaper, Full use five or more pins to prevent Text RSS, Term Extraction. the lock’s central cylinder from

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En Garde! Taking Up Swordplay ELLE.com (ELLE Fashion Blogs) Submitted at 4/29/2010 4:38:24 PM

With Clash of the Titans now in theaters and Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood opening May14th, swordplay is becoming all the rage in Hollywood. Taking full advantage of the moment, the Manhattan Fencing Center is offering free beginner lessons to promote the sport. One of only four sports to be featured at every modern Olympic games, the discipline stresses balance and coordination while promoting strategic thinking. Eager to find out more, I headed to the front terrace of the New York Public Library where the

free classes are held every Friday at 1pm through June 25th. Under the watchful eyes of the library’s resident lions, Patience and Fortitude, genial instructors separated the participants into

that requires it’s own wardrobe!) Starting with steps, then lunges, each participant learned the fundamental footwork and positions to begin. Next they were handed a sabre and taught appropriate handling. By the end of the hour the fencers were engaging each other in one on one competition. Everyone looked great, worked hard and certainly was enthusiastic. If you want to two groups. The experienced enhance your regular workout brought their own equipment, routine with something much WomansDay.com Editors w h i l e M F C p r o v i d e d t h e more stimulating, It might be (Daily Woman's Day Blog) necessary gear for the novices: time to step out on your lunch Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM the requisite jacket, mask, glove break and take up the sword. and sabre. (Anyone who loves —Tricia Schreiber CUTEST page 40 fashion can appreciate a sport

Cutest Pet of the Day: Smokey

Valerie Biener's Global Trends Highlights Latin America's Top Designers ELLE.com (ELLE Fashion Blogs)

stylist for a number of major national magazines, is now down to the business of helping Submitted at 4/29/2010 4:45:02 PM established and inspiring Forget the passport—I was just international designers break introduced to some of Latin into the large and sometimes America’s finest designers overwhelming North American without having to leave the market. country, and it was all thanks to Biener’s company, Global the extremely talented Valerie Trends offers a handful of great B i e n e r . B i e n e r , o n c e t h e services to designers including Fashion Director of Conde Nast s a l e s , p u b l i c r e l a t i o n s , Latin America and also a former marketing, showroom space,

special event planning and trade show set-up to help their business grow and flourish in the US market. Biener’s

specialty is taking small Latin America companies and introducing their goods—most of which are already popular in

South America—to major retailers in the hopes of garnering major press coverage. Visit the website and take a look for yourself. The next big designer might be right at you fingertips. —Jodi Belden, Accessories Assistant Follow ELLE on Twitter. Become our Facebook fan!

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CUTEST

Jury in Palin E-Mail Case Deadlocked on 1 Charge

continued from page 39

Every Friday, WD's Cutest Pet of the Day will pair with Petfinder.com and feature a furry one that you could bring home! Help to save these adorable animals lives by visiting the site today. Find more information about how you can rescue adorable pup Smokey at Petfinder.com. Each day we will post an adorable picture or video of some of the world's cutest pets. Send your furry friends to WDcutepets@gmail.com and you might just see them on the site!

VOTE for your favorites here using our new Cute Pet Face-Off tool. Ten winners will receive one Glow for Good Ball and two boxes of EATS from PlanetDog.com! For official rules click here. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

(Newsmax - Inside Cover)

Donate Your Old Electronics to Skip Hassle of Selling [Charity]

Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:22:52 PM

A federal jury is headed for a fourth day of deliberating the fate of a Tennessee college student accused of hacking into Jason Fitzpatrick (Lifehacker) Sarah Palin's e-mail account. The jury in Knoxville told the Submitted at 4/30/2010 7:30:00 AM judge on Thursday that they are Selling your old electronics deadlocked on one charge but gear can be a hassle. Skip the h a v e r e a c h e d u n a n i m o u s haggling and annoying question- decisions on three others. They o b s e s s e d e B a y b u y e r s b y adjourned in the afternoon and donating your gear to charity. will return Friday. The jurors declined to announce More » their verdicts on charges of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer and obstruction of justice. The deadlocked charge is identity theft.

Axelrod: No New Drilling Until Answers on Accident (Newsmax - Inside Cover) Submitted at 4/30/2010 4:46:42 AM

A top adviser to President Barack Obama says no new oil drilling will be authorized until authorities learn what caused the explosion of the rig Deepwater Horizon. David Axelrod also defended the administration's response to the April 20 accident, saying "we had the Coast Guard in almost immediately."

He deflected comparisons with the government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, telling ABC's "Good Morning America" that such speculation "is always the case in Washington whenever something like this happens." Obama recently lifted a drilling moratorium for many offshore areas, including the Atlantic and Gulf areas. But Axelrod said Friday "no additional drilling has been authorized and none

will until we find out what has happened here." © Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Former University of Tennessee student David Kernell is charged with breaking into the e-mail while Palin was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. The 22-year-old faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted of all charges. © Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Jeremiah, AmericanStyle Alan Wolfe (The New Republic - All Feed) Submitted at 4/29/2010 11:00:00 PM

Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch By Eric Miller (Eerdmans, 394 pp., $32) In a moving tribute to Christopher Lasch written shortly after his death in 1994,

Dale Vree, a Catholic convert and the editor of the New Oxford Review, wrote that “Calvinism was his true theological inspiration.” Lasch was certainly not one of the faithful. “Even before I took so rashly to writing about religion,” he once scribbled to himself, “it JEREMIAH, page 41

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JEREMIAH, continued from page 40

was an embarrassment to admit that I had none.” Yet despite his skepticism, the crucial idea associated with Calvinism since the sixteenth century—an insistence on the complete and utter depravity of the human race—fit Lasch’s increasingly dark vision of human purpose almost to perfection. “Calvinism (via Perry Miller) was my downfall,” he wrote to an inquiring Barbara Ehrenreich in an undated letter. “Or was it Luther’s commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, taught to me by Sidney Ahlstrom? Some ancestral throwback to some distant German past? Or just orneriness and perversity? I kept it under wraps for years, but it was bound to come out in the end.” If Lasch’s peculiar form of secular Calvinism was a throwback to his family’s past, it must have been a distant one. Lasch was born to Robert and Zora Schaupp Lasch in Omaha, Nebraska in 1932. Although descended from Midwestern Lutherans on her father’s side, Zora “had not a spark of religious faith,” as she described herself in her unpublished autobiography. A feminist and a rebel, she was very much a product of the Roaring Twenties, Nebraska-style. After receiving her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, she returned to the state university in Lincoln but was

denied permission to teach ethics because of her commitment to naturalism. She included among her acquaintances John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. The only thing she had in common with the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan was her home state. Robert came from an even more agnostic background than his wife. His parents did not attend church, and although they enrolled their son briefly in Sunday school, before long, as Robert put it, “the pretense of piety was gratefully dropped.” He spent his life in the field of journalism and his politics in the service of the left. A Midwestern progressive committed to social justice at home and skeptical of the projection of American power abroad, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his antiwar editorials published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Robert outlived Kit, as his son would always be known. Doing so enabled him to communicate his displeasure toward Kit’s preoccupation with religious themes. “You must be back from your vacation by now,” he wrote him in 1990, “the biggest question of it being: ‘What in God’s name were you doing at a conference on theology?’” Robert found it difficult enough to accept Kit’s increasing cultural conservatism. The son’s

interest in religious questions left the father baffled. Kit Lasch died at the age of sixty-two, and so we will never know whether he would have eventually gone all the way and joined a church; chances are he was too much of an iconoclast for that. It hardly matters, though, for when it came to the form and content of the jeremiad, the prophetic tradition of reminding us ferociously of our fallen state, there was no greater master during his lifetime. It seems appropriate that the first full-length biography of this major critic of American society and American culture should be written by a historian who teaches at a Christian college—Geneva, near Pittsburgh—named after Calvin’s hometown. And Eric Miller’s fine book has been published by Eerdmans, a press founded by a Christian Reformed Church immigrant from Holland and located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the epicenter of Calvinist America. Compared with an era that produced Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, America in the past few decades, for all its God talk, has lacked major theologians capable of attracting a widespread readership. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and if religious truths can be discussed in the general culture and even make it into presidential speeches, one can

hear these devout thinkers saying to themselves: does it really not matter that the person pronouncing them is without confessional commitments of his own? Lasch was controversial when he lived, and he remains subject to strong and divided opinion long after his death. The fact that he combined a respect for Freud with a love of the Puritans is the least of it. He became a radical just as a new radicalism in America was about to be born, but he would always have an ambivalent relationship with the younger leftists who came after him. His populistic sensibilities became stronger over time, but so did his ties to the elite worlds of academia and opinion journalism. His appreciation for the common man was married to a disdain for mass culture. Lasch was a pioneer historian of the family, but feminists hated—that is not too strong a term—his nostalgia for the nuclear one. It is common to say, as Miller does in his biography, that Lasch simply did not fit into the traditional categories of left and right. But that is because Lasch really did not fit anywhere. He was a genuine American original. So Lasch is owed his due and Miller is the right person to provide it. Although at times a bit heavy-handed in its insistence on the religious

themes in Lasch’s work, Miller’s biography is as thorough as it is thoughtful. This is anything but a quickly written effort to explore the relationship between a thinker and his times. Miller has not only dug deeply, he has also pondered carefully. Lasch’s writings always fascinated me: I looked forward to each of his books, expecting to encounter a writer willing to discuss the most serious of themes in ways that resonated among large numbers of his fellow citizens—and a writer who would provoke me into flabbergasting disagreement in the process. I never met the man, but thanks to this book I now feel that I have. I could not be more grateful to Miller for facilitating the introduction. Some people are born to be writers, and Lasch was one of them. His parents made their living with words, and had many connections to famous writers: before she married Robert, Zora had lived with Willa Cather’s sister and found the famous novelist “rather patronizing, certainly not conducive to any warm regard on my part.” Kit Lasch, too, lived in proximity with literature: for three years he roomed at Harvard with John Updike, another chronicler of the American obsessions with sex, social class, ambition, and JEREMIAH, page 42

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faith. Lasch would never be as good a literary critic as he was a social critic. “I think his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep,” he reported to his parents about Updike. “He is primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he is probably a hack. At least he has more of a hack in him than a profound artist.” It was by no means obvious that a child of the populist Midwest would choose the most prestigious private university in the country for his education, but Lasch was too precocious for any Big Ten school. His mentors at Harvard were quick to discern his talent: Donald Meyer, his tutor there, compared discovering Lasch among his students to Leo Durocher learning that Willie Mays would be his center fielder. Lasch went directly to Columbia University, the best department in American history at that time, to pursue his doctorate. Meyer’s role at Harvard was assumed at Columbia by William E. Leuchtenburg. But the real influence on Lasch would prove to be the man to whom he would so often be compared: Richard Hofstadter. For Lasch, Columbia was a tougher nut to crack: he failed his first attempt at his qualifying examinations for the doctorate. But his skills were recognized and before long he was on his way, teaching at

Williams and completing with astonishing speed the dissertation that resulted in his first book, American Liberals and the Russian Revolution. Rejected by the University of Chicago Press, it was eventually published by Columbia in 1962. It printed 1,500 copies, and 807 were sold by 1964. The only royalty check that Lasch received for the book was for $23.73. But Lasch followed three years later with The New Radicalism in America, the breakthrough book that established him, while still in his thirties, as one of the most promising historians in the country. Both books inaugurated his lifelong argument with liberalism. The dissertation relied heavily on George F. Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr to attack liberals for their naïve belief that men such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were somehow on the side of virtue; already in his early work one can see in Lasch the skepticism toward progress that would mark his later writings. The New Radicalism in America took a somewhat different tack, but sailed in the same direction. Here Lasch wrote brief biographical portraits of the leading intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lincoln Steffens, and Randolph Bourne. He chose them, he said, because they put

culture and not politics at the center of their concerns. While Lasch found much to admire in them, he also worried that in cutting themselves off from their country they downplayed the intellect in favor of the latest crusade. It was a work of history, but Lasch brought it up to his own era with scathing comments about such figures as Norman Mailer and the liberals around the Kennedy White House. “You will be interested to know,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote Richard Rovere, “that a smart aleck kid named Christopher Lasch (son of Bob Lasch of the St. Louis PostDispatch), exposes us both in a new book called The New Radicalism in America.” Unlike our age of Limbaugh, Lasch’s book appeared at a time when no one hated liberals more than leftists. Lasch, at that time, led the way. As if to return to his Midwestern roots, Lasch’s first major teaching positions were at the University of Iowa and Northwestern. Eventually he settled at the University of Rochester, joining the faculty in 1970 and remaining there until his death. Miller, who is stronger on the intellectual trajectory of Lasch’s work than on the details of his personal life, explores in fascinating fashion his complex relationship with Eugene Genovese, who recruited Lasch to Rochester.

Both men were the same age, and shared (at the time) the same Marxist politics, and would move eventually to the right. But in his temperament Genovese strongly resembled the Russian Marxists about whom Lasch had warned in his first book. Steely and suspicious whatever his political views, Genovese persuaded Lasch that the two of them could build an outstanding history department at Rochester together. It never worked out. The idea of running a department democratically was, in Genovese’s view, laughable. Supported by an administration that wanted no trouble, Genovese not only drove away some of Rochester’s stars, such as Herbert Gutman, he also froze Lasch’s salary during the terrible inflationary years of the mid-1970s—and this in spite of Lasch’s increasing fame. Meanwhile Lasch recruited top students, many of whom would go on to write well-received books of their own, and simply waited out Genovese, who eventually moved to Georgia. As Lasch tried, in the 1970s, to give structure to his reservations about liberalism, he assigned a prominent place to Freud as well as Marx. The latter provided an emphasis on the tensions between social classes that would always characterize Lasch’s writings, even when they took on their most

conservative coloration. The former gave Lasch a reason for being sensitive to ulterior motives: if well-meaning liberals could become apologists for totalitarian tyranny, then the views of anyone could produce results quite different from those intended. It was all the rage to combine Marx and Freud during the 1960s and 1970s, and Lasch found himself reading philosophers from the Frankfurt School such as Adorno and Horkheimer, who were trying to do the same thing. The insights that Lasch gleaned from both Marx and Freud helped to shape the arguments in the trilogy that would make him something of a household name: Haven in a Heartless World(1977), The Culture of Narcissism(1979), and The Minimal Self(1984). “I’ve written something that is guaranteed to bore and possibly offend almost every class of reader,” Lasch wrote to his friend Gerald Graff about Haven in a Heartless World. His editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, agreed with the boredom part: Knopf rejected the manuscript even though a book on the family from Lasch had been under contract. Finally accepted by Basic Books, it proved to be something of a publishing sensation. Praised by George Gilder in National Review as JEREMIAH, page 43

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“shrewd and brilliant,” the book infuriated New Leftists and especially feminists. Lasch’s purpose in this book was not to blame women for the collapse of the traditional family; he was still enough of a Marxist to point his finger at capitalism and its apologists for America’s high divorce rates and unhappy children. But he also left no doubt that in his view feminism was, if not the cause, then at least the symptom of family decline. Social critics thrive because so much is wrong with society that one can always find targets aplenty. The case against Lasch was not that his targets were innocent, but that his indictments were selective. Those to the left of Lasch asked: why blame people whose primary commitments were to greater equality and autonomy? But for Lasch, calling attention to the role of the advocates of personal liberation was precisely the point. As gloomy as Lasch’s analysis was, he seemed to take special pleasure in going after those whose views were shaped by the 1960s, and the latter had no trouble detecting his animus. With The Culture of Narcissism, also rejected by Knopf, Lasch broke out of debates within academic circles to make his mark on national politics. Time and Newsweek wrote about it. People featured Lasch along with Olivia Newton -John. Within four months of

publication, 45,000 copies were sold. Not nearly as much a work of intellectual history as his previous books, this book explored such concerns as aging, schooling, advertising, managerialism, and even sports, the last of which received a chapter of its own. (Lasch was not a funny man, but this chapter included what I regard as his best witticism: his definition of sport as “the utmost concentration of purpose, on behalf of activities utterly useless.”) This was the perfect book for its time. It was morbidly clever, brilliantly on target, idiosyncratically compelling. It deserved its status as a best seller and lifted (for a time) the prospects for all serious nonfiction writers to reach larger audiences. Allan Bloom, among others, would follow where Lasch had led. The most historically significant readers of The Culture of Narcissism proved to be Jody Powell and Patrick Caddell, who were working in the Carter White House. Much has been written about Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech and Lasch’s role in it (including a recent book by Kevin Mattson, “ What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President”),andMiller’s treatment of the episode is somewhat disappointing. He faithfully records Lasch’s unhappiness with the speech. Although he could hardly help

noticing how much Carter had borrowed from him, Lasch felt that “the ideas were torn out of context and came across as moral denunciations of selfishness,” and he fired off a seven-page memo to Caddell outlining his concerns. (In 1980, Lasch would vote for the hopeless campaign of Barry Commoner.) Miller takes Lasch’s side in all this, but it is not difficult to imagine hardboiled political pros coming to the conclusion that Lasch, having made his contribution, was too unreliable and needed to be dumped. That’s how politics works. A chronicler of fads should know when his time has passed. Anyway, intellectuals, even “public intellectuals,” do not do their finest work for politicians. It was certainly a boon for the republic of letters that any ambitions Lasch may have had for direct political influence were quashed. Miller correctly points out that Lasch was at his best when he wrote as a member in good standing of the intellectual class directing his fire against people very much like himself. I am not sure how much Americans in general benefited from Lasch’s secular sermons, but those who toil in the vineyard of ideas unquestionably did. The years in which Lasch’s trilogy appeared were accompanied by significant intellectual posturing

in America: an irresponsible and jargon-filled form of postmodernism began to dominate the humanities, leaving a romantic and reckless neoconservatism to take over the White House. Agree or disagree with Lasch, he sustained a fierce integrity and love of argument at a time when all too much thinking was becoming calcified and doctrinaire. (He appeared often in these pages in those years.) The further removed from politics Lasch was, the richer were his thoughts. “Neither the Right nor the Left addresses the overwhelming question of our time, the question of limits,” he wrote in the London Daily Telegraph in 1986, adding that “the problems confronting us are cultural and spiritual rather than political.” In those few words Lasch outlined the course his intellectual trajectory would take in the remaining years of his life. The True and Only Heaven, Lasch’s longest and most serious book, appeared in 1991, and addressed head-on the question of limits. The title was lifted from Hawthorne, and signified the extent to which Lasch had chosen to write in the spirit of Puritan New England. The book defies summation: Lasch took on so many thinkers from so many eras—the Scotsmen Adam Smith and Thomas Carlyle, the founders of

this magazine, Dr. Spock, the anti-busing activist Louise Day Hicks—as to leave readers gasping at the sheer chutzpah of his ambition. But underlying it all was a deep transformation in Lasch’s own thinking. Marx and Freud were out, populism and Calvinism were in. And if the former combination led to the Frankfurt School and Wilhelm Reich, the latter enabled Lasch to finally come to terms with Richard Hofstadter. “I’ve come to see Hofstadter as a latter-day version of H.L. Mencken endlessly belaboring the ‘booboisie,’” Lasch wrote to his former student (and now professor of history at Columbia) Casey Blake. It was a shrewd if cruel comment. Hofstadter was the quintessential New York intellectual, appreciative of modernity, skeptical of religion, in love with cosmopolis. Lasch, by now the anti-Hofstadter, turned all that on its head. For all their differences, populists and Calvinists were both suspicious of progress, which is why Lasch loved them both. “It is almost impossible to read True and Only Heaven, especially at a fifteen-year remove from its publication,” Miller writes, “and not see in it a work of profound scholarship.” He is right. Those fifteen years have brought us, JEREMIAH, page 46

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The TNR Primer: Thailand Seyward Darby (The New Republic - All Feed)

International's Benjamin Zawacki, who works in Thailand. What's more, there are Submitted at 4/29/2010 11:00:00 PM rumors of a dangerous divide B a n g k o k i s i n c h a o s . between the government and Thousands of anti-government parts of its security forces, and protesters (called "red shirts") s o m e s a y t e r r o r i s t s h a v e have settled into the streets of infiltrated the protests. And all the Thai capital and are living in of this is set against a backdrop an organized camp that offers in which the Thai monarchy, free food, toilets, and even once a stabilizing force in makeshift hair salons. On April national politics, is slowly 1 0 , g o v e r n m e n t f o r c e s deteriorating—raising fears a t t e m p t e d t o d i s p e r s e t h e about what's in store for the crowds, spurring street clashes Southeast Asian country. that killed 25 people. On April Here, TNR tries to make sense 22, grenade explosions rattled of the bedlam. the city, wounding more than 80 Who are the major p e o p l e , i n c l u d i n g f o u r players—and what do they foreigners. And, on Wednesday, want? clashes between protesters and Thaksin Shinawatra was elected Thai troops left one soldier prime minister of Thailand in d e a d . P r o t e s t e r s a r e n o w 2001. Following accusations of blocking traffic into Bangkok c o r r u p t i o n , T h a k s i n w a s and forcing the closure of malls deposed in a military coup in and hotels. And there are signs September 2006. Although that a government crackdown living in exile (often in Dubai, might be imminent. "It is clear though he is technically now a the protesters are not gathering citizen of Montenegro), he has peacefully. We will not be remained influential in Thai lenient with these people any politics. Considered the driving more," deputy prime minister f o r c e b e h i n d t h e c u r r e n t Suthep Thuangsuban said on protests, Thaksin would like to Tuesday. return to Thailand to regain the But the crisis isn't a simple power and money he lost after d i c h o t o m y o f g o v e r n m e n t the coup. versus protesters. There are Red shirts are the protesters multiple factions involved—and who have now been in Bangkok it's hard to distinguish the good f o r a l m o s t s e v e n w e e k s . guys from the bad. "It's difficult Officially, they are part of the to point the finger in any one United Front for Democracy direction. It's easy to point it in Against Dictatorship (UDD), a many directions," says Amnesty political party. Many are from

rural, poor areas in Thailand's northeast, and they claim to be pro-democracy. Pointing to the 2006 coup and insisting the current government is illegitimate, they want parliament to dissolve and for new elections to be held. Many also profess loyalty to Thaksin—indeed, the former PM is reportedly paying red shirt leaders and regularly delivers encouraging messages to the protesters via satellite. Abhisit Vejjajiva is the current prime minister of Thailand. He came to power in 2008, after court rulings banned Thaksin's allies—who regained power briefly after the coup—from politics. Abhisit enjoys support in Thailand's south and among its middle and upper economic classes. He has said he wants to compromise with protesters and restore order—but he has also said he won't give in to "threats, violence, intimidation, and weapons." Zawacki of Amnesty International says that, during the current crisis, Abhisit's government has shut down at least 400 websites deemed politically dangerous. Yellow shirts are protesters who have gathered to oppose the red shirts. Officially, they are part of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), an antiThaksin political party. The protested against Thaksin in 2006, declared victory after the coup, and took to the streets

again when the former PM's allies won new elections. Today, although they have gathered in Bangkok's historic district to contest the red shirts, they describe themselves as more pro -monarchy than progovernment. Indeed, they wear yellow in honor of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Bhumibol Adulyadej is the most revered person in Thailand—a father figure to his country during his 64 years on the throne. (You can end up in jail for saying anything negative about Bhumibol or his family.) While technically a figurehead, the king is crucial to national politics, playing an important role, for instance, in transitioning Thailand from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1992. But the king is now 82, and he's been hospitalized for several months. He has spoken only once during this most recent crisis, addressing the nation on Monday night—but he did not mention the protests directly. The military and police are also central to the crisis. Though technically loyal to Abhisit, there are factions that reportedly side with Thaksin (who used to be a police lieutenant) and the red shirts. Indeed, there have been reports of "watermelon soldiers" (who wear green uniforms but are "red on the inside") and "tomatoes" (red through and through) patrolling

Bangkok. And then, there are smaller groups: no colors, who call themselves Civilians Protecting the Country and want the government to restore order, and blue shirts, who have appeared recently in the southern city of Pattaya, armed with sticks and clubs and wearing shirts that say "Protect the Institution," which many people assume refers to the monarchy. Red shirts say blue shirts are military thugs, but the government denies the accusation. What are the roots of the crisis? The current protests are just the latest in a series of them that stems back to Thaksin's tenure as PM. Thaksin was elected in 2001 on a populist platform, promising cheap health care, debt relief, and a shift of power away from Thailand's elite. He was supported by people in poor, rural areas, but his opponents, including many in the old political guard, accused him of corruption, pointing to the massive wealth he had accumulated in the telecommunications sector. (He also restricted the country's media and permitted extrajudicial killings in a "war on drugs," among other human rights abuses he committed.) When his family claimed $1.9 billion in a 2006 telecom deal, street protests erupted—and, a TNR page 47

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Morning Bell: An Appetite for Real Immigration Reform Rory Cooper (The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed saying: “If there is going to be any movement in this regard, it Submitted at 4/30/2010 8:40:09 AM will require presidential In a very rare visit to the press l e a d e r s h i p . ” c a b i n o f A i r F o r c e O n e Effective reforms can be done yesterday, President Barack in a responsible and deliberate Obama told reporters that the manner through discrete steps White House will not be leading rather than another bloated bill any immigration reform efforts that hides from the American in 2010. Obama said: “…I’ve people what Washington is been working Congress pretty trying to do to gain even more hard. So I know, there may not power and authority over its be an appetite immediately to citizens. What is required is a dive into another controversial step-by-step approach, not an ill issue.” Obama went on to assert - c o n c e i v e d “ f r a m e w o r k ” that energy taxes were a higher disguised as “comprehensive” priority, and that the election in reform. November would make tackling An appropriate solution would immigration tough. reject amnesty; apply Apparently, Majority Leader appropriate security to the Harry Reid didn’t heed the border; work as a partner with President’s advice. Several Mexico in helping them address hours later, Reid, Senator Chuck economic and civil society Schumer (D-NY) and their r e f o r m a n d c o m b a t i n g c o l l e a g u e s f r o m t h e l e f t transnational crime; enforce introduced an immigration workplace and immigration laws reform framework that on the in partnership with state and surface is identical to the l o c a l g o v e r n m e n t s ; p i l o t legislation America rejected in effective temporary worker 2007. When you dig down, it programs that help employers may be worse. get the employees they need to Of course, once introduced, help grow the economy; and President Obama issued a reform our visa, immigration statement that his administration and citizenship services. would take “ an active role” The Reid-Schumer plan does toward ironing out the details. not accomplish these goals. This confusing flip-flopping Their proposal adds a lot more f r o m t h e W h i t e H o u s e i s government and bureaucracy i n d i c a t i v e o f h o w t h e (and government spending) administration has treated while doing little to actually border security and immigration ensure over the long-term the reform since taking office. Even s o v e r e i g n t y , s e c u r i t y a n d

prosperity of the nation. It is another example of government taking the short term view of long-term problems. The Reid-Schumer framework puts an emphasis on amnesty, with empty promises of border security. Granting amnesty, access to welfare and government benefits and

citizenship to all who claim they were in the United States at time of enactment of this proposal could cover 11 to 15 million people and overwhelm our borders with people looking to take part. And forgiving such violations would increase the likelihood that these laws be violated again. When you throw

in family members, the total number of those eligible for citizenship through amnesty could then be 17 to 22 million individuals. While Senate Democrats pay lip service to border security, this proposal lacks meaningful metrics for determining “when” the border is secure. It relies on an unelected commission to determine whether we are safe and secure. And maybe most troubling is the call for a biometric national id card, thinly disguised as a more robust Social Security card. Reid and Schumer are ignoring many legitimate ongoing or proposed efforts including E-Verify, Social Security no-match verification and information sharing, and REAL ID in favor of an expansive and expensive program of questionable value as an appropriate enforcement tool. There are better alternatives: • We need a temporary worker program. One that is in fact temporary, market-oriented and feasible. A balanced and wellconstructed program would provide an additional option or legal temporary workers, while diminishing the incentives for illegal entry. Congress must ensure it resolves issues of family status, require bilateral agreements, include triggers, MORNING page 50

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among other treasures, the blog; and while I appreciate the energy and the combativeness of today’s form of intellectual debate, turning back to Lasch’s magnum opus reminds one that progress in the way ideas are conveyed is just as much a mixed blessing as progress in the ideas that are conveyed. Who cannot love Lasch’s combination of learning, passion, stylistic flair, engagement with the largest of themes, and fearless hectoring? And at such length? I can think of no writer today who combines erudition with passion the way Lasch did. In February 1992, thirteen months after The True and Only Heaven appeared, Lasch learned that he had cancer. Although he would continue to write (some books were published posthumously), his life’s work was done. Over a thirty-year span, he had published eight major books, any one of which would have constituted a significant achievement. It is fitting that he died much as he thought. “I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament,” he told one of his doctors. Like Hume, who on philosophical grounds refused to be converted on his deathbed, Lasch was willing to apply his living insights to his dying days. The last word on his

life should be left to his father. “You have a staggering record of accomplishment in a worthwhile calling” is how Robert said goodbye to his son. “You do not need a divinely fashioned grand design to justify your life.” Eric Miller deals mostly with Lasch’s life. What about his legacy? On that question, we cannot let the religious thinkers who adopted him have the last word. Of Lasch’s verve and reach, there can be no doubt. Of his relevance to the years that followed, the matter remains open. The issue that preoccupied his critics even when Lasch was in his prime was whether his anger led him to exaggerations that made his conclusions untrustworthy. The passage of time, I believe, validates those critics more than Lasch. Miller faithfully gives the criticisms. Mark Edmundson, for example, characterized The True and Only Heaven as “little more than a bitter screed against liberal yuppies, a highbrow version of what the popular press has been working at sporadically over the past decade.... The only passages that hum with any kind of life—even if it’s a rather repugnant life—are passages of denunciation in which Lasch chains himself up on the rock and derides the objects of his current rancor.” Such were the

pyrotechnics that Lasch could provoke. Edmundson gives Lasch too little credit for his insights into intellectual history, but he is right about the tone. No matter what the subject, Lasch saw nothing but decline. There are only a limited number of ways one can improve on Increase Mather, and by the end of his life Lasch had run out of them. Miller’s biography shows that Lasch never seemed to understand the effects of his own venom. It was not just that he felt misunderstood by Jimmy Carter. Lasch loved to attack, but he always seemed surprised that the objects of his attack fought back. In his own mind, he was the courageous teller of truths that no one wanted to hear; and so his critics must have been engaged in a prolonged effort at denial, at misreading him as a way to escape their responsibility for the damage that their own ideas had caused. “If you talk about the growing tensions that so often seem to characterize relations between men and women, it’s assumed that you want women to return to the kitchen,” Lasch complained to friends. But whether or not he wanted women confined to cooking, he clearly wanted to make it more difficult for them to divorce their husbands or to pay as much attention to their careers as to their children. Perhaps

Lasch’s feminist critics sensed in Haven in a Heartless World the attitudes that Lasch would later express in a Harper’s forum. When asked how the Bill of Rights should be rewritten to account for the contemporary condition, he responded with a proposed article that included this: “No state shall pass laws authorizing divorce for any but the weightiest reasons. In the case of couples with children under the age of twenty-one, divorce is hereby forbidden.” Feminists, Lasch wrote to another friend, “willfully and maliciously distorted” his thinking. To me it seems that they understood his views pretty well. From the vantage point of today, it is possible to detect an even more serious flaw in Lasch’s choice of targets. Lasch was engaged in an endless war against the leftism of the 1960s when the true enemy of American traditionalism would turn out to be the radical right—one of the persistent objects of Hofstadter’s attention—that came to power after his death. To be sure, Lasch was absolutely right in insisting upon the narcissistic strain in American culture. But what public figure today can possibly compete with Sarah Palin for the title of the most narcissistic personality of our times? (Lasch would no doubt respond by describing Palin’s

prominence as an ironic consequence of feminism’s influence.) Compared to the catastrophic irresponsibility of Wall Street practices, or Republican nostalgia for the Confederacy, or the blatant unconstitutionality of much of the Bush and Cheney years, the harm done to the United States by left-wing elitists in the 1970s begins to pale. Lasch confused the counterculture with permanent revolution. The extremes that provoked him were quickly recognized, even by some of their protagonists, as overheated and dangerous, and the radicalism of the 1970s eventually receded or corrected itself. But the reactionary conservatism that we witness today, by contrast, will never learn to say it is sorry. All of which leads to Lasch’s single most important miscalculation. From start to finish, his enemy was liberalism. What was implicit in his first books became explicit to the point of caricature in his later writings. The liberal order, he wrote in 1983, “should have collapsed a long time ago,” because it could not propose a “theory of the good society” and was therefore doomed to become “a politics of mass media.” Blaming liberals for Ronald Reagan was little different, or more plausible, JEREMIAH, page 53

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few months later, while Thaksin was out of the country, the military seized control of the government. Today, if he returned to Thailand, Thaksin would face a two-year jail sentence. His allies won post-coup elections, triggering more protests by yellow shirts, who even seized Bangkok's airports in 2008. Court rulings led to the ouster of two successive proThaksin prime ministers (including Thaksin's brother-inlaw) and paved the way for Abhisit's elevation. Yet Thaksin's supporters—many of whom he paid from afar—quickly regrouped. In April 2009, red shirts staged protests in Bangkok and even forced the cancellation of a summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was set to be held in southern Thailand. They gained momentum in the following months, leading directly to the current crisis. Other than a new government, what do the red shirts want? On top of their calls for elections, the red shirts want a restoration of health and education polices that benefitted the poor under Thaksin. They also have grievances about the Thai judiciary, which moved against Thaksin and his supporters but has stalled on action against PAD leaders (such as those who seized the

airports in 2008) and other progovernment figures who have reportedly broken national laws. And they have demanded investigations into violence and threats against protesters in 2009 and 2010. But, on a base level, many red shirts, particularly among the leadership, would also like to see Thaksin return to his home country without retribution. "The leaders are just powerseeking," one human rights advocate in Thailand told me. "They want the economic spoils. They'd love to bring Thaksin back." What's the king got to do with it? In a word, everything. On the one hand, he is being used: The government and the yellow shirts are now accusing the red shirts of plotting against the monarchy (read: committing treason), which, considering Thailand's strict laws on defamation and threats to the king, could be used as a rationale for a crackdown. A government official has even provided journalists with a conspiracy diagram linking red shirt leaders, including Thaksin, with other opposition figures, media, and activists. But, on a deeper level, there is widespread fear about the monarchy's line of succession—and it's influencing the current crisis. Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn will become

king when Bhumibol dies, and it's no secret that the Thais don't like him. He allegedly leads a lurid and bizarre personal life. (As The Economist reported in March, "A video circulated widely in 2007 showed his third wife, known as the 'royal consort', at a formal dinner with the prince in a titillating state of undress. Diplomats say Prince Vajiralongkorn is unpredictable to the point of eccentricity: lavishing attention on his pet poodle Fu Fu, for example, who has military rank and, on occasion, sits among guests at gala dinners.”) And, in 2002, there were reports that he had business ties with Thaksin. I was told in my interviews that Vajiralongkorn may now be cozying up to Thaksin and the red shirts. If there is a division of opinion within the monarchy over who should run the government, it could widen when Bhumibol is no longer on the throne. With the king aging quickly and the Thai government simultaneously spiraling toward upheaval, the monarchy's stability is very much part of the political conversation about Thailand's future. "This is coming right at a time when there is a weakness," one Thailand analyst said. "There's not a sea anchor." Are there really "terrorists" involved? The government has said the

April 10 violence and the April 22 grenade explosions were carried out by"terrorists that the government has always been wanting to get rid off," who mixed in among the protesters and wore black clothing. Meanwhile, red shirts have insisted that they are nonviolent—and certainly not supporters of terrorism. Yet blaming terrorists for the situation could prove beneficial to either (or both) the government and the red shirts. On the one hand, the government could use the alleged involvement of terrorists as a pretext for a crackdown. On the other hand, the red shirts can deny responsibility for any violence—although reports indicate that rogue army officers who support Thaksin have trained para-military rangers to protect the protesters. "Behind the scenes, if you peeled it back, both sides are probably involved in some intimidation," one Thailand analyst told me. Is civil war a real possibility? I was in Thailand in the summer of 2006, teaching in the south, and I heard few rumblings of the anti-Thaksin movement, other than what I read in Bangkok newspapers. Similarly, people in Thailand—even in parts of Bangkok—said in recent weeks that life was moving along mostly as usual. Yet, as violence has flared and fears of a

crackdown have grown, civil war has seemed increasingly plausible. And protests have spread from Bangkok to northern cities like Chiang Mai and Udon Thani, and to southern locales like Pattaya. There is a red-yellow divide that already splits the country. "The Democrat Party [which controls the government] has traditionally been a party of the south and has a strong base in that region that is really wall-towall," says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division. "Up in the northeast, we are seeing increasingly wall-to-wall red shirts." Yet sources I spoke to said all-out civil war is unlikely. After all, serious unrest would further threaten Thailand's people or economy, which could be bad for all sides of the conflict. (According to Reuters, the Federation of Thai Tourism Associations says the country's critical tourist industry lost more than $300 million in March, and it projected a steeper drop in April.) What's more, because Thailand has the region's second-largest economy and is a key member of ASEAN, neighboring countries will likely "close ranks behind the Thai government" and urge stability, according to Robertson. (Cambodia would be the likely exception; last year, TNR page 53

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Standing Eight Abbas Milani (The New Republic - All Feed) Submitted at 4/29/2010 11:00:00 PM

The last few months have seen a disquieting lull in news of political dissent from Iran. On the surface, at least, Ahmadinejad’s government seems to have outlasted the furor that erupted in the wake of last June’s election. Does this mean that the Green Movement is dead? Not necessarily. Given the sheer number of people who have been arrested and tortured (political inmates at Iran’s most notorious prison just sent an incredible letter to several grand ayatollahs, detailing sexual, physical, and mental torture), it would be understandable if the Green Movement’s leaders had fallen completely silent. But they have continued to speak out. Mir Hossein Mousavi, for one, has evinced no signs of buckling under to the regime. Ten days ago, he met with other Green Movement leaders and said that while the “path to victory” would be “long and arduous,” he encouraged everyone to persevere. Then, this past Sunday, while meeting with veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, he said that the country’s current rulers were in breach of both the constitution and the tenets of Islam. And he blasted those in the regime who dismiss all critics as lackeys of Zionism.

Meanwhile, Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has recently become increasingly unabashed in her criticisms of the regime. Last Thursday, during a meeting with families of political prisoners, she spoke defiantly of a “police state” in Iran and of “freedom fighters,” denouncing the regime that has “arrested them, tortured them, used harsh interrogation techniques against them, sewn their lips, and hung them to die.” She ended the meeting by demanding “freedom for all political prisoners” and freedom “from the big prison that is Iran.” On Monday, she mocked the government’s international conduct by asking, “What honor is there in making Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, or China the crown glory” of the country’s foreign policy? For his part, reform leader Mehdi Karroubi declared a couple weeks ago in an interview with Der Spiegel that “despotism” and fear have not worked and that “the status quo is untenable,” adding that he and the Green Movement have asked the government for permission to hold a demonstration on the anniversary of last June’s election—and that, beneath the apparent calm, there is a society on the verge of eruption. And, just this Tuesday, Karroubi and Mousavi met and together called on the government to allow

them to hold the June rally. Beyond the leadership of the Green Movement, there are additional signs of fissures within Iran’s governing elite. On Ahmadinejad’s trip to the city of Qom earlier this month, according to one report, virtually every major ayatollah refused to meet with him—despite direct pressure from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself. The Qom ayatollahs provide the theological legitimacy for the regime and their support is essential for any president’s success. While none publicly explained their reasons for refusing to meet Ahmadinejad, the symbolism was hard to miss. In addition, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatist who has long positioned himself between the reformers and the hardliners, still seems to be betting that the Green Movement has a future. Despite the fact that the regime has issued an arrest warrant for one of his sons (now in Europe) and that court proceedings have begun against one of his daughters (an unabashed supporter of the Green Movement, also in Europe at the moment), he still has yet to accept Khamenei’s invitation—issued repeatedly in the weeks after the June election—to join the fold. (Khamenei’s cronies subsequently echoed this

entreaty, sometimes naming Rafsanjani directly, sometimes merely alluding to him.) In characteristic fashion, Rafsanjani has continued to send ambiguous messages. On the one hand, he recently made appearances both with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. At the same time, in one of the last sessions of the Expediency Council—a key government committee that Rafsanjani has led for years—he and Mohsen Rezai, who was commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for 18 years, cosponsored a resolution calling for an end to the role of the Guardian Council in vetting candidates. This is one of the main demands of the Green Movement. The resolution would have to clear many hurdles before becoming law, but the mere fact of its passage was a direct challenge to the authority of Khamenei. Of course, the one thing that matters most—the question of whether there remains a mass public appetite for protest and resistance—is also the most difficult thing to know. There is no doubt in my mind that Iranians remain hungry for democracy; the question is whether there are enough people who will be willing to once again take to the barricades in the near future. Still, the fact that the Green Movement’s leaders are not backing down is

an indication that they at least think their public is still behind them. That seems reason enough to conclude that popular support for the Green Movement persists. This, of course, is not something the regime and its apologists are eager to hear. To them, the Green Movement was a series of intermittent explosions. Recently, a Friday Prayer leader in Tehran called last year’s post-election events a “political earthquake.” (He also said that women refusing to fully cover themselves would cause a literal earthquake.) But it is more accurate to see the Iranian democratic movement as rooted in a long-term structural malaise—in deep tensions and fissures in the body politic; in the rapidly failing economic fabric of society; in the fact that 20 to 30 million Iranians have Internet access; and in an overall dissatisfaction among Iranians, particularly women and the young, with their lack of personal and political freedom. This reading of the Green Movement explains why it has not yet disappeared. And why it probably won’t anytime soon. Abbas Milani is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is the co-director of the Iran STANDING page 52

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Puerto Rican Statehood – Don’t Rig the Election Brian Darling (The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.)

should become fully independent from the United States;” Submitted at 4/29/2010 5:59:18 PM 2.“Sovereignty in Association H.R. 2499, the Puerto Rico with the United States: Puerto D e m o c r a c y A c t , c o n t a i n s Rico and the United States language that will rig the s h o u l d f o r m a p o l i t i c a l election in favor of Puerto Rican association between sovereign statehood. I have written a more nations that will not be subject comprehensive post titled “ to the Territorial Clause of the Puerto Rico Democracy Act – United States Constitution;” Legislation Biased in Favor of and, Statehood” on why this 3. “Statehood: Puerto Rico legislation is biased in favor of should be admitted as a State of statehood. The Senate is the the Union.” next stop for this legislation, and This vote is rigged. The Puerto it will be interesting to see if Rican people have rejected Senate Majority Leader Harry statehood on three occasions. Reid (D-NV) tries to bring up The first vote was in 1967 when the bill this year. One important the people of Puerto Rico chose point of contention is the fact to continue as a Commonwealth that this process is far different (60%) over the other choices of from the pathways of Alaska s t a t e h o o d ( 3 9 % ) o r and Hawaii to statehood. independence (1%). In the two As I wrote on the Foundry: other votes, in 1993 and 1998, The legislation contains many the people of Puerto Rico questionable provisions. First, rejected statehood by closer the legislation sets up a voting margins. The obvious question process rigged for success. The is: why would we expect this legislation sets up a preliminary vote to be different? We expect vote and the voters are given it to be different because the two options. If a majority of proponents of statehood have set Puerto Ricans vote in favor of up a false choice in the voting changing the status of the process. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico According to H.R. 2499, the to “a different political status,” Puerto Rican people will get to then a second vote would be vote on the following question: scheduled to poll voters on the Mark one of the following 2 following three options: options: 1.“Independence: Puerto Rico 1.Puerto Rico should continue

to have its present form of political status. 2.Puerto Rico should have a different political status.” If a majority votes for “continue to have its present form of political status,” then Puerto Rico can schedule votes every 8 years until they get a majority for Option 2. If a majority chooses Option 1, then they would be voting to say as a Commonwealth. It is odd that the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico would be empowered to schedule elections every 8 years until they can pass the change option. If a majority of Puerto Ricans vote for “a different political status,” then there will be a second vote, a plebiscite, to poll Puerto Ricans on the new status including “Independence,” “Sovereignty in Association with the United States,” or “Statehood.” This provides a false choice. This bifurcated vote is intended to disenfranchise those voters who choose to remain a Commonwealth in the first vote, because they are not given the option “Commonwealth” in the second vote. It is possible for 49% of the voters to choose to remain a Commonwealth, yet they will not have the option to vote for a Commonwealth in the second vote.

Another provision that rigs the process in favor of statehood is the fact that Puerto Rican born citizens will be allowed to vote in this election without a residency requirement. If a Puerto Rican national is born in the Commonwealth, then moves to the states, that individual would be allowed to vote in Puerto Rico and the state they reside. This is unfair and common sense dictates that Puerto Rican nationals living in the United States are more likely to vote for statehood than an individual who has resided in Puerto Rico their whole life. This process parts from the examples of Alaska and Hawaii. According to the Alaska Historical Society, “in 1955, the territorial legislature passed legislation authorizing a constitutional convention. Alaskan voters elected fifty-five delegates from across the territory. They met at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks in November 1955 to write a constitution for the proposed state. Alaskans voted approval of the constitution in April 1956. The new constitution was to take effect when and if Congress granted statehood for Alaska.” According to the official website of the Hawaii 50 Anniversary of Statehood

Commission, “on November 7, 1950- The Hawai‘i State Constitution is approved by the people with a vote of 82,788 to 27,109.” It is possible to win statehood with a mere 34% of the vote deviating from the Alaska and Hawaii precedents. Congressman Doc Hastings (RWA) argues that “H.R. 2499 deviates strongly from the precedent and process used to admit Alaska and Hawaii as states. If a Congressionallysanctioned plebiscite is sought first in a manner directly contrary to the Alaska and Hawaii precedent, as H.R. 2499 does, then understanding of what statehood would mean to Puerto Rico and the existing 50 states – but that is not at all happening in the House.” Statehood may be the choice of a majority of Puerto Ricans and the process should be fixed so that the precedent set over 50 years ago is followed. A simple plurality of Puerto Rican voters is not enough to prove that the residents of Puerto Rico really want statehood. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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MORNING continued from page 45

provide economic incentives, contain caps and resists unwieldy government excess. • We must remember the American economy. No solution in this debate comes without an economic impact, whether through increased government services, unemployment or states shouldering unfunded mandates. Our immigration policy should encourage a growing economy, not expand the welfare state as we know it. Congress must consider these fiscal costs and benefits. • Above all, our first priority is national security. No other reforms are possible without a complete, and strict, security apparatus. From the point of origin, to transit, to the border, to within the United States – we require a system of protection that has gone needed for too long. If our borders remain porous and open, if our border states continue to suffer from unwarranted crime, if our laws go unenforced, then this contentious debate will only be a precursor to another and likely more disruptive process in the future.

for freedom and prosperity. We are a self selected class of people who see greater opportunity available through smaller government, economic freedom, religious and social tolerance and a shared responsibility of security and safety. It is no surprise that people from other nations would yearn for what we may sometimes take for granted. Reforming our broken immigration system should not set aside these aspirations, but embrace them. Quick Hits: • Congressmen Darrell Issa (RCA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre a letter accusing him of running “false advertisements” that “ constitute a lie to the American people.” GM has been running ads that claim they have repaid government loans in full, when in fact, they’ve only paid back 10%. • One of the chief Republican negotiators for financial regulatory reform, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), has denounced the Dodd-Obama bill, saying the worst provisions We are a nation of immigrants. remain in the legislation and “It The Statue of Liberty stands as a will lead to job losses, lost testament to our desire to create opportunities for businesses to an environment welcoming to productively invest in the future, all men and women who yearn a n d i t w i l l e n s u r e f u t u r e

bailouts.” • Amidst the debate on financial regulatory reform, Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) will head to Park Avenue this weekend for big ticket Wall Street fundraisers. • Last night, The House of Representatives voted 223-169 to pass a bill allowing Puerto Rico to vote on its relationship with the United States. The measure now heads to the Senate. • President Obama and Vice President Biden have both interviewed Appeals Court Judge Sidney Thomas of the nation’s most liberal court, the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, for the Supreme Court opening. Tags: amnesty, biometric, border security, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, illegal immigrants, immigration, Morning Bell, national id, reform, social security card, Temporary Worker Program 5 Responses to “Morning Bell: An Appetite for Real Immigration Reform” • Spiff on April 30th, 2010 at 9:40am said: I wonder if these “illegals” realize that if they become US citizens that they will HAVE to pay all the taxes WE pay, and be subject to the whims of a corrupt Congress, as

WE do! Spiff • David, Washington State on April 30th, 2010 at 9:40am said: As much as I agree with the article I feeel that we are still just blowing smoke if we do not find a way to enforce the laws and regulations on businesses that knowingly hire and use illegal immigrants. Until there is a real concern within those businesses that it will hit where it hurts, their bank accounts, we will not see real reform. • Dr. Michael J. Oldham, Gambrills, MD 21054 on April 30th, 2010 at 9:40am said: I agree with what you advocate. Question: What ever happened to the money Congress authorized and appropriated to build a secure fence on the border? If we cannot act on the fence, how can we believe that our government will act on anything regarding national security? You mentioned the Statue of Liberty in your discourse. How about closing the border (I mean really closing the border similar to how we secure our maximum security prisons) and placing one point of entry where a set number of people who meet specific entrance criteria placed at a site to be determined (not unlike Elis Island) to allow legal entry? After all, we are at war and we simply cannot secure our nation

if we cannot secure all of our borders. • Mari G. MacGregor, Minneapolis, MN. on April 30th, 2010 at 9:40am said: Good Policy Proposals, BUT ALSO INCLUDE: ending anchor baby citizenship, and chain migration. Guest workers must be subsidized by employers, not by taxpayer entitlements. These are the primary magnets drawing foreigners to U.S. We cannot be the retirement center for the World. Assimilation and the Rule of Law must be the primary goal. • J.C. Hughes, Texas on April 30th, 2010 at 9:40am said: Good comment Spiff. My exact thought regarding Puerto Rican statehood. They’d be getting the losing end of the deal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Entertainers Speak Out on Ariz. Immigration Law (Newsmax - Inside Cover)

going to take this lying down," singer Linda Ronstadt, a Tucson native, said at a news A backlash against a new conference on a lawsuit planned Arizona law cracking down on by the American Civil Liberties i l l e g a l i m m i g r a t i o n i s Union, the Mexican American broadening from the political to Legal Defense and Educational the sports and entertainment F u n d a n d t h e N a t i o n a l arenas with lawsuits filed, I m m i g r a t i o n L a w C e n t e r . singers denouncing the measure Colombian singer Shakira and protesters gathering at an visited Phoenix to meet the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball city's police chief and mayor game. amid her concerns the measure A court suit from 15-year would violate human and civil Tucson police veteran Martin rights. Escobar was one of three filed "It goes against all human Thursday, less than a week after dignity." she said. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer At the Billboard Latin Music signed the bill that critics claim Awards ceremony in Puerto is unconstitutional and fear will Rico, singer Ricky Martin lead to racial profiling. denounced the law, too, saying U.S. Attorney General Eric it "makes no sense." Holder has said the federal While divisive debate over the government may challenge the law swirled nationwide, Arizona law, which requires local and lawmakers Thursday approved s t a t e l a w e n f o r c e m e n t t o modifications to the law that question people about their requires local and state law immigration status if there's enforcement to question people reason to suspect they're in the about their immigration status if country illegally, and which there's reason to suspect they're makes it a state crime to be in in the country illegally, and the United States illegally. makes it a state crime to be in Brewer and other backers say the United States illegally. the state law is necessary amid The changes include the federal government's failure s t r e n g t h e n i n g r e s t r i c t i o n s t o s e c u r e t h e b o r d e r a n d against using race or ethnicity as growing anxiety over crime the basis for questioning by related to illegal immigration. police and specifying that "Mexican-Americans are not possible violations of local civil Submitted at 4/30/2010 4:49:06 AM

ordinances can trigger questioning on immigration status. The law's sponsor, Republican Sen. Russell Pearce, characterized those changes as clarifications "just to take away the silly arguments and the games, the dishonesty that's been played." Some Latin national also entered the debate. In Mexico City, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard announced he would try to join lawsuits seeking to overturn the law, with a statement from his office calling the measure "a planned Apartheid against Mexicans." And officials in El Salvador urged countrymen to avoid traveling to Arizona, according to the Foreign Ministry. In Nicaragua, officials called on the Organization of American States and the United Nations "to take the necessary measures to safeguard the rights of the Hispanic population." The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders also sued Thursday, and sought an injunction preventing authorities from enforcing the law. The group argued that federal law pre-empts state regulation of national borders, and that Arizona's law violates due process rights by letting

police detain suspected illegal immigrants before they're convicted. In filing his suit, Escobar, argued that there's no way for officers to confirm a person's immigration status without impeding investigations, and that the new law violates constitutional rights. Tucson police said Escobar acted on his own. Separately, a Phoenix police officer filed a lawsuit arguing he'll be sued whether he enforces the law or not, either for violating civil rights or for refusing to enforce it. At least three Arizona cities — Phoenix, Flagstaff and Tucson — are considering legal action to block the law. About 40 immigrant rights activists gathered outside Wrigley Field in Chicago Thursday as the Cubs open a four-game series against the Diamondbacks. A small plane toting a banner criticizing the law circled the stadium. A Cubs spokesman declined to comment, while Arizona manager A.J. Hinch said the team was there to play baseball. Politicians from around the country also weighed in. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter said he would veto a new law like the one in Arizona, while Texas

Republican Gov. Rick Perry said such a law would be wrong for his state because it has a tradition of rejecting harsh antiimmigrant policies. Supporters of the new law also were vocal outside Arizona. A group of conservative state lawmakers in Oklahoma said they plan to introduce a bill similar to Arizona's. In Texas, Rep. Debbie Riddle, a Republican, said she will introduce a measure similar to the Arizona law in the January legislative session. And Republicans running for governor in Colorado and Minnesota expressed support for the crackdown. —— Associated Press writers Mark Carlson and Amanda Lee Myers contributed to this report. © Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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Side Effects: The Beginning of the End for FSAs Richard Sherwood (The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.)

dental procedure is in the offing — like Lasik surgery, braces or long-needed tooth implants or caps — you may want to Submitted at 4/29/2010 5:00:05 PM “If you like your current health schedule these treatments while coverage, you can keep it.” It you can still pay for a big chunk was a key promise of of the out-of-pocket expenses Obamacare. with pre-tax dollars.” But the new law gives It’s enough to make you government a say in everything wonder: If it’s smart to take from the benefits you carry to care of your medical needs the treatment you receive. And before Obamacare kicks in, that means very real changes to maybe you’d be better off existing coverage. One of those without Obamacare at all. many changes derive from new Rick Sherwood currently is a restrictions on flexible spending York Times outlined recently, The New York Times gives the member of the Young Leaders accounts(FSAs). Obamacare sends FSA users an example of the Laskin family, P r o g r a m a t t h e H e r i t a g e FSAs allow users to put aside irresponsible message: stock up who use every penny of their F o u n d a t i o n . F o r m o r e pre-tax dollars for out-of-pocket now before the law takes full $4,000 FSA each year to pay for information on interning at health expenditures such as co- effect. the prescription medication, H e r i t a g e , p l e a s e v i s i t : pays, deductibles, eyeglasses, B e g i n n i n g i n 2 0 1 3 , n e w o v e r - t h e - c o u n t e r d r u g s , http://www.heritage.org/About/I and dental work. Typically, it regulations will prohibit FSA vitamins, and doctor visits nternships-Young-Leaders/Thecuts out-of-pocket costs by expenditures on certain health needed to control chronic Heritage-Foundation-Internshiparound 20 percent. FSAs are aids, such as over-the-counter illness. Under the new law, they Program e s p e c i a l l y v a l u a b l e f o r drugs used by many to control “may find it more difficult to fit Five Filters featured article: consumers with chronic illness chronic illness. Furthermore, health care into an already The Art of Looking Prime and others who have large FSA contributions will be squeezed budget.” Ministerial - The 2010 UK f o r e s e e a b l e m e d i c a l c o s t s capped at $2,500 per year. Advises Jennifer Calhoun, a General Election. Available (families: think orthodontics!). O n e s i d e e f f e c t o f t h i s principal with Mercer Health tools: PDF Newspaper, Full And because FSA funds cannot arrangement: people suffering and Benefits, “There are still Text RSS, Term Extraction. be rolled over year to year, the from chronic diseases will wind about two-and-a-half years accounts encourage responsible up spending more on co- before the lower flex-spend budgeting and use of health payments for prescription drugs maximum takes effect. If you services. and doctor visits. know a big elective medical or Unfortunately, as The New

STANDING continued from page 48

Democracy Project. His latest book, The Myth of the Great Satan: A New Reading of U.S.Iran Relations, will appear in a few weeks.

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Florida Democrat Says Crist Switch Is His Gain (Newsmax - Inside Cover) Submitted at 4/29/2010 4:32:11 PM

Florida Democrat Kendrick Meek says he is now in a "commanding position" to win Florida's open Senate seat after Republican Gov. Charlie Crist said he was going to run as an independent. Crist's Thursday announcement sets up a likely three-way race between Crist, Republican favorite Marco Rubio and Meek, the likely Democratic nominee. Meek, a congressman from Miami, has stayed quiet as Crist and Rubio fought bitterly over the GOP nomination in recent months. Meek said Crist will have a hard time convincing anyone he's an independent and that Meek offers voters a clear alternative to two "bickering" Republicans. © Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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JEREMIAH,

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continued from page 46

than blaming feminists for family decline. Focused on the left in which he had grown up and come to political maturity, Lasch turned to populism in his final books just as conservatives discovered how to turn popular anger into a maelstrom of negativity. So it must be affirmed that against the ignorant conspiratorialism of today’s right, liberalism’s theory of the good society, however thin, looks downright robust. “His public invective in the mideighties against liberalism—which he certainly hoped was not resurgent—was as harsh as ever,” Miller points out. “He rarely gave either the political tradition or movement any sort of blessing.” Had Lasch been less misanthropic, he might have been more perceptive. Miller identifies so strongly with his subject that he accepts Lasch’s judgment that he was crucified on a cross of misunderstanding. He finds Lasch’s critics smug and condescending. They treated him, Miller concludes, “as

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someone to keep at arm’s length—a quirky and dangerous fellow who at some point along the way had taken a frightening wrong turn.” The problem is that Lasch did take a wrong turn—and it was precisely the turn toward secular Calvinism that Miller praises. It is one thing to admire Jonathan Edwards and to lament the fact that we no longer take theology seriously—I myself love to assign Edwards to my students; but a historian, of all people, should have recognized that however valuable an appreciation of our depraved nature may have been in one era, it may cause significant injury in another. Yes, progressive history—the idea that each era is better than the one that precedes it—clearly fails to do justice to the sheer contingency of human life. But so does Lasch’s insistence that everything is for the worst in this worst of all possible worlds. In the end even Miller, who is so admiring of Lasch, feels that something did not quite hold

together in his worldview. “Lasch,” he concludes, needed “a more full, complete, rich tradition than ‘populism,’ one that extended well beyond the public political sphere to touch and form mind and heart.” But Lasch confounded his faithful admirers just as he did his leftist critics; he knew about the realm of God to which Miller alludes and did not want any part of it—at least for himself. The great diagnostician of our rootlessness never found his own roots. Lasch did not like modernity, but he was modernity’s child. We must be thankful that we live in a society sufficiently mobile, alienated, elitist, and skeptical to have produced such a man. Alan Wolfe is writing a book about political evil. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Thaksin became an economic adviser to Thailand's eastern neighbor.) So, if not civil war, what happens next? It's impossible to say who the winner (or winners) of the crisis should be, considering that all sides have factions with less than good or democratic intentions. The government may try to forcibly end the protests, and the resulting bloodshed might deliver the wake-up call needed for the rivaling factions to negotiate a solution to the crisis. Such a compromise, sources said, whether arrived at peaceably or after violence, would need to involve a promise for new elections, as well as guarantees that both sides would shun intimidation during voting and respect the outcomes of the process. Right now, though, any timetable for this happening is hazy. "It changes from day to day," one human rights advocate told me. "I've had to change my tune. … I thought, 'The government can't survive.' I thought it was only a matter of days." Yet the government

remains in charge, even as the red shirts burrow deeper into Bangkok. And, even if a compromise is finally reached, experts I spoke to said it would just be a BandAid on the broader problem of what happens as Thailand's customary political elite lose power and less traditional groups gain it. Most critically, when the king dies, a period of mourning will likely be followed by a political battle to determine who should control the country. "I don't hazard to guess how it will end," one source told me. "It's going to be a gradual process whereby they are going to lose—the yellows, the government, the monarchy. … I don't pretend that it's not going to be really ugly." Seyward Darby is the assistant managing editor of The New Republic. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Quick Pasta Dinners (Cooking Light: Editor's Picks)

Time: 30 minutes Time-Saver: Buy prepeeled and deveined shrimp from the seafood counter.

Serve with Wilted Tomatoes: Heat 1 teaspoon olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add 2 pints grape tomatoes, and sauté for 3 minutes or until skins begin to

burst. Stir in 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar, 18 teaspoon salt, and 18 teaspoon black pepper. View Recipe: Shrimp and Pine Nut Spaghetti

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Outside the Beltway: The Day the Happy Meal Died Mike Brownfield (The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:30:11 AM

There might be 14,000 things to be happy about, but there is one less reason in Santa Clara County, California: the government there voted to ban toys in Happy Meals. Toys that come in those delightfully colored boxes filled cheeseburgers and fries that have brought joy to millions of children will go the way of bottled water and salt, trans fat and soda pop, all of which have fallen victim to regulationhappy local governments. The reason? No, it’s not because the toys are unsafe. It’s not because they’re filled with lead or cause choking. It’s because, well, they’re an effective way for businesses to legally market their products. The Los Angeles Times reports: This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on childrens’ love of toys” to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food,

said [Santa Clara County] Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. “This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.” Proponents of the ban argue that using toys to promote the sale of high-calorie kids meals lure children toward eating unhealthy food, leading to obesity. But as Supervisor Donald Gage says, “If you can’t control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers.” And that’s an important point. In Santa Clara County, the local government has assumed the mantle of a nanny state, presumed that parents are unable to make choices for their children, and restricted businesses’ ability to market to customers. Santa Clara County isn’t alone in attempting to enact absurd regulations over food consumption. The New York State Assembly is considering a bill that would prohibit “the use

of salt by restaurants in the preparation of food,” and so is the federal government. According to the Washington Post, “the Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans.” Individual choice and personal responsibility have no place in the nanny state, and it’s anyone’s guess what the toy police will ban next. Tags: california, food, Happy Meals, McDonald's, reglations, salt, Santa Clara County You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Before the Bell: Futures Higher After GDP Figures Melly Alazraki (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:15:00 AM

Filed under: Before the Bell, International Markets, Market Matters, Goldman Sachs Group (GS), BP p.l.c. ADS (BP), Contl Airlines'B' (CAL), UAL Corp (UAUA), Economic Data, Transocean Ltd. (RIG) U.S. stock futures remained higher Friday after the government estimated the economy grew at a slightly slower pace than expected of 3.2% in the firstquarter, as consumer spending accelerated the most in three years. U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, rose at a solid 3.2% annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said. While growth was weaker than in the fourth quarter of last year and slightly

below the 3.3% expected by economists, it was the third consecutive quarter of economic growth and was powered by consumer spending, which rose at a 3.6% pace. Continue reading Before the Bell: Futures Higher After GDP Figures Before the Bell: Futures Higher After GDP Figures originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

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Microsoft Gets Steve Jobs' Back, Decrees H.264 as Its Video Web Standard Kit Eaton (Fast Company) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:48:01 AM

What? Microsoft and Apple seeing almost eye-to-eye on something? Yes...it's true and concerns a bit of a hot topic on the Web at the mo: Video standards. After Jobs' Adobe take-down, MS has said it'll only support H.264 video in Internet Explorer. Microsoft's blog posting on this matter it's almost as frank as Steve Jobs' open letter of yesterday. Noting that there's been "a lot of talk" about this on the Web, MS is taking the chance to "talk about" its point of view, which is this: "The future of the Web is HTML5 [...] In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only." That's the boiled down summary, but it's essentially the important part of this news: In its next version tweak to adopt HTML5 coding standards in IE, MS will support in-browser playback of only those videos encoded in MPEG LA's H.264 video format. For those of you who're scratching your heads, H.264 is just another way of "wrapping" video data so that it can be

accessed and played in browsers (or dedicated media players, for that matter) much like Flash videos work currently. It's a freely accessible format that's currently license-free and Apple's been promoting it for ages, partly through in-built H.264 support inside iTunes. Unlike Flash, though, H.264 can be supported directly in the browser code itself, meaning it doesn't need a proprietary plugin like Flash does, which has important implications for the future of open Web standards, and possibly security and reliability too. MS actually mentions all of this in the posting, even going so far as to echo Steve Job's sentiments about Flash: "Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance." That'll stir up some righteous anger among Flash proponents (and it's one in the eye for Adobe itself, who yesterday intimated that if there's performance issues with Flash on Macs, then it's likely to do with the OS itself). MS doesn't quite slam the door on Adobe, though, noting that it still will "work closely with Adobe" and

world wasn't using it for fun and professional purposes at the time. Things are different now, and since some are promoting video as the real driver for nextgen Web paradigms (particularly when combined with some sort of social networking and live user video up-linking) the issue is very important indeed. Yet with big players like Apple, Google and now MS weighing in on the side of H.264 in HTML5, it looks like many of the big decisions have already been made. And you know what? As a typical Web user, you'll probably never notice the impact of this t h a t F l a s h r e m a i n s a n even more confusing rights kerfuffle: Except that soon your "important" way of delivering situations surrounding its use. browser may be a bit more content to today's Web users. Some commenters have already stable when playing video, and Just maybe not tomorrow's expressed outrage that MS is you may see fewer requests to ones... "forcing" a Web standard on its "update your Flash plug-in." Because this move by MS is users, and that this standard is To keep up with this news surprisingly bold. H.264 is a H.264 in particular--at the follow me, Kit Eaton, on freely accessible standard, just expense of supporting any other Twitter. That QR code on the not an entirely open one (there video standards in-browser. left will even take your a r e s o m e q u e s t i o n s a b o u t The battle about Web video smartphone to my Twitter feed. whether its owners MPEG LA slightly echoes some of the early And if you really liked this will require licensing fees to use debates about which graphics story, you can re-tweet too. it to encode video from 2016 code standard to support for onwards) and it's not the only Web pages (JPEG, TIFF, PNG one out there: Opera and Firefox and so on.) The main difference p r o m o t e t h e O G G v i d e o being that the Web was in its standard, which MS implies has infancy then, and the entire

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What Will an Electric Vehicle-Ready Smart Grid Infrastructure Look Like? Ariel Schwartz (Fast Company)

before they're prepared for the impending onslaught of energysucking vehicles--and they Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:44:25 AM might not all be ready in time. It's 2020. You drive your plug- One utility that thinks it will: in hybrid electric car home at 6 Southern California Edison. The p.m., plug it in, let it charge via utility covers a massive swath of the solar panels on your roof or land that includes 5 million the wind power coming from the meters, 14 million residents. By grid, and you leave it charging 2020, the utility's customers until the morning. Sounds could have up to 1 million EVs simple enough, right? It's not. on the road. But SoCal Edison is Utilities have a long way to go already gearing up for the early

adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. "If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that's probably an early adopter neighborhood," he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive

upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs. SoCal Edison is also working with cities, auto manufacturers, and car dealerships to assess the potential impact of EVs. "We will be prepared even if highend predictions are correct," Pizarro said. But there are still kinks to work out--for example, how can the utility incentivize customers to charge at off-peak

hours so they don't overtax the grid? Of the 700 customers who participated in a recent SoCal Edison survey on the matter, half of respondents said that they wouldn't be willing to charge off-peak. Even if that's just because the respondents don't realize how much money they could save, its a problem. "We have a big job ahead in WHAT page 58

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Deutsche Bank Converts Horrid '80s Towers Into Horrid '80s Eco-Towers Suzanne LaBarre (Fast Company)

they are all of these things. No, they're a triumph of new over old, their glassy tubes having Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:18:03 AM risen in 1983 on the site of a Deutsche Bank is set to become gorgeous, ill-fated 19th-century carbon neutral, starting with the palace. The shape, an abstract world's first LEED Platinum take on Deutsche Bank's logo, retrofitted skyscrapers. Too bad dispatches a message of raw self they're so damn ugly. -absorption, and the mirror We've all heard the refrain: The facade commemorates vanity in greenest buildings are the ones the age of Gordon Gekko. that already exist. But what if a They're a monument to the building is so hideous, so bland, excesses of a supposedly so utterly devoid of beauty that, bygone era. green or not, it's an affront to the Except now they're green. This very conceit of architecture? fall, Deutsche Bank will unveil Deutsche Bank's Frankfurt its grand marketing offensive headquarters are just such a retrofit, complete with a new building. Actually, a pair of energy-efficient facade; smart buildings, two 509-foot-tall elevators; and windows that towers of gorgonian ugly. It isn't actually open, which is rare in a that they're too stocky or too skyscraper and pretty cool for shiny or too awkward, though employees. The efforts will

slash energy consumption in half, and by 2013, the bank claims it'll be carbon neutral, though the specifics remain unclear. For the time being, the bank has covered all its PR bases.

Famous architect ( Mario Bellini): check. Local eco-cred ( German Sustainable Building Council cert): check. The bank gets to boast that it's on track to being the world's first LEED Platinum renovated skyscraper.

Is that really something to write home about? Turns out, it would've been less expensive to build anew. Much less expensive, according to project manager Nils Noack. Rejiggering the old mechanical systems isn't cheap, nor is ripping off the old facade and replacing it with highly insulated, triple-paned glass. Other banks have used green building to rebrand, occasionally to unremarkable ends, but hey, at least they tried something new. Deutsche Bank will tell you that it likes the look of its headquarters, thank you very much. They're "iconic." (And Gekkoian.)

Quarterly Earnings: Eastman Kodak and Kellogg Steven Mallas (BloggingStocks)

tell you this: EK was anything but up. The stock closed off 16.9% by the end of the session. Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:00:00 AM Volume was exceptionally high. Filed under: Earnings Reports, But does this mean Kodak is a Kellogg Co (K), General Mills buy or a sell? (GIS), Eastman Kodak (EK), Back in January, Kodak rallied Kraft Foods'A' (KFT) on its Q4 numbers; at that time, I'm going to take a quick look analysts and their projections at two companies that released were destroyed by the strong earnings on Thursday. First up report. I, however, remained is Eastman Kodak ( EK), but I'll bearish on the company because

Continue reading Quarterly Earnings: Eastman Kodak and Kellogg Quarterly Earnings: Eastman Kodak and Kellogg originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST. HP Reported to Have Please see our terms for use of o f i t s t u r n a r o u n d s t a t u s , feeds. Read| Read| Permalink| Axed Its Windows 7preferring to focus on the risk of Email this| Comments Based "Slate" Tablet the situation instead of the Dan Nosowitz (Fast forward-looking potential. Company) HP'sREPORTED Slate has received page 58 the Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:30:05 AM most buzz of any so-called iPad

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REPORTED continued from page 57

competitor (keeping in mind the irony and/or painful realization that we're playing into Steve Jobs's hands, since the Slate was announced well before the iPad), but it had essentially a different philosophy. The iPad is a scaled-up smartphone; it runs a mobile operating system, complete with mobile apps (iPhone OS), as well as a mobile (albeit high-speed) processor (Apple A4, rumored to appear in the next iPhone). The HP Slate, on the other hand, is a scaleddown laptop; it runs a full-bore operating system (Windows 7), complete with PC software, as well as a full-sized (albeit lowpower) processor (Intel Atom, the standard netbook processor). But that was also the source of the Slate's mystique-everything the iPad couldn't do, the Slate could. Flash video

(including Hulu)? No problem. USB-in? HDMI-out? Slate had it, iPad didn't. That came with trade-offs; the Slate's battery life was projected at half the iPad's, and nobody has much confidence that Windows 7 would be as good a mobile, touch-based operating system as iPhone OS. Every previous tablet has been a scaled-down computer, and none have achieved mainstream success. So maybe it's not that surprising that, as Techcrunch is reporting, HP may have killed off the project. Apple is proving that a scaled-up mobile OS is the path to a successful tablet, and what do you know, HP just happened to purchase a well-regarded touch-based mobile OS in Palm's WebOS. This is exactly what we'd hoped would happen-a WebOS tablet would have a

lot of advantages over the iPad (notably the best mobile multitasking out there). This is all unconfirmed--I fired off an email to HP, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. In the meantime, let's hope HP really is axing the Slate in favor of a WebOS tablet. Maybe some collective thought power will convince the company to go for it. Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one-you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

public charge spots? Utilities will have to keep track of where charge spots are located and make sure they know where the highest electricity loads will be. For its part, IBM offers a readiness assessment service that helps utilities figure out their smart grid weak spots. On the whole, though, the technology coming down the pipeline is promising--utilities just need to keep a close eye on

the auto industry. "The interesting thing is that the pace of new change to the grid isn't in control of the utility," Schurr said. "It's driven by automakers."

WHAT continued from page 56

communication," Pizarro said. Most utilities aren't nearly as prepared as SoCal Edison. "A very small number of utilities are taking practical steps," explained Allan Schurr, VP Strategy, Energy & Utilities at IBM. According to Schurr, many utilities don't know what people's driving patterns will be-will drivers upgrade their garages to be EV-ready, for example, or will they go to

The Brinks Company: A 'Kenneth Fisher' Price/Sales Value Steven Halpern (BloggingStocks)

banks and financial institutions, retailers, government agencies, mints, jewelers and other Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:40:00 AM commercial operations Filed under: Newsletters, worldwide. -- earns a 100% Stocks to Buy"Our newsletter 'guru score' on the Fisher screens stocks based on the model." specific investment critieria Continue reading The Brinks used by numerous 'legendary' Company: A 'Kenneth Fisher' i n v e s t o r ; o u r P r i c e / S a l e s Price/Sales Value Investor screen is based on The Brinks Company: A Kenneth Fisher," says John 'Kenneth Fisher' Price/Sales Reese. Value originally appeared on The editor of Validea explains, BloggingStocks on Fri, 30 Apr "The Brinks Company ( BCO) - 2010 10:40:00 EST. Please see - a p r o v i d e r o f s e c u r e our terms for use of feeds. transportation, cash logistics and P e r m a l i n k | E m a i l t h i s | other security-related services to C o m m e n t s

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YouTube Redesigns Video Appearance, Looks Way Better Than Before Dan Nosowitz (Fast Company) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:25:52 AM

Yesterday, YouTube launched a redesigned look for their video player, a much cleaner and more modern-looking interface. The big change is the shrunken and altered timeline, showing your chronological position in a video. Instead of a big red inyour-face bar, it's now a collapsible, thin line that only enlarges to allow for movement when you mouse over it. When

you move your cursor away from the video, the controls seem to melt into the background--really they're just fading from gray to a lighter gray, but it's a nice effect. Besides that, the volume is now horizontal instead of vertical (better, I suppose, since it doesn't block any part of the video now), and, well, that's about it. [youtube J-uBD4JlI9A] YouTube still isn't the bestlooking streamer around. I'd give that award to either Hulu or

Vimeo. But it's definitely an improvement, and it's nowhere near the bottom of the barrel (I'd have to give that Golden Raspberry stinker award to

Consumers Drive GDP Expansion Mark Fightmaster (BloggingStocks) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:45:00 AM

Filed under: Before the Bell, Economic Data The Commerce Department announced Friday morning that the economy grew at a 3.2% rate during the first quarter of 2010, below expectations that called for the GDP to increase 3.4%. Consumer spending increased at the fastest pace in the past three years, serving as the impetus for

the GDP growth. Consumer spending increased at a 3.6% annual rate, with business investments in equipment and software increasing at a pace of 13.4%. In

the past year, the GDP has increased 2.5% driven by a 5.6% increase in the fourth quarter. Continue reading Consumers Drive GDP Expansion Consumers Drive GDP Expansion originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink| Email this| Comments

MTV's buggy and super ugly interface--the only time it works perfectly is when it's showing an overly long commercial break while I'm trying to catch up on

The Real World/Road Rules Challenge). It's part of a new effort to simplify the oft-busy YouTube video page, which is a considerable but worthwhile effort. Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one-you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

Apple Tries to Trademark App Icons Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 4/30/2010 3:34:34 AM

Apple has filed trademark motions for its official iPhone and iPad app icons with minutely detailed descriptions. Here’s the description for the MobileMe iDisk, for instance: “The mark consists of a rectangle with rounded corners depicting a stylized white cloud on a blue background.” Descriptions are accompanied by large image files of the icons. As for trying to trademark mobile app icons in the first place, let’s put it like this: If

Apple gets the trademark, then we guess it makes sense. [via TUAW] For more Apple coverage, follow Mashable Apple on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: apple, design, icons, mobile applications, trademark

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Wynn Resorts Trades Oprah’s national "No Phone Zone Higher Following Better- Day" Than-Expected Earnings Consumer Reports Shopping Blog (Consumer Reports)

200,000 people who have submitted their pledge. The “No Phone Zone Day” is Michael Fowlkes Submitted at 4/30/2010 1:59:59 AM backed by a number of (BloggingStocks) Oprah’s national "No Phone government and advocacy Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:20:00 AM Zone Day" organizations including National Oprah Winfrey, with support H i g h w a y T r a f f i c S a f e t y Filed under: International from a number of government Administration (NHTSA), the Markets, Earnings Reports, and safety organizations, is Governors Highway Safety China Luxury casino operator launching a new campaign on Association (GHSA), National Wynn Resorts ( WYNN) traded Friday, April 30, to help put an Organizations for Youth Safety share. higher after hours today end to distracted driving. The (NOYS), SADD (Students Continue reading Wynn Resorts following the company's betterthan-expected earnings report Trades Higher Following Better- national “No Phone Zone Day” Against Destructive Decisions), i s i n t e n d e d t o i n c r e a s e and RADD (the Entertainment Than-Expected Earnings this afternoon. awareness and educate the Industry’s Voice for Road Wynn Resorts Trades Higher Higher revenue in China and p u b l i c o n t h e d a n g e r s o f Safety), among others. F o l l o w i n g B e t t e r T h a n Las Vegas helped the company U.S. Secretary of to report a profit after posting a Expected Earnings originally d i s t r a c t e d d r i v i n g . loss during the same period last appeared on BloggingStocks on Oprah’s Friday show will be Transportation, Ray LaHood, year. Earnings for the quarter Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:20:00 EST. devoted to the topic, and rallies has made it his mission to end were 22 cents per share, versus a Please see our terms for use of held in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, distracted driving. He has loss of 30 cents during the same feeds. Permalink| Email this| Los Angeles, and Washington launched a number of initiatives D.C. will bring together victims’ to combat this growing problem, period last year. Analysts had Comments families, government officials, such as creating a sample bill to been expecting to see WYNN organizations, and parents and help states enact texting bans post earnings of 14 cents a teens to discuss ways to limit and initiating the recent pilot distracted driving. In addition, campaigns in Syracuse, NY and there is a call to action to make Hartford, CT called “Phone in cars a “No Phone Zone” by one hand. Ticket in the other.” signing a pledge on the Oprah Data from NHTSA show that Web site to not call or text in the almost 6,000 people were killed car. So far, there are close to and more than a half million

injured in 2008 as a result of distracted driving. Currently, seven states, plus the District of Columbia, prohibit drivers from using a handheld cell phone and 23 states have texting-whiledriving bans. For more on distracted driving go to distraction.gov and also see our latest blogs on the topic. Also read: Despite dangers, drivers continue to text and talk Hands-free cell phone laws: Are they effective? Should cell phone use by drivers be illegal? Distracted Driving Summit: The hands-free debate Cell phone use and driving laws Government study exposes cell phone driving dangers — Liza Barth Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

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Weekend warrior chronicles: Dad assembles a giant backyard gym set Artemis Dibenedetto (Consumer Reports) Submitted at 4/30/2010 1:59:59 AM

Weekend warrior chronicles: Dad assembles a giant backyard gym set This spring, my six-year-old son has been asking for a swing set for the backyard. Now that his little brother is nearly two, I figured I’d look into getting one. We often go to a town playground on the weekends, but I figured a backyard playset would allow them to get some fresh air and burn off some energy after school, and before dinner, on weekdays. I began the hunt. I started on the Internet at Google Maps: Swing sets near my ZIP code. I quickly found two stores within 10 minutes of my house, Timbergyms and Easter Jungle Gym. Great! I could “swing” by and see what they had, and even let my kids try them out. Both stores were very similar—they had wooden swing sets on display, offered free delivery and even free setup for some models, and my kids loved them! One problem: the base-model sets started at

about $1,700 and prices steadily rose from there! Want to replace a cloth roof with a wooden one? That’s extra. Want a swing seat appropriate for your two-yearold? That’s extra. At this rate, the sets quickly added up to about $4,000 and more! Suddenly the short ride to our town’s playground seemed like a better option. I went back home and started cutting a hiking trail in the woods in the back yard. Maybe my kids wouldn’t mind playing on a rock or climbing a tree? But in the end, I still wanted a playset. But where could I find a cheaper model? I had a brainstorm: Let’s check Walmart! I headed there with my six year old and finally found them: a couple of closed boxes that promised to become wooden swing sets. They ranged from $400-600, and the most expensive one had a wooden roof—something you’d only get at the other places for the price of a small used car. After about a half-hour of searching for a sales clerk, I discovered that Walmart couldn’t even supply me a picture of what these sets looked like once assembled.

They suggested I look on the Internet. I went home. On Walmart’s Web site, the sets looked nice. But I also checked Sam’s Club’s site and found the Taj Ma-play-scape I had been looking for: The Highlander! This thing had four levels, a picnic table, a wooden roof, and more for $998. A big bonus for me was that each ladder leading to the four levels was actually very small, making it easier for my two-year-old to navigate. The user reviews for it were great, but they did mention the assembly time: 20 to 40 hours to put it together. That’s right, 20 to 40 HOURS. With two kids, and two parents working, that seems kind of like a big commitment for our family. I found several companies that assemble these things, but a quoted fee of $600

seemed a bit high. I decided to try it myself. After all, my sixyear-old loves projects—and what a project it would be. Armed with a pickup truck, I headed off to Sam’s Club. With not much more effort than it takes to buy a 96-pack of toilet paper (well, maybe a little more), I soon had nearly 800 lbs. of lumber in four huge boxes, as well as a big slide, piled into the back of the truck. Game on! After all, I thought, I’m an engineer, how hard could this be? Did I mention there were literally hundreds of boards in those boxes that mostly looked the same? The good news is that my six-yearold was a great help finding the boards I needed and put washers on the bolts. After four hours, I had already erected the base. I felt l like I’m building an Amish barn. Thoughts so far? It is a pretty incredible kit. I doubt I could even buy all the wood I needed for the thousand dollars the kit cost me. I haven’t found a single split board or an incorrectly predrilled hole, and all the boards are marked. To be honest, I’d really like to leave work now

and continue the build. I doubt it is as sturdy as the big-dollar playscapes, but I have a feeling it will be just right for my two kids. (Learn about the importance of padding underneath any outdoor play equipment, and see the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s home playground safety guidelines.) Follow-up. After about 21 hours of labor, and with some help from my Dad and my boys, I am very happy with the purchase. I really had a lot of fun assembling the kit, and my kids can't get enough of the playscape. In fact, the television hasn't gone on once since we assembled it. —Jake Fisher, senior engineer, auto test Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

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Daily electronics deals Paul Eng (Consumer Reports)

$579.99 + free shipping • Dell Home: Dell Studio Hybrid $299 + $12.95 shipping Daily electronics deals • Buy.com: Toshiba Satellite Today's electronics deals, T135 $480 Shipped courtesy of The Consumerist: • Lenovo: Save 20% on select • SuperBiiz$5 Off $15 Purchase ThinkPad T-Series Notebooks [w/ Coupon HONEYBEE5] + One More Coupon Entertainment • Dell: Dell Laser Printer for • Newegg Tekken 6 PS3 Game $69 w/ Free Shipping w/ Arcade Stick for $49.99 w/ • Newegg: Samsung Digital Free Shipping Camcorder for $109 [w/ Coupon • Walmart: Nerf N-Strike Elite E M C Y R N X 4 6 ] w / F r e e Wii Game Bundle for $15.54 + Shipping $3.97 Shipping • Buy.com: Toshiba 13.3" Red • Gamebay.com Sony PS3 Dual Laptop 1.3GHz w/ 320Gb Drive Shock 3 Wireless Controller w/ + 3GB DDR3 Memory for Motion Sensing Technology for $479.99 w/ Free Shipping $38.99 w/ Free Shipping • Dell: Hitachi 500GB USB • Amazon: New Super Mario External Mini Hard Drive for Bros. + $10 Amazon Credit $ 6 4 . 9 9 [ w / C o u p o n $39.99 + free shipping PG9QT1ST843WC7] w/ Free Shipping Neither Consumer Reports nor • NewEgg: Canon PowerShot T h e C o n s u m e r i s t r e c e i v e SD780IS 12MP Point-and-shoot a n y t h i n g i n e x c h a n g e f o r $161 + free shipping featuring these deals; the posts • Amazon: Toshiba Satellite are intended to be purely L505 15.6-inch Core i3 Laptop informational. These deals are Submitted at 4/30/2010 5:55:35 AM

often fleeting, with prices changing or products becoming unavailable as the day progresses. These posts are not an endorsement of the featured products or the Web sites that sell them—though some of the sites may be included, and recommended, in our Ratings of retailers for computers and other major electronics(both available to subscribers). Price shouldn't be your only criterion. Be wary of lower-priced deals that seem too good to be true, and check return policies for restocking fees and other gotchas. For general buying advice for many of the products on sale above, check out our free Buying Guides. Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

Suzuki offers free gas for summer Consumer Reports Shopping Blog (Consumer Reports) Submitted at 4/30/2010 6:27:23 AM

Suzuki offers free gas for summer It seems like a distant memory, but it was just two years ago when the country was plagued by high (over $4) gas prices that had consumers trading in guzzlers for more fuel-efficient cars, hanging up the car keys for a motorcycle or scooter, or turning to public transportation. While it doesn’t look like gas prices will near those levels this summer (the Energy Information Administration predicts regular fuel will average $2.92 for the season), Suzuki is looking to lure buyers with a free gas promotion for the summer. The offer is available on purchases of Suzuki’s 2010 models: the Suzuki Kizashi, SX4 SportBack, SX4 Sedan, SX4 Crossover, Grand Vitara, and Equator. Customers will receive a pre-paid gas card to

cover three months of gas ranging in value from $280 to $442. The amount will be determined by the EPA rating of the vehicle, an estimated average of 1,000 miles a month, and the EIA’s price of gasoline. The promotion kicks off May 1 and runs through August 31. Check out our new car selector to see our Ratings on Suzuki vehicles. For more information and tips on saving fuel, see our guide. — Liza Barth Subscribe now! S u b s c r i b e t o ConsumerReports.org for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products. Update your feed preferences

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Spurs Beat Mavericks, Take Series Tom Ziller (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:16:00 PM

Filed under: Mavericks, Spurs, Playoffs The mighty San Antonio Spurs have vanquished the latest incarnation of their eternal rival, the Dallas Mavericks. By the score of 9787, the 7th-seeded Spurs upended the favored Mavericks in six games, winning again in San Antonio. It marks the third time since 2001 the Spurs have eliminated the Mavericks in the postseason, with the series going the other way last season. The Spurs will now face the winner of the Suns-Blazers series. San Antonio took a stunning 22 -point first half lead, with vicious Spurs defense (surprise, surprise!) limiting Dallas to just eight points in the first quarter. The Mavericks roared back,

Spurs throughout his career, Nowitzki has averaged more than 30 points.) Caron Butler also had a strong night with 25 points, and usually ignored rookie Rodrigue Beaubois came off the bench like a lightning bolt with 15. Despite all that, the Spurs controlled the play. You might not believe this, but Richard Jefferson and Antonio McDyess actually did a credible job defending Nowitzki. Jefferson worked hard to deny Dirk the trailing by just 13 at the half and ball in the post, especially late, even taking a brief third quarter and McDyess kept a hand in the lead, but S.A. held the Mavs off, German's face. But, as he did in and held on to reign victorious. Game 1, Nowitzki hit any T h e S p u r s w i t h s t o o d a number of tough buckets, predictably great effort from fueling the Mavericks' runs. On Dallas talisman Dirk Nowitzki, the other end, the Spurs kept who read the script and put out things balanced, passed the ball 33 points in the losing effort. (In beautifully and hit shots. elimination games against the

(Mensfitness.com) Submitted at 4/30/2010 2:00:00 AM

NFL Risks Racial Mess if 'Fins GM Skates Jay Mariotti (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:56:00 PM

Filed under: NFL"Are you antiSemitic?" The editor asked the question and then stared me down, convinced I was guilty, all because a sports-franchise owner didn't like me and sometimes pressured the newspaper into intimidating me. In another meeting in his office, the same editor forearmshivered me into a wall as I tried to leave the room and escape his wrath. These incidents happened several years ago at the hopelessly chaotic Chicago SunTimes, and I relate them now because I, too, have had a Dez Bryant experience. My guess is, you have as well. Like many NFL prospects, Bryant (right) has a tumultuous family history, including a MensFitness.com is part of The Pregnancy| Flex| iShape| Men's mother who served hard time for American Media Inc Fitness & Fitness| Muscle & Fitness| selling crack cocaine and was Health Network Muscle & Fitness Hers| Natural just 15 years old when he was ÂŠ 2010 Weider Publications, Health| Shape born. His is a troubled past that LLC, a subsidiary of American E n t e r t a i n m e n t : C o u n t r y certainly was valid to explore M e d i a , I n c . A l l R i g h t s Weekly| National Enquirer| Star when the Miami Dolphins and Reserved. Five Filters featured article: other teams were weighing Mensfitness.com is a member The Art of Looking Prime whether to draft Bryant, a gifted of the Guy's TRiBE anchored by Ministerial - The 2010 UK wide receiver from Oklahoma Spike.com General Election. Available State. But it's one thing to Visit our other publications tools: PDF Newspaper, Full online: Text RSS, Term Extraction. Health & Fitness: Fit

Girl Next Door: Cristy Mendivil

investigate a young man's life via behind-the-scenes phone calls and legwork. It's quite another to ask Bryant - face to face, human being to human being -- if his mother was a prostitute. Jeff Ireland, general manager of the Dolphins and a veteran NFL executive who should know better, made that horrific mistake weeks ago during a predraft interview session with Bryant. "My job is to find out as much information as possible about a player that I'm considering drafting," Ireland tried to explain. "Sometimes that leads to asking in-depth questions.''

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Pavelski Scores 2, Sharks Take Game 1 Without Marleau Adam Gretz (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 4/29/2010 7:45:00 PM

NFL's Despicable 'Interview' Process Kevin Blackistone (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 4/29/2010 6:30:00 PM

Filed under: NFL A little over two years ago, a couple of professors produced a paper published in an academic magazine called Journal of Contemporary Ethnography that was titled "Artificially Restricted Labor Markets and Worker Dignity in Professional Football." I don't recall what they said about the pool from which the NFL pulls its proletariat. But I was suddenly reminded this week of what they found about

the common decency the league affords its prospective players: very little. "Our analysis of players' experiences point to three primary themes," BYU professor Mikaela Dufur and Western Washington professor Seth Feinberg wrote in October 2007. "[One] workers feel exploited, manipulated, dehumanized, and mistreated ... [two] potential hires cope with this invasive evaluation by identifying with management or through a hope of signing a substantial employment contract ... and [three] workers believe that the sorting process is not an

accurate assessment of an employee's potential productivity but feel they have no alternative entry to the labor market and are therefore powerless to protest such requirements." In other words, Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland, like every other GM in the NFL, felt he could ask potential draft pick Dez Bryant(above) whatever he wanted, and Bryant, like every other young man hoping to make it in the league, felt he had no option but to swallow his pride and answer.

Filed under: Sharks, Red Wings, NHL Playoffs Like many of his San Jose teammates, Joe Pavelski's 2009 postseason was rather forgettable as he managed just one assist in the Sharks' stunning first-round exit to the No. 8 seed Anaheim Ducks. It's been the exact opposite story for Pavelski and Co. this year, and thanks to his two-goal effort during a 4-3 win against Detroit on Thursday, he's now tied for the playoff lead with seven goals, which is already a career postseason-high for the 25-yearold center. Pavelski scored a pair of power play goals, including the gamewinner, as San Jose took an early lead in its Western Conference Semifinal series with the reigning Western Conference champs. He opened

the scoring nine minutes into the first period when he ripped a shot from between the circles, setting the stage for a twominute offensive explosion that saw the Sharks score three goals against Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard, giving them an early 3-0 lead. The Wings managed to cut the deficit to a single goal in the second period thanks to tallies from Dan Cleary and Johan Franzen, but couldn't get any closer. Sharks Lead Series, 1-0 Sharks 4, Red Wings 3: Recap| Box Score| Series Page

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Blazers May Be Gone, but GM Kevin Pritchard Should Stay Sam Amick (FanHouse Main) Submitted at 4/30/2010 12:00:00 AM

Filed under: Suns, Trail Blazers, Playoffs PORTLAND, Ore. -- The dead man walking couldn't have looked more alive on Thursday night. Kevin Pritchard was being Kevin Pritchard again, the Portland general manager mingling on the Rose Garden floor while wondering like the rest of the Rip City residents whether his team had one last punch in store. True to their fighting form, they did. So spirited was their 99-90 loss to Phoenix that the home crowd stood until the end as if the outcome was reversed, an insurmountable deficit and the end to a torturously-terrific season greeted in the final

Be on the lookout for APB June 29 seconds with the pulsating "Let's go Blazers!" chant. The Blazers faithful were as feverish as ever, hailing this character-filled crew that endured more than 300 games missed due to injury in the regular season and pushed these Suns far more than was reasonable to expect. And as the sold-out venue was

awash in a Blazers love affair that seemed unthinkable just four years ago, there was nary a local thought on the Jail Blazers days of old. The sagging attendance. The constant Blazer presence on the police blotter. The kind of infamy that rarely gets rectified so soon.

JC Fletcher (Joystiq)

accomplishments, according to EA: " APB provides avenues for accomplished gamers or creators Attention, all units: EA will t o e a r n r e w a r d s f o r t h e i r release Realtime Worlds' cops- creativity and subsidize their and-robbers MMO APB on PC ongoing costs with their inin North America on June 29, in game efforts." mainland Europe on July 1 and Pre-order incentives, which in the UK on July 2. should be offered by all major The initial $50 game purchase, retailers, include access to the either through retail or by demo and early access to the full download, will include 50 hours game, plus an assortment of of playtime, as well as bonus cars, clothing and "unlimited time" in APB's so- c h a r a c t e r E m o t e s . called social districts, where Gallery: APB players can customize, chat and Be on the lookout for APB June trade. When the 50 hours are up, 29 originally appeared on players have the option to Joystiq on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 purchase 20 more hours for $7, 10:56:00 EST. Please see our 30 days of unlimited access for terms for use of feeds. $10, or discounted 90- or 180- Read| Permalink| Email this| day passes. In addition, extra Comments playtime can be earned through certain unspecified Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:56:00 AM

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Capcom ships 1 million Super Street Fighter IV copies for initial retail run JC Fletcher (Joystiq) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:57:00 AM

Puzzle Agent revealed, Telltale's Scoggins mystery solved

Man 'beats' Bejeweled 2 after playing for 3 years

Clearly anticipating a hit in its updated fighter, Capcom has sent out one million copies of Super Street Fighter IV to Griffin McElroy (Joystiq) the first person to ever "beat" retailers around the world in the Bejeweled 2. That's one way of first shipment of the game. The Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:28:00 AM looking at it, we suppose. budget-priced title was released Griffin McElroy (Joystiq) iPhone and iPad, places you in W e a d m i r e a l l f o r m s o f Another way of looking at it is in North America and Japan the shoes of "the Agent," who's dedication -- even the absolutely to say that everyone else who's earlier this week and is in stores Submitted at 4/30/2010 10:25:00 AM called to solve a mystery in the insane forms. A California steel ever played Bejeweled 2 is a today in Europe. The next step? After very little nose-to-the- Fargo-esque town of Scoggins, contractor named Mike Leyde quitter. Yeah, that's right. Why Sell all these copies. grindstone sleuthing, Telltale M i n n e s o t a . W h a t a r e t h e recently displayed one such type don't you follow through with Capcom has put all-time has revealed the answer to the specifics of this mystery, you of persistence by playing a something for once in your life? shipments of Street Fighter Mystery of Scoggins Erasers: ask? We have no idea, but based single round of his casual game Sheesh. console games at more than 28 Puzzle Agent. IGN was recently on Telltale's lineage, we're of choice, Bejeweled 2, for Continue reading Man 'beats' million units worldwide, as of s h o w n t h i s f i r s t g a m e i n guessing it's going to be pretty 2,205 hours and 51 minutes over Bejeweled 2 after playing for 3 March 31, 2010 (so not counting Telltale's new "Pilot Program" -- wacky, and perhaps even a little the course of three years. In that years the initial SSFIV shipment). The a series of one-off games that bit zany. There might even be time, he collected 4,872,229 Man 'beats' Bejeweled 2 after publisher did not clarify how could be expanded into larger some hare-brained hijinks, if g e m s , e a r n i n g t h e g a m e ' s playing for 3 years originally many of those copies were franchises depending on fan we're lucky. h i g h e s t c a l c u l a b l e s c o r e , appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 upgraded re-releases of Street reception. Considering Puzzle P u z z l e A g e n t r e v e a l e d , 2,147,483,647, at which point Apr 2010 09:28:00 EST. Please Fighter games. A g e n t a p p a r e n t l y m i x e s Telltale's Scoggins mystery the score display got really see our terms for use of feeds. Capcom ships 1 million Super Telltale's quirky brand of solved originally appeared on perplexed and went blank. Read| Permalink| Email this| Street Fighter IV copies for comedy with Professor Layton- Joystiq on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 (Check out a video of Mike's Comments initial retail run originally style brainteasers, we seriously 10:25:00 EST. Please see our achievement after the jump.) appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 doubt this one will have a hard terms for use of feeds. Apr 2010 09:57:00 EST. Please According to PopCap, Leyde is time catching on. Read| Permalink| Email this| see our terms for use of feeds. The game, which is being Comments Read| Permalink| Email this| developed for PC, Mac, Comments WiiWare and, as we guessed,

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Success Story: Jim Murphy (Mensfitness.com)

pump only about 8% of his blood. The doctors thought Murphy, then just 25, should This strongman always had have died. "They told me that heart. Just not a healthy one. l i f t i n g i n t h e g y m w a s The transplant he underwent completely out of the question barely slowed him down. and that I just had to rest," he by Collin Orcutt says. Print Article Email to Friend Handfuls of pills lowered his JIM MURPHY blood pressure and slowed his Hometown: Lynnfield, Mass. heart rate, Ludwig Kietzmann (Joystiq) about as much these days). Age: 29 but the meds left Murphy so Aside from its title and what Weight: 215 lbs groggy, he slept up to 18 hours a Submitted at 4/30/2010 7:33:00 AM appears to be a release date -- Height: 5' 11" day. He had a pacemaker Your ability to recognize November 9th, 2010 -- Black Jim Murphy pulled a 65,000- implanted, but his condition insanely popular brands has Ops remains enshrouded in pound dump truck, completed worsened. Murphy needed a likely meshed with your ability m y s t e r y a n d s o m e w h a t an 895-pound deadlift, and won new heart. to recognize dates, rendering the superfluous ( we're up to 16 t h e M a s s a c h u s e t t s S t a t e He got lucky. Just four days t e x t i n t h i s p o s t r a t h e r cents!) smoke. Expect to see Strongman Championships three after going on a waiting list, he superfluous. Unfortunately for much more when GTTV reveals years in a row. But when he got a call at 4:30 a.m. telling you, we all get paid extra for the first footage later today. helped a friend move into her him one was available. "I was using lots and lots of words -- [Via XboxGaming] apartment five very excited," says Murphy. "I e s p e c i a l l y o n e s l i k e Call of Duty: Black Ops set for years ago, he felt light-headed didn't have time to get nervous "superfluous." N o v . 9 , 2 0 1 0 o r i g i n a l l y while carrying a mere 19-inch or scared because it happened so Activision has unveiled the appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 TV up a few fast." official website for Call of Duty: Apr 2010 07:33:00 EST. Please flights of stairs. He felt faint Four days after the transplant, Black Ops, the latest entry from see our terms for use of feeds. again a week later during a set despite a chest full of cracked t h e f r a n c h i s e ' s a l t e r n a t e Read| Permalink| Email this| of deadlifts, then again the next ribs, Murphy gingerly walked developer, Treyarch(they're the Comments week while training. That's around the recovery room. "I ones you haven't been reading when Murphy rushed to the felt great," he recalls. "I knew I hospital to get checked out. wouldn't run into problems." The results weren't good: In just three months, Murphy M u r p h y h a d was lifting, and six months later, cardiomyopathyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an enlarged he took and weakened heart. He'd also fifth in the New Hampshire developed a clot that was strongman competition. "I drove allowing his faulty ticker to home with a big smile on my Submitted at 4/30/2010 4:00:00 AM

Call of Duty: Black Ops set for Nov. 9, 2010

face," he remembers. Today, Murphy's the same guy he was before his old heart started to fail him, except for the scar on his chest and a new lowsodium diet. He's returned to work at his family's fireprevention business, and he's grateful to be back working out in the gym as well. "Every time I look in the mirror and see the scar," he says, "I just think 'miracle.'" Jim's Tip: Be Your Own Man "I don't want to be normal. When I think of myself, or when other people think of me, I don't want the word normal attached to my name. Not everybody can do what I do, and not everybody has gone through what I've gone through. It's just my state of mind, I guess." Related articles: Success Story: Eric Trevino Success Story: Chad Sargent Success Story: Justin Petruzziello [on Facebook, Digg, Reddit and more] Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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What's missing in realtime (Scripting News) Submitted at 4/29/2010 10:20:36 AM

I was at breakfast this morning with a friend from the tech industry, and the subject got around to Facebook vs Google, and the way Twitter is kind of in the middle of the two giants. I've felt for a long time that Twitter should have welcomed federation early-on, when the competition wasn't so fierce. While it wasn't a slam-dunk, I thought there was a decent chance our Twitter log-ins could be the default username for many other sites on the net. Now Facebook is making a strong bid to be that, and if Twitter were to try that now it would likely be seen as too-little -too-late. Then my friend, who asked not to be named, wondered why WordPress isn't in the same place as Twitter. I answered with an analogy -- Twitter is riding a bicycle on Interstate 95, and Facebook and Google are two semis about to have a headon collision. Twitter may not be directly competing with either

of them, and Google probably doesn't care much about Twitter one way or another, but the collision is going to do some serious damage to all who are in the vicinity. WordPress isn't riding a bike and they are nowhere near the freeway. Picture Matt sitting on the beach sipping a Mai Tai. It sure feels this way but then I wondered -- why? And if WordPress is on the beach sipping drinks with little umbrellas, how can Ev and Biz get some of that action? Then I figured it out. Two bits (and they may be very hard for Twitter to do): 1. I don't mind hosting sites on wordpress.com because I know if I ever want to get them off I can run them on my own server. I need to be able to do that with Twitter (or Tumblr for that matter). In other words, there must be an open source, easily installable Twitter that's the same thing that twitter.com is running, so I can just move my presence there and not skip a beat. People are going to say I can do that with Identi.ca, but I

much better too, but Twitter hardly does it at all. This is something Ev should understand, as one of the early blogging tool vendors, he should remember how important a role designers played in the evolution of blogging. Given that Twitter and the other services in this space (e.g. Facebook) don't allow the user any control over the HTML of their presence, it should be easy to improve this. But I want power over everything. More important, I want designers to have power over everything so I can use the product of their work. So in summary: I need to be able to isntall my own Twitter and move my presence to my can't -- when I move my own server, easily. And I need WordPress blog my domain control over the look and feel of points to the new location and my site. Those two things would all my links still work. To really do enough to shake up the trust Twitter, they have to market and give Twitter a new enable competition at this level. way forward and make what 2. I must be able to completely Facebook and Google do in their control the look and feel of my battle-of-the-titans-to-death presence. This is something mostly irrlevant to them. Matt & Company could do

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News: Gatorade GNC Partner Up (Mensfitness.com)

be available to the public exclusively through GNC. The new line includes pre- and postG Series Pro soon to be workout products, including a available to the public protein shake, nutritional bar, Print Article Email to Friend and a new endurance formula. Being a pro athlete comes with "I'm kind of torn," says New its fair share of sweet perks. Y o r k J e t s r u n n i n g b a c k Access to the best trainers and LaDainian Tomlinson, who was nutritionists around, invites to at the launch event in Manhattan the most exclusive, A-list last week. "We thought it was parties, and all the residual fame something secret that we got to and fortune all come along with have, and now the public gets to on-field glory. have it." And, apparently, they also get a Tomlinson was joined by secret Gatorade. fellow Jets offensive tackle For years, Gatorade's G Series D'Brickashaw Ferguson and Pro has only been available in wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery. locker rooms and training Also there to introduce the new centers. But on May 1st, it will products were New York Giants Submitted at 4/30/2010 5:00:00 AM

quarterback Eli Manning and music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs. "I've been taking the pro series since college, going on 11 years now," says Manning. "I swear by it all." Now you can, too. For more on G Series Pro, check out Gatorade.com [on Facebook, Digg, Reddit and more] Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

(Mensfitness.com) Submitted at 4/30/2010 3:00:00 AM

James Cameron is Working on a 3D Camera for the Next Mars Rover Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:23:08 AM

Remember all that beautiful Mars imagery that NASA’s Mars rover Spirit sent back during its journey to the Red Planet? Now imagine seeing high-definition color 3D video from the surface of Mars. James Cameron, one of the biggest authorities on 3D filming, is helping Malin Space Science Systems Inc. of San Diego to build a 3D camera for Curiosity, the next Mars rover. Curiosity is scheduled to be launched in 2011, but the 3D MensFitness.com is part of The Pregnancy| Flex| iShape| Men's part is not set and ready just yet. American Media Inc Fitness & Fitness| Muscle & Fitness| Malin already designed two Health Network Muscle & Fitness Hers| Natural cameras that were supposed to be installed on the rover’s main © 2010 Weider Publications, Health| Shape LLC, a subsidiary of American E n t e r t a i n m e n t : C o u n t r y mast; these can record HD color M e d i a , I n c . A l l R i g h t s Weekly| National Enquirer| Star video, but not 3D. Cameron’s Reserved. Five Filters featured article: version of the cameras will have Mensfitness.com is a member The Art of Looking Prime 3D and zoom capabilities, which of the Guy's TRiBE anchored by Ministerial - The 2010 UK may not mean much for science, Spike.com General Election. Available but it will definitely be a huge Visit our other publications tools: PDF Newspaper, Full step in awesomeness. online: Text RSS, Term Extraction. “ T h e f i x e d f o c a l l e n g t h [cameras] we just delivered will Health & Fitness: Fit do almost all of the science we originally proposed. But they cannot provide a wide field of view with comparable eye

How to Defend Yourself: Part 1

stereo. With the zoom [cameras], we’ll be able to take cinematic video sequences in 3D on the surface of Mars. This will give our public engagement co-investigator, James Cameron, tools similar to those he used on his recent 3D motion picture projects,” said Michael Malin from the Malin team. To be approved for Mars, however, the new cameras have to be finished and tested before NASA starts the final testing of the rover, which should happen in early 2011. Geeks of the world are gonna be rooting for it. [via ComputerWorld] For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: 3D, Curiosity, james cameron, Mars, NASA, rover

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Respect, blasphemy and violence Mollie (GetReligion) Submitted at 4/29/2010 5:41:09 PM

We looked at some of the coverage of the Comedy Central’s censorship of the South Park program. South Park has long shown offensive images of Jesus and other nonMuslim religious figures. It has also attempted to show inoffensive “images of Muhammad” but been censored by the network — and other media covering the issue — out of fears of violence. I put “images of Muhammad” in quotes because their most recent censored images were actually of a bear and a taxi-cab (that Muhammad was supposedly inside). Anyway, it’s not the blasphemy that’s in question. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker love to blaspheme all religions. This is why they, for instance, think it’s funny to depict Americans, President Bush and Jesus defecating on each other and the American flag. Blasphemy is sort of what they do. It’s the violence and the threat of violence and the censorship that results in that. Good coverage would look at the difference in core values of the clashing cultures and different religions in question. And that, of course, is the story few people want to cover. A good opportunity to explore

the issues came when a young illustrator came up with an “I am Spartacus” idea of having everyone draw Muhammad one day. It took off — beyond the artist’s wildest expectations, I guess. Here’s the Los Angeles

showing many objects — from a cup of coffee to a box of pasta to a tomato — all claiming to be the likeness of Muhammad. Such depictions are radioactive as many Muslims believe that Islamic teachings forbid showing images of Muhammad. First off, I’d like to thank the Los Angeles Times for putting a “many” in front of Muslims to note that not all Muslims believe that Islamic teachings forbid showing images of Muhammad. Muslims are most definitely not unanimous in their belief that any physical representation of Muhammad is blasphemous. The 15th century image with this post shows Muhammad visiting Paradise while riding Buraq, accompanied by the Angel Gabriel. Below them, riding camels, are some of the fabled houris of Paradise — the “virgins” promised to heroes and martyrs. This image is entitled Miraj Nama, and is housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Go here for more Muslim physical representations of Muhammad that are supposedly not allowed. Actually, I’m totally unsure where the breakdown is on whether or not to depict Times: That is until they realized it Muhammad, what the key The outcry from Comedy m i g h t b e c o n t r o v e r s i a l , doctrinal points are, or how Central’s decision to censor an a p p a r e n t l y . many or what type of Muslims episode of South Park with In declaring May 20th to be are on which side. I think that depictions of Muhammad last “Everybody Draw Muhammad would make a fascinating story. week led a cartoonist and a Day,” Seattle artist Molly Norris RESPECT, page 73 Facebook user to fight back. created a poster-like cartoon

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Religion/

Instruments of worship warfare tmatt (GetReligion)

in what was called a public mutual confession. Yes, it was that controversial Here is a sticky question: What that music instruments were is a reporter supposed to do used in worship services. That when writing a story about a leads us to the passage that religious group that does not see raises some interesting questions itself as a denomination and about history, vocabulary and strives not to use traditional newspaper style. (remember that word) language Henderson served as pulpit to describe itself and much of its minister at Quail for 9 1/2 years. work? Do you use the traditional He and elder Steve Hopkins terms and explain that the group both said that he and the elders being covered does not use them agreed on starting a new or do you use the group’s worship service using musical unique terms, knowing that instruments in 2008. It was a you’ll need to translate them for break from Church of Christ readers? tradition. Most Church of Christ We are talking about the congregations do not use Church of Christ, specifically musical instruments during the movement that is best church services, believing there known for the fact that its is no precedent for it in the New churches do not use musical Testament. instruments in worship. Yes, Henderson saw it as a way to this is the crew in which our offer something different, own Bobby Ross Jr. is a leader was around called the Churches m i n i s t e r i s a n e v a n g e l i s t , Henderson was back in the particularly for the church’s and editor. He had to opt out of of Christ the “West Texas addressed by members as pulpit at Quail Springs Church young people. The change commenting on the following Churches of Christ” because Brother. The ministers do not of Christ — this time on a c a u s e d a n u p r o a r i n t h e story for obvious reasons. His their churches are almost as use clergy titles. Do not precede mission of peace. Churches of Christ, especially decision may have something to common in this region as 7-11s their names by a title. …” Through the urging of several after a story about it ran in do with an expression among (and even more common than Now, with all of that said, here church members, Henderson J a n u a r y 2 0 0 8 i n T h e t h e v a r i o u s c h u r c h e s o n Southern Baptist churches and, is the top of this report from The a n d t h e c h u r c h ’ s e l d e r s O k l a h o m a n . this“Restoration” or “Stone folks, that’s saying something in Oklahoman, ripped from the participated in a mediation As I hinted earlier, the key C a m p b e l l ” b r a n c h o f t h e Texas). front lines of the worship wars, program offered by Billings, word that will raise some American Protestant tree: “We This is a colorful and unique which are especially symbolic in M o n t . - b a s e d P e a c e m a k e r eyebrows is “tradition,” as in don’t have bishops. We have ( t h a t ’ s a c o m p l i m e n t ) a Church of Christ context: Ministries. The mediation “church tradition.” editors.” movement. You can get a sense A local minister who helped meetings in February were The problem is that, instead of Another thing to mention: I of that in its Associated Press launch a controversial worship described by several men “tradition,” many people in a grew up as the son of a Southern Stylebook reference, which service with musical instruments involved as “difficult,” but they Church of Christ context would Baptist minister in Wichita states in part: resigned last year after his resulted in an outpouring of see that as “Tradition,” which is Falls, Texas, right on the edge “ E a c h l o c a l c h u r c h i s relationship with the church’s repentance and forgiveness from a word that is associated with o f W e s t T e x a s a n d t h e autonomous and operates under elders had deteriorated. both Henderson and the elders. INSTRUMENTS page 74 Panhandle. Most of the people I a governing board of elders. The Recently, however, Mark … Specific wrongs were aired Submitted at 4/29/2010 2:57:15 PM

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‘Mushy’ millennials in the news Bobby (GetReligion)

it’s pretty big news, right? Yes, if you’re USA Today Submitted at 4/29/2010 1:13:29 PM religion beat specialist Cathy Honk if you’ve heard the Lynn Grossman, whose story on phrase “more spiritual than the survey made Page 1-A this religious.” That, not“WWJD,” week: appears to be the mantra of Most young adults today don’t today’s young people, even pray, don’t worship and don’t those who call themselves read the Bible, a major survey Christian. The movement has by a Christian research firm significant ramifications for shows. Christianity — and religion in If the trends continue, “the general — in the United States. Millennial generation will see So when a major survey comes churches closing as quickly as along that confirms the trend, GM dealerships,” says Thom

Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group’s survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they’re “really more spiritual than religious.” Among the 65% who call themselves Christian, “many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only,” Rainer says. “Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.”

The survey also drew notice in the religion press, from the Christian Post to World Magazine. I’ve also heard that Katie Couric and Glenn Beck referenced it, but I didn’t see those reports. Did you? But in general, this story doesn’t seem to have caught fire in the media. I don’t find any other national media coverage in Google News (think Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, et al). I did come across a few

interesting local reports, including one by a Pittsburgh television station and another by a Georgia newspaper. Why the lack of coverage? Did USA Today get the scoop and scare off the other media? (That doesn’t seem to happen on other big stories, wink, wink.) Is this latest survey too similar to other recent findings, including a study earlier this year by the Pew Forum on ‘MUSHY’ page 73

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Chicago Tribune religion reporter Manya Brachear approached the story by asking her paper’s cartoonist Scott Stantis for his thoughts. Here’s a snippet from the interview: Seeker: Do you have a set of rules that govern what/who you draw and when? In other words, are certain people or historical figures off limits or is everyone fair game? Do you ever poke fun at people who have passed away or do you have rules about that? SS: Under certain conditions I can see drawing anyone or any body. Seeker: What are your thoughts about the reaction to the South Park depiction of the Prophet Muhammad? Do you think it’s overblown or could it lead to a productive conversation about respect? SS: Any time you threaten violence you lose the argument. I can second guess Comedy Central’s decision to edit the South Park episode but I can see where they would not want to put themselves in harm’s way. In terms of respect, I have to giggle at the notion that a faith that is so insecure that its icon cannot be held up to even depiction has a lot of internal

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work to do. A good discussion ensues in the comments (how often can you say that on the interwebs!?). But again, this isn’t really a debate about respect. Christian and Jewish symbols and figures are disrespected by cartoonists or other media figures every day that ends with a y. So this isn’t really a debate about how to show proper respect to religious figures. This is really a debate about whether fear of violence is the only reason to back away from disrespectful speech. I’ve been sick and under the weather all week so perhaps this has been covered better by mainstream reporters, but the only place I even saw a discussion of this issue was in Ross Douthat’s New York Times column. Read the whole thing, but here is a snippet: In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our

establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self -loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force. He sort of took the ball and scored three touchdowns with it — but I’d settle for a simple discussion on establishing standards under threat of violence. How does that affect our culture, how does that affect Muslims in Muslim countries, how does affect Muslims living in countries that are not predominantly Muslim? How does that affect Muslim art? How does that affect art critical of Islam? Where are we seeing this issue played out? What are the hidden costs of decisions such as those made by Comedy Central — and countless other publishing houses and art venues that don’t even wait for the death threats to pull books, productions, etc.?

Brachear has also used her blog to provide a forum for other voices in the depiction of Muhammad controversy. Here’s Hesham Hassaballa saying he was bothered by the cartoon but more bothered by the Muslim extremist response to the cartoon and Ahmed Rehab saying he thought the controversy was contrived. And there’s an agnostic defender of the First Amendment in there for good measure, too. The Washington Post’s comic blog also took up the issue, noting that 17 Pulitzer Prizewinning cartoonists had signed a petition expressing outrage at the threats made against Parker and Stone. Blogs are great (hey, we’re a blog, too!) but how about some more substantive coverage of the issue — and the long-term concerns that need addressing. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Religion & Public Life? Is it that a Baptist organization commissioned the survey? Is it the loss of so many Godbeat pros? I don’t know. But this survey and the place of millennials in the modern American religious landscape seem to merit wider attention. Grossman’s story did an excellent job of framing the issue through the lens of experts such as Lifeway’s Rainer. But plenty of ground remains to be plowed, including putting a better face on these “mushy” millennials. “More spiritual than religious” is one of those phrases that makes sense when you hear it. But reflect on it a big more and you find yourself going, “Huh? What exactly does that mean?” Religion writer Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal tackled that exact question in an enlightening piece last month— even before the release of the LifeWay survey. Smith cited an in-depth Bowling Green State University study: Those who self-identified as “spiritual” — whether they were also “religious” — were more likely to have been “hurt by clergy”; to have higher levels of education and income; and to take part in mystical and group spiritual experiences. And those who identify as ‘MUSHY’ page 74

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INSTRUMENTS continued from page 71

Catholic, Orthodox and, perhaps, Anglican churches. Tradition is, in other words, a fighting word that is linked to some of the very liturgical and doctrinal questions that are at the heart of this movement’s fervent belief that its independent congregations are helping “restore” the church to the purity of its early roots, before the advent of what it sees as man-made “Traditions” that have hurt the faith. But is “doctrine” a better word? Doctrine might sound, well, like these churches have a creed or a catechism. Would it be better to say that this is the movement’s “interpretation” of scripture? That, however, would imply that

Church of Christ is a body that makes that kind of decision for its autonomous congregations. Notice that the story says that “most” Church of Christ congregations do not use instruments in worship. This is very important issue for these churches. Trust me on that. More than a decade ago, a man I shall identify only as an intellectual who is active in the Church of Christ told me that, in the circles he runs in, it doesn’t really matter if someone believes in the Virgin Birth, the Second Coming or maybe even the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, “as long as you believe that the Bible says you can’t play a

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“spiritual” and who reject “religion” are less likely to pray and hold orthodox beliefs and more likely to be agnostic. Such trends alarm Christians who emphasize Jesus as the only source of truth and salvation. “‘Spiritual’ has, in some sense, come to mean ‘my own personal religion with my own individual creed,’” said Timothy Paul Jones, associate professor of leadership and church ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Now, that reference to “Christians who emphasize Jesus as the only source of truth and salvation” made me smile.

“Are there any other kind of Christians?” I asked myself. Alas, I know the answer … But back on topic: Have you seen any other major mainstream coverage of the LifeWay survey? Do you agree that there’s a religion ghost in the lack of headlines? Is it time for the media to get spiritual? Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

piano in church.” That’s overstating matters things, to say the least. But reporters and editors in the Southwest have to find a way to deal with style issues of this kind. OK, folks in Church of Christ pews and pulpits: What think ye? What word was The Oklahoman supposed to have used in this case? Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Remember Microsoft’s Courier? Well, You Can Forget About It Stan Schroeder (Mashable!) Submitted at 4/30/2010 5:03:39 AM

Microsoft’s Courier was supposed to be the tablet of the future, Microsoft’s answer (and challenger) to Apple’s iPad, with two screens, multi-touch support, camera and a bunch of other goodies. But now, close on the heels of a rumor that HP might be giving up on a Windows 7-powered tablet, we know that Courier wasn’t meant to be. With its demise the inevitable truth comes out: All those devices that were supposed to “kill” the iPad now have to be rethought and redesigned, because no one was really sure what Apple planned to do with the iPad. Sure, it now seems obvious (it’s a big iPhone, duh), but history repeats: When iPhone came out, it took the competition years to catch up. It’s simple, really. Although

Windows 7 has touch support, no version of Windows was really designed to offer an experience similar to the iPad. Now, it’s back to the drawing board for companies that planned to release an iPad killer. For HP, the drawing board will probably be webOS; for others, it may be Android. Still, once again it might take some time until the competition catches up with the iPad. For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Tags: apple, courier, ipad, microsoft, Tablet, trending

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What Twitter’s New Ad Model Could Mean for Small Business Adam Ostrow (Mashable!) Submitted at 4/30/2010 9:38:07 AM

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Twitter has finally answered a big piece of the long running question of how it plans to make money. At Ad Age’s Digital Conference in New York, the company revealed “Promoted Tweets,” an advertising system that will allow businesses to have their tweets highlighted in search results, and eventually, in the Twitter stream and thirdparty applications. The platform is currently being piloted by a number of big brands – it’s not yet self-serve like Google AdWords or Facebook’s advertising offerings. Nonetheless, there’s much to be excited about, and looking at Promoted Tweets in light of other recent developments at Twitter, there’s a ton of potential for what the platform could one day mean for small businesses. What It Is

Thousands of companies – large and small – are already on Twitter. Promoted Tweets introduces a way for these businesses to gain extra exposure for their messages. For example, if you own a coffee shop, when a user searches for “coffee” on Twitter, you’ll conceivably be able to have a tweet from your business sit atop the results. However, these ads shouldn’t be thought of like traditional forms of online advertising, like a banner or even a text link in search, but rather an extension of what you’re already doing on Twitter. Promoted Tweets will sink or swim – quite literally – based on the response they get from users. In a system that Twitter is calling “resonance,” ads will be judged based on how users engage with them, through actions like replies, retweets and clicks. If an ad doesn’t get enough engagement, it will be removed from the system. The key to making effective use of Promoted Tweets, then, will be to create the same type of engaging messages you already do organically on your account,

investing some money into the system when you have a particular tweet that you’d like to give an extra push. Location Currently, big global brands like Best Buy, Starbucks and JetBlue are testing Promoted Tweets. However, for the platform to be useful to small businesses – especially those that are primarily brick-andmortar – you’ll need the ability to target Promoted Tweets based on location. While Twitter hasn’t yet announced this capability, there’s reason to believe it will eventually be part of the platform. Twitter has already made its “trending topics” feature location-based, so you can see what people in your city are talking about. The microblogging service now also lets users attach their location to every tweet, and its advanced

search features let users filter to find tweets near them. As its location features continue to evolve and gain adoption, expect them to become a part of the Promoted Tweets platform. Mobile Until recently, applications for using Twitter on mobile phones were all developed by thirdparties. But in April, the company releases its own BlackBerry app, acquired the company that makes Tweetie(which will become Twitter for iPhone), and announced plans for an Android application. Expect these applications to be GPS-enabled – meaning they’ll know a user’s location – and in turn create an opportunity for businesses to target Promoted Tweets based on a user’s whereabouts. More to Come We’re still at the dawn of Twitter’s monetization plans. Until Promoted Tweets are available to more advertisers and become a part of the Twitter stream, the impact of the platform will be fairly limited in the small business realm. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Twitter’s

ad model could evolve into a staple of the small business online marketing mix, creating an unprecedented opportunity to communicate with current and potential nearby customers in real-time. For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook More business resources from Mashable: - How Companies Should Approach the New Twitter Advertising Model - How One Small Biz Turned Their Company Retreat Into Social Media Success - Growing Your Business: 5 Tips From the Founder of Foursquare - 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page - HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy Tags: advertising, business, Promoted Tweets, small business, social media, social media marketing, twitter

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Turn Your iPad into a Moving Landscape with Magic Window Jolie O'Dell (Mashable!)

to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide This post is part of Mashable’s network of investors and Spark of Genius series, which incubators. There are no upfront highlights a unique feature of costs, so if your business is startups. If you would like to privately owned, less than three have your startup considered for years old, and generates less inclusion, please see the details than U.S.$1 million in annual here. The series is made app works, as well as an idea of revenue, you can sign up today. possible by Microsoft BizSpark. what the graphics look like: Entrepreneurs can take Magic Window is currently advantage of the Azure Services Name: Magic Window Quick Pitch: Magic Window featured in the “New and platform for their website turns your iPad into a virtual Noteworthy” section of the App hosting and storage needs. window with magical views of Store. It’s holding a #1 spot in Microsoft recently announced the entertainment category and the“new CloudApp()” contest– beautiful scenes. Genius Idea: Magic Window’s is #14 in overall grossing apps. use the Azure Services Platform creator calls it “the ultimate in The current list price at press for hosting your .NET or PHP relaxation apps. If you are often t i m e i s $ 2 . 9 9 , a l t h o u g h app, and you could be the lucky stuck in a room with no window marketing copy states the app winner of a USD 5000* ( please or a bad view, Magic Window is usually sells in the App Store see website for official rules and for $9.99. for you.” guidelines).” The app lets users choose Magic Window’s creator, Josh For more Apple coverage, between ten stunning scenes to Michaels, is a former Microsoft follow Mashable Apple on act as virtual screensavers of a employee. He’s been developing Twitter or become a fan on sort. The vistas offered include mobile applications for two Facebook sunsets, mountain scenes and years. This app represents his Tags: bizsparks, ipad, magic even a fireplace. Users can first big success. Sponsored by window, startup adjust the rate of time passage in Microsoft BizSpark BizSpark is a startup program this app, as well. that gives you three-year access Here’s an overview of how the Submitted at 4/29/2010 11:59:19 PM

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