Federal Appeals Court Rules Telecommunications Companies ...

In recent days, a federal appeals court ruled that a 2008 law granting telecommunications companies legal immunity for helping the National Security Agency with an email and telephone eavesdropping program is constitutional.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the lower court ruling that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is indeed constitutional.

The appeal was involving a case that consolidated 33 different lawsuits filed against various telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. on behalf of these companies? customers.

The plaintiffs were represented by lawyers including the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. They accused the companies of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with NSA on intelligence gathering.

The case is rooted in the new surveillance rules passed by Congress in 2009; these included protection from legal liability for telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. spy on Americans without warrants.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued the case before the panel was quoted as saying in the December 29th foxnews.com article, ?Court OKs Immunity for Telecoms in Wiretap Case?: ?I?m very disappointed. I think the court reaches to try to put lipstick on a pig here. I think what Congress did was an abdication of its duty to protect people from illegal surveillance.?

In its ruling, the court made note of comments put forth by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence involving the legal immunity?s role in helping the government gather intelligence.

Judge M. Margaret McKeown was quoted as saying: ?It emphasized that electronic intelligence gathering depends in great part on cooperation from private companies ? and that if litigation were allowed to proceed against persons allegedly assisting in such activities, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future.?

However, in a separate opinion, a three-judge panel of the court pointed to two other lawsuits that challenged the warrantless surveillance program. Two groups of telecom customers sued the NSA for violating their privacy by collecting Internet data from AT&T from telecom companies in the surveillance program authorized by President George W. Bush.

Government lawyers have made attempts to stop such cases, on the grounds that defending the program in court would jeopardize national security. The suits will be sent back to U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

America?s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is an Act of Congress, which put in place procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of ?foreign intelligence information? between ?foreign powers? and ?agents of foreign powers?. This may also include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of being engaged in espionage and violating U.S. law on territory under United States control.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, which involves cryptanalysis and cryptography.

Source: http://www.jdjournal.com/2011/12/30/federal-appeals-court-rules-telecommunications-companies-have-legal-immunity-in-connection-with-nsa-program/

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Seven hurt as bomb hits madrassa in Nigeria (Reuters)

PORT HARCOURT/JOS (Reuters) ? Assailants threw a homemade bomb into a madrassa in southern Nigeria's Delta state, police said, wounding seven people and escalating tensions between Muslims and Christians after a spate of church bombings across the nation.

Six of the wounded were children younger than nine learning the Koran at the Islamic seminary, or madrassa.

In a separate incident, armed Fulani herdsmen shot dead three members of a family in the ethnically and religiously mixed Plateau state on Wednesday, witnesses and officials said.

The school attack on Tuesday night came two days after Christmas Day bombings of churches and other targets by Islamist militant group Boko Haram killed 32 people in a coordinated strike that seemed aimed at igniting sectarian strife.

"Some men driving in a Camry car threw a low-capacity explosive into a building where an Arabic class was taking place," police spokesman Charles Muka said.

"Children aged between four and nine were taking a lesson. Six children were injured and one adult," he said.

He said police suspected a local vigilante group.

Boko Haram, a sect which aims to impose Islamic sharia law across Nigeria, claimed responsibility for the December 25 attacks, the second Christmas in a row it has caused carnage.

The worst attack killed at least 27 people in the St Theresa Catholic church in Madalla, a town on the edge of the capital Abuja, and devastated surrounding buildings and cars as worshippers poured out of the church after Christmas mass.

The attacks risk reviving sectarian violence between the mostly Muslim north and Christian south, which has killed thousands of people in the past decade.

"DECLARATION OF WAR"

Speaking at a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday, Ayo Oritsejafor, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), an umbrella group for all denominations, said Christians had become victims of "Islamic Jihad."

"It is considered as a declaration of war on Christians and Nigeria," Oritsejafor said. "CAN has found the responses of ... Islamic bodies on this matter to be unacceptable and an abdication of their responsibilities."

"The Christian Community is fast losing confidence in government's ability to protect our rights."

Jonathan promised to do more to tackle the threat of Islamists and hinted at a reshuffle in his security services.

"We will restructure ... and make sure we get a team that will meet with the challenge we are facing today," he said. "I will plead with religious leaders, both Muslim and Christian leaders, to work together."

Nigerian Christians fear the Christmas Day bombings could lead to a religious war in Africa's most populous country.

There was no suggestion the killings in Plateau had any link to Sunday's church bombings, as the victims were Christians.

The state is a tinderbox of ethnic and religious rivalries over land and power between local people and migrants from other areas that often take the form of sectarian strife between the state's Christian and Muslim communities.

Women wept and wailed in anguish over the bodies of a husband and wife in their thirties and their baby child, all of which were riddled with bullet holes.

"When the Fulani herdsmen came around late in the night, I managed to escape through the window before they killed my son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter with guns," said Mary Pam, the mother of Philip Francis, one of the victims.

(Additional reporting by Felix Onuah in Abuja and Anamesere Igboeroteonwu in Onitsha; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Myra MacDonald and Matthew Jones)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/education/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111228/ts_nm/us_nigeria_school_bomb

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Santorum surge: Underdog candidates push for surprise Iowa caucus 'win'

A new Iowa caucus poll appears to show Rick Santorum surging at just the right moment, rising into third place as Gingrich falls. But he's not the only underdog hoping for an Iowa surprise.

Rick Santorum appears to be surging at just the right moment, with a new poll showing him rising swiftly into third place among likely attendees at the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.

Skip to next paragraph

For the former US senator from Pennsylvania, it's confirmation that his persistent efforts to meet Iowans face to face are paying off. Already, other polls had shown him rising to 10 percent support in the state.

The new poll shows Mr. Santorum at 16 percent, just ahead of a sagging Newt Gingrich but behind Mitt Romney (25 percent) and Ron Paul (22 percent). The CNN/Time/ORC survey was conducted between Dec. 21 and Dec. 27.

The upward arc for Santorum also symbolizes something broader ? the volatilty of the Iowa race and the hopes of other underdog candidates to make last-minute surges that could revive their campaign hopes.

The Iowa caucuses are a volatile affair spanning precincts around the state, with results affected by hard-to-predict turnout and last-minute appeals by the candidates.

Along with Santorum, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota face what many analysts see as make-or-break moments in the Hawkeye State. A surprisingly strong showing could propel one of them forward to compete in the next string of primaries.

But a weak showing could finish their campaigns. And they are campaigning like they know it.

Ms. Bachmann has been on a bus tour covering all 99 counties in the state. Governor Perry's bus is stopping at many of the same places, while his better-funded campaign keeps rolling out TV ads.

Each of them draws respect from Christian conservatives in the state, and Santorum has recently won some key endorsement from that camp. Bachmann and Santorum, in particular, has each sought to cast him or herself as the lone "consistent conservative" in the field.

This touted strength is also perceived by some voters as their weakness: The CNN poll found them bringing up the rear in perceived "electability" when matched against President Obama in the general election.

In a race that has seen almost every candidate shine as "flavor of the month," Santorum has not yet enjoyed a period of ascendency. Bachmann and Perry, by contrast, are struggling to recover from slumps after earlier rises.

Each of the candidates in Iowa gained ground with GOP voters in the recent poll except for Gingrich, who has faded quickly under a barrage of attack ads.

Santorum is the one who shows the biggest recent momentum, however. Where none of the other candidates have gained more than 5 percentage points over the past month, Santorum shot to 16 percent support after garnering just 5 percent in the poll conducted from Nov. 29 through Dec. 6.

He doesn't have big money for ads, but has rolled out radio spots that proclaim his conservative credentials, citing legislative successes on welfare reform, ending partial-birth abortion, and vigilance against the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Bachmann also can't afford a huge ad blitz, and is focusing on her 99-county tour.

Perry is better funded. One of his new ads is called ?Part-Time Congress,? a modest proposal to downsize the role of a legislative branch that has run up big deficits. "Cut their pay in half, cut their time in Washington in half, cut their staff in half," Perry says in the ad.

It's a jab, in part, at Bachmann, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich (all of whom served in Congress and are pictured in the ad). If the CNN poll is right, though, Perry is behind Santorum in the race to be a surprise gainer from the Iowa caucus.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/WHMlQzQT1NA/Santorum-surge-Underdog-candidates-push-for-surprise-Iowa-caucus-win

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Optoma HD8300

You don't have to look any further than the $4,499 list price to know that the Optoma HD8300 is aimed at serious videophiles rather than typical consumers. In fact, it's sold primarily by the sort of custom dealer who will normally install and calibrate the projector for you, if not build your entire home theater. If that's the class of projector you're looking for, the HD8300 is easily up to job, with great-looking images in both 2D and 3D at up to 1080p resolution.

Not too surprisingly, the HD8300 shares some important features with the Optoma HD33 ($1,500, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed. In particular it offers a similar frame interpolation feature to eliminate judder?the slightly jerky motion that's built into filmed content because of the standard 24 frame per second speed for film. It also shares the HD33's 3D support for both DLP-link glass and RF glasses, which are currently less common.

As with the HD33, the HD8300's DLP-Link support is built into the projector. The RF support uses an external RF emitter that comes with the projector and plugs into its VESA 3D port. The advantage for RF glasses is that you don't have to maintain a line of sight connection to keep the glasses synched for 3D, which means you won't lose sync if you look away from the screen for a moment. Note too that the projector doesn't come with any glasses, so whichever kind you want, you'll have to buy them separately, at $100 each for the rechargeable Optoma models.

Because it's worth it
Of course, at roughly three times the price, you would expect the HD8300 to deliver some significant advantages over the HD33 as well, and it does. Among other features, it offers a 1.5x manual zoom to give you far more flexibility in how far you can put the projector from the screen for a given size image. It also offers both vertical and horizontal lens shift, so you can shift the image up, down, left, and right without moving the projector.

Optoma says the vertical shift is plus or minus 65% from the midpoint, and the horizontal shift is less than plus or minus 10% from the midpoint. That's less than with some other projectors, like the somewhat less expensive Sony VPL-HW30ES ($3,700 street, 4 stars) or the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 8350 ($1299 direct, 4 stars), for example, but it's enough to be helpful.

A much more important advantage for the HD8300 over the HD33 is that it has still less of a rainbow effect. Rainbow artifacts, with light areas breaking up into little red-green-blue rainbows, are a potential issue for any single-chip DLP projector, because of the way the technology creates colors, showing each primary color in sequence, rather that showing them all at once.

When I reviewed the HD33, I pointed out that I saw rainbow artifacts with it less often than with most DLP projectors. I saw them even less often with the HD8300. I'd still rather have a projector that doesn't show rainbow artifacts at all, but unless you?or someone you regularly watch with?are extremely sensitive to seeing the rainbow effect (as I am), you probably won't see them with the HD8300.

Setup and Brightness
Setup isn't much of an issue, given that the dealer is likely to be doing it for you. Even so, it's worth knowing that this is a relatively big projector, at 7.6 by 14.6 by 19.3 inches (HWD), and it offers a fairly typical set of connectors, including two HDMI ports for video sources or a computer, a VGA port for a computer or component video, three phono plugs for component video, and a composite video port. As is common with home theater projectors, there are no audio ports, and no audio system.

Optoma rates the projector in its brightest mode at 1,500 lumens. That would make it far too bright for the size screen you're most likely to have in the projector's natural home, which is a traditional home theater setup with theater-dark lighting. With that in mind, the default lamp setting uses the lowest brightness for the lamp, which Optoma calls the standard setting. And, as is typical with projectors, the Cinema mode setting is noticeably dimmer than the brightest mode.

With these default settings, the projector offers the appropriate brightness for the 78-inch wide image (90-inch diagonal at 1080p) that we generally use for testing. For a larger screen, or for a room with ambient light, you can switch to a brighter setting.

Image Quality
Our 2D tests include both DVDs upscaled to 1080p and Blu-ray discs. The HD8300 showed just a hint of posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually) in one scene that many projectors have problems with, but if I weren't looking for it, I might not have noticed. In every other scene, and in every other way, the image quality was excellent. The projector did a good job with color, skin tones, shadow detail (maintaining details based on shading in dark areas), and maintaining details in bright areas. I also saw little to no noise.

As I already noted, the projector scored remarkably better than most DLP projectors for rainbow artifacts. I saw them in black and white footage in night scenes, but hardly at all otherwise. It's unlikely that even those who are sensitive to seeing the artifacts will find them objectionable.

Optoma's PureMotion feature, the frame interpolation that I mentioned earlier, worked as promised to remove judder. As with the same feature in the HD33 and the equivalent MotionFlow feature in the Sony VPL-HW30ES, however, it also adds artifacts in its highest setting that I find distracting. I found the lowest setting in all three projectors to be the best compromise, and I found the low setting in the two Optoma projectors more watchable than the low setting for the VPL-HW30ES. However, this is a matter of personal taste, and you may feel differently.

You may even want to turn the feature off altogether. Adding the interpolated frames gives movies much the same look and feel as live video. Some people, including me, find that the improvement just doesn't look right, a reaction that can make it hard to ignore how the image looks and simply watch the movie.

The HD8300 also did well on 3D tests. It offers HDMI 1.4a ports so you can show 3D from a Blu-ray player, cable, FIOS, or equivalent source without needing a video converter. More important, with both 3D Blu-ray discs and a direct connection to FIOS, the HD8300 delivered good image quality and I saw only an occasional hint of crosstalk (the blurriness, or ghost image, that shows when the frame meant for one eye leaks through to the other eye as well.)

Ultimately, the Optoma HD8300 gets high marks and an enthusiastic recommendation, but with an important hedge. If you see rainbow artifacts easily, you might find them all the more annoying after spending this much on a projector. In that case, you might prefer an alternative, like the Sony VPL-HW30ES, which is based on a technology that can't show rainbow artifacts. But for those who aren't sensitive to the effect, or don't mind seeing an occasional rainbow, the enthusiastic recommendation stands.

More Projector Reviews:
??? Optoma HD8300
??? Sony VPL-HW30ES
??? Epson VS315W Multimedia Projector
??? InFocus IN114
??? Epson PowerLite S9 Multimedia Projector
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/l4FsQwasjW4/0,2817,2398053,00.asp

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Heros and Villians Needed (Beneath Our Feet)

Hey!

My name is BlondeGamer, creator of "Beneath Our Feet"

Beneath Our Feet is a modern/fantasy roleplay about a secret organization that houses, experiments on, and often tortures people with powers that are out of the ordinary.
We are needing more heroes, villians, and even a few more agents wouldn't hurt.

If you are interested, please check out the roleplay at the link below and submit a character!

roleplay/beneath-our-feet/

Hope to see you there!

BlondeGamer

Its better to ask forgiveness... than permission

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China, Japan unveil deals to tighten finance ties

BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese and Japanese leaders have unveiled initiatives to tighten financial links between East Asia's economic giants and sometime rivals - measures that could expand use of China's tightly controlled currency abroad.

During a visit to Beijing by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, the two governments said in a surprise announcement Sunday they will encourage use of their own currencies in bilateral trade, which now is conducted mostly in U.S. dollars.

They also agreed to support the sale of bonds denominated in China's yuan by Japanese companies in Tokyo and foreign markets and by the state-owned Japan Bank of International Cooperation in mainland China's markets, which are closed to most foreign investors.

The pledges were a striking step for China and Japan, which are the world's second- and third-largest economies and are bound by billions of dollars in trade but whose political relations often are strained over conflicting territorial claims and other disputes.

"To support the growing economic and financial ties between China and Japan, the leaders of China and Japan have agreed to enhance mutual cooperation in financial markets of both countries and encourage financial transactions between the two countries," the governments said in identically worded statements.

They said Japan's government also planned to purchase Chinese government bonds, and an application process for official approval of that was under way.

The governments gave no timetable for practical steps to put the pledges into action or the size of possible bond offerings. Commercial banks still have to create yuan-denominated letters of credit and other tools before traders in Japan can use the currency.

The moves might reduce the dominance of the U.S. dollar in East Asia, the world's fastest-growing region. The Kyodo News agency cited a Japanese official who told reporters some 60 percent of trade between Japan and China is now settled in dollars, which requires companies to convert money between yen, dollars and yuan, adding to their costs.

Beijing controls the yuan's exchange rate and the flow of money into and out of China's booming economy. But the government has begun allowing limited use of yuan for trade. It said this month that some companies that obtain Chinese currency abroad will be allowed to invest it in mainland financial markets.

Most trade in yuan is conducted through Hong Kong, where Beijing also has created a market for yuan-denominated bonds that McDonald's Corp. and some other foreign companies have used to raise money to invest in their mainland operations.

The easing of controls on bond sales could help to reduce costs for Japanese companies that need to raise money to invest in their China operations.

The communist government keeps China's bond and other financial markets sealed off from global financial flows. That helped the country avoid the turmoil of the 2008 global financial crisis but has slowed the development of markets that Chinese leaders want to support economic development.

The latest pledges also might help to promote moves to allow the yuan to trade more freely on currency markets.

The United States and other trading partners complain that Beijing's currency controls keep the yuan undervalued, giving China's exporters an unfair price advantage and hurting foreign competitors at a time when the global economy is struggling.

Source: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_JAPAN_FINANCE_DEALS?SITE=VASTR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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How IBM Built the Most Powerful Computer in the World

Chris Marroquin is waist-deep in a hole in the floor. He's a tall guy with a medium build, but he looks awfully short now, and his shirt is pumped up to Schwarzenegger size by a 60-degree breeze blustering all around him. Grappling with a 1-inch-diameter hose, he attempts to explain the liquid-cooling system of IBM's next-generation supercomputer to me, but I can barely hear him over the howling wind. We're in a development room of IBM's Rochester, Minn., facility, where engineers test and assemble the company's Blue Gene supercomputers. The air buffeting Marroquin cools a small, four-rack Blue Gene/P system capable of 13.9 teraflops per rack, but the hose he's holding is part of a far more advanced cooling system. Filled with deionized water, the anti-corrosive agent benzotriazole and a dose of biocide, the tube feeds into a prototype of the company's new Blue Gene/Q computer. The Blue Gene/Q rack sitting on the raised floor has its own circulatory system?850 feet of copper pipe, with check valves, quick-disconnect rubber hoses and an electronic monitor that measures flow rate, pressure and dew point?designed to shut down if anything goes awry. "You don't want any drips," Marroquin says.

As sophisticated as the cooling system is, what launches this machine into the realm of technological superlatives is its processing power: Each rack contains 1024 computer chips, and every one of those chips has 16 processor cores. That's a total of 16,384 processors, making it capable of 209 teraflops, 15 times more power per rack than the Blue Gene/P. Within the next year IBM will ship 96 Blue Gene/Q racks to Bruce Goodwin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Collectively, those racks will become the most powerful computer in the world. It should be able to predict the path of hurricanes, decode gene sequences and analyze the ocean floor to discover oil. But Goodwin primarily wants to use it to blow up a nuclear bomb.

Goodwin used explode nukes the old-fashioned way. From 1983 to 1991, he designed and oversaw five nuclear weapons tests at the Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site. He and other engineers would dig a 2000-foot-deep hole, toss a warhead and some highly specialized monitoring equipment into a 10-story-tall, 1-million-pound iron canister and lower it into the hole. Then everybody would move way the heck back, cross their fingers and detonate. "Sitting in the control room 10 miles away, it felt like a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake," Goodwin says.

All that changed in October 1992, when then President George H.W. Bush declared a moratorium on nuclear testing in anticipation of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996. After that, if the United States wanted to test any of the warheads in its multithousand-weapon arsenal, it had to do a computer simulation. Thus, our interest in really powerful computers was nationalized.

Really powerful computers have been around as long as computers themselves, but the term supercomputer didn't arrive until 1976, when Seymour Cray built the Cray-1. It cost $8.8 million ($35 million in today's dollars) and cranked up to 160 megaflops. Yesterday's supercomputer, however, has less power than today's personal computer?a modern PC has more than 50 times the processing horsepower of the original Cray. In fact, the "super" prefix is so fuzzy that many computer scientists eschew the term supercomputer altogether and call such machines high-performance computers, or HPCs. In an attempt to bring some clarity to the genre, in 1993 a private group called the Top500 project started publishing a twice-yearly list of the 500 most powerful computers in the world. If your computer is on the list, it is by definition a supercomputer.

For 17 of the Top500 list's 18 years, the U.S. and Japan have swapped supremacy. But in October 2010, China claimed the top spot with the 2.6-petaflop Tianhe-1A. The computer scientists who design and build these systems tend to work for multinational companies and are cautious about characterizing what they do as a statement of national pride. Regardless, supercomputers have come to symbolize the technological prowess of the countries that build them?a silicon-age version of the space race. In a sign of the whipsaw speed of technological progress, Japan eclipsed China just eight months later, in June 2011, unveiling the 8-petaflop K Computer. The Chinese countered in August, outlining a road map to "exascale" computing, essentially promising a 125-fold increase in computing power within 10 years. If Tianhe-1A was China's Sputnik moment, exascale is its moonshot.

The supercomputer's role in maintaining America's nuclear weapons justifies its status as a national security interest. But China's challenge to the West's computing dominance has led many computer scientists and policy wonks to claim that supercomputing is essential to U.S. economic security as well. These machines are force multipliers for American scientists, engineers and businesses, the argument goes, and whoever builds the best ones gains an advantage. Supercomputers don't just reflect intellectual and technological power, they also reinforce it.

The folks at IBM Rochester betray little interest in China's goal of supercomputing dominance. Their job is to work out the engineering for Blue Gene/Q, and they deliberately focus on the technology, not the politics. They are classic pocket-protector engineers, and their titles are inelegant bureaucratic artifacts that offer little clue to their actual roles. "We're a very small, roll-up-your-sleeves team effort," says Pat Mulligan, development manager for Global Server Integration (who, for the record, had his sleeves rolled up when we spoke). "We're not overly nationalistic, we just want to make the best computer we can."

The building where Marroquin, Mulligan and the rest of the IBM team are creating the 21st century's most powerful computers is a monument to mid-20th-century corporate futurism. Designed by architect Eero Saarinen (who also designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch), the sprawling structure is clad in dark blue glass. Hallways a half-mile long stretch through the interior. At some point IBM?always pushing the technological envelope?concealed wires in the hallway floors to guide robots that delivered parts and machinery from one assembly room to another. The robots are long gone, a dream of mechanical efficiency undone by reality: They were slow and broke down so often that the facility switched to human-guided forklifts.

The Blue Gene/Q computers I'm getting a look at in midsummer are not part of Bruce Goodwin's supercomputer (named Sequoia). These are test models, used to work out the kinks in the hardware and software. The manufacturing of Sequoia's 96 racks was due to ramp up soon after my visit, but Goodwin and his team at Lawrence Livermore are already logging in to Blue Gene/Q and tinkering from afar; a sign on one of the racks in the Rochester assembly room says LLNL REMOTE ACCESS MACHINE.

Goodwin's Terascale Simulation Facility (TSF) at Livermore is one of two DOE centers that perform nuclear simulations as part of the Stockpile Stewardship Program (the other is at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico). To get a simulation that delivers an acceptable degree of accuracy, Goodwin's team models a 50-microsecond explosion in three dimensions down to a scale of 10 microns. "It gets very complicated," Goodwin says. "These things are imploding and exploding, and you have to track the fluid mechanics with the precision of a Swiss watch." Every time a component is changed or upgraded in a U.S. nuclear warhead, the TSF virtually tests the bomb to make sure it will still go boom. The computer simulations have revealed aspects of nuclear fission that testers hadn't anticipated, and, consequently, the number and complexity of algorithms have increased over time. Modern simulations model only parts of a full explosion, and even then, the most complex sims Goodwin runs use about a million lines of code. If you had 1600 years, the calculations could conceivably be done on a laptop; Livermore's current 500-teraflop Blue Gene/P system, named Dawn, gets a high-complexity sim done in a month. When the 20-petaflop Sequoia system goes live in 2012, the test time should drop to a week.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/extreme-machines/how-ibm-built-the-most-powerful-computer-in-the-world?src=rss

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Ben Nelson: "It's time for me to step away from elective office" (Washington Bureau)

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Chinese dissident jailed for 10 years

A Chinese court jailed a veteran dissident who organised a
pro-democracy activist network for 10 years today for inciting
subversion, his wife said.

The stiff sentence come near the end of a year in which the Chinese government has used various means to silence dissent, from lengthy imprisonment to months of disappearances, in a crackdown aimed at preventing Arab Spring-style uprisings.

A court in the southern city of Guiyang found Chen Xi guilty of the charge of "incitement to subvert state power" for 36 essays he wrote and posted online, his wife said.

Chen maintained his innocence but will not appeal the verdict, Zhang Qunxuan said.

"This is utterly absurd," Zhang said. "Chen Xi told the court it did not take into consideration the things he has written as a whole, and has interpreted his words out of context. But they have power and they don't listen."

"The court said he was a repeat offender and also that this is a very serious crime," she said.

Chen was active in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and was sentenced to three years in prison, and several years after that, he was jailed for 10 years on charges of counterrevolutionary offences, Zhang said.

The Chinese government has long meted out heavy punishments to veteran activists who have refused to give up despite decades of harassment and imprisonment.

PA

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Chinese Yuan and the Japanese Yen.. Direct Trades

The?Chinese currency?closed up against the dollar on today after hitting an all-time high, guided by a stronger mid-point by the?People?s Bank of China, and looks set for an over-4-per cent appreciation for 2011, traders said.? The Yuan is expected to remain stable or rise slightly in the last week of the year to close 2011 near 6.30 versus the dollar, in line with market expectations.

The currency is likely to continue to appreciate next year as China continues to post big trade surpluses despite a slowdown in exports and amid pressure from the United States to let the Yuan rise to balance bilateral trade, traders said.

The Yuan has appreciated 4.27 per cent so far this year, with most of the gain being recorded in the first 10 months of the year as China tries to rebalance trade and use the currency to help fight high inflation.

While the government has recently halted Yuan appreciation amid slowing exports, it also seems to be wary of a weaker Yuan that may lead to capital outflows.

Some overseas investors appear to have been shorting the Yuan in recent months amid signs that China?s growth is slowing under the double weight of a global slowdown and the country?s monetary tightening policy in place since October last year.

In an unexpected announcement ?Japan?and China will promote direct trading of the Yen and Yuan without using dollars and will encourage the development of a market for companies involved in the exchanges, the Japanese government reported today

Japan will purchase Chinese bonds next year, allowing the investment of renminbi that leaves China during the transactions, the Japanese government said encouraging direct yen- Yuan settlement should reduce currency risks and trading costs.

China is Japan?s biggest trading partner with 26.5 trillion yen ($340 billion) in two-way transactions last year, from 9.2 trillion yen a decade earlier. The pacts between the world?s second- and third-largest economies mirror attempts by fund managers to diversify as the two-year-old European debt crisis keeps global financial markets volatile.

Given the huge size of the trade volume between Asia?s two biggest economies, this agreement is much more significant than any other pacts China has signed with other nations.

Source: http://www.findata.co.nz/News/13939943/Chinese_Yuan_and_the_Japanese_Yen_Direct_Trades.htm

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U.S. regrets Cuba failure to free American citizen (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The State Department said on Saturday it deplored Cuba's failure to free Alan Gross - a U.S. citizen serving a 15-year prison term in a case that has stalled progress in U.S.-Cuba relations - as part of an announced humanitarian release of some 2,900 prisoners.

"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr. Gross this holiday season, especially in light of his deteriorating health, and to put an end to the Gross family's long plight," Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said Saturday.

The Cuban government said on Friday it would free 2,900 prisoners in coming days for humanitarian reasons ahead of a visit next spring by Pope Benedict XVI.

Those to be pardoned do not include Gross, a government spokesman said in Havana. He was imprisoned after setting up Internet equipment as a subcontractor in a U.S.-funded program promoting political change in Cuba.

The Cuban government considered his work subversive. His arrest halted a brief warming in U.S.-Cuba relations that have been hostile since Fidel Castro embraced Soviet Communism after his 1959 revolution.

In a statement, Toner reiterated a U.S. call on Cuban authorities to release Gross "and return him to his family, where he belongs." The State Department has said in the past that Gross was merely providing Internet access for Jewish groups in Cuba and should be released immediately.

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/latam/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111224/ts_nm/us_cuba_usa_gross

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China to try another dissident for "subversive" online essays (Reuters)

BEIJING (Reuters) ? China will try a veteran dissident, Chen Xi, on charges of "inciting subversion" for pro-democracy essays he published online, his wife said on Sunday, days after another dissident was jailed for nine years on similar charges.

Chen, a human rights campaigner in Guiyang city in Guizhou, southwest China, was arrested last month and will be tried for "inciting subversion of state power," a charge often used against critics of the ruling Communist Party, said his wife Zhang Qunxuan.

"They accused him because of 36 essays he published at home and overseas," Zhang told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"I don't know exactly what the charges are, because the court and prosecutors wouldn't show me the indictment. They said there are rules against showing that to family members," she said, adding that one of Chen's lawyers told her about the subversion accusations.

Chen, 57, is sure to maintain that he is innocent, but is certain to be found guilty and jailed by China's party-controlled judiciary, Zhang said.

"He's definitely going to fight the charges," she said, citing her discussions with his defense lawyers. She was told of the trial date on Friday, she added.

"But it looks certain that he'll be convicted. That's what courts always decide."

Chen was arrested last month after being released from a week-long detention triggered by his campaigning for independent candidates seeking to win places on China's party-controlled People's Congress assemblies, said Zhang.

Police confiscated his computer, she added.

"Then on November 29, the police called him and said he could come and get his computer," she said. "Instead, they lured him to the public security bureau and arrested him."

Calls to the Guiyang People's Intermediate Court were not answered on Sunday, a rest day in China,. Another human rights activist, Lu Yongxiang, told Reuters he also knew of the trial on Monday through Chen Xi's friends and supporters.

The trial will come after a court in Sichuan province, also in southwest China, convicted rights advocate Chen Wei and sentenced him to nine years in jail after a brief trial on Friday -- the stiffest punishment in a crackdown on dissent this year.

Chen in a common family name in China, and the two men are not related.

Chen Wei's wife, Wang Xiaoyan, and lawyers said he was jailed as punishment for essays that he had published on overseas Chinese websites.

China uses a "firewall" of Internet filters and blocks to prevent citizens from reading websites abroad that are deemed to be politically unacceptable or socially unsound.

Chen Wei's sentence was the third-longest term ever handed down for inciting subversion after Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who has been serving an 11-year sentence since 2009, and Liu Xianbin, who was jailed for 10 years in March this year.

Earlier this year, Chinese police held hundreds of dissidents, rights activists and protest organizers in a crackdown on dissent this year, when the ruling Communist Party sought to prevent potential protests inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world.

Many of those detained have been released but remain under police watch. But officials appeared determined to "make an example" of Chen, said Huang Qi, a human rights advocate in Chen's home Sichuan province and a long-time friend of his.

Chen Xi, who faces trial on Monday, is a former soldier and factory worker who was jailed for three years for his support for the 1989 pro-democracy protests across China that ended after troops crushed demonstrations, said his wife.

He was again jailed in 1996, but since his release in 2005 has been an organizer of a citizens' human rights forum in Guiyang.

(Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111225/wr_nm/us_china_dissident_trial

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Earth Has Two 'Moons' Right Now, Theorists Say (SPACE.com)

Earth has two moons, a group of scientists . One is that waxing and waning nightlight we all know and love. The other is a tiny asteroid, no bigger than a Smart Car, making huge doughnuts around Earth for a while before it zips off into the distance and is replaced by another.

That's the scenario posited by the scientists in a paper published Dec. 20 in the planetary science journal ICARUS. The researchers argue that there is a space rock at least 1 meter (3.3 feet) wide orbiting Earth at any given time, though it's not always the same rock.

In the scientists' theoretical model, our planet's gravity captures these asteroids as they pass near us on their way around the sun. When one is drawn in, it typically makes three irregularly shaped swings around Earth ? sticking with us for about nine months ? before hurtling on its way.

According to the researchers, surprisingly little attention has been paid to Earth's natural satellites other than the moon, despite the fact that they're sure to exist. "There are lots of asteroids in the solar system, so chances for the Earth to capture one at any time is, in a sense, not surprising," said co-author Jeremie Vauballion, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in France.

The group claims that its paper is the first effort to theoretically model the orbits and sizes of Earth's temporary second moons. The researchers' results are consistent with observations of one such "temporarily-captured asteroid" that is believed to have orbited Earth for about a year starting in June 2006. The object, labeled 2006 RH120, was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona; estimated to be between 10 and 20 feet (3 and 6 meters) wide, it appeared to be orbiting Earth from two moon-distances away. [What Would Earth Be Like with Two Suns?]

Mikael Gravnik, a physicist at the University of Helsinki and lead author of the new paper, says 2006 RH120 was probably discovered because it was slightly larger than most of the other "temporary moons" that come traipsing through our planetary system. Most of the hobo moons are only about 1 meter wide.

"Objects of this size are too faint to be detected when being at a distance of, say, a few lunar distances from the Earth," Gravnik told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com."When coming closer in during their orbit, they are moving too fast to be detected, because the limited amount of photons is spread over too many pixels."

These limitations mean we don't currently have a way of finding our second moons. But an observatory called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), planned to open in Chile in 2015, could change that.

"We hope that LSST will do something about this, but dedicated programs will without doubt be even better," Vauballion said. "Statistic study is still needed to see where and how to look for them."

NASA's Spaceguard Survey tracks the paths of all near-Earth objects (NEOs) in Earth's neighborhood that are larger than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in diameter, but the scientists are less concerned with bodies that are too small to pose a threat to Earth ? as is the case when they're just 1 meter wide.

But if our distant, noncommittal moons don't threaten Earth, and are much too dim to act as nightlights, does it matter that they're there at all?

According to astronomers, it does. Some researchers say it might be possible to go and get one of these temporary moons and bring it back to Earth for analysis.

"When found, such an asteroid will immediately raise the question whether or not we should go, and I'm ready to bet that many astronomers will argue that we definitely have to go!" Vaubaillon said in an email. "The reason is simple: What astronomers would not want to have a full and intact (unaltered by any physical process) piece of space rock? Meteorites are all altered because they go through our atmosphere. The only piece of asteroid we have comes from the Japanese Hayabusa mission (a few grams at the very most). The comet grains the Stardust mission got back from comet Wild 2 were all altered."

Clark Chapman, senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said a lot could be learned from the retrieval of a temporary satellite. "No doubt it is true that temporarily captured NEOs would be comparatively easy to get to and get back from ? it wouldn't take an especially powerful rocket, and round-trip times would be short," said Chapman, who is an expert on asteroid impact hazards.

Gravnik said, "We certainly hope that a space mission to a natural Earth satellite would someday materialize, and have actually already started a collaboration with experts in spacecraft orbital mechanics to find out how a mission from the Earth to a temporary satellite could be accomplished."

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/space/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/space/20111223/sc_space/earthhastwomoonsrightnowtheoristssay

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Romney ignores Gingrich's taunts on ads, tax spat (AP)

BETHLEHEM, N.H. ? Mitt Romney, seemingly happy with how the Republican presidential campaign is playing out, is not explaining or apologizing for TV attack ads paid for by his allies that have damaged his chief rival's political standing 12 days before the Iowa caucuses.

Whether he's the true front-runner or not, Romney is acting like one. He refuses to be dragged into debates about the campaign's tone, high-stakes brinkmanship in Congress over a payroll tax dispute ? or into a one-on-one debate sought by Newt Gingrich.

The former Massachusetts governor on Thursday shrugged off Gingrich's complaints about the ads and Romney's reluctance to weigh in on the political standoff over extending payroll tax cuts, which lawmakers late in the day appeared to be resolving just in time to head off a hit on workers' paychecks Jan. 1.

Gingrich, the former House speaker, has repeatedly called on Romney to face him before cameras and defend the ads, which are largely financed by a heavily bankrolled group friendly to Romney.

"We've had many occasions to debate together, and we'll have more, I presume quite a few more, before this is finished," Romney told The Associated Press. "But I'm not going to narrow this down to a two-person race while there are still a number of other candidates that are viable."

Some party insiders expect a strong showing in the lead-off Iowa caucuses Jan. 3 by libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. But they generally see Gingrich, a prominent GOP figure for more than 30 years, as having the best chance to compete with Romney for weeks or months.

Gingrich and Romney planned to campaign through Friday, underscoring the stakes for both candidates even as the pace by the crowded field began to lighten for Christmas weekend. The barrage of ads, though, kept up in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In a sign of his late organizing start, Gingrich spent Thursday in Virginia, scrambling to secure the 10,000 voter signatures he needs to get on the state's March 6 primary ballot. It cost him a precious day of campaigning in Iowa and in New Hampshire, which holds its primary Jan. 10.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been by far the heaviest spender in Iowa. However, his campaign this week gave 30-day termination notices to all political consultants in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Aides said the campaign was moving toward fiscal discipline as it prepares for a long multistate strategy.

But even in states that vote early, political consultants rarely receive such notices. Some are usually retained with an eye toward the general election, or sent to other states.

Gingrich renewed his call for Romney to condemn or defend ads sponsored in Iowa by a so-called super PAC. It's run by Romney supporters who are legally barred from coordinating with the official campaign.

Romney, interviewed during his bus tour of New Hampshire, didn't take the bait.

"Could I come out and speak about ads, generally, and speak about positive ads and negative ads?" Romney asked. "Of course, that's available to everybody. But I'm not in any way coordinating the ads or the approach that's taken by the super PAC."

Gingrich scoffed at the explanation, saying Romney could easily condemn the ads without breaking campaign finance laws.

"It tells you a lot about Gov. Romney," Gingrich told reporters in Richmond, Va. "I'm happy to go all over Iowa and point out that he doesn't mind hiding out behind millions of dollars of negative ads, but he doesn't want to defend them. The ads are false."

Ads showing in Iowa accuse Gingrich of supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants, and remind voters of his 1998 ethics problems in Congress, which involved his paying a $300,000 penalty. More subtle ads tout Romney's 42-year marriage, an indirect swipe at Gingrich's two messy divorces.

Gingrich said some ads dealing with abortion are inaccurate. Iowans will not reward "falsehoods by millionaires," he said.

Despite such remarks, Gingrich has vowed to stay positive. It's a decision partly driven by his inability to match Romney, Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry with heavy ad buys.

Some prominent Republicans came to Romney's defense. Former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, a Romney supporter, said he's getting tired of Gingrich's "whining."

And former President George H.W. Bush told the Houston Chronicle that Romney is the best choice for president. "I like Perry, but he doesn't seem to be going anywhere," Bush said.

Romney also dissociated himself anew from the debate in Washington over a proposed two-month extension of a cut in payroll taxes.

"I really don't think it's productive for me to describe which of all of the compromises within the sausage-making process is my favorite compromise position," Romney said, refusing to go "deep in the weeds."

Gingrich responded: "If you're a candidate for president and you're not prepared to talk about the hottest issue right now which affects every single working American ? there's a concept called leadership. And people sometimes think that I'm too aggressive, but at least I lead."

"I think there's a timidity of calculation," Gingrich said. "I suspect some candidates have had consultants say `Oh, don't take any risks.'"

Afterward, House Speaker John Boehner, in a retreat from the position Gingrich favored, announced that he expects to pass a new bill by Christmas to renew the tax break and federal unemployment benefits for two months while congressional negotiators work toward the yearlong extension House Republicans had been holding out for.

Some of Gingrich's and Romney's rivals rolled through Iowa on long bus tours. Rep. Michele Bachmann, stretched thin as she tries to visit all 99 counties, planned 10 visits Thursday before taking a brief break for Christmas. With her voice failing, she relied on supporters to make the case for her as she walked around diners and restaurants, whispering greetings to her fans in rural Iowa.

She was shouted down at the popular Hamburg Inn in Iowa City, with protesters blasting her conservative position on gay rights, health care and taxes.

"You're not wanted here. So go, just go," they chanted.

Perry stopped at two meet-and-greets with Iowa caucus-goers, many of whom remain undecided. He also attended a town hall-style meeting near Des Moines before returning to Texas for the holidays. While Perry has struggled to regain his one-time, front-runner mantle, his ads have blanketed Iowa and helped paint him as a conservative alternative to Romney and Gingrich.

Perry's campaign has spent $4.4 million on TV ads in Iowa ? twice as much as any other candidate there ? and $234,000 in New Hampshire. The super PAC behind Perry, Make Us Great Again, has spent an additional $200,000 on Iowa TV this week, bringing its total to more than $1.65 million.

Paul is also spending heavily in Iowa. His campaign spent about $500,000 on Iowa TV this week, bringing its total to about $2.2 million. The Romney-friendly super PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent almost $2.8 million in Iowa, largely on ads hitting Gingrich.

Gingrich aimed his sharpest barbs Thursday at President Barack Obama. He blamed the president for the impasse over the payroll tax, said a two-month extension made no sense and commented that the political squabbling makes the U.S. look "like Italy on a bad day."

___

Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in Bethlehem, N.H., and Philip Elliott in Iowa contributed to this report. Babington reported from Richmond, Va.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111223/ap_on_el_pr/us_gop_campaign

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The winner of 'The X Factor' is ...

By Craig Berman, TODAY.com contributor

Michael Becker / FOX

Melanie Amaro was crowned the first "X Factor" champ on Thursday night.

Melanie Amaro was crowned the winner of ?X Factor? on Thursday, surprising almost nobody and completing the journey that nearly ended before it began.

Amaro famously wasn?t one of judge Simon Cowell?s original four female finalists, but got called back into the competition when he either changed his mind or decided that the charade had gone on long enough, depending on how cynical you are. Once she got that second chance, she immediately became the favorite among the women, sailing through the competition and earning the $5 million recording contract.

She fell to her knees in prayer after hearing the news, overwhelmed enough to resist host Steve Jones? numerous attempts to get something resembling a sound bite out of her. She choked up several times during her show-closing number, but presumably will recover in time to record what everyone at Fox hopes?will be?a monster album that sells millions of downloads.

Josh Krajcik, the former burrito maker and champion of the 30-somethings, came in second, with Chris Rene having been eliminated earlier in the evening as the third-place finisher.

The result capped an evening that was more of a holiday special than a coronation. The three finalists all sang Christmas tunes, as did Justin Bieber in a duet with Stevie Wonder. Bieber than sang a few notes with Drew, the teenager eliminated earlier in the competition who auditioned with Bieber?s ?Baby? and seemed as overwhelmed by the opportunity as any girl her age would.

?She is a very special girl and she will go far,? Bieber said, though he did not indicate that he was prepared to fulfill Drew?s fantasy of a date with him at the beach.

The show also featured the snippets of interviews with friends and family members that tug at the heartstrings and are a staple of all reality competitions, or so it seems.

?We used to complain about you singing all the time, and now look at you singing in front of millions of people,? Amaro?s brothers said.

?I?m not really surprised we?re here right now. I want you to know that I love you so much, and I don?t think I say that enough,? said Krajcik?s daughter.

The night also saw the rivalry between Simon and judge?L.A. Reid depicted as a battle of heavyweights, while judges Nicole Scherzinger and Paula Adbul had the ?Cry-Off? clip show instead. This concept was brought to you by the 1950s, which wants its gender roles back.

Rachel Crow made her return, two weeks after her elimination in what was called the most shocking moment of the season. She didn?t seem to have any lingering scars from that experience.

?I?m gonna steal your job,? she told Steve.

It was a tough night for the host in general, who was often stymied in his attempts to talk with the contestants and had Nicole whiff on a punchline several times before he finally threw up his hands and gave up.

Other acts included 50 Cent, who tested the Fox censors and was accompanied by some of the less-heralded members of the Los Angeles Lakers, as well as Ne-Yo and Pitbull. Also singing was Leona Lewis, who won the British version of the show and is what the folks at Fox are desperately hoping that Amaro becomes. That, as much as anything else, will determine whether this becomes the next ?American Idol? or just one of the countless shows stuck in its wake.

{"contentId":"9645437","totalVotes":"1058"}

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?

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Source: http://theclicker.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/22/9645437-the-winner-of-the-x-factor-is

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Wednesday's "M:I:4"'s $8.6M reinvigorates box office (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" shot its way to the top of the box office Wednesday, collecting a solid $8.6 million, according to early studio estimates.

By contrast, on the Wednesday before Christmas last year, Universal's "Little Fockers" was the No. 1 film with just $7.1 million.

The strong "M:I:4" showing led a flurry of strong weekday performances by other new films Wednesday.

In its first full day of domestic wide release, Sony's "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" grossed $3.5 million at 2,914 domestic locations.

Paramount's Steven Spielberg-directed "Tintin," meanwhile, took $2.3 million during its U.S. debut Wednesday. It's playing at 3,087 theaters in the U.S. and Canada.

In its sixth day of release, "Sherlock Holmes -- A Game of Shadows" grossed $4.3 million, continuing a strong rebound after a disappointing first weekend.

Paramount/Skydance's "M:I:4" -- the fourth in the "Mission: Impossible" series -- now has grossed $25.7 million domestically and $85 million internationally.

The PG-13 film, directed by Brad Bird and starring Tom Cruise, opened at 425 large-format screens Friday. Its wide release began at 5 p.m. Tuesday, making Wednesday its first full day of wide release. It is now screening at 3,455 locations.

Warner Bros.' "Sherlock Holmes -- A Game of Shadows," which opened to $39.6 million, has grossed a total of $54 million. The PG-13 movie directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, is showing signs of strength at its 3,703 locations. The movie took in $4.9 million on Monday, $5.2 million on Tuesday.

Sony's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," David Fincher's R-rated adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novels, opened at 7 p.m. Tuesday. In its first five hours of release, the movie grossed $1.55 million. It more than doubled that in its first full day Wednesday, and has now taken in a total of $5.1 million at 2,914 locations.

Paramount's other new release, Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin," opened at 3,087 locations Wednesday and, because it opened in Quebec December 9, now has a North American total of $5.57 million. Internationally, the motion-capture animated movie has grossed nearly $240 million.

This is the weekend Hollywood has been looking forward to. After a wretched few weeks, studios are expecting audiences to return to movies in large numbers.

Still to be released: Fox's comedy "We Bought a Zoo," on Friday, and DreamWorks' World War I drama "War Horse," also from Spielberg, which hits theaters on Sunday. Also Sunday, Summit releases its R-rated sci-fi thriller "The Darkest Hour."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/enindustry/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111222/media_nm/us_boxoffice

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Finnish govt sees possible recession (AP)

HELSINKI ? Finland could hit recession early next year, the Finance Ministry said Tuesday, as it slashed forecasts for economic growth in 2012 to 0.4 percent from an earlier predicted 1.8 percent.

The ministry predicted that growth in 2011 will be 2.6 percent and after a year of low demand and falling investments next year it should pick up again in 2013 and reach 1.7 percent.

The ministry's economic review warned that Finland might hit a recession at year-end or early 2012 unless growth in its main trading partners ? Russia, Sweden and Germany ? markedly improves.

"Growth in 2012 will depend almost entirely on domestic demand since exports will remain subdued in 2012," the review said. "Dwindling international and domestic demand is also reflected in investment demand. Private investment is projected to contract by 1.5 percent in 2012."

The government said it expects unemployment, at a three-year low of 6.2 percent in November, to gradually grow and top 8 percent next year. Inflation was predicted to fall slightly, to about 2.7 percent, in 2012.

After a good first half in 2011, the financial crisis in the eurozone began to affect the economy of the small Nordic country ? one of six eurozone members with a triple-A debt rating.

"The sense of uncertainty that began to take hold late in the summer, especially in the eurozone, is once again quickly feeding through into the real economy," the review said. "Since the early autumn, economic statistics have indicated a broadly based slowdown in activity both in Finland and across Europe."

The report also noted that Finland's public finances had deteriorated rapidly after the previous global economic crisis.

"With growth remaining sluggish and the economy possibly heading for recession, the state of public finances will again present a serious challenge," the ministry warned.

Last week, the Bank of Finland also predicted that economic growth would fall to 0.4 percent in 2012 and could be even lower if the euro debt crisis worsens.

Finland, a member of the 17-nation eurozone, has been a keen supporter of the European Union but earlier this year said it would demand guarantees or collateral in any future bailout packages for ailing eurozone partners.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111220/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_finland_economy

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Revolutionary Sports Performance: Beason Still Going

Revolutionary Sports Performance: Beason Still Going

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Hangout on the Go, Check Your New Timeline, Ask Alfred, and Start a Spreadsheet on the Bus [Video]

Facebook for Android gets Timeline. Take your Google Hangouts with you wherever you go. Get the best Office suite, and a concierge app that was so good, Google bought it.

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Senate OKs $1T budget bill, payroll tax cut

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, left, and Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., comment as the Senate approves legislation that extends Social Security payroll tax cuts for two months, at the Capitol in Washington. The action also extends long-term unemployment benefits for another two months and forces President Barack Obama to approve construction of a controversial oil pipeline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, left, and Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., comment as the Senate approves legislation that extends Social Security payroll tax cuts for two months, at the Capitol in Washington. The action also extends long-term unemployment benefits for another two months and forces President Barack Obama to approve construction of a controversial oil pipeline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., arrives as the Senate votes to approve legislation that extends Social Security payroll tax cuts for two months, at the Capitol in Washington. The action also extends long-term unemployment benefits for another two months and forces President Barack Obama to approve construction of a controversial oil pipeline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, left, and Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., comment as the Senate approves legislation that extends Social Security payroll tax cuts for two months, at the Capitol in Washington. The action also extends long-term unemployment benefits for another two months and forces President Barack Obama to approve construction of a controversial oil pipeline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., talks on his cell phone just off the floor of the Senate as the body votes to approve legislation that extends Social Security payroll tax cuts for two months, at the Capitol in Washington. The action also extends long-term unemployment benefits for another two months and forces President Barack Obama to approve construction of a controversial oil pipeline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Senate passed legislation Saturday extending a Social Security payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for just two months, handing President Barack Obama a partial victory while setting the stage for another fight in February.

It also brought a peaceful end to a year-long battle over spending by passing a $1 trillion-plus catchall budget bill that wraps together the day-to-day budgets for 10 Cabinet departments and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House passed the measure Friday, and the White House has signaled that Obama will sign it.

The renewal of the 2-percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax for 160 million workers and unemployment benefits averaging about $300 a week for the additional millions of people who have been out of work for six months or more is a modest step forward for Obama's year-end jobs agenda.

As a condition for GOP support of the payroll tax measure, Obama has to accept a provision that forces him to decide within 60 days whether to approve or reject a proposed a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline that promises thousands of jobs.

Obama didn't reference the pipeline issue in a brief appearance at the White House after the vote. He welcomed the Senate's passage of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance extension and said it would be "inexcusable" for Congress not to extend them for the rest of 2012 when lawmakers return from their holiday break.

The budget bill, passed 67-32, heads to the White House for Obama's signature; the payroll tax measure won a 89-10 tally that send it back to the House ? where many Republicans only reluctantly support it ? for a vote early next week.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, would not predict whether the House would accept the Senate payroll tax measure, saying GOP leaders would have to discuss it with the rank and file. But Democrats assume Senate Republicans would not have allowed the short-term measure to advance without a signal from Boehner that the House would go along.

Democratic and GOP leaders opted for the short-term extension of the payroll tax and jobless benefits measure after failing to agree on big enough spending cuts to pay for a full-year renewal. The measure also provides a 60-day reprieve from a scheduled 27 percent cut in the fees paid to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

The $33 billion cost of the measure would be covered by raising fees on new mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The fees, drawn from a Treasury Department housing finance market reform plan, would effectively raise the interest rate on home loans guaranteed by the mortgage giants and the Federal Housing Administration by one-tenth of a percentage point.

The idea is to open up the market to private companies currently priced out by the implicit subsidies of Fannie and Freddie.

The White House says the fee would increase the monthly cost of a typical $220,000 mortgage by almost $15 a month. Over 30 years, the fees would increase the total cost of such a mortgage by more than $5,000.

In contrast, a worker making a $100,000 salary would reap a tax cut of about $330 through the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut. A worker with a typical $50,000 salary would get just a $165 tax cut.

Officials said that in private talks, the two sides had hoped to reach agreement on the full one-year extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits that Obama had made the centerpiece of the jobs program he submitted to Congress last fall.

Those efforts failed when the two sides could not agree on enough offsetting cuts to blunt the measure's impact on the debt.

The failure tees up the issue again for early next year, but it won't get any easier to agree on spending cuts.

Neither House Speaker Boehner nor his aides participated in the negotiations, although McConnell said he was optimistic about the measure's chances for final approval. The payroll tax cut is unpopular in GOP ranks and another vote in two months could present a headache for GOP leaders.

On the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, the legislation requires the president to grant a permit unless he makes a determination that it is "not in the national interest." One senior administration official said the president would almost certainly refuse to grant a permit. The official was not authorized to speak publicly.

The White House on Friday backed away from Obama's earlier threat to veto any bill that linked the payroll tax cut extension with a Republican demand for a speedy decision on the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline. Obama said on Dec. 7 that "any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut I will reject. So everybody should be on notice."

The president recently announced he was postponing a decision on the much-studied pipeline until after the 2012 election. Environmentalists oppose the project, but several unions support it. The legislation puts the president in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between customary political allies.

The State Department, in an analysis released this summer, said the pipeline project would create up to 6,000 jobs during construction, while developer TransCanada put the total at 20,000 in direct employment.

The pipeline would carry oil from western Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refineries, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The spending bill locks in spending cuts that conservative Republicans won from the White House and Democrats earlier in the year.

Republicans also won their fight to block new federal regulations for light bulb energy efficiency, coal dust in mines and clean water permits for construction of timber roads.

The White House turned back GOP attempts to block limits on greenhouse gases, mountaintop removal mining and hazardous emissions from utility plants, industrial boilers and cement kilns.

___

Associated Press writers David Espo, Alan Fram, Donna Cassata and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-12-17-Congress%20Rdp/id-a36f31ff0e634eb1b68fd7c41d4de5c2

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