Tag Archives: news
Pet rescue home celebrated in stamps
Royal Mail marks 150 years of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home with pet portraits
Mahmoud Abbas snubs peace talks with Israel
Mahmoud Abbas ‘not ready to negotiate’ after Israel announces 1,600 new homes for East Jerusalem The Palestinians pulled out of a new round of indirect peace talks last night, even before they had begun, as a protest at Israel’s decision to announce approval for hundreds of new homes in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. The decision to pull out, announced in Cairo by Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, represents a major setback to months of diplomacy by the US administration and comes after the US vice-president, Joe Biden, delivered an unusually strong rebuke to Israel. Amr Moussa said he had been told by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that even this low-key process of so-called “proximity talks” could not start unless Israel stopped expanding its settlements. “The Palestinian side is not ready to negotiate under the present circumstances,” Moussa said. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not held direct negotiations since Israel’s war in Gaza last year. The White House had won agreement on Monday from the two sides to begin the indirect talks, hoping they would lead to face-to-face meetings. The Palestinians had insisted there would be no direct talks unless Israel halted all settlement expansion, in line with the demands of the US administration and the roadmap, which remains the framework of peace talks. But Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, leading a rightwing coalition government, offered only a temporary, partial curb to new building. Then, on Tuesday, hours after Biden met Israeli leaders, the Israeli interior ministry announced approval for 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. All settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law. Israel’s opposition Kadima party said it is planning a no-confidence vote in the prime minister in parliament for “destroying” the Biden visit. Yesterday, Biden emerged from talks with Abbas in Ramallah, on the occupied West Bank, and repeated his criticisms of the timing and substance of Israel’s announcement. “It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them,” he said. “The decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust, the trust that we need right now in order to begin … profitable negotiations.” Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said the Palestinians appreciated “the strong statement of condemnation” by the US administration. Eli Yishai, Israel’s interior minister, apologised for the timing of the announcement, admitting that it had caused Biden “real embarrassment”. Palestinian territories Israel Mahmoud Abbas Binyamin Netanyahu Joe Biden Rory McCarthy guardian.co.uk
Expenses investigation targets Cohen
Investigations will focus on how the MP, who is standing down at the general election, wrongly claimed the second-home allowance for four years Police have launched an investigation into the expenses claims of the Labour MP Harry Cohen who received more than £70,000 in a second home allowance for a house he rarely visited, it was reported last night. Cohen, who was severely criticised last month for a “particularly serious breach of the rules” by a Commons committee, is the fifth Labour MP to be subject to a Scotland Yard inquiry. Officers will focus their investigations on how the MP, who is standing down at the general election, wrongly claimed the second-home allowance for four years. Cohen received money for a second home when he was renting out the property designated as his main home, the standards and privileges committee said last month. Over the past few weeks, the Metropolitan police are understood to have approached Commons authorities seeking documents relating to claims made by Cohen, the Daily Telegraph reported. Today, three MPs, Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine, are due to appear before the courts after being charged last month with multiple offences under the Theft Act. Another MP, Eric Illsley, is also being investigated over claims he allegedly made “phantom” claims for council tax. The Commons committee last month called for the Leyton and Wanstead MP to become the first MP to lose a £65,000 retirement payoff to claw back the wrongly claimed money. Attention has focussed on a Colchester home bought by Cohen in 1998 which he told the Commons authorities was his main residence. He used his second-home allowance to fund a home in his north-east London constituency, which was in accordance with the rules. In 2003 Cohen’s wife fell ill and the couple began to spend more time in the constituency home so that Cohen could look after her while still carrying out his parliamentary duties. As the Cohens were not using their Colchester house, they began to rent it out. From early 2004 until August 2008 they periodically let the house on six-month leases. But Cohen continued to tell the Commons authorities that the Colchester house was his main home, thus enabling him to use the second home allowance to claim for the home in the constituency. The parliamentary commissioner for standards, John Lyon, found that Cohen was in breach of the rule saying that an MP’s main home should normally be the one where he or she spends the most nights. As an outer-London MP, Cohen could have claimed the London supplement, instead of the second-home allowance, if he had designated his constituency home as his main home. But the committee said Cohen claimed more than £70,000 between April 2004 and August 2008. If he had claimed the London supplement instead, he would only have been able to claim about £9,000. MPs’ expenses Labour Crime Telegraph Media Group James Sturcke guardian.co.uk
Sony Answers Wii Remote With PlayStation Move
Sony has named its forthcoming PlayStation 3 motion controller “PlayStation Move.” The controller is Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s Wii Remote and Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox 360 — a way to use motion to play video games instead of (or at least in addition to) buttons. The controller was originally announced at the E3 interactive entertainment conference last year, but it was not named. Since then people have simply called it “the PlayStation motion controller.” It’s good to have a name to work with even though it’s a straightforward one. Move is expected to launch in Fall of 2010, right next to Microsoft’s competing Project Natal peripheral for the Xbox 360. Both devices will use cameras to track movements, but the similarities end there. Move uses a spherical light which is tracked by the camera in concert with internal sensors. Natal on the other hand uses 3D camera technology to track the entirety of the player’s body without a controller. Sony plans to charge under $100 for a package including Move, the PlayStation Eye camera and one game. The pitch: It’s far more accurate than Nintendo’s Wii remote, so it will appeal to hardcore gamers who play difficult games, not just casual gamers who enjoy party games. Move will be supported by new games Ape Escape , Echochrome 2 , and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 , plus old games LittleBigPlanet , Flower , and Resident Evil 5 . Others are planned too. [ img credit: Kotaku ] Tags: GDC , gdc-2010 , motion controls , nintendo wii , playstation 3 , playstation move , sony , video games , wii remote
Google Reader Play Transforms Feeds into Entertainment Experience
Google has just released an alternative player for Google Reader that gives those with a penchant for browsing news the ability to do so in an image-heavy, TV-like fashion. Dubbed Google Reader Play , the new tool is an experimental Google Labs project that presents stories one by one — based on their Recommend Items technology — using enlarged photos and auto-playing videos (in lieu of text) on a black backdrop. Viewers can redefine categories and star, like or share stories, with those behaviors further contributing to what Google displays. Google Reader Play could be both an entertainment utility for browsing the web and a complement to your Google Reader experience. Actions that you take in Reader or Reader Play are shared between the two products, and the recommendations in Reader Play are personalized based on the people you’re following in Reader. Google Reader Play is certainly eye-catching, but it’s more pop than it is substance. In fact, given that Google Reader appeals to fairly narrow audience today, we believe the product was intended to up the entertainment factor and introduce Reader-esque features to a much broader set of users. It’s nice to look at and worth a try; whether or not that’s enough to attract the attention of those outside the web/tech realm remains to be seen. We do, however, think that Google Reader Play on an iPad or actual TV set, say via something like Boxee Box, would be worth watching. Tags: Google , google reader , google reader play , tv
Google Apps Marketplace: 6 Great Apps to Try Now
Last night at its Campfire One event, Google officially launched the Google Apps Marketplace . The Google Apps Marketplace offers third-party developers and services a way to integrate directly with the Google Apps platform and sell that integration at whatever price point they choose. This is a huge win for the cloud because it finally allows other cloud services to tap into some of Google’s APIs for things like Gmail and Google Docs at a much deeper level, which can benefit their own customers, as well as offering additional value to Google Apps itself. Although the launch was yesterday, many companies and developers have been preparing for this event for quite some time and a number of very cool and useful apps are already available in the Marketplace. Here are just a few that stand out to us. 1. Zoho for Google Apps Zoho and Google Apps actually offer a lot of the same services: hosted email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools, wikis, chat, etc. However, that doesn’t mean that Zoho doesn’t benefit from Google Apps integration. Plus, because Zoho also offers services that go beyond what Google Apps can do, direct integration can be a nice way for Zoho to keep customers using their product (or even make them more interested in checking it out). Zoho has two products in the Google Apps Marketplace: Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects . Zoho CRM is free for up to three users and then $12 per month per user starting with the fourth user. Zoho Projects is free for one project and starts at $12 per month for unlimited projects. Both tools allow users to plugin Google Apps into the Zoho CRM or Zoho Projects system. 2. Intuit Online Payroll Intuit, makers of Quicken and Quickbooks, has an online payroll tool called Intuit Online Payroll . Intuit Online Payroll for Google Apps was one of the applications demoed at the Campfire One event yesterday and it lets users access their payroll or paychecks from anywhere in Google Apps. For instance, paychecks can be retrieved from Google Calendar, users can print checks or E-File their taxes and run the payroll application from directly within Google Apps. Pricing is $39 per month for one employee filing taxes in one state, each additional employee is $1.50 per month and each additional state for filing taxes is $12 per month. 3. Manymoon Manymoon is a team collaboration application that integrates with Google Apps. Think of it as a project and task management tool. The Manymoon app was built to deeply integrate with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail. The company has also created a Google Gadget for managing and monitoring tasks. Manymoon is free and is currently the highest rated app in the Google Apps Marketplace. 4. Aviary Aviary offers web-based tools for things like image editing and creation, vector graphics, and audio editing. Now Aviary can integrate into Google Apps, which lets you use Aviary to create graphics that can be used and accessed within things like Google Docs and Google Sites. The free app lets you do all kinds of stuff, like edit images for business cards, presentation slides and labels, create scalable vector art, record and remix audio and even edit the markup from websites or slides. This is the sort of functionality that Google doesn’t have the resources to offer, which is why it’s great that Aviary can just plug into existing Google Apps accounts! 5. Expensify Expensify is a service designed to make expense reporting less painful. Expensify’s Google Apps app integrates directly with Google Apps, which eliminates one more step in the expense-report creation process. Once reports are submitted and approved, they can be exported to QuickBooks or other accounting solutions in one-step. Expensify is always free for report creation and submission and for two submitters a month, the approval process is free too. After that, approval for each individual submitter is only $5 a month. 6. Box.net Like Zoho, Box.net shares some features with Google Apps. Box.net has really morphed from a file storage service into a full-fledged cloud-based content management system akin to something like Microsoft SharePoint. Many of the companies that are creating apps for the Google Apps Marketplace also have apps for Box.net’s OpenBox platform . However, while there is some overlap in terms of services offered (especially since Google Docs added file storage support in January), there is even more opportunity for users of both services. Box.net is offering a Cloud Content Management app for Google Docs that will let you basically access and integrate your Google files directly within the Box.net ecosystem. That means you can create a Google Doc or Google Spreadsheet as a file type within Box, which means you can then utilize the collaboration tools of both platforms. You can also access and manipulate your Box content directly from within Gmail and Google Calendar — which really makes this attractive for companies that want to look at replacing both Exchange Server and SharePoint. Existing Box.net users can call their account manager to start the setup process of integrating the two systems and new users can sign up for a free trial of Box.net and automagically add it to Google Apps, plus get 30% off upon sign-up. More to Come We’re only scratching the surface in terms of what the Google Apps Marketplace can potentially offer users — as well as developers and other providers — but just looking at some of the apps and integrations that already exist, we have to say, this is exciting. The power of the “cloud” really isn’t realized until you can see how easy it is to not just access files from various places (like on mobile phones), but also when you can easily share and integrate with other services. For small business users especially, the extensibility options offered to Google Apps via the Marketplace makes Google’s platform even more compelling. Have you tried any of the new Google Apps apps? What do you think? Let us know! Tags: Aviary , box.net , cloud computing , Expensify , google apps , Google Apps Marketplace , intuit , manymoon , Zoho
Rock Out with PixieTea and Her Amazing iPhone Band [VIDEO]
Remember the Stanford iPhone Orchestra and their kick-ass musical stylings? Well, there’s a new smartphone virtuoso on the scene by the name of PixieTea who could become more synonymous with the word “telephone” than Lady Gaga herself. The Chinese artist created a video and song — mostly on an iPhone 3GS — that has been going viral over in China. PixieTea’s video has become a hit on Youku (basically the Chinese YouTube), racking up 1,670,109 hits and counting since it was posted back in December. Gizmodo brought the vid to the attention of the U.S. today when it shared it on its site. According to Gizmodo, the girl made use of apps like DrumMeister, Bassist, iDrum, NlogSynthesizer, NESynth and iShred, as well as a laptop, a camera and photography software. And let’s not forgot those sweet pants, which recall the ones rocked by fellow foreign viral legends, the Norwegian curling team . Check out the video below, which puts all those tape deck recordings of “Like a Virgin” that my sister and I made when I was six to utter shame. Oh, and bonus points to anyone who can translate the lyrics for us so that we can sing along. Tags: apple , iphone , music , viral video
UN orders review of glaciers report
Moves aims to restore public confidence in science of global warming after mistake over melting rates of glaciers The UN called in the world’s top scientists today to review a report by its climate body, four months after public confidence in the science of global warming was shaken by the discovery of a mistake about the melting rates of Himalayan glaciers. In an announcement at the UN in New York Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and Rajendra Pachauri, the much-criticised head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the InterAcademy Council, which represents 15 national academies of science, would conduct the independent review. The announcement follows months of controversy which, while not altering the scientific consensus on climate change, has given fresh ammunition to opponents of action on global warming. Pachauri has faced calls for his resignation, a controversy he acknowledged obliquely today. “We have received some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that and we are doing something about it,” he said. The review, which is to complete its work by August, will not undertake a dissection of the 2007 report, which has been pored over by climate sceptics, or re-examine the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, said Robert Dijksgraaf, the head of the InterAcademy Council. “It will definitely not go over vast amounts of data,” he told reporters. “Our goal will be to assure nations around the world that they will receive sound scientific advice on climate science.” Instead, he said it would focus on putting in place better quality control procedures for the next report, which is due in 2014. These would include guidelines for dealing with material that has not undergone peer review such as the item on Himalayan glaciers. One focus of the review would be the role played by Pachauri who has been criticised for his handling of the error when it first came to light. Djiksgraaf also said the panel, likely to be made up of 10 experts, would also look at procedures for making corrections in a timely and transparent manner. The report has been pored over by climate sceptics for errors since last November when it emerged that the IPCC had stated, wrongly, that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. As Pachauri and Ban noted today, the solid body of the 3,000 page report remained unchallenged. The discovery of the error goes to the core of criticism of Pachauri whose first response to questions about the accuracy of the IPCC’s prediction on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers was to dismiss it as “voodoo science”. Pachauri had also rankled critics by refusing to apologise for the mistakes. But a spokesman for Pachauri today said the IPCC had initiated the independent review, and had pressed the UN to call in the scientists. In his brief comments, Pachauri said the work of the IPCC, which shared a Nobel prize with Al Gore in 2007, remained the gold standard of climate science. “We believe the conclusions of that report are really beyond any reasonable doubt,” Pachauri said. Environmental and science organisations supported the UN’s decision. “This is the right move,” said Peter Frumhoff, the science director for the Union of Concerned Scientist and a lead author on the IPCC report. “If this independent review is carried out with rigour and transparency, it will help strengthen the IPCC’s commitment to robust scientific assessments and restore public confidence that has been shaken by an aggressive campaign to sow confusion about climate science.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate change Rajendra Pachauri Climate change United Nations Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk
Google and Facebook Sued for Mobile Patent Infringement
Facebook may have secured a patent for its news feed technology, and Google for location-based ads , but that doesn’t make the two companies immune to other patent challengers. In fact, both Google and Facebook are being sued by Winksite over mobile social networking technology. The complaint, first reported by Bloomberg, was said to be filed by Winksite yesterday in a Manhattan federal court, and points to patent infringement claims around Facebook Mobile and Google Buzz . The company is looking for reparation in financial form (though specific amounts have yet to be disclosed). More importantly, it is also seeking “a court order to prevent further use of its invention.” Winksite was awarded the patent in question — United States Patent No. 7,599,983 “Method, apparatus and system for management of information content for enhanced accessibility over wireless communication networks” – in October of last year, though its mobile application technology dates back to 2004. Given this, Winksite’s lawyer Jeremy Pitcock believes that both the social networking and search giant were aware of the patent and are thus liable for damages. The patent summary reads: “In accordance with one aspect of the invention, information content is managed in a network-based communication system by providing a content management site accessible to a user of the system. The content management site is configured so as to permit the user to enter information in accordance with a specified format comprising a plurality of selectable mobile information channels each corresponding to an information category. The entered information is processed to generate for the user a mobile site comprising information content that is accessible via one or more mobile devices over a wireless network of the system. “By way of example, the content management site and the mobile site may each comprise web sites accessible over the Internet. A given mobile site may be shared by a group of members having a common interest. The mobile site may comprise, for example, a collaborative workspace, a data mailbox, a collaborative community, or other similar element(s). The information content of the mobile site is preferably configured such that a persistent version of the content is accessible via one or more mobile devices over the wireless network. “In accordance with another aspect of the invention, the information content of the mobile site is configured so as to integrate therewith information associated with at least one messaging action, collaboration action, location-based service action, or other wireless networking functionality of the wireless network. The information associated with the wireless networking functionality of the wireless network may be determinable based on one or more parameters associated with one or more of the mobile information channels of the content management site. “ Both Google and Facebook are said to be reviewing the complaint but have yet to put out public statements addressing the matter. We’re curious to see how the court and companies respond, but until then we will dig into the case and original patent to see if we can get more clarity on the specific technologies that Winksite feels are being unlawfully used in Buzz and Facebook Mobile. [ img credit: KLH49 , iStockphoto ] Tags: facebook mobile , google buzz , lawsuit , patent , patent infringement
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