- McCain, Facing G.O.P. Foe in Primary, Tilts to the Right Challenged by J.D. Hayworth from the airwaves, and soon in a primary, John McCain has moved starkly, and often awkwardly, to the right.
- On Health Bill, G.O.P.’s Road Is a New Map Republicans this month will bring President Obama a set of ideas and a more modest health care plan.
- News Analysis: For Kremlin, an Election in Ukraine Cuts T... The apparent win for Russia’s preferred candidate in a starkly contested presidential race contrasts sharply with Russia’s recent history.
- Toyota Details Recall of 2010 Prius for Brake Problems The worldwide recall will affect about 436,000 units of the 2010 Prius and other hybrid models, according to the company’s filing.
- Paperwork Hinders Airlifts of Ill Haitian Children Doctors and aid workers are wrestling with proving that they are not illegally transporting children, whose risk of dying is rising while the paperwork awaits.
- As Data Flows In, Families See the Dollars Flow Out The average American is expected to spend nearly $1,000 this year on services like cable, Internet and video games.
- U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege Rajendra K. Pachauri and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change face accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest.
- In City Real Estate, Old Clans Are Shrewd Again Some families with deep roots in Manhattan kept their heads a few years ago when the market for skyscrapers and other big projects overheated.
- In Northern Iraq, a Vote Seems Likely to Split In Nineveh Province, a parliamentary election considered crucial to Iraqi unity is highlighting conflicts among ethnic and religious groups.
- Menendez Prodded Fed to Aid Lender Sen. Robert Menendez wrote to the Fed last July asking it to approve a bank takeover that would have kept two of his campaign contributors from losing their investments in the ailing bank.
- Leverage Sought In Health Summit Republicans ruled out any health legislation that doesn't start from scratch in response to Obama's plans for a bipartisan health summit.
- Hearts Actually Can Break Broken-heart syndrome mimics a heart attack but is brought on by acute emotion or physical trauma. But patients usually fully recover with no lasting heart damage.
- Fannie, Freddie Remain State Wards With no blueprints for the future and no clear exit strategy for the government, Fannie and Freddie are focusing for now on the U.S. loan-modification program.
- Toyota to Recall Hybrids World-wide The auto maker said it has sold 400,000 vehicles subject to the recall world-wide, including the Prius, in order to update the vehicle's anti-lock brake system.
- Dow Closes Below 10000 The Dow industrials closed below 10000 for the first time in three months as concerns about the global economy and U.S. interest-rate policy simmered.
- Japan Airlines Sticks with AMR Japan Airlines is planning to announce that it will maintain its alliance with AMR's American Airlines, dealing a blow to rival Delta.
- UBS Posts Quarterly Profit UBS reported its first net profit in five quarters, but continued to lose assets from wealthy clients, underlining that the Swiss bank has yet to regain trust it lost during the financial crisis.
- CIC Offers a Glimpse of Holdings The massive national China Investment Corp. provided the closest look yet at its politically sensitive holdings, in an SEC filing that revealed that it has accumulated small stakes in more than 60 U.S. companies but is making big bets outside the U.S.
- Mortgage Mess Breeds Unlikely Allies Some activists and investors have formed a loose coalition, aiming to cut amounts owed by borrowers whose loans exceed the values of their homes.
- Sources: Pakistani Taliban leader is dead Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is dead, three Taliban sources said Tuesday.
- Toyota recalls 400,000 hybrid cars Toyota announced a global recall Tuesday for three of its 2010 hybrid models, totalling about 400,000 vehicles.
- Jenny Sanford calls memoir 'cathartic' South Carolina's first lady, Jenny Sanford, said Monday that writing her much-anticipated memoir of her husband's affair was a "cathartic" and "cleansing" experience.
- 3 shot during Super Bowl celebrations in New Orleans Three people were shot amid celebrations surrounding the New Orleans Saints' Super Bowl win, police said Monday.
- Police: Iraq vet abused daughter, held her head in water An Iraq war veteran has been charged with assault on suspicion of abusing his daughter, whose head he allegedly held in water to get her to recite the ABCs, according to police in Yelm, Washington.
- Americans jailed in Haiti tried taking other kids, office... The group of American Baptist missionaries in Haiti who are facing kidnapping charges for trying to take 33 children out of the country last week made an earlier attempt at taking dozens of other children, according to a Haitian police officer.
- CNN Student News Transcript: February 9, 2010 February 9, 2010
- Man goes undercover to combat child sex slavery Aaron Cohen first met Jonty Thern and her older sister, Channy, in 2005 while singing in a karaoke bar in Battambang, Cambodia. He has come back to see them every year since.
- Obama's 'stupid' jab at Vegas President Obama made a couple of stupid little jokes about Vegas. He uses our Las Vegas as a symbol. Everyone knows what Vegas means. Doc Pomus wrote "Viva Las Vegas" for Elvis years before Doc ever visited Sin City and got everything right.
- Iran official: Window for nuke deal open Iran's envoy to the International International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the window for nuclear negotiations is still open -- even as tensions rise over Iran's decision to defy the world on uranium enrichment.
- Google launches Nexus One phone support Customers suffering shipping and technical issues with the new Android phone now have more resources than online support forums.
- Did this Metro PCS ad make the tech world cringe? Cell phone provider Metro PCS' new campaign, featuring two supposed Indian tech experts, is proving a little controversial. The company admits it has received complaints.
- iPad pricing: How low can you go, Apple? It seems odd that Apple execs would even hint at the possibility of an early price cut lest they give folks already on the fence about buying the first iteration of the device more reason to stay there.
- Twins learn of teen brother's death on Facebook Twins logging on to Facebook to read birthday wishes instead discover that people have left RIP posts about their 17-year-old brother. Police hadn't notified the family.
- Silicon: It's good for you, especially in beer Researchers at UC Davis say that silicon, the most common metalloid and a known booster of bone-mineral density, is highly "bioavailable" when consumed in beer.
- University worker accused of extorting student file sharers Security analyst at University of Georgia tasked with catching copyright violators allegedly uses his position to shakedown students.
- TweetDeck gets a few tweaks The latest version of TweetDeck is out, and although it's a minor update it also introduces some useful changes worth noting.
- Boeing's next-gen 747 takes first flight The 747-8 Freighter, whose passenger version is slated to come a year later, is getting tested alongside the 787 Dreamliner in Washington state.
- Former Intel exec pleads guilty in Galleon case A former Intel executive pleads guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud by providing confidential information in the Galleon Group insider-trading case.
- Next-generation 747 takes first air (photos) On Monday, Boeing's 747-8 Freighter took off from Paine Field in Everett, Wash., its first flight, and the first for the new 747 program.
- Microsoft Declares Itself Still Innovative, Not Clumsy Dick Brass, an ex-reporter who once led the charge to build tablet PCs and e-books at Microsoft, published a fairly devastating critique of his former company in The New York Times. In an op-ed, Brass portrayed the software giant as a company where visionary thinking goes to wilt and die
- Dubai closes viewing deck on world's tallest building The observation deck on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, closes only a month after it opened.
- Insects Use Wind to Travel Efficiently at 60 MPH or Faster Migrating insects have evolved to take advantage very efficiently of high speed winds (up to 60 MPH, possibly more) to travel hundreds of kilometers in relatively short periods of time, all that while correcting for crosswinds taking them off-course, and expanding as little energy as possible.
- Marijuana ineffective as an Alzheimer's treatment The benefits of marijuana in tempering or reversing the effects of Alzheimer's disease have been challenged in a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.
- Launch (pic) *****
- Are You Interested in Tablet Computing? We've been showered in tablet talk in the wake of the Apple iPad announcement, and while we have our problems with it (and so did you), we're still left wondering: Are you interested in some form of tablet computing?
- 16 Movies to Get Excited About in 2010 Every new year means a fresh start and the promise of great things to come. What's in store for moviegoers in 2010?
- 12,500 Recycled Plastic Bottles Set Sail on Shakedown Cruise A strange looking vessel took a leisurely sail on San Francisco Bay - a shakedown voyage for a plastic, fantastic adventure that should finally start next month. The boat is the 60-foot-long catamaran Plastiki, which David de Rothschild, the 31-year-old scion of the British banking family, plans to sail across the Pacific to Australia in March.
- 'Fewer than 50 wild tigers' left in China Fewer than 50 wild tigers remain in China, a conservation group said Monday, voicing hope that the Year of the Tiger would not be the last for the endangered cats.
- Even if You're Careful, Drugs Can End Up in Water- NYTimes PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- A study in Maine shows that unused or expired medications that are thrown into the trash are showing up in landfill water, potentially putting aquatic life at risk.
- Foursquare Signs a Deal With Zagat (Jenna Wortham/Bits) Jenna Wortham / Bits:
Foursquare Signs a Deal With Zagat — Foursquare, the location-based mobile application that is capturing the fancy of hip urbanites, is a fun bar game that lets users compete for points and badges when they go out at night. But recently the service has been branching out beyond its bar-hopping origins.
- 1080p streaming not coming to Netflix this year (Josh Low...
Josh Lowensohn / Crave: The gadget blog:
1080p streaming not coming to Netflix this year — Editors' note, 4:30 p.m. PST: Netflix now claims that it incorrectly acknowledged 1080p streaming in the company's 2010 development road map. A Netflix representative has clarified that the company plans to bring 5.1 surround and closed captioning …
- Job Postings Hint at Amazon's Plans for the Kindle (Nick ...
Nick Bilton / Bits:
Job Postings Hint at Amazon's Plans for the Kindle — It looks like color screens and Wi-Fi might be the next additions to Amazon's Kindle. — Last week, Brad Stone and I reported that Amazon had acquired the New York based multi-touch screen company Touchco to integrate into Lab126, the Kindle hardware division.
- Motorola: Droid update to Android 2.1 'will start to roll...
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
Motorola: Droid update to Android 2.1 ‘will start to roll out this week’ — We knew Android 2.1 was coming for the Droid, but we'll confess — we didn't expect it to come this soon. Motorola is now reporting via its official Facebook page that it's “happy to relay the 2.1 upgrade to Droid …
- iPhone 4G Parts are Here... (Brian/iPod Repair, iPhone Re...
Brian / iPod Repair, iPhone Repair, Apple Repair:
iPhone 4G Parts are Here... And they have a couple of interesting features. — 1) The LCD appears to be factory glued to the digitizer which is more similar to the first generation iPhones than the iPhone 3G and 3GS. The digitizer can be separated from the LCD on the 3G and 3GS models …
- Google Launching Twitter-Killer For Gmail! (GOOG) (Nichol...
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google Launching Twitter-Killer For Gmail! (GOOG) — Google could launch a Twitter-killer as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports. — Google already allows Gmail users to update their status. The prompt reads, “let people know what you're up to, or share links to photos, videos, and Web pages.”
- Motorola Droid's next update to be Android 2.1, includes ...
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
Motorola Droid's next update to be Android 2.1, includes multitouch browser — We've just gotten the inside line on the next Droid update that's making the rounds through Verizon's testing department from one of our trusted sources, and overall, it looks like this should take users 95 percent …
- Google doppelgänger casts riddle over interwebs (Cad...
Cade Metz / The Register:
Google doppelgänger casts riddle over interwebs — Why is Google routing the world through ‘Googol’? — Sometime in the middle of October, Google silently launched a new net domain - a barely-disguised doppelgänger to the familiar google.com - and according to the latest stats …
- Apple Management: iPad Prices Could Change (Matt Phillips...
Matt Phillips / MarketBeat:
Apple Management: iPad Prices Could Change … Apple intends to stay “nimble” on pricing of the iPad, possibly lowering prices if the newly unveiled tablet device fails to gain traction among consumers. — That was just one of the items in a note out Sunday night from Credit Suisse recounting meetings with Apple executives.
- How to split up the US (Pwarden/PeteSearch)
Pwarden / PeteSearch:
How to split up the US — As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends.
- Game Development In a Post-Agile World An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- IBM Releases Power7 Processor Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Virtualizing a Supercomputer bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML.)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Virus-Detecting "Lab On a Chip" Developed At BYU natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- New Material Transforms Car Bodies Into Batteries MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Verizon Blocking 4chan An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- A Reflection On Sun Executive Payouts For Failure With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."Read more of this story at Slashdot.