Verizon's been teasing us with them for weeks now, but today the company has finally made things official: Motorola's LTE-capable DROID XYBOARD tablets will be hitting Verizon stores this month. For those of you who have managed to miss all the news about Motorola's latest tablet venture, here are a few of the salient details.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aL_f4kep76I/
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LAHORE, Pakistan ? In an overture to Washington, Pakistan's prime minister said Monday his country wants to repair U.S. relations pushed close to rupture since NATO airstrikes on the Afghan border killed 24 Pakistani troops last month.
Yousuf Raza Gilani's interview with The Associated Press was the strongest indication yet that Islamabad realizes Pakistan needs an alliance with Washington even as it continues retaliating for the Nov. 26 raid by blocking NATO and U.S. supplies from traveling over its soil into landlocked Afghanistan.
The interview came a day after U.S. President Barack Obama called Pakistan's president to tell him that the airstrikes were not deliberate targeting of Pakistani soldiers and that the U.S. was committed to a full investigation. The White House said Obama and President Asif Ali Zardari reaffirmed their countries' relationship, which it described as "critical to the security of both nations," and agreed to keep in close touch.
Gilani didn't offer the U.S. anything other than Pakistan's willingness to consider starting over, apparently believing the attack had given Islamabad fresh leverage to dictate terms in what has been an uneasy and largely transactional relationship since Pakistan joined the U.S. war against violent Islamist extremism after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Gilani said new ties being negotiated with the U.S. would ensure that the two countries "respected each other's red lines" regarding sovereignty and rules of engagement along the border.
"We really want to have good relations with the U.S. based on mutual respect and clearly defined parameters," he said in the interview at his residence in the eastern city of Lahore, at one point having to put up with a mischievous grandchild using a watch to reflect sunlight onto his face.
"I think that is doable. I think that it won't take long. We are not anti-American, we are part of the system, we have to work with the entire international community."
Despite Gilani's gentler rhetoric, the gulf between the two nations remains wide. U.S. officials have said the airstrikes have been the most serious blow to a relationship that has been battered by a series of crises this year, exposing its brittleness each time.
Pakistani officials have been demanding more clarity in their relationship with the United States for some time, angry over the CIA presence in the country and the covert but routine drone strikes that kill militants on its side of the border.
A new agreement, even a vague, nonbinding one, may be enough to satisfy domestic critics that Pakistan has extracted something from Washington before agreeing to reopen the supply lines.
The May 2 U.S. mission that killed Osama bin Laden infuriated the army, which faced humiliation at home for failing to detect the U.S. raid and suspicion abroad after the al-Qaida leader was revealed to have been hiding in an army town for five years.
The Obama administration wants continued engagement even as Pakistan's refusal to attack militant sanctuaries along the border over the last three years has fueled criticism in Congress the country is a duplicitous ally unworthy of American aid.
Many U.S. officials regard Pakistani cooperation as vital for peace talks with Afghan insurgent leaders to succeed because many of the leaders live in Pakistan and have ties to its security forces. The country, home to 180 million people, has nuclear weapons and a thriving Islamist militant insurgency of its own that is giving support to al-Qaida operatives. Containing that threat requires good intelligence cooperation for several years to come.
Gilani also said Pakistan remains committed to working with Afghanistan to bring insurgent leaders into talks with the government. That may offer some reassurance to international leaders who discussed Afghanistan's future at a conference Monday in Bonn, Germany.
Islamabad boycotted the Bonn conference because of last month's deadly airstrikes, disappointing Afghan and Western leaders.
"I think we have evolved some mechanisms, and we are ready to cooperate," Gilani said, referring to meetings with Afghanistan's military and intelligence chiefs on a framework for talks. "We are committed (to reconciliation), despite that we are not attending" the conference on Afghanistan, he said.
Speaking in Bonn, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it "was unfortunate that Pakistan didn't participate" but said she was encouraged by Gilani's remarks, presumably to the AP, that the U.S and Pakistan will continue cooperation.
"I expect that Pakistan will be involved going forward and we expect them to play a constructive role," said Clinton.
The civilian government that Gilani heads is in many respects subservient to the army, which formulates Afghan policy. Gilani is unlikely to say anything that does not broadly reflect the thinking of the army.
This year's crises in Pakistan-U.S. ties included an incident in which an American CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis on the street in Lahore. The previous disputes have been patched up, though at a cost of dwindling trust and expectations on both sides.
Pakistan, despite the fiercely anti-American rhetoric of its people, many of its lawmakers and ? increasingly after the NATO strike ? its army, relies on Washington for military and civilian aid to maintain some parity with its regional foe India, as well as diplomatic legitimacy.
In Gilani's office, along with photos of his children, there are two pictures of the prime minister with then-President George W. Bush in Washington. There's also a signed note from Bush in 2008 pledging continued support for Gilani's efforts to bring stability to the country and thanks for "the fine-looking gun" he had brought him as a gift.
Besides boycotting the Bonn talks and blocking supplies, Pakistan gave the U.S. 15 days to vacate Shamsi air base, which has been used by American drones to strike militants along the Afghan border. U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter said in a local TV interview that Washington was doing its best to comply with the demand to leave the base.
The move was not expected significantly to curtail drone attacks in Pakistan since Shamsi was used only to service drones that had mechanical or weather difficulties. NATO officials say the supply line blockage is not affecting operations, but that a stoppage of more than a month would begin to hurt.
Washington and Islamabad have given differing accounts of what led to the airstrikes on the Pakistani army posts last month, in what is at least the third such incident along the porous and poorly defined border since 2008.
U.S. officials have said the incident occurred when a joint U.S. and Afghan patrol requested air support after coming under fire. The U.S. checked with the Pakistan military to see if there were friendly troops in the area and were told there were not, they said.
Pakistan has said the coordinates given by the Americans were wrong ? an allegation denied by U.S. defense officials.
___
Associated Press writers Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Pakistan, Zarar Khan and Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad and Anne Gearan in Germany contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON ? The coming year-end spending spree after so much debate over budget deficits shows just how hard it is to stem the government's flow of red ink.
Lawmakers are poised to spend $120 billion or so to renew a Social Security tax cut that averaged just under $1,000 per household this year. They're ready to commit up to $50 billion more to continue unemployment benefits to people out of work for more than half a year.
And doctors have no reason to doubt they won't be rescued, again, from steep cuts in their Medicare payments. Combine that with the tax cuts and jobless benefits, and Congress could add almost $200 billion to the federal ledger this month.
That's why it's excruciatingly difficult to cut the deficit, even when the House is dominated by tea party forces.
The year-end spree follows the failure of three high-profile efforts at big deficit deals: talks led by Vice President Joe Biden; efforts by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to strike a "grand bargain"; and the ignominious cratering of a special deficit supercommittee before Thanksgiving.
Each disintegrated in great measure over the question of taxes. But their failures also illustrate the tremendous difficulty in getting anyone to actually cut spending.
The singular success in attacking the deficit this year came after a protracted battle this summer over whether to let the government continue borrowing. That fight finally produced a promise of more than $2 trillion in cuts over the coming decade.
Even with those savings, new government borrowing would be on track to total four or five times that amount over the same period.
The debt-deficit deal contained virtually no specific cuts to any program. Instead, it would reap $900 billion over 10 years by capping the annual day-to-day operating budgets of Cabinet agencies below inflation.
The deal also set up the bipartisan supercommittee and told it to produce a plan that would cut $1.2 trillion more from future deficits. If the panel failed, as it did, the alternative was automatic spending cuts of a like amount to domestic and military programs.
The budget caps are indeed tough, but they're also easy to support because most of the pain comes in the future. Likewise, the across-the-board cuts, which start in January 2013, won't cause any immediate hardship.
With projected federal spending expected to total about $4 trillion each of the next two years, the August budget pact would cut spending by $25 billion in 2012 and by $115 billion in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
"They've sketched out the outlines but they haven't painted the picture, and that's the hard part," said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and director of the Congressional Budget Office during the deficit battles of the early 1990s. "They have yet to make the tough decisions."
No sooner had the budget deal been adopted than defense hawks such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., pledged to block nearly half a trillion dollars in automatic spending cuts for the Pentagon and its military contractors.
"I will not be the Armed Services (Committee) chairman who presides over crippling our military," said Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif.
Congressional champions of defense interests aren't the only lawmakers scampering to protect their favorite programs. The supercommittee's experience exposed the great difficulty of coaxing lawmakers to embrace real spending cuts in other programs.
The chairmen and senior minority members of the Senate and House agriculture committees tried to add a five-year farm bill onto a deficit panel package that never came together. They promised "reforms" that would end much-criticized direct subsidy payments to Southern rice and cotton growers whether they farm or not.
But instead of banking the nearly $50 billion in savings, farm-state lawmakers maneuvered to channel much of the money to a new subsidy for locking in four-decade-high revenues for corn and soybean growers in the Midwest.
The new subsidy would act as a free revenue insurance and could pay out if a farm lost as little as 13 percent of its revenue in a year. They easily could end up costing the government as much or more than the current subsidies to cotton and rice growers
The revenue insurance idea, said Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, is a "cynical attempt to turn deficit reduction into a guarantee of prosperity for large-scale agricultural interests."
Republicans insist that extending the Social Security tax cut and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed must be paid for through cuts to other programs or finding other nontax sources of money for them.
But using any such arrangements means they're no longer available for cutting deficits.
A list presented Friday to Republicans at a private caucus contained "cuts" that are among the easiest to enact. They include around $15 billion from new auctions of broadcast spectrum to wireless companies, and $35 billion by increasing the fee that mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge lenders to guarantee repayment of new loans. The fee increase would add $15 a month to the monthly cost of an average new mortgage, the White House estimates.
Conspicuously absent are politically nettlesome proposals such as raising airline security fees from the current rate of $2.50 per trip leg, which was part of a recent proposal by supercommittee Republicans.
These spending cuts are measured over 10 years to pay for deficit spending that occurs over the next year or so, which has generated much grumbling among conservatives.
"It's a gimmick," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. He complained that the pay-for proposals are spread over a decade while the tax savings to workers and aid for the unemployed are for a single year. He predicted the same dance would occur again year from now when both parties will feel the political pressure to renew them again.
The White House, after saying all fall that Obama's jobs agenda must be paid for with tax increases on high-income earners, appears willing to simply pad the nation's $15 trillion national debt instead of finding offsetting cuts.
"It's not even any more about how you pay for it," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. "It's whether or not one party actually supports giving tax cuts to middle-class Americans."
___
Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
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My question: What is Newsweek, right now?
Is it a journal of news and opinion, sort of The New Republic Lite, with an emphasis on opinion? Is it a celebrity publication, where topics leap out onto the cover because of THE NAME of the author more than the topic? Is it still a news weekly in the American news model?
I ask these questions because I read the publication quite closely and it is, after all, the home of Peter J. Boyer, one of the long-form journalists I most admire. And everyone has to read Howard ?Howie? Kurtz, right?
The problem is, I can find evidence to support any of those journalistic labels in just about any recent issue of Newsweek. What we have here is a confusing case of multiple journalistic personality syndrome.
This leads me back to Michelle Goldberg?s piece on Newt and the evangelicals. This report started out looking like a rather mundane drive-by journalistic shooting. Ho-hum. But then I kept reading and, by the end, I found that this story had bravely included some very interesting voices and they were raising some of the key Newt questions that I hear being discussed in Christian circles from time to time.
The current media template, of course, focuses on Gingrich and his private life. That is supposed to turn off the evangelicals. When you put this in print, it looks like this:
After all, it?s not just that Gingrich is on his third marriage. He famously divorced his first wife while she was suffering from cancer ? a cancer he?d previously used to garner sympathy in campaign speeches. He cheated on his second wife with congressional aide Callista Bisek, now his third wife, while leading the impeachment battle against Bill Clinton. Like Sen. Larry Craig, he of the attempted airport-bathroom tryst, Gingrich?s personal life has become a liberal punchline, proof of Republican hypocrisy on family values. How can voters whose main priority is the restoration of the traditional family rally around him?
Now the X-factor in this is, of course, that Newt has improved his Godtalk game in recent years, finding a way to fuse it into his established love of lofty soliloquies about history, Western civilization, rampant secularism, etc. In the Newsweek piece that all adds up to ?theocentric? rhetoric. The key, readers are told, is Newt?s conversion to Catholicism, which has turned into the official faith of bookish conservatism ? especially on topics of law and politics.
This is pretty standard stuff. What fascinated me, of course, was that the Catholic angle in this story simply vanishes ? poof. The Iowa storyline, after all, is about Newt and evangelicals. That?s what matters.
Later on, the story ? to my surprise and pleasure ? actually includes materials based on real, live evangelicals talking about how their religious beliefs affect their views of Gingrich. For example, there is the question of whether or not Newt will enthusiastically sign a document called ?The Marriage Vow,? which states the following: ?We acknowledge and regret the widespread hypocrisy of many who defend marriage yet turn a blind eye toward the epidemic of infidelity and the anemic condition of marriages in their own community.?
Apparently, many of the evangelicals are convinced that Newt has signed on for real.
Why do they believe that?
Gingrich benefits, of course, from the powerful Christian narrative of sin and deliverance. ?These voters believe in forgiveness, they believe in redemption,? says Ralph Reed, who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition. After all, as he points out, it was evangelicals who helped elect Ronald Reagan, our first and only divorced president.
The redemption narrative allows evangelicals to see themselves as fundamentally different from the feminists who rallied behind Bill Clinton because he was able to advance their agenda despite his personal failings. Tamara Scott is the Iowa director of Concerned Women for America and recently became a co-chair of Bachmann?s campaign, but she has nothing bad to say about Gingrich and resists Clinton comparisons. ?Here?s the difference,? she says. ?Bill Clinton denied what he did. He didn?t repent.?
Yikes. An actual theological context for this discussion! For these voters, in other words, the big issue is whether Gingrich meant what he said when he talked about the sin in his life. For some, it is enough that he publicly repented.
This is the point at which I wanted to ask a question that is very close to being out of bounds, in terms of journalism and privacy. Newt is now a Catholic. Who is his confessor? How is he walking his talk? Would he like to discuss that?
Then there is this related question: At what point is some media type going to ask conservative and middle-of-the-road Catholics what they think of his conversion, repentance and public professions of a changed life?
Obviously, the thoughts of the evangelicals matter. But what about the Catholics? We know that liberal Catholics are almost certainly rolling their eyes at all of this. But what do other Catholics think of this man? Consider this, for example: Newt angered many GOP hardliners with his more moderate stance on immigration. Might there be some Catholic intellectual DNA, in his stance? Will that hold up? Where are the other Catholic fault lines and questions?
Someone needs to write that story. The evangelicals are not the only people studying the allegedly new Newt Gingrich.
IMAGE: From the liberal Catholic site Bilgrimage.
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Kim Kardashian isn't too happy that Kris Humphries isn't allowing their marriage to die easily. Kardashian filed for divorce on Oct. 31, but Humphries countered on Wednesday by filing for an annulment -- claiming that their 72-day-long marriage was a "fraud" and that all legal records of their union should be forever erased from existence.
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T.I. believes his back-to-back prison bids kept him from moving on signing Meek Mill to Grand Hustle?
T.I. is blaming his legal woes for not being able to sign Meek Mill to his Grand Hustle imprint before the up-and-coming rapper signed to Maybach Music Group.
?After my two [jail] hiatuses I was put in a position where I couldn?t really make moves on Meek as quick as he may have wanted to,? Tip told Billboard.com?s The Juice.
Instead, of course, Meek signed with Rick Ross? MMG, become an XXL Freshman and has had a huge year, scoring hits like ?I?ma Boss,? ?Tupac Back? and ?House Party? all before his solo effort with MMG.
?I never been one want to hold anyone back or to slow down the success of anybody,? T.I. continued. ?I?m the first to try to enhance what you have and if I can?t make it better then I shouldn?t be a part of it.?
Before signing to Ross? label, Meek got his feet wet while hanging out T.I., even making a cameo in the King of The South?s ?What Up, What?s Haapnin?? video. ?Jakinder Singh
Source: http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2011/12/t-i-says-his-legal-troubles-kept-him-from-signing-meek-mill/
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Time Warner Cable's tablet app available for Android, live TV streaming still iPad only originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Android Market, TWCable Untangled | Email this | CommentsSource: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/29/time-warner-cables-tablet-app-available-for-android-live-tv-st/
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