Latest News Clippings 2011.10.27

              

1.      Gadhafi's demise and the Arab Spring

CNN   October 21, 2011

The next chapter in the Arab Spring

  

(CNN) -- Three gone (Gadhafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali), two holding on in the face of daily protests (al-Assad, Saleh), two more (Kings Abdullah of Jordan and Mohammed of Morocco) trying to stay ahead of the curve of protest: After 10 months of the Arab Spring, the region is still in the throes of a heady and unpredictable transformation.

Moammar Gadhafi's demise, after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, means that three rulers in power collectively for 95 years are gone. Scholar and author Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, says that 2011 "is to the Arabs what 1989 was to the communist world. The Arabs are now coming into ownership of their own history and we have to celebrate."

Protesters in Yemen and Syria may be re-energized by the pictures from Sirte, Libya, showing the almost pathetic end of a ruler whose flowing robes and uniforms had long given him an aura of invincibility. Demonstrators in Syrian cities celebrated Gadhafi's death and warned President Bashar al-Assad that he would be next. As one Syrian activist told CNN: "The clear fate of all who kill his people is to end up under the feet of the nation."

2.      Google Ice Cream Sandwich Woos Developers as IPhone Sales Set Record: Tech  

Bloomberg  Oct 19, 2011

Google Inc. (GOOG) unveiled the first device running the new version of its Android software, stepping up competition with Apple Inc. (AAPL) and seeking to win over developers by making it easier to write programs that run on both phones and tablets.

              

The new Android, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, was unveiled at a joint event with Samsung Electronics Co. in Hong Kong today, less than a week after Apple started selling the iPhone 4S, the smartphone that set a sales record of more than 4 million units in three days.

The latest Android incarnation pitches facial recognition programs that enhance security and photo sorting. With the update, Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page aims to boost mobile-advertising sales and give customers an alternative to Apple’s iOS software, which runs iPhones and iPads. At stake is dominance in the $207 billion mobile-phone market, where iPhone is the top-selling device and Android is the most-used software.

3.      Report: Death toll rises to 217 after massive earthquake in Turkey

CNN     October 24, 2011

Residents of Ercis, Turkey, gather around fires in the aftermath of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that rocked the city on Sunday.

(CNN) -- Battling near-freezing temperatures and darkness, rescue workers and residents in eastern Turkey early Monday scoured the wreckage wrought by the country's most-powerful earthquake in more than a decade, hoping to find survivors.

They used flashlights, shovels, heavy machinery and their hands to lift the debris, and climbed over collapsed buildings in search of victims.

At least 217 people were killed in Sunday's quake, said Turkish Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin, the Anatolian news agency reported Monday. The previous official toll was 138.

Another 350 people were injured in the quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey said had a magnitude of 7.2.

4.      Tseng wins 7th LPGA title at home

The China Post   October 24, 201

       

World pro golf queen Yani Tseng of Taiwan hit a 6-under 66 in the final round of the 2011 Sunrise LPGA Taiwan Championship to capture the title with a four-round total of 16-under 272, yesterday. The title is her seventh LPGA championship this year and the 12th in her professional career of four seasons.

The 22-year-old Tseng said she dedicated the trophy to all of her compatriots who have given her strong support. She also thanked corporate sponsors for their support of the first LPGA event ever played in Taiwan.

The latest victory fulfilled Tseng's goal of keeping the trophy of the first Taiwan LPGA tournament in the country.

She chalked up the five-stroke victory over Spain's Azahara Munoz and South Korea's Amy Yang, who shared second place with 272.

Tseng bagged the US$300,000 (NT$9 million) top prize to boost her tour-leading total to US$2,873,629.

5.      Halloween

History.com

Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to

honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions

of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.

Latest News Clippings 2011.10.20

                

1.         Obama jobs bill appears to fall short in Senate

      CNN   2011-10-11

President Barack Obama has touted the jobs bill in a series of campaign-style speeches across the country.

Washington (CNN) -- As expected, President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs plan appeared to have stalled Tuesday in the Senate, reflecting a cavernous ideological divide over economic growth strategies and helping to set the stage for what is expected to be a bitterly contested 2012 campaign.

2.         Senate passes China currency bill

CNN    October 11, 2011

(CNN Money) -- In a rare showing of bipartisanship, the Senate passed a bill on Tuesday targeting China's undervalued currency -- long accused of hampering the U.S. economy.

The Senate voted 63-35 to slap new duties on imports from nations whose currency is undervalued -- a provision aimed squarely at China's yuan. Lawmakers say the bill is intended to help U.S. businesses hurt by ongoing global trade imbalances and lost business to Asian nations.

But the Republican-controlled House won't take up the bill, Speaker John Boehner has said, making Senate passage more of a political exercise than an attempt at legislating. Boehner has called the bill "dangerous."

China opposes the bill and warns of a trade war if the bill passes.

3.  Fears mount in Bangkok as Thailand flood waters rise

   

 

CNN    2011-10-12

(CNN) -- Thailand's capital was braced for unprecedented flooding Wednesday, amid the monsoon rains that have overwhelmed much of the country as well as Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines in recent weeks.

"It's going to be clearer over the next couple days" whether Bangkok can be spared the brunt of the flooding said Matthew Cochrane, spokesperson for the International Red Cross in Bangkok.

So far, 281 people have been killed and four people are missing in Thailand, according to the country's Flood Relief Operations Command. Some 60 of the country's 76 provinces have so far been affected, impacting some eight million people.

"It's really quite serious, these are the worst floods in Thailand since 1949," Cochrane said.

4.  Bhutan's King Marries Commoner Bride

The Wall Street Journal           OCTOBER 13, 2011

PUNAKHA, Bhutan -- The beloved king of the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan married his commoner bride Thursday in an ancient Buddhist ceremony at the country's most sacred monastery fortress.

     

King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, wearing the raven crown, came down from his golden throne in front of a huge statue of Buddha to place a smaller, silk brocade crown upon the head of his bride, Jetsun Pema.

Monks chanted in celebration as she took her seat beside him as the new queen of the country.

The wedding has captivated the nation, which had grown impatient with their 31-year-old bachelor king's lack of urgency to find a bride and start a family of his own since his father retired and handed power to him five years ago.

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The Oxford-educated king is adored for pushing development and ushering in democratic reforms that established a constitutional monarchy and legislature in 2008. His teen-idol looks--slicked back hair, long sideburns--his penchant for evening bike rides through the streets and his reputation as a laid-back, accessible leader, also make him the rare monarch whose picture adorns the bedroom walls of teenage girls.

His bride, the daughter of a pilot, has been on an introductory tour of the remote villages of the nation since the king told Parliament in May, "It's now time for me to marry."

The remote nation began slowly opening up to the rest of the world in the 1960s. Foreigners and the international media were first admitted in 1974. Television finally arrived in 1999.

News Clippings 2011.10.13

 1.      Steve Jobs, In Memoriam

    Our tribute to a boundary-breaking thinker and endlessly astute businessman

    Bloomberg BusinessWeek   October 6, 2011

 

Doug Menuez (1986)

Steve Jobs was born in 1955, into an era of rotary phones and room-size computers. He died on Oct. 5, 2011, having put a computer inside a phone and that phone into 120 million pockets.

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, and while he went to characteristic lengths to control public knowledge about the details of his condition, he could not hide his physical deterioration. First he underwent surgery and took a leave of absence. When he returned as chief executive officer, he guided Apple through a streak of new products that proved his belief that art and commerce, complicated ideas and simple packages, could be merged into a universal aesthetic. Each launch brought more magic, more acclaim, more profits—and less Jobs. There was a second leave of absence in 2009, and pictures of the CEO introducing iPhones and iPads over the last three years show a man disappearing before our eyes. He died at home, surrounded by his family, the day after Apple introduced the latest version of the iPhone without him.

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Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. ---May 25, 1998, Business Week

Clippings from Steve Job’s Commence Address to Stanford University graduates

June 12, 2005

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I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic.  And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.  Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

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Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love.

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Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

2.      Wall Street protests mix with anti-war demonstrators   CNN    Oct. 07, 2011

New York (CNN) -- A mix of protesters gathered again Friday in cities across the country, decrying a loosely defined list of financial problems and mixing in places with others marking the 10-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Demonstrators in New York and Washington appeared to congregate over both the Afghan conflict, arguably America's longest war, and in protest against the widening disparities between rich and poor and corporate greed, among other grievances. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said an investigation is under way after protesters claimed officers used excessive force when corralling demonstrators earlier this week. He also noted that demonstrations had cost tax payers $1.9 million in overtime costs for the city's law enforcement. CNN affiliate stations also broadcast images of crowds that gathered in Austin, Texas, as well as Minneapolis, Minnesota; Seattle, Washington and Atlanta, Georgia. The activity came a day after President Barack Obama discussed the growing movement, saying demonstrators "are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."

3.      Michael Jackson called hiring me 'divine guidance,' Murray says

CNN    2011-10-07  

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Michael Jackson begged for his "milk," his nickname for propofol, after a sleepless night and just hours before he died from what the coroner said was an overdose of the surgical anesthetic, the singer's doctor Conrad Murray told detectives.

"I've got to sleep, Dr. Conrad," Murray said Jackson pleaded to him. "I have these rehearsals to perform. I must be ready for the show in England. Tomorrow, I will have to cancel my performance, because you know I cannot function if I don't get to sleep."

Jurors in Murray's involuntary manslaughter trial heard about half of the two-hour police interview on Friday, before going home for a three-day weekend.