Singer feared dead in Mexican plane crash

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — Mexico’s music world mourned Jenni Rivera, the U.S.-born singer presumed killed in a plane crash whose soulful voice and openness about her personal troubles had made her a Mexican-American superstar.

Authorities have not confirmed her death, but Rivera’s relatives in the U.S. say they have few doubts that she was on the Learjet 25 that disintegrated on impact Sunday in rugged territory in Nuevo Leon state in northern Mexico.

“My son Lupillo told me that effectively it was Jenni’s plane that crashed and that everyone on board died,” her father, Pedro Rivera told dozens of reporters gathered in front of his Los Angeles-area home. “I believe my daughter’s body is unrecognizable.”

He said that his son would fly to Monterrey early Monday to identify her presumed remains

Messages of condolence poured in from fellow musicians and celebrities.

Mexican songstress and actress Lucero wrote on her Twitter account: “What terrible news! Rest in peace … My deepest condolences for her family and friends.” Rivera’s colleague on the Mexican show “The Voice of Mexico,” pop star Paulina Rubio, said on her Twitter account: “My friend! Why? There is no consolation. God, please help me!”

Born in Long Beach, California, Rivera was at the peak of her career as perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated regional style influenced by the norteno, cumbia and ranchero styles.

A 43-year-old mother of five children and grandmother of two, the woman known as the “Diva de la Banda” was known for her frank talk about her struggles to give a good life to her children despite a series of setbacks.

She was recently divorced from her third husband, was once detained at a Mexico City airport with tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and she publicly apologized after her brother assaulted a drunken fan who verbally attacked her in 2011.

Her openness about her personal troubles endeared her to millions in the U.S. and Mexico.

“I am the same as the public, as my fans,” she told The Associated Press in an interview last March.

Rivera sold 15 million records, and recently won two Billboard Mexican Music Awards: Female Artist of the Year and Banda Album of the Year for “Joyas prestadas: Banda.” She was nominated for Latin Grammys in 2002, 2008 and 2011.

Transportation and Communications Minister Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said “everything points toward” the wreckage belonging to the plane carrying Rivera and six other people to Toluca, outside Mexico City, from Monterrey, where the singer had just given a concert.

“There is nothing recognizable, neither material nor human” in the wreckage found in the state of Nuevo Leon, Ruiz Esparza said. The impact was so powerful that the remains of the plane “are scattered over an area of 250 to 300 meters. It is almost unrecognizable.”

A mangled California driver’s license with Rivera’s name and picture was found in the crash site debris.

No cause was given for the plane’s crash, but its wreckage was found near the town of Iturbide in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental, where the terrain is very rough.

The Learjet 25, number N345MC, took off from Monterrey at 3:30 a.m. local time and was reported missing about 10 minutes later. It was registered to Starwood Management of Las Vegas, Nevada, according to FAA records. It was built in 1969 and had a current registration through 2015.

Also believed aboard the plane were her publicist, Arturo Rivera, her lawyer, makeup artist and the flight crew.

Though drug trafficking was the theme of some of her songs, she was not considered a singer of “narco corridos,” or ballads glorifying drug lords like other groups, such as Los Tigres del Norte. She was better known for singing about her troubles in love and disdain for men.

Her parents were Mexicans who had migrated to the United States. Two of her five brothers, Lupillo and Juan Rivera, are also well-known singers of grupero music.

She studied business administration and formally debuted on the music scene in 1995 with the release of her album “Chacalosa”. Due to its success, she recorded two more independent albums, “We Are Rivera” and “Farewell to Selena,” a tribute album to slain singer Selena that helped expand her following.

At the end of the 1990s, Rivera was signed by Sony Music and released two more albums. But widespread success came for her when she joined Fonovisa and released her 2005 album titled “Partier, Rebellious and Daring.”

Besides being a singer, she is also a businesswoman and actress, appearing in the indie film Filly Brown, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, as the incarcerated mother of Filly Brown.

She was filming the third season of “I love Jenni,” which followed her as she shared special moments with her children and as she toured through Mexico and the United States. She also has the reality shows: “Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis and Raq-C” and her daughter’s “Chiquis ‘n Control.”

In 2009, she was detained at the Mexico City airport when she declared $ 20,000 in cash but was really carrying $ 52,167. She was taken into custody. She said it was an innocent mistake and authorities gave her the benefit of the doubt and released her.

In 2011, her brother Juan assaulted a drunken fan at a popular fair in Guanajuato. In the face of heavy criticism among her fans and on social networks, Rivera publicly apologized for the incident during a concert in Mexico City, telling her fans: “Thank you for accepting me as I am, with my virtues and defects.”

On Saturday night, Rivera had given a concert before thousands of fans in Monterrey. After the concert she gave a press conference during which she spoke of her emotional state following her recent divorce from former Major League Baseball pitcher Esteban Loaiza, who played for teams including the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I can’t get caught up in the negative because that destroys you. Perhaps trying to move away from my problems and focus on the positive is the best I can do. I am a woman like any other and ugly things happen to me like any other woman,” she said Saturday night. “The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up.”

Rivera had announced in October that she was divorcing Loaiza after two years of marriage.

There have been several high-profile crashes involving Learjets, known as swift, longer-distance passenger aircraft popular with corporate executives, entertainers and government officials.

A Learjet carrying pro-golfer Payne Stewart and five others crashed in northeastern South Dakota in 1999. Investigators said the plane lost cabin pressure and all on board died after losing consciousness for lack of oxygen. The aircraft flew for several hours on autopilot before running out of fuel and crashing in a corn field.

Former Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker was severely injured in a 2008 Learjet crash in South Carolina that killed four people.

That same year, a Learjet slammed into rush-hour traffic in a posh Mexico City neighborhood, killing Mexico’s No. 2 government official, Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino, and eight others on the plane, plus five people on the ground.

___

Associated Press Writer Galia Garcia-Palafox and Olga R. Rodriguez contributed to this report from Mexico City.

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Britain launches genome database to improve patient care

LONDON (Reuters) – Up to 100,000 Britons suffering from cancer and rare diseases are to have their genetic codes fully sequenced and mapped as part of government efforts to boost drug development and improve treatment.

Britain will be the first country to introduce a database of genetic sequences into a mainstream health service, officials say, giving doctors a more advanced understanding of a patient’s illness and what drugs and other treatments they need.

It could significantly reduce the number of premature deaths from cancer within a generation, Prime Minister David Cameron‘s office said in a statement.

“By unlocking the power of DNA data, the NHS (National Health Service) will lead the global race for better tests, better drugs and above all better care,” Cameron said on Monday.

His government has set aside 100 million pounds ($ 160 million) for the project in the taxpayer-funded NHS over the next three to five years.

Harpal Kumar, chief executive of the charity Cancer Research UK, said the work would uncover new information from which doctors and scientists will learn about the biology of cancers and develop new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat them.

He said some targeted, or personalized, cancer treatments such as Novartis’ Gleevec, or imatinib – a drug for chronic myeloid leukemia – are already helping to treat patients more effectively.

Some critics of the project, known as the “UK genome plan”, have voiced concerns about how the data will be used and shared with third parties, including with commercial organizations such as drug companies.

Genewatch, a campaign group fighting for genetic science and technologies to be used in the public interest, has said anyone with access to the database could use the genetic codes to identify and track every individual on it and their relatives.

Cameron’s office said the genome sequencing would be entirely voluntary and patients would be able to opt out without affecting their NHS care. It said the data would be made anonymous before it is stored.

($ 1 = 0.6242 British pounds)

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Stephen Powell and Tom Pfeiffer)

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These Christmas Trees Have Frequent Flier Miles

People are finicky about their Christmas trees. For some, that holiday staple must hail from Wisconsin. That’s where Wayne Raisleger comes in. He’s been FedExing Wisconsin trees from his Windswept Tree Farm to customers across the nation since 1999.

“A lot of my customers are ex-Wisconsin residents,” he says, noting that he’s shipped to at least 40 states. “They’re used to quality Christmas trees but are unable to get them, if they live in, say, Georgia, or Coral Gables, or the Los Angeles area, or what have you.”

Raisleger, who with his 23-year-old daughter runs the site ChristmasTreesNow.com, says orders have tripled over the past two decades. These days he sends out hundreds of trees each holiday season, for $ 75 a pop, plus shipping. Many of his customers are urbanites from Chicago and New York. “For them, it’s a question of convenience,” he says. It’s also among their only options for buying a freshly cut pine. Many Christmas trees sold on city street corners, Raisleger points out, are cut anywhere from six weeks to two months in advance. “I get calls from people who say they bought their tree and within a couple days the needles started falling off,” he says.

Still, the mail-order tree business isn’t for the faint of heart. Raisleger has a good deal of competition, not only in Wisconsin, but also from other big Christmas tree-growing states such as Michigan. There are also some unique challenges. Packaging, for example.

“Every tree is different—just like every person is different—and here I am, I have to package a very nonstandard Christmas tree into a standard-size box,” says Raisleger. He solved the problem by making his own boxes. “We buy huge [cardboard] blanks that are like 100-inch x 100-inch squares, and we start making boxes in early November,” he says. “In packing the trees, you have to be very attuned to the branching, the configuration, the density—and if the tree is too cold, the limbs can snap off.”

The cost of shipping varies from state to state. Shipping a tree via FedEx (FDX) from Wisconsin to Florida or California costs roughly $ 65, while shipping to Texas costs about $ 40. Last minute buyers, of course, pay a lot more. “Invariably I get an order or two around the 20^th, when someone wants a tree air freighted by FedEx,” says Raisleger. “I’m serious. Last year there was a fella in North Carolina. I think the tree was like $ 75 and the FedEx Air was like $ 225.”

Raisleger also keeps his eye out for tree scams. “Every year I have at least one fraudulent order on a stolen credit card,” he says. “This year, one of my first ones, right off the bat, was somebody from New York who ordered a tree to be delivered to Miami.”

A much more serious problem, which affects both online and offline sales, is the weather. This year Wisconsin, along with other Midwest states, suffered the worst drought since 1988. According to Donna Gilson, a spokeswoman for Wisconsin’s Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection, thousands of trees were wiped out. “We inspected 212 of our licensed growers this year—that was 446 fields,” she says. “What we found was that 97 fields had drought damage, meaning that that they had 40 percent or more mortality rates.” The trees that did survive, she notes, were typically older trees, with deeper root systems.

Windswept Tree Farm suffered immensely. “I got to tell ya, I have partnerships with a couple growers—and I grow right here too—and we’ve lost everything we planted this spring,” says Raisleger. “We’re talking thousands and thousands and thousands of trees.”

Christmas trees normally take six to eight years to mature, which means we won’t see repercussions from the drought this year. We may, in fact never see any at all, if growers can manage to make up for their loss in coming seasons. “Those farms in Wisconsin, they might plant twice as many trees next year, and they might grow twice as fast in 2015 or 2016,” says Rick Dungey, a spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association. “The trees also might be ready to harvest at 5 feet tall, or maybe they’re going to wait for them to be harvested at 8 feet tall,” he says.

Raisleger isn’t so sure. “I’m not going to say that there’s going to be a shortage of trees, because there are trees growing in other parts of the country,” he says. “But I think that quality might be diminished somewhat—I was just looking at my home plantation here, and some of the trees are still turning brown, and we’re into December now.”

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Peru’s capital highly vulnerable to major quake

LIMA, Peru (AP) — The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn’t get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.

Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru‘s capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.

The relatively long “seismic silence” means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth’s crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.

Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. Its acute vulnerability, from densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, is unmatched regionally. Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.

“In South America, it is the most at risk,” said architect Jose Sato, director of the Center for Disaster Study and Prevention, or PREDES, a non-governmental group financed by the charity Oxfam that is working on reducing Lima’s quake vulnerability.

Lima is home to a third of Peru’s population, 70 percent of its industry, 85 percent of its financial sector, its entire central government and the bulk of international commerce.

“A quake similar to what happened in Santiago would break the country economically,” said Gabriel Prado, Lima’s top official for quake preparedness. That quake had a magnitude of 8.8.

Quakes are frequent in Peru, with about 170 felt by people annually, said Hernando Tavera, director of seismology at the country’s Geophysical Institute. A big one is due, and the chances of it striking increase daily, he said. The same collision of tectonic plates responsible for the most powerful quake ever recorded, a magnitude-9.5 quake that hit Chile in 1960, occurs just off Lima’s coast, where about 3 inches of oceanic crust slides annually beneath the continent.

A 7.5-magnitude quake in 1974 a day’s drive from Lima in the Cordillera Blanca range killed about 70,000 people as landslides buried villages. Seventy-eight people died in the capital. In 2007, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck even closer, killing 596 people in the south-central coastal city of Pisco.

A shallow, direct hit is the big danger.

More than two in five Lima residents live either in rickety structures on unstable, sandy soil and wetlands that amplify a quake’s destructive power or in hillside settlements that sprang up over a generation as people fled conflict and poverty in Peru’s interior. Thousands are built of colonial-era adobe.

Most quake-prone countries have rigorous building codes to resist seismic events. In Chile, if engineers and builders don’t adhere to them they can face prison. Not so in Peru.

“People are building with adobe just as they did in the 17th century,” said Carlos Zavala, director of Lima’s Japanese-Peruvian Center for Seismic Investigation and Disaster Mitigation.

Environmental and human-made perils compound the danger.

Situated in a coastal desert, Lima gets its water from a single river, the Rimac, which a landslide could easily block. That risk is compounded by a containment pond full of toxic heavy metals from an old mine that could rupture and contaminate the Rimac, said Agustin Gonzalez, a PREDES official advising Lima’s government.

Most of Lima’s food supply arrives via a two-lane highway that parallels the river, another potential chokepoint.

Lima’s airport and seaport, the key entry points for international aid, are also vulnerable. Both are in Callao, which seismologists expect to be scoured by a 20-foot (6-meter) tsunami if a big quake is centered offshore, the most likely scenario.

Mayor Susana Villaran’s administration is Lima’s first to organize a quake-response and disaster mitigation plan. A February 2011 law obliged Peru’s municipalities to do so. Yet Lima’s remains incipient.

“How are the injured going to be attended to? What is the ability of hospitals to respond? Of basic services? Water, energy, food reserves? I don’t think this is being addressed with enough responsibility,” said Tavera of the Geophysical Institute.

By necessity, most injured will be treated where they fall, but Peru’s police have no comprehensive first-aid training. Only Lima’s 4,000 firefighters, all volunteers, have such training, as does a 1,000-officer police emergency squadron.

But because the firefighters are volunteers, a quake’s timing could influence rescue efforts.

“If you go to a fire station at 10 in the morning there’s hardly anyone there,” said Gonzalez, who advocates a full-time professional force.

In the next two months, Lima will spend nearly $ 2 million on the three fire companies that cover downtown Lima, its first direct investment in firefighters in 25 years, Prado said. The national government is spending $ 18 million citywide for 50 new fire trucks and ambulances.

But where would the ambulances go?

A 1997 study by the Pan American Health Organization found that three of Lima’s principal public hospitals would likely collapse in a major quake, but nothing has been done to reinforce them.

And there are no free beds. One public hospital, Maria Auxiliadora, serves more than 1.2 million people in Lima’s south but has just 400 beds, and they are always full.

Contingency plans call for setting up mobile hospitals in tents in city parks. But Gonzalez said only about 10,000 injured could be treated.

Water is also a worry. The fire threat to Lima is severe — from refineries to densely-backed neighborhoods honeycombed with colonial-era wood and adobe. Lima’s firefighters often can’t get enough water pressure to douse a blaze.

“We should have places where we can store water not just to put out fires but also to distribute water to the population,” said Sato, former head of the disaster mitigation department at Peru’s National Engineering University.

The city’s lone water-and-sewer utility can barely provide water to one-tenth of Lima in the best of times.

Another big concern: Lima has no emergency operations center and the radio networks of the police, firefighters and the Health Ministry, which runs city hospitals, use different frequencies, hindering effective communication.

Nearly half of the city’s schools require a detailed evaluation to determine how to reinforce them against collapse, Sato said.

A recent media blitz, along with three nationwide quake-tsunami drills this year, helped raise consciousness. The city has spent more than $ 77 million for retention walls and concrete stairs to aid evacuation in hillside neighborhoods, Prado said, but much more is needed.

At the biggest risk, apart from tsunami-vulnerable Callao, are places like Nueva Rinconada.

A treeless moonscape in the southern hills, it is a haven for economic refugees who arrive daily from Peru’s countryside and cobble together precarious homes on lots they scored into steep hillsides with pickaxes.

Engineers who have surveyed Nueva Rinconada call its upper reaches a death trap. Most residents understand this but say they have nowhere else to go.

Water arrives in tanker trucks at $ 1 per 200 liters (52 gallons) but is unsafe to drink unless boiled. There is no sanitation; people dig their own latrines. There are no streetlamps, and visibility is erased at night as Lima’s bone-chilling fog settles into the hills.

Homes of wood, adobe and straw matting rest on piled-rock foundations that engineers say will crumble and rain down on people below in a major quake.

A recently built concrete retaining wall at the valley’s head lies a block beneath the thin-walled wood home of Hilarion Lopez, a 55-year-old janitor and community leader. It might keep his house from sliding downhill, but boulders resting on uphill slopes could shake loose and crush him and his neighbors.

“We’ve made holes and poured concrete around some of the more unstable boulders,” he says, squinting uphill in a strong late morning sun.

He’s not so worried if a quake strikes during daylight.

“But if I get caught at night? How do I see a rock?”

___

Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.

___

Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

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Barnes and Noble Nook HD+ is a Big Screen, Good Value Tablet

Barnes and Noble Nook-HD+

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[More from Mashable: 7 Stylish iPad Cases With Notepads]

The other night I handed the new Barnes and Noble HD+ to my son to see his reaction to one of the latest 9-inch tablets. He held it, played with the screen and said, “Which one is this?” I told him and he answered, “I can’t tell the difference anymore.” It’s true, with the sudden explosion of 7-, near-8-, 9- and 10-inch-plus tablets, it’s getting a little hard to tell which one is which — especially when many larger tablets look like their tinier siblings.

Barnes and Noble’s large-format (9-inch) HD-screen entry, the HD+, is a quite similar to the 7-inch Nook HD. However, with its somewhat sharper corners and far-reduced black-screen border, it’s also more similar in appearance to larger tablets such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9. What sets the Nook apart visually is the trademark nook hole in the lower left-hand corner. It appears to serve no visible purpose, though you could hold the roughly 18-ounce tablet by that corner without too much stress on your hand. It is one of the lightest tablets on the market, although it’s thicker than the Google Nexus 10, Kindle Fire 8.9 and fourth-generation Apple iPad.

[More from Mashable: The 7 Best Tablets for Kids]

Nook HD+’s other distinctive feature is the physical “N” home button on the face of the device. It’s an attribute the Nook HD+ (and 7-inch Nook HD) share with the iPad. As I’ve said before, having that obvious “take me home” button on the front of the device is something I wish every tablet manufacturer would replicate.

Interface

Speaking of replicate, much of what is important and what you need to know about Barnes and Noble’s biggest tablet can be found in my review of the 7-inch Nook HD. The interfaces are exactly the same, so I won’t waste too much space recounting every bit of the Nook HD+ interface, which obscures any trace of Android 4.0, and is exquisitely usable.

The biggest difference between the Nook HD and the HD+ is screen resolution. The HD gets you 1440×900 pixels, while the HD+ offers 1920×1280, which is slightly more than the Kindle Fire HD 8.9’s 1920×1200. The latter two devices are almost the exact same size. By contrast, the competitors’ 7-inch devices are quite different because Amazon includes a front-facing camera, while Barnes and Noble does not include cameras on any of its tablets (if you plan on taking photos or video with your tablet, you can stop reading now). In the case of the Nook HD+, Barnes and Noble uses the space it saves on a camera for, it appears, 80 extra pixels of space. For the record, neither device beats the iPad’s 2048×1536 resolution.

Connectvity

Barnes and Noble also chose to leave out a cellular option from all of its tablets. Amazon, on the other hand, adds it in for the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 LTE. This is not as big of a deal as it seems since the world is filled with high-speed Wi-Fi. Still, if you plan to surf the web on your tablet while sitting on a train without another device to which to tether your HD+, look for products with the mobile broadband option, instead.

When it comes to connectivity, Amazon adds dual-band Wi-Fi to its HD Kindle Fires, while Barnes and Noble’s tablet remains single band. I’ve tested both devices in the most stressful situation -– streaming HD video -– and the difference is negligible.

Using It

Barnes and Noble Nook HD+’s profile-centric interface remains one of the best on the market. There is no learning curve; you simply drag your profile image to the unlock icon, and you have access to the large and uncluttered interface that features a carousel (which like the Kindle is a hodge-podge of disparate icons), your library and some recently used apps. Persistent menu items include the Library, Apps, Web, email and Shop. The screen also includes “your Nook Today,” which, along with the weather, is a place for Barnes and Noble to push shopping options based on your interests.

As you would expect, reading books and magazines is a pleasurable experience, especially on this larger screen. Magazines such as Esquire look great and, yes, Barnes and Noble still employs the animated page turn (though I don’t know for how much longer). Email and Web browsing are solid, and I prefer Barnes and Noble’s web solution to Amazon’s home-grown Silk browser, which crashed too often for my taste.

Social integration is fairly good on the Nook HD+. When I installed the Twitter client, it became one of my options for social sharing. That said, the app looks like it would be more at home on a small-screen smartphone than on the HD+’s 9-inch display. For Facebook, I opted for the web interface, which looks too tiny in portrait mode, but just right in landscape.

Movies and Music

I had no trouble buying, renting and streaming HD-quality movies such Arthur Christmas, and Netflix worked smoothly. Barnes and Noble, however, lacks its own streaming option. If you pay $ 75 a year for Amazon Prime, you get access to a vast library of streaming content. Both devices will let you play HD content on your big-screen TV, though they do it in slightly different ways.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD 8.9 comes complete with a mini-HDI-out port, and can accommodate a mini-to-standard HDMI cable (not included), so I could watch the HD content on my big-screen TV. The Nook HD+ lacks an HDMI port, but you can buy a $ 39 adapter (with an HDMI cable), which plugs into the tablet’s 30-pin port, to do the same thing.

I still prefer the Kindle HD platform for music since Amazon’s music services are more deeply integrated into the device and its cloud-based storage offering. On the Nook HD+ you have to start by finding the music service under Apps. If Barnes and Noble is serious about music, it should be on the main menu. Worse yet, if you open the Music app, it offers no instruction on how to fill your music library. You have to add tunes via your computer, by connecting to your PC with the proprietary cable or through the Micro SD slot where you can add more storage or place, say, an entire library of songs.

If you have a Rhapsody Account, you can use it to manage your music needs on the Nook HD+.

I almost never use my large tablet for music (that’s a job for my iPhone or iPod), so I don’t miss the rich music capabilities as much as some others likely would.

Apps and Performance

Like Amazon, Barnes and Noble curates its app library, which generally makes it safe and usable. The key apps, such as Netflix, Twitter, Dropbox, MobiSystems’ OfficeSuite, FlipBoard and Evernote, are all there.

I found some games on there, too, such as the Angry Birds Series and Cut the Rope. On the other hand, Barnes and Noble has very few action games. This may be because, while it’s running the same Texas Instruments Dual core 4470 CPU as the Kindle Fire HD 8.9, it doesn’t offer the same quadcore graphics processing power as Apple’s fourth-generation iPad.

Amazon actually includes the GPU-hungry Asphalt 7 in its app library, but the game does not look particularly good on the Kindle Fire HD 8.9. Obviously, Barnes and Noble chose not to take that risk.

Price

At $ 269 for the 16 GB model (I tested the $ 299 32 GB option), Barnes and Noble’s Nook HD+ is one of the most affordable large-screen tablets on the market — that price even includes the AC adapter. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD 8.9 costs $ 299, but does not include the charger, and adds subsidizing sleep-screen ads. A 16 GB Wi-Fi-only fourth-generation iPad starts at $ 499.

Obviously, the iPad is more powerful, has a higher resolution and two cameras, while the Kindle, which also includes a camera, offers powerful Dolby stereo speakers (Nook HD+ has ones with decent volume) and unlimited cloud-based storage for your Amazon content. But if those features don’t matter to you, and you’re looking for an attractive, large-screen, light-weight, fun, effective and very affordable tablet from a company that knows a thing or two about good content, you can’t do better than the Nook HD+.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Rick Ross cancels shows after gang threats

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Rick Ross has canceled two shows in North Carolina after a gang named Gangster Disciples published a series of YouTube videos threatening the Southern rapper.

Ross, a solo artist, is the founder of Maybach Music Group, a record label that release albums through Warner Bros Records. He was set to perform with fellow Maybach artists Wale, Meek Mill and Machine Gun Kelly in Greensboro on Friday and Charlotte on Saturday. A quick look at the Ticketmaster page evinces that Live Nation has canceled the shows, but a Live Nation spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Various sects of the Gangster Disciples (GDs), a gang founded on the South Side of Chicago, appear in videos on YouTube threatening Ross and asking him for money. A nearly 10-minute video published recently featuring members of the North Carolina crew is titled “Rick Ross In Trouble with the GD’s North Carolina.”

They claim to have already given Ross a pass “for using our honorable chairman’s name in a disorderly fashion – a dishonest fashion.” That courtesy is over, and they know where Ross will be, mentioning Greensboro and Charlotte. They then say when they catch him in his Maybach his “time is through” and that Ross should know his penalty.

Some of the conflict seems to arise out of a reference to Gangster Disciples’ leader Larry Hoover in Ross’ song “B.M.F (Blowin Money Fast)” – hence the comment about “our honorable chairman.”

Others have said it is not about Hoover and the GDs also appear to be upset that Ross has been acting like more of a gangster than he really is. Affiliated groups, such as ones in Florida and Georgia, have made their displeasure known on YouTube and demanded money.

“We need that cash now, we need that cash – now. We need that cash right now,” one man says in a video from a Florida sect.

“We coming to you as a man William, he adds. “As a man, you supposed to honor your obligations. Therefore you going to do so. Until you do, you going to deal with the mob.”

While both those shows have been canceled, a Sunday show in Nashville, Tenn. remains on schedule.

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Insight: Making France work again

ECUEILLE, France (Reuters) – Shirt manufacturer Marc Roudeillac was delighted when 48 of the 49 staff in his factory in central France voted to adapt their strict 35-hour week contracts to meet the up-and-down demand of the fashion trade.

Then the labor inspector stepped in and ruled the contracts must not be changed. So Roudeillac began an overtime system with 25 percent hourly bonuses. Again, the seamstresses were happy – until the government this year scrapped tax breaks on overtime.

“Now, no one wants to do overtime anymore – they say it’s just not worth their while,” Roudeillac said at his Confection du Boischaut Nord (CBN) company in the region of Indre, a two-hour drive south of Paris.

CBN is a small miracle of manufacturing: it is one of the few firms in Indre’s once-buoyant local textiles sector to have withstood the onslaught of foreign competition, first from southern Europe, then North Africa and now Asia.

Yet the overtime episode is a telling insight into a France struggling with itself: the France whose appetite for work sits uneasily with the France whose priority is to sustain one of highest standards of living in the world.

In just over 30 years after World War Two, France lifted itself from the ignominy of Nazi occupation into a sleek and modern Group of Seven economy with world-beating industrial champions in sectors such as energy and aerospace.

Its welfare system is among the most generous in the world. A road and rail transport network means its companies are within hours of tens of millions of potential customers. It is a leader in luxury goods and is the world’s top tourist destination.

But somehow that Gallic vigour is being lost.

Unemployment is at 14-year highs as plant closures mount, France’s share of export markets is declining, and the fact that no government in three decades has managed a budget surplus has created a public debt pile almost as big as national output.

Louis Gallois, the industrialist charged by President Francois Hollande to address France’s waning competitiveness, even warned in a November report: “French industry has hit a critical threshold below which it risks breaking apart.”

The euro zone’s debt crisis too has shone a harsh spotlight on France. The International Monetary Fund believes France could get left behind as Italy and Spain are pushed by the crisis into profound economic reform. Ratings agencies Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s have stripped French debt of its AAA rating.

Diagnosing France’s ills has created a whole new literary genre – the work of the self-appointed “declinologues” whose tomes compete on bookshelves to explain and fix the problem.

But the simplest test of France’s health is whether a business like CBN can keep selling the world its shirts.

THE GLORIOUS…

One hundred years ago, local entrepreneur Marcel Boussac put Indre on the world textiles map when he ended what was known as the “black look” in France by introducing color into the clothes manufacturing process.

Boussac founded a conglomerate that acted as its own bank and insurance broker and in 1946 bankrolled the first Paris fashion house of an up-and-coming designer called Christian Dior. He had a stable of racehorses, a country chateau and was at one point reputed to be Europe’s richest man.

Boussac, like millions of French, was the beneficiary of France’s “Glorious 30″ – 30 years of uninterrupted boom in which post-World War Two U.S. aid and heavy state planning wrenched its transport, energy, housing, financial and farming sectors into the second half of the 20th century.

It was a period of high wages, high consumption, full employment and very little foreign competition. And it all came to a juddering halt when the 1973 oil crisis sent energy costs soaring and capped the Western world’s growth rates for good.

There are no racehorses or country estates for Roudeillac and business partner Richard Boireau, who arrive for work in modest family saloon cars and share a desk in a cramped six-meter-square office.

If their company survives, it is largely thanks to a 20-year alliance serving a major Japanese fashion brand – whose name they asked should not be published – and a manufacturing model pared right down to the bone.

A trained engineer, Roudeillac, 45, says 80 percent of CBN‘s costs are labor – the local mushroom-picker, beautician or school-leaver whom he and Boireau meticulously train to contribute to the CBN production line.

Because CBN gets the client to purchase the raw materials, and all other overheads are low, CBN‘s slender gross margin of around six percent depends on optimizing what Roudeillac calls the “productive minute” of the seamstresses.

“What we do is sell French labor – by the minute,” he says of their daily output of 200 shirts and 90 jackets.

Now CBN wants to strike out and revive an 86-year-old French brand of shirt called “Lordson” which fell prey to the textile sector’s decline but which CBN believes has potential in the high-end quality segment of the market.

The “Lordson” will feature a rich cotton that feels smoother on the back after three years of washes, sleek three-millimeter seams about half the size of normal stitching, and buttons stuck on with a special machine of which only three exist in France.

There is one snag.

“Given our costs, it is impossible to retail a “Made in France” quality shirt for less than 140 euros,” said Boireau, who entered the trade sweeping factory floors.

“At 120 euros a shirt it works. But at 140 – not sure.”

…AND THE PITIFUL

If veteran textile entrepreneurs like Boireau fear they cannot hit the price point on their signature shirt, it is a direct result of choices made by France after the oil crisis.

By 1980, French economic growth had shrunk to two percent compared to its pre-oil crisis rate of above six percent – a rate which France and most rich states have not seen since.

In the years that followed, governments around the world reacted in their fashion: Britain’s Margaret Thatcher faced down Britain’s unions in a drive to free up labor markets, while Scandinavian leaders sought to free their economies of debt.

In France, governments of left and right chose entrenchment: strong rises in public spending which helped ease the social and employment shocks but which sent national debt soaring from 20 percent of output in 1980 to its current record of 91 percent.

The next three decades are sometimes called the “Pitiful 30″

Unwilling to switch from a pre-oil crisis policy of boosting consumption with low sales taxes, French politicians used labor to fund the bulk of the welfare spend. The result, 30 years later, is that French labor charges are among the highest in the European Union with those in Sweden and Belgium.

The high productivity of its workers might have compensated for their rising cost. But decisions such as the 1997 cut in the working week from 39 to 35 hours meant many French were also starting to work less.

A 2008 paper on “the Liberation of French growth” by Jacques Attali, ex-adviser to Socialist President Francois Mitterand, calculated that while the French lived 20 years longer than they did in 1936, they worked 15 years less over their lifespan – a shortfall he labeled “35 years of extra inactivity”.

“Even given that each French worker produces five percent more per hour than an American, he produces 35 percent less over his working life,” he found in the 245-page report.

Even that would not be disastrous if employers simply hired more people – the whole point of the 35-hour week after all was to reduce unemployment by requiring more workers to be taken on to do the same job.

But small companies like CBN insist it was plain unrealistic to assume they can simply hire more people for the same cost and without disruption to existing work patterns.

“When they brought in the 35-hour week, I wrote a letter to our clients saying, “Sorry, but as of tomorrow, prices are going up 11 percent,” recalls Boireau.

INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS

French laws which make it difficult to lay off workers have created the perverse incentive for employers to stop offering permanent contracts that in many cases equate to a job for life.

Instead they turn to temporary contracts when they need extra labor, creating for millions of French the very labor insecurity which the law was supposed to prevent.

While today the majority of French workers still benefit from a permanent contract, three out of four new jobs are on fixed-term contracts, often for no more than a month.

The split personality of the labor market is, experts agree, a major drag on its economy. At one end there is expensive but inflexible labor and at the other cheap but ill-trained and often demoralized fill-in workers.

Roudeillac acknowledges that CBN is one of the employers who turn to temporary labor to help with peak production periods – but he would prefer not to. “We could take on six or seven more people. But in France, hiring people is a risk,” he said.

For think tanks such as the OECD, the solution is simple: the first group needs to hand over some of their job security to the second group by accepting more flexible contracts. Surely such a burden-sharing should be easy for a country built on the ideals of “Liberty, equality and fraternity”?

Not a bit of it. In the past 30 years, France became not one country but two: the France of the “insiders” and the France of the “outsiders”. And the reason it is so hard to reform is that the insiders are determined to keep the rest out.

Those “in” the system include workers on long-term contracts, labor groups protecting their interests, and the mostly large companies who have found an accommodation with the system. Those left “out” are the growing army of temporary contract workers, small firms such as CBN who do not have the economies of scale to allay the high cost of labor, and of course France’s three million-plus unemployed.

“Neither the employers nor the trade unions want real reform – they are both in the insiders’ camp,” explains Eric Chaney, chief economist for insurer Axa Group. “The employers are scared of strikes and unions don’t want to change anything in the system because the people they are protecting are insiders too.”

Hollande has begun his plan to restore France’s competitive position with corporate tax credits linked to labor hires. He has also launched a public investment bank aimed to make up for France’s lack of venture capital. At his behest, French trade unions and employers have a year-end deadline to negotiate rules offering more flexibility and greater job security.

Yet it is unclear whether any accord will crack the mould. A dramatic cut in labor charges is not on the table and the 2013 budget stays clear of spending cuts sought by the reform lobby.

As CBN’s managers gear up to bring the world the Lordson shirt next year, they will need Hollande to go a few steps further in helping them sell the product of French labor.

“We need something better adapted to the world now,” said Boireau. “It needn’t take very much.”

(editing by Janet McBride)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Alexander: No triple dip slump

9 December 2012 Last updated at 07:36 ET

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander: “It is a longer and harder road… but we are making progress”

Britain is not heading for a triple dip recession, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has said.

Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast that the economy was set to shrink in the final three months of 2012.

Mr Alexander said he accepted this, but added “steady growth” in 2013 meant the UK would avoid another recession.

He said the road to economic recovery was being “longer and harder” than expected, but progress had been made.

The OBR growth forecasts show that despite the UK economy’s return to growth in the three months from July to September, in the final quarter the economy will shrink again by 0.1%, before growth returns in 2013.

The UK would experience a triple dip recession if it had two quarters or more of negative growth before the economy had fully recovered from the 2008 recession.

It experienced a double dip recession earlier this year, with three quarters of negative growth between the end of 2011 and the middle of 2012.

‘Uncertain world’

Asked on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether he thought the UK would face a triple dip recession, Mr Alexander said: “The OBR forecast that the final quarter of this year would be negative, but that we would see positive growth slowly returning in every quarter of next year.

“That would suggest that we’re not going to have that happening. But it is an uncertain world out there.

“We’re seeing continuing problems in the eurozone, but I’m happy to rest on the OBR’s forecast, which is a bounce-back from the Olympic boost we saw in the third quarter causing a small negative in the final quarter of this year, but then steady growth slowly starting to return next year and the year after that.”

However, Mr Alexander’s Liberal Democrat colleague Business Secretary Vince Cable was more cautious.

He told the Observer there was “certainly a risk” of the UK going back into its third recession since 2008, although it is more likely the economy will “continue bumping along the bottom”.

Mr Alexander said slow growth in the eurozone and the “weight of the broken banking system in the United Kingdom” were weighing down the economy.

This meant the economic recovery was “a longer and harder road” than expected, but he said: “We are making progress and I think we are going to get there”.

Spending review

He said he would continue to protect the NHS budget and schools spending, as he looks to save an additional £10bn before the next election.

It follows a warning from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that unprotected government departments could face could cuts of more than 30% following the Autumn Statement.

It said further welfare cuts and tax rises “must be on the cards” to make the government’s numbers add up if the NHS and welfare continue to be protected.

Mr Alexander said additional savings to be made in 2015-16 will be “at the same pace” as departments have had in recent years.

“I think we’re right not to chase our debt target, but instead to continue to do this in a steady way,” he added.

Decisions on spending for after the next election, and whether to continue to protect the NHS budget, would be set out in party manifestos, he said.

The next spending review, which will set out future departmental spending, is expected to be announced in the first half of next year.

BBC News – Business

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Election underscores Ghana’s democratic reputation

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Voters in Ghana selected their next president Friday in a ballot expected to mark the sixth transparent election in this West African nation, known as a beacon of democracy in a tumultuous region.

Proud of their democratic heritage, residents of this balmy, seaside capital trudged to the polls more than four hours before the sun was even up, standing inches apart in queues that in some places stretched 1,000-people deep.

By afternoon, some voters were getting agitated, after hitches with the use of a new biometric system caused delays at numerous polling stations.

Each polling station had a single biometric machine, and if it failed to identify the voter’s fingerprint, or if it broke down, there was no backup. At one polling station where the machine had broken down, a local chief said he’d barely moved a few inches: “I’m 58 years old, and I’ve been standing in this queue all day,” Nana Owusu said. “It’s not good.”

Late Friday, when it became clear that large numbers of people had not been able to vote, the election commission announced it would extend voting by a second day. This nation of 25 million is, however, deeply attached to its tradition of democracy, and voters were urging each other to remain calm while they waited their turn to choose from one of eight presidential contenders, including President John Dramani Mahama and his main challenger, Nana Akufo-Addo. The election commission

“Elections remind us how young our democracy is, how fragile it is,” said author Martina Odonkor, 44. “I think elections are a time when we all lose our cockiness about being such a shining light of democracy in Africa, and we start to get a bit nervous that things could go back to how they used to be.”

Ghana was once a troubled nation that suffered five coups and decades of stagnation, before turning a corner in the 1990s. It is now a pacesetter for the continent’s efforts to become democratic. No other country in the region has had so many elections deemed free and fair, a reputation voters hold close to their hearts.

The incumbent Mahama, a former vice president, was catapulted into office in July after the unexpected death of former President John Atta Mills. Before becoming vice president in 2009, the 54-year-old served as a minister and a member of parliament. He’s also written an acclaimed biography, recalling Ghana’s troubled past, called “My First Coup d’Etat.”

Akufo-Addo is a former foreign minister and the son of one of Ghana’s previous presidents. In 2008, Akufo-Addo lost the last presidential election to Mills by less than 1 percent during a runoff vote. Both candidates are trying to make the case that they will use the nation’s oil riches to help the poor.

Besides being one of the few established democracies in the region, Ghana also has the fastest-growing economy. But a deep divide still exists between those benefiting from the country’s oil, cocoa and mineral wealth and those left behind financially.

A group of men who had just voted gathered at a small bar a block away from a polling station in the middle class neighborhood of South Labadi. Danny Odoteye, 36, who runs the bar, said that the country’s economic progress is palpable and that the ruling party, and its candidate, are responsible for ushering in a period of growth.

“I voted for John Mahama,” he said. “Ghana is a prosperous country. Everything is moving smoothly.”

Administrator Victor Nortey, sitting on a plastic chair across from him, disagreed, saying the country’s newfound oil wealth should have resulted in more change.

“I voted for Nana Akufo-Addo,” He said. “Now we have oil. What is Mahama doing with the oil money?” Nortey said. “We can use that money to build schools.”

In an interview on the eve of the vote, Akufo-Addo told The Associated Press that the first thing he will do if elected is begin working on providing free high school education for all. “It’s a matter of great concern to me,” he said, adding that he plans to use the oil wealth to educate the population, industrialize the economy and create better jobs for Ghanaians.

Policy-oriented and intellectual, Akufo-Addo is favored by the young and urbanized voters. He was educated in England and comes from a privileged family. The ruling party has depicted him as elitist.

“The idea that merely because you are born into privilege that automatically means you are against the welfare of the ordinary people, that’s nonsense,” he said.

Ghana had one of the fastest growing economies in the world in 2011. Oil was discovered in 2007 and the country began producing it in December 2010.

Throughout the capital, new condominiums are rising up next to slums and luxury cars creep along narrow alleys lined with open sewers. A mall downtown features a Western-style cinema and is packed on weekends with middle class families. At the same time shantytowns are cropping up, packed with the urban poor.

Polls show that voters are almost evenly split over who can best deliver on the promise of development.

Kojo Mabwa said that he is voting for Akufo-Addo, because he is impressed by his promise of free education. He dismissed critics that say the project is too ambitious. “There is money,” he said. “(The ruling party) has done nothing for us. They are misusing our money.”

Paa Kwesi, a 30-year-old systems analyst, said he doesn’t think Akufo-Addo is making promises he can keep.

“He says he can do free education, but you have to crawl before you can walk. It’s not possible,” he said.

__

Associated Press writer Francis Kokutse contributed to this report from Accra, Ghana.

Africa News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Red Hat divulgará los resultados del tercer trimestre del año fiscal 2013 a través de un webcast

Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), proveedor líder mundial de soluciones de código abierto, analizará los resultados del tercer trimestre del año fiscal 2013 el jueves, 20 de diciembre de 2012, a partir de las 5:00 p. m., hora del Este.

Se puede acceder a un webcast en vivo en la página de Relaciones con los Inversores de Red Hat en http://investors.redhat.com y la reproducción se encontrará disponible a partir de aproximadamente dos horas luego de finalizados los eventos en vivo.

Acerca de Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat es el proveedor líder mundial de soluciones de software de código abierto; utiliza un enfoque basado en la comunidad para tecnologías confiables y de alto rendimiento en la nube, Linux, middleware, almacenamiento y virtualización. Red Hat también ofrece servicios galardonados de consultoría asistencia y capacitación. Como centro de conectividad de una red global de empresas, socios y comunidades de código abierto, Red Hat ayuda a crear tecnologías relevantes e innovadoras que liberan recursos para el crecimiento y preparan a los clientes para el futuro de la tecnología de la información. Obtenga más información en: http://www.redhat.com.

Declaraciones a futuro

Ciertas declaraciones del presente comunicado de prensa pueden constituir “declaraciones a futuro” dentro del significado de la Ley de Reforma de Litigios Sobre Valores Privados (Private Securities Litigation Reform Act) de los EE. UU. de 1995. Las declaraciones a futuro ofrecen expectativas actuales de eventos futuros en base a determinados supuestos e incluyen cualquier declaración que no se relaciona directamente con cualquier hecho actual o histórico. Los resultados reales pueden diferir sustancialmente de los indicados por dichas declaraciones a futuro, como resultado de varios factores importantes, incluso: riesgos relacionados con retrasos o reducciones en el gasto en tecnología de la información; los efectos de la consolidación del sector; la capacidad de la Compañía de competir en forma eficaz; la incertidumbre y los resultados adversos en litigios y acuerdos relacionados; la integración de adquisiciones y la capacidad de comercializar en forma exitosa las tecnologías y productos adquiridos; la incapacidad de proteger adecuadamente la propiedad intelectual de la Compañía y el posible incumplimiento o violación de reclamaciones de licencia o relacionadas con la propiedad intelectual de terceros; la capacidad de entregar y estimular la demanda de nuevos productos e innovaciones tecnológicas en forma oportuna; los riesgos relacionados con la vulnerabilidad de la seguridad de datos y de información; la gestión ineficaz de, y control sobre las operaciones internacionales y el crecimiento de la Compañía; las fluctuaciones en las tasas de cambio; y cambios en el personal clave y una dependencia del mismo, así como otros factores presentes en nuestro más reciente Informe Trimestral en el formulario 10-Q (copias del cual se encuentran disponibles en el sitio Web de la Comisión de Bolsa y Valores en http://www.sec.gov), incluidos los que se encuentran en el título “Factores de riesgo” y “Análisis y Discusiones de la Gerencia sobre Condiciones Financieras y Resultados de Operaciones”. Además de estos factores, el desempeño futuro real, y los resultados pueden diferir sustancialmente debido a más factores generales que incluyen (entre otros) las condiciones generales del mercado y de la industria y las tasas de crecimiento, las condiciones económicas y políticas, los cambios en las políticas públicas y gubernamentales y el impacto de los desastres naturales como terremotos e inundaciones. Las declaraciones a futuro incluidas en este comunicado de prensa representan las opiniones de la Compañía a la fecha de este comunicado de prensa y estas ideas podrían cambiar. Sin embargo, si bien la Compañía puede elegir actualizar estas declaraciones a futuro en algún momento, la Compañía en forma específica renuncia a cualquier obligación de hacerlo. No debe confiar en estas declaraciones a futuro como si representaran las opiniones de la empresa a partir de cualquier fecha posterior de la fecha de este comunicado de prensa.

Red Hat y JBoss son marcas comerciales de Red Hat, Inc. registradas en los EE. UU. y en otros países. Linux® es la marca comercial registrada de Linus Torvalds en los EE. UU. y en otros países.

El texto original en el idioma fuente de este comunicado es la versión oficial autorizada. Las traducciones solo se suministran como adaptación y deben cotejarse con el texto en el idioma fuente, que es la única versión del texto que tendrá un efecto legal.

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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