Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/KOQ89aBRN2Q/technology-in-americas-most-notorious-prison
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INDIANAPOLIS ? Indiana Republicans took their first presidential loss in 40 years when Barack Obama carried the rock-ribbed GOP state. They're not about to let it happen again.
To return the state to the GOP column and nail it there, national Republicans say they plan to treat Indiana as if it were a long-standing battleground state. State Republicans hope to recreate the excitement that fired up underdog Indiana Democrats in 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Obama campaigned extensively throughout the state in a lengthy primary battle that dragged through May, creating a buzz that lasted until the general election.
By contrast, GOP nominee John McCain largely took Indiana for granted, focusing his energy on actual battleground states. Obama won the state in November by a little more than 30,000 votes.
Now the state is fairly crawling with GOP candidates.
The state party has sponsored four presidential forums since August. Those events brought Republican candidates like pizza magnate Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former U.S. Ambassador to China John Huntsman to Indiana and helped add 1,000 names to the party's e-mail list, party spokesman Pete Seat said.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose YouTube videos about the budget crisis have given him a high profile, headlined the state party's fall fundraiser with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus last Friday. Cain visited the exclusive Columbia Club in downtown Indianapolis at the same time.
"It's nice that we're getting this kind of attention, it's creating interest in the election," Garry Petersen said last week, before listening to Perry speak to roughly 300 Republicans at the Columbia Club. Petersen and his wife, Terri, have long been active in Indiana Republican politics and said this is the most attention the state has gotten from Republican presidential candidates since the early 1980s.
"Our responsibility is to take care of our backyard here and to make sure that Indiana is fired up. We have a network of folks that are willing to sacrifice their time and just make sure that Barack Obama is one and done," Indiana Republican Party Chairman Eric Holcomb said.
Obama was the first Democrat to win Indiana since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And even though they voted three separate Democratic governors into office in the intervening years, Hoosiers voters so reliably went for whomever the Republicans offered nationally for 44 years.
That near-certainty that any Republican presidential nominee would carry the state made both sides complacent until Obama's win in 2008. It has sent some of the most conservative representatives to Congress, including Dan Burton, Dan Coats and Dan Quayle, who was vice president under President George H.W. Bush.
To keep Indiana's reputation for producing conservative wins, the RNC plans to begin sending staffers and money to Indiana in the spring, said Rick Wiley, RNC political director. Republicans learned a hard lesson in Indiana in 2008 when they waited until after McCain's nomination had been locked up to begin organizing their campaign, he said.
"We're going to treat it as a battleground state. We're going to treat as though we're running behind in the state," Wiley said Tuesday. He would not say how much the national party plans to spend in the state or how many full-time staff they will pay for here.
For its part, the Obama campaign is touting a continued staff presence in Indiana that has been maintained since Obama took office. The re-election effort has maintained between two and four fulltime staffers in Indiana since 2008, according to an Indiana Democratic source who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Obama campaign does not want to release campaign staff numbers.
Those staffers have been running phone banks and helping the state's Democratic mayoral candidates, the source said. The Obama campaign is running weekly phone banks from the state Democratic party headquarters every Tuesday, according to the campaign website.
Obama's Indiana supporters say even if the president loses Indiana next year they are optimistic the network they built in 2008 has scared Republicans enough to at least draw away resources from other battleground states.
"I think they better" campaign hard in Indiana, said Kip Tew, a former Indiana Democratic Party chairman who led Obama's Indiana efforts in 2008. "They didn't the last time and they lost, so they probably learned a lesson."
In the meantime, both parties are using Indiana's statewide municipal elections as training ahead of next year's battle. Indiana Republicans have held four training sessions with mayoral candidates and volunteers, sending out executive director Justin Garrett to lead the events throughout the state.
"It's a long road ahead of us," GOP state chairman Holcomb said. "We need to take nothing for granted and make sure that Indiana turns red."
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ALAMEDA, Calif.?? Once again, the world failed to end, despite a high-profile prediction from a radio preacher in California.
Harold Camping, the 90-year-old leader of Family Radio International, stirred a global frenzy when he predicted that the Rapture would take 200 million Christians to heaven on May 21. When the Rapture didn't occur, Camping said he got his Bible-based calculations wrong and revised his prophecy to set the world's end on Friday, Oct. 21.
But as the day wore on around the world, there was no sign that doomsday had dawned.
Millions of dollars had been spent by Family Radio and its followers to get the world out about May's date with doomsday. Some quit their jobs, or donated retirement savings or college funds for the more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs that were plastered with Judgment Day messages.
This time around, Camping took a lower profile ? perhaps because he was chastened by the mockery he suffered in May, or perhaps because of his health.
Camping suffered a mild stroke in June. His daily radio program, "Open Forum," is no longer aired on the Family Radio syndication network, which includes more than 60 U.S. radio stations.
Contacted by telephone on Thursday, Family spokesman Tom Evans declined to comment on Camping or his prophecies ? except to say that he had "retired" as a radio host but remained chairman of the board of Family Stations Inc.
'Nothing to report'
Camping himself had little to say when he answered the door of his home in Alameda, wearing a bathrobe and leaning on a walker. "We're not having a conversation," he told a Reuters reporter, shaking his head with a chuckle. "There's nothing to report here."
Municipal records show that a Sunday prayer group led by Camping, the Alameda Bible Fellowship, has continued to meet on a weekly basis in a large ground-floor room of the Veterans Memorial Building leased by the city Recreation and Parks Department.
Marcia Tsang, a facilities coordinator for the department, said receipts show that Camping's group has been renting that space since at least 1996, paying the standard fee of $45 an hour. The room remains assigned to his fellowship under an evergreen reservation that extends beyond this week, she said.
Local American Legion officer Ron Parshall, 70, part of a veterans group that meets at the same building in an adjacent room one Sunday a month, said he has seen Camping leading his Bible services there regularly.
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He said Camping's congregation has dwindled since the failed prophecy in May ? down to about 25 attendees on a typical Sunday, plus about 20 youngsters who attend Sunday school classes in conjunction with the prayer group.
Parshall said he thought Camping was "a nice man."
"He was just too radical for me," he said. "Anyone who claims to be that close to God, I take it with a grain of salt."
Calculating the endtime
Most Christian interpreters of the Bible ? even those who believe the end is truly near ? say the precise date for Judgment Day cannot be predicted. They generally point to a passage in the Book of Matthew in which Jesus says "no one knows the day or hour when these things will happen."
Camping, however, based his prophecies on an idiosyncratic calculation of the number of years since the Noah's Ark flood and the number of days since Jesus' crucifixion, plus a healthy dose of numerology. If it weren't for the multimillion-dollar publicity campaign, his prediction might have attracted little notice in May.
In a message on the Family Radio website, Camping tried to explain his revised math. He said that God's judgment and salvation were actually completed on May 21, but that a reinterpretation of the dates in the Bible pointed to an Oct. 21 doomsday.
"Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on Oct. 21," he said on the website.
Camping said he didn't think doomsday would be marked by natural disasters or blasts of hellfire. "I really am beginning to think as I've restudied these matters that there's going to be no big display of any kind," he said. "The end is going to come very, very quietly."
Camping, a retired civil engineer, also prophesied that the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but he said later that didn't happen because of a mathematical error.
This report includes information from Reuters, The Associated Press and msnbc.com.
? 2011 msnbc.com
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44983933/ns/technology_and_science-science/
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David Rocco?s Amalfi Getaway (6 x ) -? Chef David Rocco travels around the coast of Italy in search of delicious food and breath-taking sights.
Channel: Cooking Channel (formerly Fine Living Channel) / Food Network Canada
Producer: Breakthrough Entertainment
TX: 2012
Source: C21
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tvmole/pZEX/~3/uUM9BziaQiQ/
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BEIJING ? China moved to embrace Libya's new government Friday after Moammar Gadhafi's death, updating its references to the former leader in state media ? from the "strongman" who defied the West to the "madman" whose time ran out.
China initially refused to support the rebels or to criticize Gadhafi, but started building ties to the insurgents as the months-long Libya conflict wore on. Jetisoning any last vestige of neutrality, China's Foreign Ministry called Friday for the rapid launch of an inclusive political process and economic reconstruction in Libya.
Meanwhile, state media outlets began referring to Gadhafi in disparaging terms not seen before. As recently as late August, Gadhafi had been portrayed in relatively complimentary terms as a "Middle Eastern strongman" who defied Western threats and pressure. On Friday, however, the Web sites of both the official Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily newspaper ran photos of him, including those of his corpse, alongside side captions describing him as insane.
"The death of Gadhafi concludes the Middle East's era of madmen," people.com.cn said, while xinhuanet.com wrote simply, "The Middle Eastern madman Gadhafi."
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu also urged national unity and the restoration of social stability in Libya, but it did not directly comment on Gadhafi's death.
"We have noted the relevant reports. At present, a new page has been turned in the history of Libya," Jiang said.
"We hope Libya will rapidly embark on an inclusive political process, maintain ethnic solidarity and national unity, swiftly establish social stability, begin economic reconstruction, and allow the people to live in peace and happiness," she said.
China abstained in the U.N. Security Council vote on whether to use force to protect civilians from Gadhafi's troops and was highly critical of the NATO air campaign that helped unseat the dictator. During the fighting, Beijing maintained contacts with Gadhafi's regime, even while gradually opening links to the rebels.
Beijing was the last member of the U.N. Security Council to formally recognize on Sept. 12 the transitional council as the ruling authority of Libya, and only after it had provided Beijing with assurances that business contracts signed under Gadhafi would continue to be honored.
China had accused NATO of overstepping its U.N. mandate, and Chinese diplomats say that strengthened Beijing's opposition to similar action against Syria's regime, which was accused of atrocities against civilian protesters.
China joined with Russia earlier this month in vetoing an already watered-down U.N. resolution criticizing the Syrian leadership, saying it objected to its holding open the possibility of sanctions against it.
Considerable sympathy for Gadhafi remained on Internet forums, including the popular Weibo microblogging site where ordinary Chinese feel freer to express personal views.
"Deeply mourn Libya's former leader Gadhafi, friend of the Chinese people. He died a heroic death," read one comment, signed "Yuan Jun."
"Heroic warrior against Western imperialism, slain by the Western bullets wielded by his own people," read another on the Sohu site, signed simply "Shanghai Internet user."
China's negative views of the uprisings in Libya, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere do not come without risk.
Spokesmen for Libya's new government have said they may discriminate against Chinese companies because of Beijing's failure to provide strong support, in contrast to France, Italy and other countries that early on condemned Gadhafi and fervently backed the air campaign.
China had invested billions of dollars in Libyan projects, including housing and railway construction, and was forced to send military cargo planes and a navy frigate to aid in the evacuation of more than 30,000 Chinese workers in the country when the conflict erupted in February.
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BP moved a step closer to being allowed to drill new deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico when the agency that regulates U.S. offshore drilling said Friday it approved a supplemental exploration plan submitted by the oil giant.
The British firm still must obtain permits to be able to start drilling. BP PLC is seeking to drill up to four wells in the Gulf's Keathley Canyon in water that is more than 6,000 feet deep and is located 192 miles from the Louisiana shore.
The project would be the first new one drilled by BP in the Gulf since last year's Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The company has a 46 percent stake in a well already approved for drilling by Noble Energy. BP also bought out Shell's 25 percent interest in two Gulf fields in December, making BP the sole owner of both.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement said it conducted a thorough review before making its decision, and it cited additional safety enhancements and performance standards announced by BP in July. The agency said it has verified that BP has met the relevant voluntary performance standards.
In Washington, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said the approval may be premature.
"Comprehensive safety legislation hasn't passed Congress, and BP hasn't paid the fines they owe for their spill, yet BP is being given back the keys to drill in the Gulf," Markey said.
A deepwater drilling moratorium that was painful for the industry and Gulf states that rely on drilling for jobs and tax revenue was imposed after the April 2010 spill. After it was lifted, the U.S. government began a slow process of approving the resumption of deepwater activities in the Gulf. It set out to make sure the drilling plans met strict new rules put in place after the BP spill.
Also Friday, a federal judge in New Orleans held a hearing to update lawyers on the status of the more than 500 lawsuits pending in the multidistrict litigation over the oil spill. A trial is scheduled for February to determine whether rig owner Transocean Ltd. can limit what it pays claimants under maritime law and to assign percentages of fault to Transocean and other companies involved in the disaster
___
Follow Harry R. Weber at http://www.facebook.com/HarryRWeberAP
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As they are wont to do with just about everything, Apple is being incredibly secretive about how they're paying tribute to Steve Jobs.?On Tuesday, an Apple employee?leaked the news to Reuters that the stores would be closing for three hours during a worldwide "celebration of Steve Jobs' life" at their Cupertino, California headquarters. The company did release any official word about what was going on, but ABC News reports that "employees will be able to watch video of it on a live webcast" and "the event is closed to the public and the news media." For the non-Apple employees, there's a stream of comments from around the world that's taken over the company's website under the bold headline: "Remembering Steve." So if Apple is celebrating and the public is remembering, isn't anybody actually mourning--you know, the normal thing to do when someone dies?
Related: The Best of Steve Jobs's On-Camera Performances as CEO
The verbiage of death is both simple and complex. Quite simply, Mirriam-Webster defines "mourn" as "to feel or express grief or sorrow;?to show the customary signs of grief for a death." Thinking back on the events following Jobs death a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of traditional grieving. Apple fans held iPhones displaying candles burning. People laid flowers at the end of Jobs's driveway. One guy played the bagpipes outside of Apple's headquarters. Many of the messages that Apple is now streaming on their website take on a similarly sad tone. "RIP my inspiration," reads one. "I'm very very sorry," reads another. "What a loss," reads another. Among the messages is the now familiar meme that popped up moments after Jobs's death was announced: iSad. It would seem that in remembering Steve Jobs, the public is really mourning.
Related: What It Means: Life After Steve Jobs
The definition for "celebrate" suggests a different: "to perform (a sacrament or solemn ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites;?to honor (as a holiday) especially by solemn ceremonies or by refraining from ordinary business." This is the message that was communicated in the leak to Reuters, which used the word "celebration" six times in its brief report, and in a way, it's the perfect word to describe what Apple employees are doing.?They've shut down the business, if only for a few hours. Though we have no idea what's actually happening--they've even installed?curtains and come-back-later placards at the stores--the silence and solemnity is kind of contradictory with a typical celebration.
Related: The Onion and The Economist Manage to Agree on Steve Jobs
The useful thing about the word celebration, though, is that these events tend to have a beginning and an end. Anxiety over Apple's future in the absence of Steve Jobs has been mounting since he was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. When Jobs died, the company's stock didn't tank, and despite all their mourning, Apple's customers still managed to buy a record-breaking number of iPhones last weekend. But as yesterday's shaky quarterly earnings report suggests, the company's future success is hardly guaranteed. At the end of the day--or in this case, the "celebration"--Apple's employees will need to get back to work and keep inventing and selling more shiny things and leave mourning to their fans.
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BOGORODSKOYE, Russia (Reuters) ? A top Russian diplomat said on Wednesday that talks with the United States on missile defense had hit a "dead end," and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded coolly to a gesture designed to allay the Kremlin's concerns about U.S. plans.
The remarks by Lavrov and Moscow's NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, underscored the uphill battle the U.S. administration faces in convincing the Kremlin to drop its complaints about an anti-missile system Washington says poses no threat to Russia.
Moscow says the system is a potential threat and is demanding binding guarantees that it would not blunt the deterrent effect of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Talks aimed at turning confrontation into cooperation have brought no deal.
"Negotiations with the United States on missile defense have run into a complete dead end," state-run news agency RIA quoted Rogozin as saying. "We will continue negotiations -- there is still time, but very little."
Both sides earlier said they hoped an agreement could be reached in time for a NATO summit in the United States in May.
Persistent tension over the plan has undermined efforts to build on recent improvements in ties between the former Cold War foes. It is deepened by Russia's uncertainty about future U.S. policy after the November 2012 presidential election.
The United States says the planned shield is not intended to counter Russia's huge arsenal, but is needed to protect against missiles that could be fired by countries with smaller arsenals such as Iran.
Moscow says the system, due to be fully deployed by 2020 with interceptor missiles and radars at sea and in several European countries, would weaken Russia if it can shoot down the nuclear missiles Moscow relies upon as a deterrent.
Stepping up efforts to change Moscow's mind, a Pentagon official said on Tuesday the United States had invited Russia to use its own radars and other sensors to monitor one or more U.S. missile interceptor flight tests.
Lavrov made clear the offer fell far short of Moscow's calls for a role in planning a missile shield and binding guarantees that the system would not weaken Russia.
"We are being invited to monitor the realization of a plan that we see as creating a risk to our forces of deterrence," Lavrov told reporters when asked about the invitation.
Lavrov repeated Russia's complaint that the United States was pushing ahead with its own plans instead of giving Moscow a say in how a European missile shield should look.
"It would be better to ... first collectively create a missile defense architecture that would be guaranteed to be directed outside Europe and would not create threats for anyone inside Europe -- and only then to start putting this system in place and inviting one another to monitor," he said.
The chief U.S. negotiator on missile defense, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher, said on Tuesday the United States was prepared to offer written assurances that the system being built was not directed against Russia, but was not prepared to provide legally binding commitments.
Russia's Interfax news agency cited an unnamed Foreign Ministry official as saying on Wednesday that only legally binding guarantees would suffice.
(Reporting By Gleb Stolyarov; Writing by Alexei Anishchuk; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Peter Graff)
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Apple will close its retail stores for several hours Wednesday so that employees can watch a webcast of a company-wide memorial service to celebrate the life of co-founder Steve Jobs, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the closings and spoke on condition of anonymity. The store closings were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters.
The memorial will be held at 10 a.m. at Apple's Cupertino headquarters and was announced last week in an email to employees from CEO Tim Cook. Apple says it is a private event.
A private memorial for Jobs was held Sunday at Stanford University's Memorial Church. Jobs, who died Oct. 5 at age 56 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was buried in Palo Alto on Oct. 7. Apple isn't holding any public services for him.
Jobs battled pancreatic cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January ? his third since his health problems began ? and resigned in August, handing the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Cook.
Jobs was a tech visionary who started Apple in his parents' Silicon Valley garage with friend Steve Wozniak in 1976. Both men left the company in 1985, Jobs after a clash with then-CEO John Sculley.
Jobs returned as interim CEO in 1997 after Apple, then in financial dire straits, purchased a computer company he created called Next. He led the company through a remarkable upswing that included the launch of such popular products as the iPhone, iPad and iPod. His death came a day after Apple Inc. announced its latest iPhone, the 4S, which began selling last week.
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