Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/169528465?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Monday, December 5, 2011
Russia's ruling party wary as nation votes (AP)
MOSCOW ? Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in national parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote that opinion polls indicate could water down the strength of the party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite the government's relentless marginalization of opposition groups.
Although Putin and his United Russia party have dominated Russian politics for more than a decade, popular discontent appears to be growing with Putin's strongman style, widespread corruption among officials and the gap between ordinary Russians and the country's floridly super-rich.
United Russia holds a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. But a survey last month by the independent Levada Center polling agency indicated the party could get only about 53 percent of the vote in this election, depriving it of the number of seats necessary to change the constitution unchallenged.
Putin wants United Russia to do well in the parliamentary election to help pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away.
He has warned that a parliament with a wide array of parties would lead to political instability and claiming that Western governments want to undermine the election. A Western-funded election-monitoring group has come under strong official pressure and its Web site was incapacitated by hackers on Sunday.
Only seven parties have been allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups have been denied registration and barred from campaigning.
The Communist Party and the liberal Yabloko party complained Sunday of extensive election violations aimed at boosting United Russia's vote count, including party observers being hindered in their work.
In Vladivostok, voters complained to police that United Russia was offering free food in exchange for promises to vote for the party. In St. Petersburg, an Associated Press photographer saw a United Russia emblem affixed to the curtains on a voting booth.
Golos, the country's only independent election-monitoring group, said that in the Volga River city of Samara observers and election commission members from opposition parties had been barred from verifying that the ballot boxes were properly sealed at all polling stations.
Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister when Putin was president, said he and other opposition activists who voted Sunday are under no illusion that their votes will be counted fairly.
"It is absolutely clear there will be no real count," he said. "The authorities created an imitation of a very important institution whose name is free election, that is not free and is not elections."
United Russia's dominance of politics has induced a grudging sense of impotence among many in the country of 143 million. In Vladivostok, voter Artysh Munzuk noted the contrast between the desire to do one's civic duty and the feeling that it doesn't matter.
"It's very important to come to the polling stations and vote, but many say that it's useless," said the 20-year-old university student.
There are around 110 million eligible voters in Russia and turnout in many areas appeared low Sunday. In the Pacific Coast regions of Sakhalin and Kamchatka, turnout was just 45 to 48 percent with two hours to go until the polls closed.
Turnout in some regions appeared high, however. An AP reporter saw a polling station in Moscow's southwest filled with voters, including an unusually high number of young people compared to the previous election.
Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev made final appeals for their party Friday, the last day of campaigning, warning that a parliament made up of diverse political camps would be incapable of making decisions.
The view underlines Russian authorities' continuing discomfort with political pluralism and preference for top-down operation.
As president in 2000-2008, Putin's autocratic leadership style won wide support among Russians exhausted by a decade of post-Soviet uncertainty. But United Russia has become increasingly disliked, seen as stifling opposition, representing a corrupt bureaucracy and often called "the party of crooks and thieves."
A few dozen activists of the Left Front opposition group tried to stage an unsanctioned protest just outside the Red Square on Sunday, but were quickly dispersed by police, who detained about a dozen of them.
In the western city of Bryansk, an unidentified assailant threw a firebomb into the window of the local United Russia's office. No one was hurt and the fire was quickly extinguished, according to local police.
An interim report from an elections-monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted that "most parties have expressed a lack of trust in the fairness of the electoral process."
The websites of Golos and Ekho Moskvy, a prominent, independent-minded radio station were down on Sunday. Both claimed the failures were due to denial-of-service hacker attacks.
"The attack on the site on election day is obviously connected to attempts to interfere with publication of information about violations," Ekho Moskvy editor Alexey Venediktov said in a Twitter post.
Golos has come under strong pressure in the week leading up to the vote.
Its leader, Lilya Shibanova, was held at a Moscow airport for 12 hours upon her Friday return from Poland after refusing to give her laptop computer to security officers, said Golos' deputy director Grigory Melkonyants. On Friday, the group was fined the equivalent of $1,000 by a Moscow court for violating a law that prohibits publication of election opinion research for five days before a vote.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle said in his blog that he called the Golos head Saturday "to express my support for the work they have been doing, and convey the concern of the White House about the pressure they have been experiencing over the last week."
Putin last Sunday accused Western governments of trying to influence the election. Golos is funded by grants from the United States and Europe.
The group has compiled some 5,300 complaints of election-law violations ahead of the vote. Most are linked to United Russia. Roughly a third of the complainants ? mostly government employees and students ? say employers and professors are pressuring them to vote for the party.
____
Lynn Berry and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed to this report.
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Penn State's Paterno never raised charges with Sandusky: report (Reuters)
NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Ousted Penn State football coach Joe Paterno never confronted former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with accusations that Sandusky had molested young boys, even though Paterno had reportedly been told of the incidents, the New York Times said on Saturday.
In an interview with the Times, Sandusky said Paterno allowed him to continue to use university facilities after he had retired from his job as defensive coordinator in 1999.
"I know that he never said anything to me," Sandusky said of Paterno.
Paterno denied knowing about an investigation into molestation charges in 1998, according to the Times, and has said that he reported the 2002 accusations to the athletic director.
Sandusky is charged with abusing boys over a period of nearly 15 years, with prosecutors alleging that he met the boys through his charity, The Second Mile, and would molest some of them in the locker rooms on the university campus.
Sandusky denied all the charges and told the Times that prosecutors have "twisted" all the work he has done for children over the years.
"They've taken everything that I ever did for any young person and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever," Sandusky said. "I had kid after kid after kid who might say I was a father figure. And they just twisted that all."
Paterno was fired last month following accusations that he had not done enough to alert authorities after a graduate assistant told him in 2002 he had seen Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the shower. University president Graham Spanier also was fired.
The abuse scandal has also led to criminal charges against the school's athletic director, Tim Curley, and a finance official of the athletic department.
The executive director of The Second Mile, Jack Raykovitz, has resigned after he was accused of not doing enough to protect the children once they learned that Sandusky was being investigated.
Sandusky also told the Times that his relationships with the Second Mile kids caused his wife concern, and he sometimes worried Paterno would view his involvement as a distraction from football.
(Writing by Karen Brooks; Editing by Greg McCune)
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
CyberLink PowerDirector 10
When you're creating a movie, whether you're James Cameron or Joe Schmoe, the last thing you want to do is wait. Sure, you want powerful, easy-to-use video editing tools, but you also want to see the effects of your edits and enhancements as soon as possible. This is where CyberLink PowerDirector continues to hold an edge over other consumer video-editing software. It blows through previewing and rendering digital movies where others stall and stutter. But PowerDirector offers more than speed alone: its interface is among the easiest to use, and its raft of special effects and adjustments at least equals and in many cases exceeds those of its peers, including Adobe Premiere Elements 10 ($99.99, 3.5 stars) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio ($94.95, 3 stars).
Install
CyberLink is a Windows-only app, running on any flavor of that operating system from XP SP2 to Windows 7. Its installer file is 562MB, so don't expect it to appear instantaneously as you would with a browser, especially if you're downloading it. You'll also need a good deal of free disk space?up to 60GB if you're planning to burn Blu-ray HD discs. You'll probably want to sign up for a DirectorZone account, too, which gives you access to user-contributed effects and another place to post your videos besides YouTube. Some of PowerDirector's graphics hardware acceleration may require a driver supplementary installation for your graphics card, as my ATI Radeon HD 4290 did. And finally, you'll probably want to download more disc themes, effects, and titles in two Content Packs to get all the program has to offer.
Interface
New for PowerDirector 10 is a welcome screen that offers buttons for the full video editor, the easy editor, and the slideshow creator. This also lets you choose whether you want your project to have a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio or standard-def 4:3. Unlike Adobe Premiere Elements' welcome screen, this one doesn't cause much of a delay to your getting to the program, and also unlike Adobe's consumer video editor, you can bypass it completely via a check box.
The actual editor interface uses three panels, with the top divided in half between source and effect content and a preview window and the bottom taking up the timeline or storyboard. You can resize each panel relative to the other, but you can't drag them out to a separate window ad you can with Corel VideoStudio. The storyboard view in PowerDirector is one of the program's few weak points: It's just thumbnails, with no ability to add transitions or other effects. It does let you insert clips, but if you try to add a transition, the view will be switched to timeline. I'd almost recommend CyberLink to ditch the storyboard until it's more useful. Some other video editors, such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio, dispense with it.
Import
CyberLink's Capture mode makes it simple to get video content from just about any device that can create video, each clearly represented by icons?DV camcorder, HDV camcorder (including AVCHD), digital or analog TV, attached webcam, microphone, or external device. Another option is to grab content from Flickr. But you don't even need to use this mode if your clips are in a file folder or on an attached storage device?just click the folder icon in Edit mode. When you import HD video, a dialog asks if you want the program to create shadow copies, or lower resolution versions to speed up the editing process. This is a good technique that can make video editing less painful, and, in my testing, the video preview it produced wasn't as degraded as that in Adobe Premiere Elements.
Another strength of PowerDirector is the wide range file types it can import. Not only all the standard video formats, but even camera raw files (which the program converts to JPG) and the latest 3D formats (including MVC and Dual-Stream AVI) are supported.
One of the few areas where Premiere Elements beats PowerDirector is in the former's ability to apply tags?includign auto-generated tags?to video for things like faces, blurriness, or shakiness. PowerDirector does offer a comment field for clips you import, but it's not as simple or useful as Premiere's tagging.
Basic Video Editing
PowerDirector makes it easy to fix the lighting, color, and stabilize your video, from the Fix/Enhance button above your timeline. The trim tool allows precise control (down to the individual frame) with two sliders, and the multi-trim tool lets you mark several In and Out points on your clip?something I'm surprised and chagrined to report that isn't available in most competitors. But if you're not fussy, you can just delete a selected part of a clip right in the timeline.
Splitting video and deleting sections are a pleasure, with PowerDirector's unique and intuitive selection cursor. Sony Vegas Movie Maker doesn't offer the excellent control of PowerDirector's double sliders or its scene detection. Fix/Enhance also includes video denoise, audio denoise, and enhancements to punch up color and sharpness. You can independently adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance. And for each of these adjustments, you can set keyframes to designate when it should be turned on and off. Premiere Elements makes you choose separate effects for each of these, rather than offering PowerDirector's unified Fix/Enhance options.
Instant Video Editing
One of the new welcome dialog's choices is Easy Editor, which opens the Magic Movie Wizard. This is a template-based editor that makes your job easier. Only four themes were available by default, but you can download more from DirectorZone, CyberLink's online resource. After choosing a style, you can add a background music from your computer, and change the video length to match. Other apps include more in the way of canned music to add to their instant projects. A nice capability is a slider that lets you adjust the balance between the video and background sound. After this, you get a preview, with transitions and effects added. The results were a bit hokey for me, but some will find them fun. After you've previewed the Magic Movie, the final step is to produce it by outputting to a file or burning to disc. Alternatively, you can open it in the advanced editor for fine-tuning.
A couple more Magic tools may be of interest: Magic Fix and Magic Cut. The first stabilizes and enhances audio and image quality, while the latter finds the most interesting parts of a clip and cuts out the rest. This last lets you match a clip to a music track's length, and even lets you set criteria like favoring sections with zooming and panning or with people speaking or moving objects. It worked as advertised in my testing, and offers a handy way to ditch boring stretches in your video clips.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/3YqYMyzhXQA/0,2817,2372982,00.asp
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Argentina wins Davis Cup doubles vs Spain (AP)
SEVILLE, Spain ? Argentina won the doubles against Spain to trail 2-1 Saturday and stay in contention at the Davis Cup final.
David Nalbandian and Eduardo Schwank, partnering for the first time, eased to a 6-4, 6-2, 6-3 victory over Spanish pair Fernando Verdasco and Feliciano Lopez on the clay at Olympic Stadium.
The South Americans broke five times and repelled each of the three they faced against their Spanish counterparts to extend the match into Sunday. The visitors need to sweep Sunday's reverse singles to become the first team in 72 years to rally from a 2-0 deficit.
"We played a great game. We're in very good shape, and the series is still alive," Nalbandian said. "Our hope is intact."
Rafael Nadal, unbeaten on clay in 16 Davis Cup matches, opens for four-time champion Spain against Juan Martin del Potro.
The 11th-ranked Del Potro needs to recover quickly from his exhausting, nearly five-hour loss to David Ferrer on Friday.
"Rafa will be going out to win, so Juan Martin has to play his best tennis to win," said Nalbandian, who added he was ready to replace Juan Monaco should the final stretch to a fifth match.
Lopez and Verdasco again failed to follow up an impressive sweep of the opening singles by Nadal and David Ferrer. They also lost in the semifinals against France in which they won only three games. Their cup win-loss record together stands at 7-6.
"Obviously, today we didn't play well," Spain captain Albert Costa said.
The Argentine section of fans was boisterous throughout, with Nalbandian volleying home the winner to break Lopez's serve in the fifth game as the visitors served out the set.
Nalbandian played for the first time since October because of various injuries. He and Schwank took a 4-0 lead in the second to take command of the match.
In the third set, after the Spanish pair managed to get the crowd fired up with a break chance in the sixth game, Argentina saved two break opportunities before Schwank ended the suspense with a volley at the net to hold serve.
Argentina has never won in three previous final appearances, including 2008 when it lost to Spain in Mar del Plata.
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Twitter, mixi form Japan tie-up as Facebook gains (AP)
TOKYO ? Twitter Inc. and Japan's biggest homegrown social networking site mixi Inc. joined forces Wednesday to strengthen their ground against a rapidly expanding Facebook.
For Twitter, the partnership with a local social network could point to a new strategy as the San Francisco-based microblogging service seeks to accelerate global growth. Japan is the company's second-biggest market after the U.S. and has served as a key international testing ground of sorts.
Japanese was Twitter's first foreign language platform, and it opened its first overseas office in Tokyo earlier this year. In April, the company hired James Kondo in Japan as its first international country manager.
Kondo said he didn't know if Twitter would forge similar partnerships in other countries. But the company is keen to see what happens with the experiment, which launched with a limited Christmas-themed application, he said.
"This is going to be an interesting case," he told The Associated Press. "We're going to see what works and what doesn't work, and we're going to build on top of that as opposed to throwing out something that may not work."
For mixi, the announcement couldn't have come at a better time.
The seven-year-old Tokyo-based company had been the dominant social networking platform in Japan. Despite its massive popularity elsewhere in the world, Facebook failed to make much of an impact in the country. That is, until this year.
Data released this week from Nielsen NetRatings Japan showed that mixi stood in third place behind Twitter and Facebook in terms of unique visitors in October.
More than 14.5 million users visited Twitter, and 11.3 million went to Facebook, according to the Nielsen report. In contrast, about 8.4 million visited mixi. Google's social networking service was a very distant fourth.
Facebook has surged over the last year in Japan, in part due to the popularity of the hit movie "The Social Network." The Nielsen data indicates that it surpassed mixi midway through the year. Growing social gaming services GREE and DeNA also pose threats to mixi.
Twitter and mixi said they offer contrasting ? and mutually beneficial ? services. While Twitter is a public platform with real-time information, mixi is a closed network. Most users limit their networks to a small group of their closest friends.
Mixi hopes that by partnering with Twitter, it can better integrate public information and conversation into its tight-knit communities.
"Mixi rightly had a choice to do it themselves or partner with someone who's good at this," Kondo said. "And we're glad that they thought that Twitter would be a good partner. I think we can provide value that's distinctive."
Kenji Kasahara, mixi's founder and president, said that the two companies started talking after the March earthquake and tsunami. Both services were used extensively as critical information lifelines in the wake of the disaster.
Twitter in particular gained credibility in Japan after the earthquake. New users flocked to the site for real-time information about the nuclear crisis, electricity blackouts and aftershocks.
"Had our services been connected during the disaster, we would have been able to provide much better service for our users," he said at a joint press conference at mixi headquarters.
But for starters, mixi has created a "mixi Xmas 2011" page, through which its users can share holiday messages on both platforms and send "social gifts" to friends.
Other new joint products are also in the works. The companies said they hope to cooperate on emergency communications during disasters, location-based applications, advertising and business services.
___
Follow Tomoko A. Hosaka on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomokohosaka
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Friday, December 2, 2011
ADATA S101 flash drive brings USB 3.0 speeds, shrugs off shocks and splashes
USB flash drives may not be the hottest tech hardware out there, but that doesn't mean they can't look good. ADATA's latest thumb drive refresh packs the same military-spec rough and tumble credentials of last year's S007, but this time it's guarding some USB 3.0 goodness. While the design of the S107 is nigh-on identical to its predecessor, it's now capable of read speeds of up to 100MB per second. The rubberized storage sticks, available in red and blue, will be available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes, although ADATA is still keeping schtum on pricing and release dates.
Continue reading ADATA S101 flash drive brings USB 3.0 speeds, shrugs off shocks and splashes
ADATA S101 flash drive brings USB 3.0 speeds, shrugs off shocks and splashes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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