USA TODAY - Revote donors linked to Clinton

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WASHINGTON
By Fredreka Schouten, USA TODAY

Ten wealthy Democrats have offered to pay for a new presidential primary in Michigan all with ties to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who showed up in the state Wednesday seeking a revote.

Five of the donors are listed on Clinton's campaign website as among her major fundraisers. All 10 have contributed to Clinton's presidential or Senate campaigns or the races run by former president Bill Clinton, according to federal data compiled by the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics.

The Michigan revote donors including New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos and financier Roger Altman have offered to put up $12 million to pay for a new election in June.

Corzine and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, both Clinton backers, released the donors' names in a letter to Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. The letter was aimed at demonstrating support for a do-over, so the state's voters could have a say in the hotly contested nomination battle. Barack Obama's supporters in the state have raised questions about logistics and costs.

Michigan Democrats held a primary Jan. 15, but no convention delegates were awarded because the date violated national party rules. Clinton won that vote. Obama took his name off the ballot in deference to the national party and other states that did not schedule early primaries.

Clinton changed her schedule to fly to Detroit Wednesday and challenged Obama to support a do-over. He "speaks passionately on the campaign trail about empowering the American people," Clinton said. "I'm urging him to match those words with actions."

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said any notion that potential Michigan donors sought to help Clinton was "absurd."

MICHIGAN: Democratic rivals duel over do-over

"Of course, only Clinton people have come forward to say they are willing to finance it because Obama is opposing it," he said. "We would be thrilled if Sen. Obama would direct some of his supporters" to help.

Obama, who leads Clinton in delegates, has not said whether he will back a new Michigan primary.

Wealthy individuals can legally contribute unlimited sums to state political efforts but can't give more than $4,600 to federal candidates for primary and general elections. Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the donor list is "even more evidence that Clinton is willing to do absolutely anything to get elected."

Billionaire financier George Soros, an Obama supporter, declined Rendell's request to help foot the bill for a Michigan revote.

Soros "does not support holding another primary in Michigan," spokesman Michael Vachon said.

Website address: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-19-michigan_N.htm

Cheapo laptop

For cheap?

Reuters - Intel cheap laptops expanding to U.S., Europe

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Intel cheap laptops expanding to U.S., Europe

Thursday, Mar 20, 2008 12:13AM UTC

By Jim Finkle and Duncan Martell

BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp <INTC.O> said on Wednesday sub-$300 laptops initially designed for poor children will soon be available to U.S. and European consumers in a move that could further push down computer prices.

PC makers in the United States and in Europe will sell a yet-to-be-unveiled, second-generation version of the Intel-designed Classmate PC for $250 to $350, said Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel's emerging market platform's group, in an interview with Reuters.

"This is a very big deal," said Laura Didio, an analyst with Yankee Group who follows the personal computer industry.

While the machines are intended for children, analysts said the launch will add momentum to the low-cost computing movement -- and will likely mean this year's bargain-basement laptops will have more power than in previous years.

"Particularly in a recession year, quality low-cost products are going to move well," said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. "But the key is for them to be quality."

He said while he hasn't yet seen the machines that will be on sale this Christmas, he suspects consumers will be able to get "a pretty decent" laptop for less than $600 and perhaps for less than $500.

Didio said retailers might throw in another $50 to $100 in rebates or other incentives.

Laptop prices have been under extra pressure since last year, when Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc <2357.TW> introduced the $399 Eee PC, which has flown off store shelves from Asia to North America.

The machine runs on the Linux operating system, and people used to Microsoft's <MSFT.O> Windows and Apple's <AAPL.O> Mac OS X operating systems have had trouble adapting to the system, Enderle said.

The new, cheap laptops being developed from Intel's technology will likely run on Windows, he added.

The movement toward low-cost computing was also spurred by the XO laptop, the brainchild of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

The foundation began producing a laptop running on Linux at a cost of $188 in November. They sold them in the United States and in Canada for $400 through a charity drive that also provided one machine to a poor child overseas.

The chipmaker has conducted pilot tests of the Classmate PC at schools in Texas, Oregon and California, along with some schools in Australia, said Intel spokeswoman Agnes Kwan.

Intel said manufacturers in India, Mexico and Indonesia already have begun selling Classmate PC laptops on the retail market.

To date, Intel has sold fewer than 100,000 of the Classmate PCs, but plans to ramp up production in 2008.

Intel declined to identify the PC makers or discuss the features of the second-generation machine, which has not yet been released in developing markets, at the request of the companies.

It has already begun work on a third model, the Classmate 3, said Ibrahim.

The second- and third-generation models of the Classmate PC design give manufacturers flexibility to build a range of laptops with different memory configurations, screen sizes and peripheral devices including cameras, Ibrahim said.

Inventor Mary Lou Jepsen, a scientist who developed the XO Laptop, resigned from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation at the end of last year and started her own company Pixel Qi with the goal of building a $75 laptop by 2010.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston and Duncan Martell in San Francisco; editing by Carol Bishopric/Jeffrey Benkoe)

Free itunes?

Article:Apple in talks on free iTunes, paper says:/c/a/2008/03/19/BU8TVMMS4.DTL
Article:Apple in talks on free iTunes, paper says:/c/a/2008/03/19/BU8TVMMS4.DTL
SFGate
Back to Article
SFGate
Apple in talks on free iTunes, paper says

Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Apple Inc. is reportedly in talks to offer free access to its iTunes music library to customers who pay extra for an iPod or iPhone.

The Cupertino technology company is discussing a deal with the major record labels, but the negotiations hinge on how Apple and the music companies would share the revenue, the Financial Times reported.

Representatives for Apple, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner Music declined to comment Wednesday. A spokesman for Universal Music Group did not return phone calls.

If the plan is realized, Apple could charge a premium for iPods and iPhones in return for permission to download unlimited songs for free from iTunes.

Apple also is studying a plan, according to the paper, that would allow iPhone owners, who already are billed monthly for their cell phone services, to pay a regular subscription in exchange for unlimited access to its library, an arrangement that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has scoffed at in the past.

Apple's iTunes Store is the No. 2 music retailer in the United States behind Wal-Mart, according to the market research firm NPD, selling more tracks than Target, Best Buy and Amazon.com. The iPod also remains the most popular digital media player on the market, and the iPhone has quickly captured market share since its introduction last year.

At the same time, the number of iPods sold during the most recent quarter was flat, and Wall Street has expressed concern that the iPod may be beginning to saturate the market, something that Apple executives have denied.

The rumored deal could be a move to encourage consumers to continue purchasing iPods, now that some of the music sold on iTunes can be played on any MP3 player, not just the iPod, said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. Amazon.com and other online retailers also have started selling music not protected by copyright restrictions.

"The big shift in music right now is to MP3 files that are not connected to a particular device," McQuivey said. "That means any MP3 player is as good as any other MP3 player."

Apple does not make much of a profit from its iTunes music sales, Jobs has said. But it draws millions of dollars in revenues from iPod sales.

David Pakman, CEO of eMusic, a rival online music retailer, said he worries that Apple could take advantage of its monopoly in the digital music player market - the iPod commands about 85 percent of the market - and take over the online music retail market.

"If they were to bundle iTunes digital music downloads with every iPod, that would be anti-competitive behavior," he said.

Apple's rumored proposal is modeled after a deal that Nokia struck with Universal last year for its upcoming "comes with music" offer.

Nokia plans to sell "comes with music" cell phones later this year that will be accompanied by a one-year pass to its music library. Customers will be able to download as many tunes as they want and keep them after the year is up, said Bill Plummer, a Nokia vice president.

The songs, however, will be copyright-protected and will only play on the cell phone and a registered computer.

E-mail Ellen Lee at elee@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/20/BU8TVMMS4.DTL

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Slosh

Bill reed

Reuters - Hurricane flood threat coming soon to Google

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Hurricane flood threat coming soon to Google

Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008 9:59PM UTC

By Jim Loney

MIAMI (Reuters) - Americans in the hurricane danger zone may soon be able to use Google to find out if their own home is threatened by a dangerous storm surge, the director of the National Hurricane Center said on Wednesday.

Storm surge, the massive wall of water carried onto land by a hurricane, is considered perhaps its most destructive element and greatest threat to the lives of people who ignore evacuation orders in vulnerable coastal areas.

Bill Read, who was appointed head of the Miami-based U.S. forecasting center in January, said a planned program will couple a Google application with storm surge data that meteorologists have used for years to determine the flooding threat from any category of storm.

"People can plug in their address and see at what level they are at risk," Read told Reuters in an interview.

He said he hoped the program would be available during the coming Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30.

Data gathered during Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion damage on the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, found the storm surge reached up to 22 feet above normal sea level in eastern Mississippi.

Hurricane Andrew, the destructive Category 5 storm that hit the Miami area in 1992, pushed at least 16 feet of water ashore south of the city.

The damage a storm can cause is largely dependent on its storm surge, and whether it hits a city or a sparsely populated area. Despite the catastrophic damage of Katrina, New Orleans was spared the worst of the surge.

"With Katrina, 30 miles to the west and everything that happened in New Orleans in two days would have happened in a matter of hours because the surge would have been much worse and it would have overtopped the levees," Read said.

Hurricane forecasters use a computerized model called SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) that estimates storm surge heights by taking into account the size, internal pressure, forward speed, track and wind strength of a hurricane.

The idea to make it available to the public evolved from calls that inundate local emergency managers and weather forecast offices every time a hurricane threatens. Read said people ask what flooding will be like at their house.

"We're not going to know that off the top of our heads," he said. "So we can say 'go to our Web site, go to such and such, and it's there."

Hurricane forecasters will also offer a new color-coded graphic on the NHC Web site this year that will indicate storm surge probabilities for threatened areas, similar to forecasts they now offer on wind-speed probabilities.

The graphic will indicate the probability of the surge reaching or exceeding five feet within a given number of hours, Read said.

The graphic promises to help local emergency managers with key decisions such as when to lock down bridges and which roads could be washed out or need to be cleared.

Omar khadr

It all happened so quickly

Reuters - Canadian says U.S. interrogators threatened rape

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Canadian says U.S. interrogators threatened rape

Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008 11:26PM UTC

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - A young Canadian prisoner held at Guantanamo said in legal documents that U.S. interrogators repeatedly threatened to rape him and Canadian government visitors told him they were powerless to do anything.

The claims were part of an affidavit sworn by Omar Khadr, 21, who is charged in the Guantanamo war court with murdering a U.S. soldier with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan when Khadr was 15.

Khadr has long claimed he was abused by American interrogators in Bagram, Afghanistan, after his capture in July 2002 and at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval base in Cuba, where he was taken a few months later.

The previously undisclosed allegations of the rape threats were part of a nine-page affidavit released by the U.S. military on Wednesday, with some of the names and details blacked out.

"On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped," Khadr said in the document.

He said interrogators told him at one point that the Egyptians wound send "Soldier No. 9" to rape him.

Khadr was shot twice in the back and suffered shrapnel wounds in the eye during the battle that led to his capture at a suspected al Qaeda compound. After treatment at a field hospital, he was taken to a prison in Bagram, where he was hooded, threatened him with barking dogs and had water thrown on him, he said in the document.

Khadr said he was often shackled for hours during interrogations and denied use of a bathroom, forcing him to urinate on himself.

FLOOR CLEANING

"While my wounds were still healing, interrogators made me clean the floors on my hands and knees. They woke me up in the middle of the night after midnight and made me clean the floor with a brush and dry it with towels until dawn, carry heavy buckets of water," he said.

Later at Guantanamo, Khadr said an Afghan with a U.S. flag on his pants threatened to send him back to Afghanistan unless he cooperated, telling him: "They like small boys in Afghanistan."

Khadr said he gave "answers that made interrogators happy" to protect himself from further harm, but the information was untrue.

The U.S. military has said captives at Guantanamo are treated humanely and that claims of abuse are an al Qaeda tactic. They have confirmed that Canadian government representatives visited Khadr at Guantanamo.

During one such visit in 2003, Khadr said, he complained about his treatment and a man claiming to be a Canadian government representative told him:

"'The U.S. and Canada are like an elephant and an ant sleeping in the same bed' and there was nothing the Canadian government could do against the power of the U.S."

Khadr is charged with murdering U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Speer and injuring other American soldiers with a grenade during the firefight. He is also charged with attempted murder, providing material support for terrorism and conspiring with al Qaeda. He could face life in prison if convicted.

He was scheduled to go to trial in May in the Guantanamo tribunal created by the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists. But a judge last week postponed the trial indefinitely to allow military defense lawyers more time to receive and review evidence they accused prosecutors of withholding.

(Editing by Chris Wilson)

Iraq war protests

Bow your heads

CNN - Protesters march on Iraq anniversary

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Protesters march on Iraq anniversary

Several hundred anti-war protesters marched through Washington on Wednesday's fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, splattering red paint on government offices and scuffling with police.

Protesters, including many veterans, demanded the arrests of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as war criminals. Others hurled balloons full of paint at a military recruiting station and smeared it on buildings housing defense contractors Bechtel and Lockheed Martin.

Colby Dillard, who held a sign reading, "We support our brave military and their just mission," pointed to some red paint that one of the war protesters had splattered on the sidewalk.

"The same blood was spilled to give you the right to do what you're doing," Dillard, who said he served in Iraq in 2003, told The Associated Press.

"This has happened throughout the downtown area throughout the day," Metropolitan Police Capt. Jeffrey Herold said.

At least 31 people were arrested after crossing police lines outside the Internal Revenue Service building on Pennsylvania Avenue, protest organizer Freida Berrigan said. Several were released Wednesday afternoon.

Organizers of Washington's protests said that about 500 demonstrators had registered to attend but that "hundreds and hundreds more showed up," said Leslie Cagan, national director of the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice.

Protests also took place in San Francisco, where 115 people were arrested and released after being cited for misdemeanors such as trespassing, resisting arrest and blocking an intersection, said Sgt. Steve Mannina, a police spokesman. Watch protesters in the Bay Area

Demonstrators split up into several groups under overcast Washington skies throughout the day, though the weather forced two events to be canceled, organizers said.

About 50 protesters of an estimated 250 engaged in shoving matches with police at McPherson Square, about two blocks from the White House, as officers tried to push them out of K Street traffic. About 20 others blocked traffic around K Street and Connecticut Avenue by chaining their hands together inside school desks, demanding more money for education and less spending on the war.

They dispersed after police didn't move in to arrest them, declaring victory by shutting down the street.

But most participants were peaceful, and some had a comic bent. The activist group Code Pink pushed a pink bed on wheels down the street, urging Americans to "wake up," and one demonstration featured a trailer with an effigy of Bush riding a cartoon bomb.

More serious, members of the "Granny Peace Brigade" delivered boxes of hand-knitted "stump socks" -- meant to keep the ends of amputated limbs warm -- to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Workers there suggested that they donate the boxes to the USO instead.

Laurie Wolberton of Louisville, Kentucky, whose son just finished an Army tour of duty in Iraq, told The Associated Press she fears that the worsening U.S. economy has caused Americans to forget about the war.

"We're not paying attention anymore," she said. "My son has buried his friends. He's given eulogies; he's had to go through things no one should have to go through, and over here, they've forgotten. They just go shopping instead."

Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq on March 19, 2003, after months of warnings that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and efforts to build a nuclear bomb. U.N. weapons inspectors found no sign of banned weapons before the invasion, and the CIA concluded that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs in the 1990s.

Nearly 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq since then, and estimates of the Iraqi toll range from about 80,000 to 150,000 or more. Nearly 160,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, and the war has cost U.S. taxpayers about $600 billion, according to the House Budget Committee.

Speaking on the war's anniversary, Bush said Hussein's removal has left the world better off and the United States safer. He said that last year's buildup of American troops has helped quell the sectarian warfare that brought Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2006 but that "there is still a lot of hard work to be done."

But the conflict is now widely unpopular at home: A CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Wednesday found that only 32 percent of Americans support the conflict. And 61 percent said they want the next president to remove most U.S. troops within a few months of taking office.

Outside the National Archives, anti-war protesters laid a large cloth on the ground with the preamble to the U.S. Constitution drawn on it. The placement forced people to walk over the text in order to enter the building. Watch war protests in the nations's capital

Also in front of the Archives was a masked man dressed in orange prison clothing, kneeling with his hands tied behind his back. A sign in front of him read, "no torture, no secret prisons, no detention without legal process," referring to several contentious issues tied to the war.

And about 70 people marched from Arlington Cemetery in Virginia to the Vietnam War Memorial, where they read the names of victims from that conflict. The group also visited the State Department, where many of them played dead by "freezing" themselves in various poses.