New Mexico Judge Charged in Bribery Case, but Former Governor Draws a Mention

Prosecutors accuse Judge Murphy of advising a judicial candidate several years ago that if she wanted to increase her chances of getting a judgeship, she should deliver cash in an envelope to a Democratic Party operative, who would pass it along to Mr. Richardson, who was in his second term as governor. Judge Murphy is quoted in court papers as saying that the practice was commonplace and that he paid $4,000 to win an appointment from Mr. Richardson in 2006.

Mr. Richardson said in a statement that suggestions that he appointed judges based on campaign contributions were ?outrageous and defamatory.?

His supporters call the case politically motivated, pointing to the involvement of two prominent Republicans, including Gov. Susana Martinez, who succeeded Mr. Richardson in January. ?That speaks volumes about this prosecution,? said Gilbert Gallegos, who was Mr. Richardson?s deputy chief of staff.

In 2009, Ms. Martinez, who was then a district attorney, received a complaint from one of Judge Murphy?s colleagues. Because her office appeared before the judge, she referred the matter to another prosecutor, Matt Chandler, who was the Republican candidate for state attorney general.

?This is not about one party or another,? Mr. Chandler said in a telephone interview, pointing out that five of the witnesses are Democrats and the sixth is an independent. ?It?s about a judge who put a price tag on a judgeship.?

A grand jury recently indicted Judge Murphy on felony charges of bribery and witness intimidation. On Friday, Judge Murphy pleaded not guilty at his own courthouse in Las Cruces and was released after posting $10,000 bail, handing over his passport and agreeing to stay away from witnesses in the case, avoid the courthouse and turn over any firearms.

?How absurd to suggest that any governor?s selection of a state judge would be altered for any price, especially for a handful of dollars directed to a political party,? Michael Stout, Judge Murphy?s attorney, said in a statement on Saturday.

In an interview, Mr. Chandler indicated that Mr. Richardson might be questioned as part of the investigation.

?At this time, the investigation is directed at Mr. Murphy, but I can assure you that law enforcement are following leads involving other suspects,? he said. ?No one is off limits to get the truth.?

Ms. Martinez released a statement earlier in the week saying the charges were serious and needed to be pursued. ?The indictment of a sitting judge on charges that he paid bribes for his judicial appointment and solicited bribes from another judicial candidate is deeply troubling,? Ms. Martinez said.

Judge Murphy has been suspended without pay by the State Supreme Court. A retired magistrate, Leslie Smith, was appointed to handle the case.

The matter dates to 2007 when Beverly Singleman, a former state appeals judge, contacted Judge Jim T. Martin of State District Court to discuss a vacancy on his court. She said that Judge Martin, a Richardson appointee, invited Judge Murphy along to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Las Cruces and that he stayed largely silent during the meal as Judge Murphy laid out how political contributions were an essential part of the process. Judge Martin has not been charged, but was removed from hearing criminal cases last week.

After the meal, Ms. Singleman, a onetime Democrat who changed her registration to independent, took the matter to Judge Lisa C. Schultz of State District Court. Judge Schultz, a Richardson appointee, later confronted Judge Murphy about the accusations, once while taping the conversation.

Judge Schultz said she was hesitant to take the matter to the Judicial Standards Commission, which investigates ethical complaints, because most of its members were appointed by Mr. Richardson.

Eventually, she took the complaint to Ms. Martinez, who was criticizing Mr. Richardson?s tenure as ethically challenged in her campaign against Diane Denish, a Democrat who was Mr. Richardson?s lieutenant governor.

New Mexico has a hybrid system of elected and appointed judges that is designed to reduce the role of politics. The governor picks judges from a list submitted by a nominating commission run by the University of New Mexico School of Law. Appointed judges then must face nonpartisan elections to keep their posts.

?I appointed judges through an extensive process, including a thorough vetting first by the judicial nominating commission and then by my legal staff of the candidates that were nominated to me,? Mr. Richardson said in his statement.

He said he interviewed every candidate and based his appointments on merit. ?I appointed 113 judges, including several Republicans, and the general consensus in the legal community is that we selected excellent judges who had to prove themselves to voters in elections,? he said.

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Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform ? one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, ?They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers? union lobbyists.? They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation?s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

?We?ve learned that school-level investments aren?t enough to drive systemic changes,? said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation?s United States program. ?The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.?

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy ? quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation?s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

?It?s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,? said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation.

Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 ?to influence the national education debates,? acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. ?As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,? he said. ?There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we?re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.?

?Everybody?s implicated,? he added.

Indeed, the foundation?s 2009 tax filing runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies? effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.

The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million ?to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.? It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place ?strategic data fellows? who could act as ?entrepreneurial change agents? in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers? unions ? as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.

?It?s easier to name which groups Gates doesn?t support than to list all of those they do, because it?s just so overwhelming,? noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation?s tax filings as part of his academic work.

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Freshman Democrats in the House Bond Over Policy and Egg Rolls

You dive deeply into policy, plowing through a 300-page briefing book on the Department of Homeland Security on a Friday night. You find an issue you can work on with a member from the other side of the aisle and dig in. You eat a lot of Chinese food.

In the sprawling class of 96 House freshmen, just nine are Democrats, dubbing themselves ?the noble nine.? Their marginalization ? in a chamber obsessed with party control and seniority ? is all the more acute vis-à-vis the 87 Republican freshmen, whose sheer numbers and ideological intensity make them the most visible novices in over a decade.

But the Democrats, a cheerful coterie, have learned to embrace small victories, work hard and keep their eyes fixed firmly on their districts, from Southern California to Delaware, where they maintain a powerful role.

They all remain keenly aware that a wave election, like the midterms last November, can sweep a relatively new member into power, a la Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, a Republican first elected in 2006 and now No. 3 in his party?s leadership.

The Democrats also view themselves as a much-needed countervailing voice against the majority in the huge policy disputes that have engulfed the Capitol this year (even if this can often feel like using a garden hose on a wildfire).

?Our role is to fight for what we think is the right agenda,? said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, ?and hopefully in some way influence the agenda. We are not just here as observers.?

At the end of the day, each of the nine Democrats said in interviews last week, their role in their own districts is not terribly diminished by their relative invisibility here. ?It just doesn?t change the focus of what the folks in Alabama sent me here to do,? said Representative Terri A. Sewell, whose district covers parts of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.

While the Republican freshman class is notable for the large number of members without any prior political experience, the freshman Democrats are an experienced group, including Representative Karen Bass, a former speaker of the California Assembly; Mr. Cicilline, who was the mayor of Providence; and Representative Frederica S. Wilson, who spent over a decade in the Florida Legislature. Only Ms. Sewell had never been elected to public office.

?It?s kind of frustrating,? said Ms. Wilson, who is best known for her large cowboy hats that tend to match her outfit (well hello, lemon yellow!), which to her great disappointment were banned from the House floor in the session?s first week.

?I walked in the first time to a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting and I was told I had walked through the Republican door,? she said. ?I thought, ?Ohhhhh, I didn?t know there was a door for each party.? Being in the minority is intrinsic here.?

Some, like Representative William Keating of Massachusetts, never labored in the minority in their previous state legislative careers, and then there is Ms. Sewell, who is the only Democrat in the seven-member Alabama House delegation.

These freshmen Democrats are a diverse bunch, racially and geographically, though politically they are largely liberal. One exception is Representative John Carney, the lone representative from Delaware, where Democrats have a smaller majority than most other districts represented by Democratic freshmen. Mr. Carney won the seat that had been held by a Republican, Mike Castle, for nearly three decades.

?These nine men and women represent the best of public service,? said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, ?each bringing their own unique background and experience to the halls of Congress.?

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Tracking How Mobile Apps Track You

Third-party apps are the weakest link in user privacy on smart phones. They often get access to large quantities of user data, and there are few rules covering how they must handle that data once they have it. Worse yet, few third-party apps have a privacy policy telling users what they intend to do.

That was the message delivered at a hearing of the U.S. Senate committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held yesterday. Companies and regulators are struggling to find ways to ensure that user data is handled properly by apps installed on smart phones, but the way apps are designed makes this difficult.

Mobile privacy has come under extreme scrutiny since revelations that Apple's iPhone and Google's Android software collect and store users' location data. Last week, a U.S. Senate subcommittee questioned those two companies on their handling of personal data. This week, Facebook joined Google and Apple on the hot seat.

But all three companies run platforms that support thousands of third-party developers, and how to make sure those apps respect users' privacy, and explain their rules, is a major question. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas) said at the hearing, "It's not clear that Americans understand how their information may be shared or transferred."

The hearing also highlighted several reasons why it'll be difficult to control what apps are doing with user data. It's not clear which laws should be used to regulate third-party apps, and, in some cases, it's hard to design proper technical requirements. "There's no privacy law for general commerce whatsoever," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts). "Data collectors alone are setting the rules."

A major initiative designed to improve consumer privacy on the Web?the proposed "Do Not Track" bill?could be hard to apply to mobile devices, regulators said. The bill would allow consumers to opt out of having their online activity tracked.

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Divisions Are Clear as Obama and Netanyahu Discuss Peace

Sitting at Mr. Obama?s side in the Oval Office, leaning toward him and at times looking him directly in the eye, the Israeli leader bluntly rejected compromises of the sort Mr. Obama had outlined the day before in hopes of reviving a moribund peace process. Mr. Obama, who had sought to emphasize Israel?s concerns in his remarks moments earlier, stared back.

In his public remarks, delivered after a meeting that lasted more than two hours, Mr. Netanyahu warned against ?a peace based on illusions,? seemingly leaving the prospect for new talks as remote as they have been since the last significant American push for peace collapsed last fall. Officials said that the meeting was productive, but that there were no plans for formal negotiations or any mechanisms in place to push the two sides forward.

Most significant among his public objections, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would not accept a return to the boundaries that existed before the war in 1967 gave it control of the West Bank and Gaza, calling them indefensible.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama said for the first time that those borders should to be the starting point for negotiations to create a Palestinian state, though he emphasized that they would be adjusted to some degree through land swaps to account for Israeli settlements. Mr. Netanyahu simply ignored that nuance ? as did many conservative critics here in Washington ? further exacerbating tensions with the administration.

?Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide; it?s half the width of the Washington Beltway,? Mr. Netanyahu said. He was referring to the narrowest point between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tel Aviv, while displaying a well-honed familiarity with American cultural references to make his point for an American audience. ?These were not the boundaries of peace. They were the boundaries of repeated wars.?

If Mr. Obama and his aides hoped his speech on Thursday would give fresh momentum to the peace process, Mr. Netanyahu?s reaction ? first in an angry phone call Thursday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then face to face with the president a day later ? underscored why the conflict has long vexed presidential peacemaking.

?There was no expectation the outcome of the speech would be an immediate resumption of talks,? a senior administration official said after the meeting. ?It may take some time.?

Mr. Obama did not back away from his proposals, despite harsh criticism from Israel?s staunchest supporters, especially among Republicans, who accused the president of setting out a framework intended to force Israeli concessions.

But Mr. Obama went to length in his remarks on Friday to acknowledge Israel?s security concerns and to emphasize what he called ?the extraordinary bonds between our two countries.? When Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Obama ?the leader of a great people? and then fumbled with his words after calling himself ?the leader of a much smaller people,? the president interrupted to correct him. ?A great people,? he said.

As he did in his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama called the region?s turmoil ?a moment of opportunity? to promote democracy and stability in the Middle East and North Africa, even as he acknowledged that ?there are significant perils,? reflecting a widely held perception in Israel that the events have made a peace settlement riskier than ever.

Mr. Obama received the political backing of the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, which with the United States are the international mediators overseeing efforts to end the conflict, known as the quartet. It issued a statement expressing ?strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace outlined? by Mr. Obama.

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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Tracking How Mobile Apps Track You

Third-party apps are the weakest link in user privacy on smart phones. They often get access to large quantities of user data, and there are few rules covering how they must handle that data once they have it. Worse yet, few third-party apps have a privacy policy telling users what they intend to do.

That was the message delivered at a hearing of the U.S. Senate committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held yesterday. Companies and regulators are struggling to find ways to ensure that user data is handled properly by apps installed on smart phones, but the way apps are designed makes this difficult.

Mobile privacy has come under extreme scrutiny since revelations that Apple's iPhone and Google's Android software collect and store users' location data. Last week, a U.S. Senate subcommittee questioned those two companies on their handling of personal data. This week, Facebook joined Google and Apple on the hot seat.

But all three companies run platforms that support thousands of third-party developers, and how to make sure those apps respect users' privacy, and explain their rules, is a major question. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas) said at the hearing, "It's not clear that Americans understand how their information may be shared or transferred."

The hearing also highlighted several reasons why it'll be difficult to control what apps are doing with user data. It's not clear which laws should be used to regulate third-party apps, and, in some cases, it's hard to design proper technical requirements. "There's no privacy law for general commerce whatsoever," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts). "Data collectors alone are setting the rules."

A major initiative designed to improve consumer privacy on the Web?the proposed "Do Not Track" bill?could be hard to apply to mobile devices, regulators said. The bill would allow consumers to opt out of having their online activity tracked.

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Thoughts on Jumping

It may seem an odd subject to focus on, as jumping doesn't seem to be very important on the face of it ? cut it out of a game, though, and it can make a huge difference. Games in which players can?t jump, or at the very least dodge or roll, can seem painfully slow, dull and static. Games in which players can jump around and use that movement to interact with the environment can seem immeasurably more fun because of it.

Take Half-Life 2, for example. It?s a game which nearly everyone would agree is well-made, decently written, fun and fast to play through. Now cast your mind back to the first scene in Kliener?s lab, where Gordon is first properly introduced to his allies, where the plot is given its first proper push and where you?re gifted with the HEV suit again. It?s a busy sequence; lots to do, lots to take in. You?d expect most players to pay close attention, at least the first time around.

Instead, every single player I know spends most of the time jumping around. Sometimes they try to jump on the scenery or knock over objects, other times they just leapfrog around the room when a simple stroll would suffice.


The same behaviour holds true in most other games too, I?ve found. When I played Beyond Good and Evil for the first time I hardly walked anywhere across the surface of Hillys; I rolled. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, any hallway that involved walking for more than two seconds would be punctuated by periodic bounding. It seems like aberrant behaviour at first, yet it seems as though everyone does it. Why?

The reason, I think, is actually more to do with player speed than actually jumping. It?s not that people always like to move fast through games or that they enjoy spending time off the ground. Instead, it comes back to the original point ? games that don?t feature jumping can feel static and slow, so we use these features if they're present to help negate this effect. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a pretty fast-paced game, but running down a long corridor can still feel dull and empty; jumping as you run lets you vary the speed of the game. It creates tiny events of player agency and interaction, which stave off that staid feeling.

At the same time, adventure games that don?t feature anything so much as a sprint button? Don?t they seem increasingly slow and dated these days?


This isn?t the only reason why jumping is important, though. It helps you practice for later. It can be used to ward off boredom. It helps you to further explore the game space away from the key features. There's an abundance of smaller reasons; not least of which is possibly the fact that some people just have twitchy thumbs.

For the best games, though ? and this ties into a more overarching theory of mine about character speed ? the act of jumping can be a joy in itself. Master Chief?s jump, for example, is pleasantly floaty, while Dante?s can last for as long as you can hammer the attack buttons. Faith?s standing jump in Mirror?s Edge, however, is realistically awkward; she?s much better with running leaps.

Getting these nuances of player speed correct is one of the most subtle and important aspects of making a good game, especially for first person shooters. Trust me, I play a lot of really rubbish games and I can tell you that, if you throw all the cleverness away and boil it down to basic functionality, Half-Life 2 would still stand above Conspiracy Island 2 based solely on player speed. And the quality of the jumping.

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How Mexican web design got on the map

Many would be glad to be one of the most awarded interactive advertising agencies in the world, but Mexican digital agency Grupo W is taking it further. Here is how a company and its school helped put Mexican web design on the map.

Grupo W was founded in 1999 in Saltillo, a Mexican city of 700,000 inhabitants one hour away from Monterrey. The group opened a commercial office in the capital Mexico D.F. in 2009, and another one in Miami at the end of 2010 to enter the US Hispanic market. This expansion is easy to explain: over the last decade, Grupo W imposed itself as one of the most creative digital agencies in the world, particularly with regard to web design, and counts with clients such as Coca-Cola, Nike and Unilever.

Since the group is also heavily involved in developing the Mexican industry, it was a natural choice to interview one of its founder, Ulises Valencia. According to Ulises, Mexican web design should still improve, but the sector has grown a lot recently. In his view, the gap with developed countries has narrowed over the last years. As for the region, ?Mexico and Brazil are now well ahead of the other Latin American countries, though there are some interesting things going on in Argentina and Colombia.?

His area of expertise is digital advertising, where he witnessed the same shift that had already happened in other countries: most Mexican campaigns have now integrated mobile and social elements. As a consequence, Flash is less prominent and HTML5 is gaining ground. Digital advertising budgets have finally increased: Mexican advertising clients now spend an average of 15% of their total campaign budget online, vs. 5% a few years ago (though Ulises hopes that this share will keep on growing). Visually, Mexico also follows global design trends.

Does this mean that it would be more appropriate to talk about ?web design in Mexico? than ?Mexican web design?? The answer is yes in most cases, but small digital offices still manage to maintain a Mexican perspective. One example is Zoveck Studio, known for re-interpretating Mexican symbols and clichés; their website is also worth a look!

Grupo W too is making efforts to reflect the Mexican culture in its creations whenever it?s possible. This was the case of PS3 and XBox 360 video game ?Lucha Libre: AAA Heroes del Ring?, whose campaign looked very Mexican.

However, Grupo W?s most interesting contribution to Mexican web design wasn?t exactly done on purpose. When it decided to create its own school in 2008, it was only looking for a solution to an internal problem: while growing quickly, it wasn?t managing to fill vacancies in the group due to the lack of qualified young professionals in the country. This is why the Digital Invaders school was born in 2009, when it welcomed its first promotion of students.

Since then, 3 more generations have completed the course and a 5th promotion just arrived in Saltillo. The school is located there because all 11 teachers are professionals from Grupo W. According to Alejandro Montoya, the school?s Director, the fact that the city doesn?t offer many distractions is a plus for Digital Invaders: it helps the students to remain focused during the 3 months they spend in Saltillo.

The best thing about Digital Invaders is that it had a huge impact on Mexico, much beyond the original intent. Of course, it did answer Grupo W?s contracting problems ? from the students who graduated from the school each year, about a third joined the agency, which currently employs 55 people. But the unexpected collateral effect is that the remaining students (all of them Mexican so far) also joined other Mexican agencies in Mexico D.F., Monterrey, Morelia or Guadalajara. They brought with them what they had learned in the school, contributing to the Mexican digital industry?s professionalization - which is the school?s key mission. Agencies and clients are now well aware of this and most students don?t pay tuition fees thanks to third-party scholarships.

As for the curriculum, it doesn?t include any programming classes: students should master these skills before joining. According to Alejandro, what they learn is how to use these skills for creative purposes and unleash their creativity. A good example of this is Digital Invaders? website, which unexpectedly became (and still is) Grupo W?s most awarded piece. Since it?s a Flash experience, I can only recommend you to go and see for yourself, but this image already gives you an idea of the design.

Though Digital Invaders is crucial, it?s not the only way Grupo W contributes to the digital switch in Mexico: some professionals have recently left Grupo W and joined traditional agencies to work on digital projects. Unexpectedly, Ulises seems very pleased about it: he is confident that they will bring a more digital approach with them and help the market grow.

One final example of Grupo W?s sharing mindset is the Labs section of their website, where they put some of their work for others to use. As Ulises says, ?Grupo W learned a lot from others, so it?s appropriate to give back too?. Let?s leave him the last word: ?Generosity is one of the greatest things about Internet?.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/la/2011/05/21/how-mexican-web-design-got-on-the-map/

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Intel extends warranty of 320 Series, discontinues X25-M

In a brief statement yesterday morning, Intel announced that it would extend the limited warranty for its 320 Series solid-state drives from three years to five. The company said it is "confident in the enhanced reliability features" of its third-generation SSDs and the updated policy applies to all 320 Series drives, including those that have already been purchased by consumers.

Interestingly, the company didn't bless its 510 Series with the same treatment, suggesting it has less faith in the durability of those models. The 510 Series is equipped with Intel's 34nm MLC NAND flash and a Marvell controller, whereas the 320 Series pairs Intel's new 25nm memory with its own-brand PC29AS21BA0 controller -- the same part found inside its X25-M G2.

It's also worth noting that the 320 Series has additional reliability features to protect against flash errors and power failures. The drives come in six capacities spanning from 40GB ($100) to 600GB ($1,200) with read rates of up to 270MB/s and peak writes of 220MB/s -- though that speed declines with the drive's size. The 40GB model maxes out at 200MB/s and 45MB/s.

The 320 Series represents Intel's latest mainstream offering and is a replacement for the company's vastly successful X25-M. While that has been known for months, reports are circulating this week that Intel has recently informed its partners that it will officially discontinue its X25-V, X25-M and X25-E series flash drives this year, with the last shipment set for November 15, 2011.

The warranty extension comes shortly after the results of an RMA study that covered various computer hardware components, including storage drives. According to that report, Intel had an SSD return rate of 0.3% -- the lowest recorded and the only company below 1%. Kingston had a 1.2% RMA rate, Crucial had 1.9%, Corsair had 2.7% and OCZ was last with 3.5%.

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Divisions Are Clear as Obama and Netanyahu Discuss Peace

Sitting at Mr. Obama?s side in the Oval Office, leaning toward him and at times looking him directly in the eye, the Israeli leader bluntly rejected compromises of the sort Mr. Obama had outlined the day before in hopes of reviving a moribund peace process. Mr. Obama, who had sought to emphasize Israel?s concerns in his remarks moments earlier, stared back.

In his public remarks, delivered after a meeting that lasted more than two hours, Mr. Netanyahu warned against ?a peace based on illusions,? seemingly leaving the prospect for new talks as remote as they have been since the last significant American push for peace collapsed last fall. Officials said that the meeting was productive, but that there were no plans for formal negotiations or any mechanisms in place to push the two sides forward.

Most significant among his public objections, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would not accept a return to the boundaries that existed before the war in 1967 gave it control of the West Bank and Gaza, calling them indefensible.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama said for the first time that those borders should to be the starting point for negotiations to create a Palestinian state, though he emphasized that they would be adjusted to some degree through land swaps to account for Israeli settlements. Mr. Netanyahu simply ignored that nuance ? as did many conservative critics here in Washington ? further exacerbating tensions with the administration.

?Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide; it?s half the width of the Washington Beltway,? Mr. Netanyahu said. He was referring to the narrowest point between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tel Aviv, while displaying a well-honed familiarity with American cultural references to make his point for an American audience. ?These were not the boundaries of peace. They were the boundaries of repeated wars.?

If Mr. Obama and his aides hoped his speech on Thursday would give fresh momentum to the peace process, Mr. Netanyahu?s reaction ? first in an angry phone call Thursday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then face to face with the president a day later ? underscored why the conflict has long vexed presidential peacemaking.

?There was no expectation the outcome of the speech would be an immediate resumption of talks,? a senior administration official said after the meeting. ?It may take some time.?

Mr. Obama did not back away from his proposals, despite harsh criticism from Israel?s staunchest supporters, especially among Republicans, who accused the president of setting out a framework intended to force Israeli concessions.

But Mr. Obama went to length in his remarks on Friday to acknowledge Israel?s security concerns and to emphasize what he called ?the extraordinary bonds between our two countries.? When Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Obama ?the leader of a great people? and then fumbled with his words after calling himself ?the leader of a much smaller people,? the president interrupted to correct him. ?A great people,? he said.

As he did in his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama called the region?s turmoil ?a moment of opportunity? to promote democracy and stability in the Middle East and North Africa, even as he acknowledged that ?there are significant perils,? reflecting a widely held perception in Israel that the events have made a peace settlement riskier than ever.

Mr. Obama received the political backing of the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, which with the United States are the international mediators overseeing efforts to end the conflict, known as the quartet. It issued a statement expressing ?strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace outlined? by Mr. Obama.

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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