Obama and Netanyahu Are Facing a Turning Point

By all accounts, they do not trust each other. President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far ? a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama?s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president?s plan to endorse Israel?s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama did not back down. But the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a ?train wreck? coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.

Mr. Netanyahu, his close associates say, desperately wants Mr. Obama to use the diplomatic muscle of the United States to protect Israel from the vote, not only by vetoing it in the Security Council, but also by leaning hard on America?s European allies to get them to reject it as well.

Mr. Obama has indicated that he will certainly do the first. But it remains unclear how far Mr. Obama can go to persuade Britain, France and other American allies to join the United States in rejecting the move, particularly as long as Mr. Netanyahu continues to resist endorsing the pre-1967 lines.

From one of their first meetings, at the King David Hotel on July 23, 2008, when Mr. Obama, then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, visited Israel, the two men have struck, at most, an intellectual bond. Mr. Netanyahu, as the leader of Israel?s conservative Likud Party, was far more comfortable with the Republican Party in the United States than with Mr. Obama, the son of a Muslim man from Kenya whose introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict was initially framed by discussions with pro-Palestinian academics.

?Their relationship is correct at best,? said Judith Kipper, director of Middle East programs at the Institute of World Affairs. Mr. Netanyahu ?likes the status quo, and he particularly identifies with conservative Republicans.?

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a friend of Mr. Netanyahu?s, recalled that after the first meeting, Mr. Netanyahu walked out of the hotel and told him that he had been impressed with Mr. Obama?s intellect, and that the American presidency ?was his to lose.?

But things went downhill soon after Mr. Obama took office and, within months, called for a halt in Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu refused, handing the president his first foreign policy humiliation when Mr. Obama had to abandon the demand in the face of Israel?s refusal to comply.

Compounding the problem, Mr. Netanyahu delivered a fiery speech to a pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington declaring that ?Jerusalem isn?t a settlement, it?s our capital.? A furious White House promptly denied him all the trappings of a presidential meeting with Mr. Obama the next day, refusing to allow photographers to take pictures of the two men in the Oval Office, as is usually the case for meetings with foreign leaders.

Things got so bad, Mr. Foxman recalled, that Mr. Netanyahu ?told me, ?Abe, I need two hours just alone to talk to him.? Late last year, Mr. Netanyahu got his two hours at the White House with Mr. Obama, a meeting which, both American and Israeli officials say, helped clear the air. ?The relationship now is very cordial,? a senior White House official said.

But the easing of tensions ended this spring when, Israeli and American officials said, Mr. Netanyahu got wind of Mr. Obama?s plans to make a major address on the Middle East, and alerted Republican leaders that he would like to address a joint meeting of Congress. That move was widely interpreted as an attempt to get out in front of Mr. Obama, by presenting an Israeli peace proposal that, while short of what the Palestinians want, would box in the president. House Speaker John A. Boehner issued the invitation, for late May.

So White House officials timed Mr. Obama?s speech on Thursday to make sure he went first.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e1a54f3c87a39129e3dc13691bf1b5ef

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Apple completes deal with Sony for cloud music service

Apple has completed its deal with Sony for its unannounced upcoming cloud music service, Bloomberg reports.

The company wrapped up an agreement with EMI yesterday, and finalized deals with Warner Music Group some time ago.

This means there?s only one more major label to go, and it also happens to be the largest: Universal Music Group. Depending on how smoothly talks with them go, it?s becoming more and more likely that we?re looking at a WWDC announcement.

Google and Amazon have already launched their own cloud music services, but they have foregone licensing deals and don?t have the ubiquity in the music space that Apple?s iTunes does.

I think it?s clear who is likely to be the winner in this war, but Apple has to enter the scene first.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/05/20/apple-completes-deal-with-sony-for-cloud-music-service/

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Lawsuit accuses AT&T of inflating iPhone, iPad data usage

A new class action lawsuit accuses AT&T of "systematically overcharging" iPhone and iPad users for data usage. Suspecting foul play, AT&T customer Patrick Hendricks and his lawyers hired an independent tech consultant who conducted a four-month study that determined AT&T inflates data consumption figures by an average of 7% to 14% and sometimes as much as 300%.

In an interview with MSNBC, attorney Barry Davis likened the discovery to a rigged gas pump that only dispenses 9/10's of a gallon. Davis said the researchers recorded discrepancies that bloated every single data transaction. Affected users may only pay an extra $10 or $15 per month, but that's big money when you multiply it by as many as 20 million iPhone and iPad owners.

In addition to overestimating legitimate data transactions, the suit accuses AT&T of so-called "phantom charges." The tech firm reportedly purchased a spanking new iPhone and disabled everything that might trigger data usage. After letting the handset sit on but unused for 10 days, it supposedly accumulated charges for 35 different transactions totaling nearly 3,000KB.

The tests also found that AT&T doesn't always record the correct time and date of data usage, causing some transactions to appear on the wrong bill. It's unclear how much cash AT&T might be making off the unscrupulous billing, but the suit didn't hesitate to note that the company's wireless data revenues increased by $1.1 billion on-year in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The carrier has responded to the allegations by saying that they are "without merit" and reflect a "misunderstanding of how data is consumed and billed." AT&T blamed some of the overages on applications that run in the background or those that are automatically updated. For instance, less tech-savvy users might not realize that features such as push notifications count toward their data limit.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43878-lawsuit-accuses-att-of-inflating-iphone-ipad-data-usage.html

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The Dell Venue Pro continues to disappoint

Consumer backlash over issues with Dell?s Venue Pro Windows Phone 7 handset continues to mount. Today marks yet another slipped date for a possible firmware update to assuage issues with the phones, and owners are steamed.

The handsets were originally delayed, and lengthily so, and have since dealt with bricking and a grip of other issues that have yet to be resolved.

Dell is in the soup with this one. In fact, one grumpy owner who has gone through several Venue Pros, only to have each break, has surrendered:

I give up. You guys win. These things are defective products and will always be. [...] You?ve got me Dell. You took my money. You have had me make OVER a 100 hours of phone calls trying to get help in getting a working unit. I have missed at least two dozen extremely important calls in the past five months (I have missed hundreds of calls all together) due to constant crashing. I get it.

Ouch. Today was a heavily rumored day to mark the release date of a, now nearly mythical update that would end many of the issues, but it did not appear.

That same disgruntled user has a second tale, however. According to him Dell tried to buy him off, offering cash if he gave up on his cause to get a non-faulty handset. This is his story:

Let me know if anyone else understands my point or if I am the one that is nuts.

I bought the Dell Venue Pro for $249 with an additional $20 a month added to my cell bill to subsidize the other $250 that the $500 device actually costs.

I have returned 5 of these units and out of no where Dell?s customer service (Kapeesh is his name) has started calling me, to inform me that they want to offer me other options since they can?t get me a working device.

They want me to send the device back and they will give me back my $250. I explained that that puts me in the hole, because I would still be making payments with the extra $20 a month (which eventually goes in Dell?s pocket) for the next year and a half. Further more, since I already have a contract, they will not subsidize a new phone to me. The only comparable phone with T-Mobile is the HD7, which will cost me $499 with this existing contract.

So I explained their ?refunding? the device in the manner of which they speak gives them money, and I get nothing in return, and then have to shell out more money to buy a phone completely outright.

They keep talking to me like I am nuts and that I am trying to double talk them into handing me more money I don?t deserve.

Does anyone else understand what I am saying, or am I looking at this incorrectly?

Talk about a sad monologue indeed. Let?s hope that Microsoft steps in and does something about the situation. If Dell is really shipping broken handsets to users, Microsoft needs to get involved and protect its brand.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/05/19/the-dell-venue-pro-continues-to-disappoint/

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News Analysis: Inventing the New American Motives

But even as Mr. Obama appealed for the people of the region to embrace self-determination as the route to peace and prosperity, he left open how far the United States could go in matching its enthusiasm with concrete steps to support a sustained transformation in a region long defined by repression, poverty and seething frustration.

If the model, as the president suggested, was the integration of eastern Europe into the West after the fall of Communism, the reality that he left unaddressed was that this is not 1989.

In global politics, as in life, timing is everything. The Middle Eastern and North African states now in various stages of upheaval have come to democracy in an era of painfully tight budgets in the United States and economic crisis in Europe.

What Egypt was offered in the president?s speech ? $1 billion in debt relief over several years and another $1 billion in loans to finance infrastructure improvements ? is hardly a Marshall Plan, as the Egyptians have made clear in private discussions with Washington.

And because there are no institutions in the Arab world akin to the European Union, the beacon that drove many of the former Soviet states to adopt the institutions of democratic capitalism, Mr. Obama and other Western leaders are racing to invent something.

?The reality is that there just isn?t much money around for this project,? one of Mr. Obama?s top officials acknowledged after his speech in the State Department ended.

The drive now is to persuade the Saudis and other oil rich states to underwrite the transitions in democracy. It is not an easy sell as the Saudis, among others, swallow their anger at Mr. Obama?s abandonment of old but reliable dictators, and as they desperately try to stop the democratic contagion from seeping across their borders.

That dilemma points up one of the many challenges that faced Mr. Obama as he tried to fashion an American doctrine for dealing with a period of upheaval that is still under way. Six months after a Tunisian street peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in protest, and set a region on fire, the president was understandably eager to fill the vacuum from forming in the region.

With the fate of Libya, Syria and Yemen still in play, his aides knew he had to align himself more forcefully with the voices for change, and to equate their revolution with America?s, 235 years ago.

He did, declaring: ?The United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves. Now, we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable and more just.?

But the risk is that the region may perceive that Mr. Obama has more good intentions than cash to put into the enterprise. And in an area that has long been suspicious of American motives, Mr. Obama acknowledged that it will take more than hearty endorsements to carry the revolution to the next stage.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a089559185dcd8f6209ed10357d33d34

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Use your social network for good and win tickets to the Black Eyed Peas

BroadCause, the largest cause awareness platform announced today that, in an effort to raise awareness and funds for the Robin Hood Foundation, they?ll be giving away tickets to the Black Eyed Peas ?Concert 4 NYC? benefit event June 9th.

The week-long promotion aims to encourage BroadCause users to share the campaign via Facebook and Twitter. That?s all you have to do to enter. 54,000 general admission tickets will be given away on the Concert 4 NYC site and 100 VIP tickets (valued at $500 a pop) will be given away on the BroadCause site.

BroadCause is the go-to social platform for any brand that wants to authentically align themselves with good causes ? in this case, the concert will directly benefit impoverished New Yorkers by way of the Robin Hood Foundation. The RHF board pays all administrative fees, so donations go directly to those who need it most.

?As our big event approaches, the authentic social influence of BroadCause will help us reach millions of brand new fans and supporters who will rally around our mission,? said Jim Samalis, managing director of marketing, communications & events, Robin Hood Foundation. ?With the help of the Black Eyed Peas and BroadCause, we are on our way to change the lives of the many people, families and children of New York City who are greatly in need.?

Supporters are also welcome to donate directly to the Robin Hood Foundation page.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/19/use-your-social-network-for-good-and-win-tickets-to-the-black-eyed-peas/

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Amazon: Kindle books now outselling print books

Amazon began selling hardcover and paperback books in July 1995. Twelve years later in November 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle and began selling Kindle books.

In July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales. In January 2011, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Now, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon customers are purchasing more Kindle books than all print books combined.

Since April 1, for every 100 print books sold on Amazon.com, 105 Kindle books have been sold. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded (if included the number would of course be even higher).

So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon's print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon's US books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital, and once again free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.

Furthermore, actual device sales are also very high. Amazon sold more than three times as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.

The US Kindle Store now has more than 950,000 books (175,000+ were added to in the last five months), including New Releases and 109 of 111 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 790,000 of these books are $10 or less, including 69 New York Times Best Sellers. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle devices.

Arguably the best part of the Kindle ecosystem is Amazon's Whispersync technology. It saves and synchronizes your full library of books, bookmarks, last page read, highlights, and annotations across all of your Kindles and Kindle apps for the Mac, PC, Android devices, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Phone, and soon HP TouchPads and BlackBerry PlayBooks.

"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said in a statement. "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly - we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years. In addition, we're excited by the response to Kindle with Special Offers for only $114, which has quickly become the bestselling member of the Kindle family. We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers. We're grateful to our customers for continuing to make Kindle the bestselling e-reader in the world and the Kindle Store the most popular e-bookstore in the world."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43875-amazon-kindle-books-now-outselling-print-books.html

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Use your social network for good and win tickets to the Black Eyed Peas

BroadCause, the largest cause awareness platform announced today that, in an effort to raise awareness and funds for the Robin Hood Foundation, they?ll be giving away tickets to the Black Eyed Peas ?Concert 4 NYC? benefit event June 9th.

The week-long promotion aims to encourage BroadCause users to share the campaign via Facebook and Twitter. That?s all you have to do to enter. 54,000 general admission tickets will be given away on the Concert 4 NYC site and 100 VIP tickets (valued at $500 a pop) will be given away on the BroadCause site.

BroadCause is the go-to social platform for any brand that wants to authentically align themselves with good causes ? in this case, the concert will directly benefit impoverished New Yorkers by way of the Robin Hood Foundation. The RHF board pays all administrative fees, so donations go directly to those who need it most.

?As our big event approaches, the authentic social influence of BroadCause will help us reach millions of brand new fans and supporters who will rally around our mission,? said Jim Samalis, managing director of marketing, communications & events, Robin Hood Foundation. ?With the help of the Black Eyed Peas and BroadCause, we are on our way to change the lives of the many people, families and children of New York City who are greatly in need.?

Supporters are also welcome to donate directly to the Robin Hood Foundation page.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/19/use-your-social-network-for-good-and-win-tickets-to-the-black-eyed-peas/

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Bracing for the Data Deluge

From Facebook to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the world is catalogued in databases. No one knows it better than MIT adjunct professor and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who has spent the last 25 years developing the technology that made it so. He got his big break by inventing and commercializing technology that underlies most of the databases, known as relational databases, that rule today. But Stonebraker now happily calls his earlier inventions largely obsolete. He's working on a new generation of database technology that can handle the flood of digital data that is starting to overwhelm established methods.

"Relational databases are omnipresent as the solution for enterprise data. They have been fabulously successful," Stonebraker says. But he says that the largest database vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, still sell such products as being appropriate for any business. Stonebraker has a different view: that new database technologies are required to handle the exponential increases in the information that businesses must handle. Stonebraker, 67, is already finding success with several of his own new approaches.

One is a database system called C-Store. Unlike most systems in use today, it stores data on disk column by column, not row by row. That simple tweak required a complete rewrite of how databases have worked, but it dovetails neatly with both the way computer memory works and the way databases are accessed. That yields much faster performance and more compressed data.

That tweak and others made by Stonebraker and colleagues at MIT, Brown, Brandeis, Yale, and the University of Massachusetts enabled the launch of Vertica, a company that commercialized C-Store and helped customers to query large databases almost in real time. Vertica was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in February and boasts clients including Comcast, which uses it to monitor the millions of devices that make up its TV and Internet networks, and Groupon, which uses it to analyze the actions of its millions of subscribers.

A related system from Stonebraker and some of the same academic colleagues, H-Store, builds on the same ideas with extra improvements such as running entirely in a computer's memory, not on disk; this method is particularly useful in online transaction processing. H-Store's code is open source, but the technology is being commercialized by venture-backed VoltDB, with Stonebraker as CTO. He argues that this kind of use-specific, built-for-speed databasing system is what most enterprises will need to adopt sooner rather than later to deal with the flood of digital data.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=ce3ec286d4828416d6d798c942b15949

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Amazon: Kindle books now outselling print books

Amazon began selling hardcover and paperback books in July 1995. Twelve years later in November 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle and began selling Kindle books.

In July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales. In January 2011, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Now, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon customers are purchasing more Kindle books than all print books combined.

Since April 1, for every 100 print books sold on Amazon.com, 105 Kindle books have been sold. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded (if included the number would of course be even higher).

So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon's print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon's US books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital, and once again free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.

Furthermore, actual device sales are also very high. Amazon sold more than three times as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.

The US Kindle Store now has more than 950,000 books (175,000+ were added to in the last five months), including New Releases and 109 of 111 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 790,000 of these books are $10 or less, including 69 New York Times Best Sellers. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle devices.

Arguably the best part of the Kindle ecosystem is Amazon's Whispersync technology. It saves and synchronizes your full library of books, bookmarks, last page read, highlights, and annotations across all of your Kindles and Kindle apps for the Mac, PC, Android devices, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Phone, and soon HP TouchPads and BlackBerry PlayBooks.

"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said in a statement. "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly - we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years. In addition, we're excited by the response to Kindle with Special Offers for only $114, which has quickly become the bestselling member of the Kindle family. We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers. We're grateful to our customers for continuing to make Kindle the bestselling e-reader in the world and the Kindle Store the most popular e-bookstore in the world."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43875-amazon-kindle-books-now-outselling-print-books.html

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