Bahrain to hire ex-U.S. police chief for reforms (Reuters)

DUBAI (Reuters) ? Bahrain plans to hire a former police chief in Florida to help with reforms of its law enforcement procedures after an independent inquiry found evidence of systematic rights abuses during a crackdown on pro-democracy protests this year.

"(John) Timoney was chief of the Miami Police for seven years, where among his many accomplishments were the successful reduction of crime and the implementation of proper practices for the use of force," Bahrain's government said in a statement.

Bahrain has said that the interior ministry was in the process of hiring U.S. and British security experts to help police protect rights and freedoms while enforcing order.

The Gulf Arab state has said a code of conduct would be developed for police, as it faces frequent protests by majority Shi'ite Muslims against the Sunni-led government.

Bahrain has said it will comply with the findings of the inquiry, headed by international rights experts, and is under pressure from its ally the United States to show improvements in its rights record to secure an arms sale.

The inquiry was set up after Bahrain faced international criticism for imposing martial law during a crackdown on protests, in which it called in Saudi and United Arab Emirates forces for help.

Rights activists have said senior figures should be sacked over the abuses listed in the inquiry's report, which appeared to have been more hard-hitting than some in government expected.

It said torture was used to extract confessions that were used to convict hundreds of people in military courts, mainly Shi'ites. It described the abuse as "systematic", and said some 3,000 people were detained and 2,000 sacked from state jobs.

(Reporting by Firouz Sedarat, editing by Rosalind Russell)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111202/wl_nm/us_bahrain_police

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IPhone surpasses celebs, news as most searched on Web (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Apple's iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the top searched term on the Web in 2011, according to Yahoo!

The digital media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five.

American Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.

"This is the first time since 2002 that we have had a gadget at No.1, which is an iPhone." Vera Chan, a Web trend analyst at Yahoo!, said in a conference call announcing the results of the review now in its 10th year.

"Even though the product has been around for four years it just became such a major news story," she added.

PlayStation2 topped the list in 2002.

Chan credited the iPhone with helping to facilitate political movements around the world and said the device embodied the vision of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who died in October.

Women dominated the list, capturing six out of the top 10 spots. Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan made headlines for a brief stay in jail and court appearances for violating probation on drunken driving and theft charges captured the No. 6 spot.

Actress Jennifer Aniston, a first timer on the top 10 list along with Lopez, came in eighth.

In addition to the Casey Anthony trial, the Japan earthquake and Osama bin Laden who was killed in a U.S. assault in Pakistan earlier this year, were the only news stories to make the top 10.

"People don't have to search for details they get in the news, and it is rare that a news story end up on the overall list," said Chan.

Pop princess Britney Spears, who dominated the list in the top spot for four consecutive years, failed to make the list this year.

"American Idol," which was the most search item in 2004, placed seventh.

The Yahoo! list is based on aggregated visitor activity on the network and billions of consumer searches.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/search/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111201/wr_nm/us2011_trends

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Zynga plans up to $1 billion in IPO: report (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Facebook games developer Zynga Inc will sell about 15 percent of its common stock in an initial public offering, Bloomberg said, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.

Zynga plans to sell shares for $8.50 to $10 apiece in its initial public offering to raise as much as $1 billion, valuing the company at as high as $7 billion, the agency said.

Dani Dudeck, a spokeswoman for Zynga, declined to comment to Reuters on the Bloomberg report.

Zynga rose to prominence on viral games such as "Farmville," which is still among one of the most popular games on the Facebook social network. While its games are free, Zynga makes money from selling virtual items such as tractors and weapons that people use in its game worlds.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111202/bs_nm/us_zynga_ipo

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Taylor Swift To Premiere 'Ours' Video Friday

In a photo tease from the clip, Swift sits on a bed in just a white, oversized cardigan.
By Jocelyn Vena

Taylor Swift on the set of "Ours"
Photo: Big Machine via Instagram

Taylor Swift is giving her fans a little treat for the holidays: a brand-new music video. The singer will drop the clip for her Speak Now ballad "Ours" on E! on Friday evening.

In a photo tease from the video, Swift sits on a bed in just a white, oversized cardigan, her hair swept up, looking off into the distance. Swift performed the song at the CMA Awards earlier this month. For the performance, she kept it equally simple, sitting on a big, comfy couch, strumming her guitar.

The track, featured on a bonus edition of her chart-topping 2010 album, is a country-tinged ditty about falling for someone everyone thinks you shouldn't. On it, she sings, " 'Cause I love the gap between your teeth/ And I love the riddles that you speak/ And any snide remarks from my father about your tattoos will be ignored/ 'Cause my heart is yours."

The timing of the video release comes just as Swift is knee-deep in writing her next album. "I've just been so excited about what's gonna happen in the next year," she said. "I'm also really excited about [the next album]. I've been writing all the time. I've been writing so much for the new record. I can't believe I'm saying that already: It comes out in a year, but I'm already excited about it."

As the year wraps up, Swift's schedule remains busy until the holidays. She was on hand Tuesday night for a taping of CMT Artists of the Year in Nashville. It airs December 13 and will also feature Jason Aldean, Kenny Chesney, Lady Antebellum and Brad Paisley.

But perhaps what has Swift the most pumped is the holiday season. "I'm excited about the holidays," she said. "I love Christmas. I love the whole buildup to Christmas and the way that everything is exciting and wintergreen-ish and Christmas tree-ish."

What are you expecting from the "Ours" video? Let us know in the comments!

Related Artists

• Taylor Swift

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1675138/taylor-swift-ours-music-video.jhtml

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BBC iPlayer (Global) now available in Canada

The BBC has now made its global BBC iPlayer app available in Canada following successful launches in eleven other countries earlier in the year. There is still no sign of the app hitting the U.S. App Store but it can?t be too far away now.

Watch

...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/SV_GJjIP76M/story01.htm

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Mars science lab 'Curiosity' to launch 'extraterrestrial real-estate appraisal'

After a decade of "following the water," planetary scientists want to see if water co-existed with other critical environmental conditions that could have allowed simple forms of life to emerge.

Mars Science Laboratory, a one-ton chemistry lab on wheels set for launch Saturday morning from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is geared for a unique mission.

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Think "extraterrestrial real-estate appraisal," says Pamela Conrad, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

We're not quite ready to hunt for life itself yet, and the MSL rover isn't designed to do so, say researchers taking part in the $2.5-billion mission to the red planet.

IN PICTURES:?Exploring Mars

But after a decade of "following the water" ? a necessary ingredient for life as researchers currently understand it ? planetary scientists are moving to take the next critical step: see if water co-existed with other critical environmental conditions that could have allowed simple forms of life to emerge.

Organisms on Earth take the forms they do because they are adapted to their environments, MSL researchers explain. If humans eventually hunt for evidence of life itself on the Red Planet, or anywhere else, for that matter, knowing something about the environment organisms inhabit will yield clues about what the organisms were or are like.

"If a Tim Allen, 'Galaxy Quest,' alien rock creature were to come up and bang us on the head, we don't want to ignore it. That would be the 'Ah ha!' moment we'd regret having missed," says Steve Brenner, director of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla.

For Mars, the incremental Holy Grail is finding organic carbon, the stuff of complex molecules that form the building blocks for life, according to John Grotzinger, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the mission's project scientist.

"It's a long shot, but we're going to try," he said during a prelaunch briefing this week..

Meteorites deposit organic compounds on the Martian surface all the time, but today's conditions are so harsh that the compounds are quickly destroyed, he explains.

Finding organic carbon captured in the layered rocks that the rover Curiosity will explore would indicate that at the time the layers were deposited, conditions on the surface at that location could well have been far more benign, allowing organic compounds to exist at the surface.

Set for launch at 10:02 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Saturday, Curiosity holds a TripTik that sets the rover into Mars' Gale Crater next August.

The oversized ding in Mars' crust is 96 miles across, about 3 miles deep, and sports a gently sloping mountain in its center that rises to a height comparable to California's Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states.

Some researchers crudely estimate the impact crater's age at between 3.5 billion and 3.8 billion years old.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/8lI2VFYDnS8/Mars-science-lab-Curiosity-to-launch-extraterrestrial-real-estate-appraisal

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Google exec: Online piracy bills in Congress wrong

MINNEAPOLIS?? Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that it would be a mistake for Congress to approve Hollywood-backed legislation meant to combat online piracy because it would be ineffective and could fundamentally alter the way the Internet works.

Companion bills before the House and Senate would allow copyright holders to go to court to compel credit card companies and online advertising companies, including Google, to cut off websites dedicated to distributing pirated material. Prosecutors would be able to get court orders forcing search engines to drop the sites.

The House's Stop Online Piracy Act the Senate's Protect IP Act are backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which estimates the cost of online piracy at $135 million a year. Internet giants Google, Yahoo, Facebook have come out against the legislation.

In response to a question after speaking Wednesday at the University of Minnesota, Schmidt said it would be a mistake to adopt the bills' approach to fighting piracy. "The problem with the two bills is that they go after all the wrong problems," said Schmidt.

Schmidt said some provisions in the bills were technologically difficult, including giving copyright holders the right to delete links from the Internet and criminalizing the indexing of the content by search engines.

"There are a whole bunch of issues involved with breaking the Internet and the way it works," he said.

Another big problem, he said, was that the bills won't work. He said the criminal activity would immediately move to different websites and continue.

"The correct solution, which we've repeatedly said, is to follow the money," Schmidt said. "Making it more explicitly illegal to make money from that type of content is what we recommend."

Finally, Schmidt said they violated free speech rights protected in the First Amendment. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the author of the Senate bill, disputed that in a statement released by his office Wednesday afternoon.

"There is no First Amendment right to steal," he said. "This (bill) will protect Americans' intellectual property rights, which in turn boosts our economy and promotes American jobs."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has introduced a separate bill that would update current federal copyright law to make clear that streaming copyrighted material for commercial purposes can be prosecuted as a felony. A spokesman, Linden Zakula, said Klobuchar "hopes that Leahy and the House authors work to address the concerns about the larger bill."

Schmidt spoke at the university's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The university is one of the biggest users of the Google's free applications in higher education in the United States, with more than 90,000 Google email accounts.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45501385/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

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