Mostly Suppressed in AP Pirate Hostage/Murder Stories: Leader’s Threat, Couple’s Faith
February 23, 2011 No CommentUSA Today's Wednesday cover story (“Killings Escalate Piracy Crisis”), has this reference to a quote obtained by the Associated Press: Killing hostages “has now become part of our rules,” said a pirate who identified himself as Muse Abdi in a statement to the Associated Press. “From now on, anyone who tries to rescue the hostages in our hands will only collect dead bodies,” Abdi said. “It will never, ever happen that hostages are rescued and we are hauled to prison.” Pretty provocative, right? In fact, it resembles a declaration of war without the rules of war. You might even call it a declaration of t-t-t-t … terrorism. The problem is, Abdi's quote is no longer in any story at the Associated Press's home web site, and is rarely present in other Internet news reports. A search at the AP's home site on “Muse Abdi” (in quotes) returns no results . An AP home site search on “Abdi” returns one relevant item that relates to Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, a pirate who was sentenced to 33 years in prison last week. Muse's sentencing is cited as being a possible motivation for the hostage-taking of Scott Adam, wife Jean Adam, Bob Riggle, and Phyllis Macay, who were killed by their captors on Tuesday. As of 10:30 ET, six of
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With four of the 10 best-picture nominees based on true stories, contenders discuss whether fact or fiction is harder to portray. (Feb. 23)
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We’ve been waiting for the pricing and availability pieces of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 puzzle, and a short press release from Vodafone Portugal seems to at least help fill out the edges. While we thought Vodafone’s UK branch had exclusive dibs on the 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet, it looks like it will be hitting Vodafone Portugal first in March for €699. That’s not exactly a bargain, but it’s inline with the pricing of the other Android tablets overseas. Now, if only we knew more about when this one was going to learn English and hit the US. As always, we’re digging as hard as we can on that one. [Thanks, The Wizard] Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 hitting Vodafone Portugal in March for €699 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Historic changes in Russia: Beer, long classified as “foodstuff,” is about to get upgraded to alcohol, “dragging Russian alcohol regulation into the 21st century,” quips the Telegraph . Beer consumption has tripled in Russia in the last 15 years thanks to the fact that it’s been cheap and only lightly regulated….
Continue reading …On second thought, maybe it wasn’t a great idea for Billy Ray Cyrus to blab on about how Hannah Montana ruined his family . The country musician tells People his comments in a recent GQ interview were “explosive, and unintentionally so,” and says that right now the most important thing to…
Continue reading …John Thune’s announcement that he’ll sit out the 2012 presidential race leaves the field bereft of a current sitting lawmaker—something that hasn’t happened since 1904. Typically some senator or other has his eyes on the prize, but right now the GOP’s frothing with so much anti-establishment hostility that anyone…
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Click here to view this media The Nation’s Chris Hayes filling in for Rachel Maddow takes a look at the negotiating tactics being used by the GOP where they’re more than willing to hold the country hostage to get their agenda passed no matter how damaging it is to our country and the Democrats never ending willingness to meet the crazy half way.
Continue reading …Motorola Atrix 4G Laptop Dock demo units have multitouch trackpads — but yours doesn’t
February 23, 2011 No Comment
We were crestfallen to discover that our review unit of the Laptop Dock for Moto’s Atrix 4G didn’t have multitouch capability, making scrolling a rather old-fashioned affair — and considering that a desktop build of Firefox figures prominently into Webtop’s capabilities, scrolling is something you’ll be doing quite a bit of. Well, this is where it gets weird: a number of people on xda-developers are discussing the fact that in-store demo units of the Laptop Dock seem to mysteriously have multitouch added in, and at least one poster notes that a Motorola rep that visited his local store a while back had multitouch working as well. That means one of three things: either these units are physically different hardware, they’re running a prerelease firmware upgrade, or they’ve got a feature that was pulled at the last minute, possibly because it didn’t work very well. Unfortunately, the latter seems plausible because Motorola has indicated to us that the Laptop Dock’s hardware doesn’t support multitouch and it’s not something we can expect to be added in down the road — but we can hope. [Thanks, Caleb] Motorola Atrix 4G Laptop Dock demo units have multitouch trackpads — but yours doesn’t originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Arab States Stockpiling Food As Hedge Against Price Rises & Scarcity (Revolution?)
February 23, 2011 No Comment
Global food prices have been rising for some time , are predicted to rise up to 20% in 2011, and have played a background role in the successful and ongoing popular uprisings in North Africa. Now, United Arab Emirates’ The National reports that several states in the Middle East have begun reinforcing stockpiles of food staples, with the stated motivation being to offset
Continue reading …Sarah Palin lobbied for fellow Mama Grizzly Christine O’Donnell to go on Dancing With the Stars last year, and now it looks like it just might happen. The former Tea Party candidate told her Facebook fans Monday that she was invited onto the reality show, the New York Daily News…
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