HBT: Nationals are favored to get C.J. Wilson

The Nationals made a big splash at last December?s Winter Meetings, signing outfielder?Jayson Werth to a seven-year, $126 million contract. Might they be preparing a similar-style plunge at this year?s event?

According to Jon Heyman of SI.com, other teams are viewing the Nationals as the current favorite to land free agent left-handed starter C.J. Wilson.

Wilson, 31, posted a stellar 2.94 ERA and 206/74 K/BB ratio in 223 1/3 innings this past season for the Rangers. He was a dominant reliever, and he?s now turned himself into a top-of-the-line rotation arm.

The Marlins, Angels and Red Sox are also thought to have interest. Texas is likely to make a bid as well.

Source: http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/12/04/nationals-seen-as-favorite-for-left-hander-c-j-wilson/related/

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4 aboard small plane that crashed in Colorado (AP)

SILVERTON, Colo. ? Authorities say four people were aboard a single-engine plane that crashed this weekend in the southwest Colorado mountains.

More than 18 hours after the crash there was still no word on whether anyone survived. San Juan County officials say a search team was headed to the site Sunday morning.

The plane crashed at about 3 p.m. Saturday about 1 1/2 miles north of Silverton.

The search was suspended later Saturday because of bad weather. Temperatures in Silverton dipped to 4 degrees overnight and more than 3 inches of snow has fallen this weekend.

The names of the people on board haven't been released. Authorities say the plane was flying from Durango to Aspen.

Debris from the plane is scattered over a wide area up to 11,000 feet above sea level.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111204/ap_on_re_us/us_colorado_plane_crash

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The 2012 candidates should be judged by personalities, not promises. Introducing ?Character Sketch,? a new column. (The Ticket)

Mitt Romney (Mary Schwalm/AP)

A month before the Iowa caucuses, most campaign coverage pivots around breathless questions with the staying power of a Kardashian marriage. Will Mitt Romney go all-out in Iowa? Can Newt Gingrich develop a ground game? Should Herman Cain reassess himself off the political stage? Yet while horse-race strategies dominate cable TV chatter, they do not provide clues about how a victorious Republican might govern from the Oval Office.

So how do we predict presidential performance?

Not by parsing position papers. Too often what a candidate talks about on the campaign trail has scant connection with his posture in the White House. George W. Bush belittled "nation building" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore. Barack Obama trumpeted his opposition to a health-care mandate nearly four years ago during his primary race against Hillary Clinton.

When we elect a president, Americans instinctively grasp that we are choosing a leader who will have to respond to unforeseen crises. That is why voters place such a premium on the personality and biographies of the candidates. But too often news nuggets that illuminate a candidate's character and decision-making style get lost in the hurly-burly of daily campaign coverage.

A prime example of what gets overlooked appeared this week in the first short installment of Politico's campaign ebook, Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back. Written hastily by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas, the ebook boasts the literary grace of Politico's collected tweets from the campaign trail. Too often the narrative reflects the narrow worldview of campaign consultants. (For example, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are all belittled for not making enough fund-raising calls.) But still The Right Fights Back offers intriguing, if fleeting, character sketches of the Republican contenders.

An anecdote or a quote that illuminates one aspect of a candidate's personality tends to be suggestive rather than a Rosetta Stone that decodes everything at once. The Politico ebook and several magazine profiles that were published this week provide hints of Romney's micro-managing; of Gingrich's trouble with personnel, as he is unable to explain why he originally hired a traditional staff for an unorthodox campaign; and Rick Perry's bafflement that charm alone ?is not sufficient in presidential politics. These are not definitive judgments so much as tiles in a mosaic that will not be completely filled in even on Election Day 2012.

What we learned this week:

Mitt Romney: New anecdotes about the former Massachusetts governor are doled out as parsimoniously as dinner in a Dickensian orphanage. That is why it is telling that both the Politico ebook and a New York Times Magazine profile by Robert Draper both contain the oft-told tale that Romney wrote his own 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. Presumably, this factoid was deliberately leaked twice to underscore Romney's unswerving fidelity to every policy position that he has taken, er, very recently.

There is enough detail about Romney the Writer in the ebook and the magazine article to suggest that this story is not only self-serving but also actually true. Romney, who has a proprietary sense about his words, balked at dictating his thoughts to a ghostwriter who would then write draft chapters. In the end, Romney produced a first draft and then his collaborator added a spit shine and some polish. None of this should suggest that Romney is a great natural stylist. An unnamed aide, quoted in the New York Times Magazine piece, recalls saying during the 2008 campaign, "We're not very happy with our speechwriter, and we want to fire him. His name's Mitt, and he works on the third floor."

Reading words that a candidate has actually written is one of the best ways to try to divine how his mind works. In imagining Romney as a possible 45th president, we should never lose sight of his hyper-rational background as a business consultant. It is evident in sentences like this from No Apology: "Our economy is powered by two pistons--the first is productivity improvement in existing businesses and the second is creation of new businesses." Why am I so sure that Romney composed this passage? Because no ghostwriter would have dared to submit prose this clunkily earnest.

Ever since imagemakers peddled the outlandish notion of a "New Nixon" during the 1968 campaign, political narratives have been built around the way that presidential candidates mature and grow during their quest for power. (Odd how in no other profession do personalities change significantly in one's fifties and sixties). In the Politico ebook, Romney purportedly "seemed more Zen-like" after his 2008 defeat and a senior adviser confided that the candidate now no longer obsesses over "the little things."

This portrayal of Mitt the Mellow is at odds with a new article by Alec MacGillis in The New Republic highlighting the more explosive aspects of Romney's personality. (Disclosure: I am a special correspondent for the magazine). Some of the incidents that MacGillis cites are ancient history: Romney was briefly handcuffed by a Massachusetts park ranger in 1981 in an argument over whether his motorboat registration number had been painted over.

But during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, which he ran, Romney began personally directing traffic when an overly zealous sheriff's deputy refused to allow VIP buses to pass, because they lacked security placards. Another security official, Shaun Knopp, told reporters at the time that Romney unleashed a string of epithets. For his part, Romney insisted that the worst word he used was "H-E double hockey sticks."

Far more worrisome than Romney's ire was his use of this Victorian euphemism to describe Satan's Zip code.

Newt Gingrich: In a political year in which the conventional wisdom has been upended more times than the euro, it is not surprising that the former House speaker--now the surprise leader of the Republican pack--gets only a few walk-ons in The Right Fights Back.

In a mid-November interview with Politico for the ebook, Gingrich lambasted his former campaign advisers, most of whom are now working for Rick Perry. What particularly irked Gingrich was the suggestion that his third wife, Callista, should not campaign in South Carolina for fear of reminding voters of his tangled marital history. As Gingrich put it, without ever acknowledging his mistake in hiring these staffers, "We were surrounded by a bunch of guys who had learned politics 25 years ago and they had no idea how the world had changed."

Rick Perry: Politico's account of the three-term Texas governor's flame-out as a presidential front-runner follows the established story line: Perry was lured into the race believing that it was a cakewalk and only belatedly discovered that it was a fire walk. The Right Fights Back does offer a few telling details like Perry privately bristling after being quizzed in Florida on his policy positions by potential major donors. Afterward a genuinely puzzled Perry asked a staffer, "Why do they need to know my position on global warming? Don't they just like me?"

That quote alone could serve as the epitaph for Perry's presidential ambitions. And, no surprise, the fund-raiser who told that story to Politico has since left the Perry campaign.

Almost all the good stories in The Right Fights Back come from the disillusioned, the disloyal and the dismissed. The advisers for candidates in sight of the nomination (see Romney, Mitt) have no incentive to transcend the banalities of the spin room. That is why campaign books dating back to Theodore White's landmark The Making of the President 1960 appeared only after Election Day. As much as we long for insights about the candidates that go beyond the humdrum details of a new Romney ad in Iowa, Politico's new ebook reminds me of a putdown that Walter Mondale hurled at Gary Hart during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign: "Where's the beef?"

Walter Shapiro is covering his ninth presidential campaign. This is the first in a series of articles examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20111202/pl_yblog_theticket/the-2012-candidates-should-be-judged-by-personalities-not-promises-introducing-character-sketch-a-new-col

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China's demand for oil will equal US demand by 2040, study predicts

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) ? Despite aggressive demand-management policies announced in recent years, China's oil use could easily reach levels comparable to today's U.S. levels by 2040, according to a new energy study by the Baker Institute.

The study's authors said this finding has timely significance because China's growing energy use could continue to pose a major challenge for global climate deliberations in South Africa this week.

The study, "The Rise of China and Its Energy Implications," finds that China's recent efforts at centralizing energy policy do not appear to be significantly more successful than the makeshift patchwork of energy initiatives devised by the United States. In fact, the study said, the U.S. system of open and competitive private sector investment is stimulating more innovation in the American energy sector than in the Chinese energy industry, especially in the area of unconventional oil and gas.

That, ironically, is attracting Chinese state investment to U.S. shores and prompting Beijing to consider further opening of its oil and gas exploration activities to partnerships with U.S. firms, the study said.

China, like the United States, has substantial potential shale gas resources but faces technical, regulatory and market infrastructure challenges that are likely to delay rapid development. Were China to mobilize investments in shale gas more quickly, the study said, it could greatly reduce the country's expected large import needs for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Australia and the Middle East and contribute to a future glut in global natural gas markets.

Despite sporadic government policies to discourage private car ownership, the growth in the number of vehicles on the road in China has more than quadrupled in recent years to more than 50 million. The Baker Institute report projects that this number could increase to more than 200 million vehicles by 2020 and 770 million by 2040 under a scenario where China's real gross domestic product growth averages 6 percent between now and 2030. Even under a scenario where the number of electric cars rises to 5 million a year by 2030, which is in line with ambitious targets announced by China's National Development and Reform Commission, China's oil use from the transportation sector will grow significantly, the Baker Institute study said.

"Given the scale of vehicle stock growth in China, it is going to be extremely difficult to move the needle of the country's rising transport fuel outlook," said Kenneth Medlock, a study author and the James A. Baker III and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics at the Baker Institute.

The study noted that China's "going abroad" strategy has also encountered recent difficulties in light of geopolitical events and rising global political risks in oil-producing regions.

"China is learning that owning equity oil in risky regions may not be as effective an energy security strategy as it had previously imagined," said Amy Myers Jaffe, an author of the study and the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute. "China is now finding itself mired in more energy-related foreign diplomacy than it bargained for.

"But this could be good news for the United States," Jaffe said. "It may mean China will be more inclined to act in concert with other members of the international community in conflict-prone regions."

The study noted that China has tried to offset some of this risk by increasing investments in the United States and Canada, which gives the U.S. more leverage in seeking China's collaboration in international diplomatic matters.

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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111201132521.htm

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Kroger 3Q profit dips but tops Wall Street's view

In this photo made Nov. 28, 2011, a shopper pushes a cart into a Kroger grocery story in Richardson, Texas. Kroger Co.?s third-quarter net income slipped 2 percent, hurt by a higher LIFO charge. But the performance beat analysts? expectations and the nation?s largest grocery chain raised its full-year earnings forecast. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

In this photo made Nov. 28, 2011, a shopper pushes a cart into a Kroger grocery story in Richardson, Texas. Kroger Co.?s third-quarter net income slipped 2 percent, hurt by a higher LIFO charge. But the performance beat analysts? expectations and the nation?s largest grocery chain raised its full-year earnings forecast. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

In this photo made Nov. 28, 2011, a deli worker wears the Kroger logo on her shirt sleeve, at the grocery story in Richardson, Texas. Kroger Co.?s third-quarter net income slipped 2 percent, hurt by a higher LIFO charge. But the performance beat analysts? expectations and the nation?s largest grocery chain raised its full-year earnings forecast. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Kroger Co. says its customers are feeling increasingly stressed as they face pressure from both the weak economy and higher food costs.

The grocery store operator managed to post a profit Thursday that beat Wall Street's expectations and it raised its full-year forecast. However, Kroger said cost inflation and the economy have had a harsher impact on the overall operating environment than it expected. Some shoppers are struggling to stretch their limited grocery budget further and as a result, are buying less each visit, opting for smaller packages and switching to store brands.

"When you consider that household income has remained stagnant for the past year ? in fact for the last several years ? some shifting in purchasing behavior is understandable," said Rodney McMullen, Kroger's president and chief operating officer. "This is one of the reasons we embarked upon the strategy we did several years ago."

Kroger has managed to maintain its popularity and profitability amid this pressure by increasing its emphasis on low prices and loyalty programs, which offer its most frequent shoppers discounts on fuel and their favorite items. It also has put a heavy emphasis on cost-control in its operations.

The company, which operates Kroger, Ralphs, Fred Meyer and other grocery chains, reported that its net income dipped to $195.9 million, or 33 cents per share, for the period ended Nov. 5 as it struggled with some higher costs of its own. That's down from $202.2 million, or 32 cents per share, a year ago.

The quarter included an inventory accounting charge of $61.6 million, which is much higher than a similar $11.5 million charge it incurred a year earlier. There were fewer shares outstanding in the current quarter.

Kroger's revenue increased 10 percent to $20.59 billion. Excluding fuel, revenue increased 5.1 percent from the prior-year period.

The results beat analysts' expectations for earnings of 31 cents per share on revenue of $20.4 billion, according to a FactSet survey.

Like many grocers, Kroger has been dealing with rising costs that it has passed along to consumers as suppliers have increased prices for meat, product and other goods. Kroger said costs rose 6 percent for the quarter on food and other items in its stores excluding fuel.

Consumers across the board are struggling with these increases but have adapted, being more cost-conscious in their shopping by sticking to lists, using coupons and more.

Kroger has put a heavy emphasis on everyday low prices to attract these shoppers but says it will continue to pass along higher costs as needed.

The company's popularity has remained strong as it saw the number of shoppers in its stores grow during the period. Kroger reported that revenue at supermarkets open at least a year gained 5 percent, taking out fuel. The company said that it is the 32nd straight quarter that the figure has increased. This metric is a key measure of a retailer's performance because it excludes results from supermarkets recently opened or closed.

Kroger said that based on its consistent growth, it now expects full-year earnings of $1.95 to $2 per share, up from a previous outlook for earnings between $1.85 and $1.95 per share. Analysts predict earnings of $1.95 per share for the year.

The company also boosted the low end of its guidance for revenue from supermarkets open at least a year. Kroger now anticipates a 4.5 percent to 5 percent increase for the year, excluding fuel. Its prior forecast called for the figure to rise 4 percent to 5 percent.

Its shares rose 13 cents to $23.31 in midday trading amid a broader market dip.

Kroger, based in Cincinnati, operates more than 2,000 supermarkets and multi-department stores nationwide as well as a chain of convenience stores, jewelry stores, fuel centers and 40 food processing plants.

___

Skidmore contributed to this report from Portland, Ore. Chapman contributed from New York.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-12-01-Earns-Kroger/id-865b3d8b68fc40bd8355662464871420

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Android 4.0, meet your granddad x86

Isn't it nice when different generations get together without bickering? Google's x86 version of Ice Cream Sandwich is finally ready for developers and it promises to do exactly that, by playing happily with Intel and AMD's 33-year-old architecture rather than just those young upstarts from ARM. The union isn't entirely harmonious just yet: Ethernet and camera support won't function, while Wi-Fi, sound and hardware acceleration are currently AMD-only. Devs who remain unfazed by such trifles, however, can download the source code via the links below.

[Family photo via Shutterstock]

Android 4.0, meet your granddad x86 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 9to5Google  |  Android-x86.org, Android-x86 (Google Groups)  | Email this | Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/android-4-0-meet-your-granddad-x86/

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Asia stocks mixed before German leader speaks

BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets were mixed Friday as markets nervously awaited a key speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in hopes she might unveil new steps to stanch Europe's escalating debt crisis.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index rose 0.2 percent to 8,613.28, and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3 percent to 4,242. But South Korea's Kospi dropped 0.3 percent to 1,910.87 and Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 0.4 percent to 18,925.68. Benchmarks in Taiwan, Singapore and mainland China were also lower.

Merkel will speak Friday before Germany's parliament about Europe's financial crisis and ahead of a summit of European Union leaders on Dec. 9, whose goal is to deliver a long-term solution to the debt crisis.

Merkel has acknowledged the need for changes to the European Union treaty to impose stricter financial controls on countries that use the euro common currency to prevent them from taking on too much debt.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland said they were working together to make it easier for banks to borrow dollars.

The coordinated effort was meant to prevent Europe's debt crisis from exploding into a global panic. Should a European bank fail or if a country default on its debt, investors fear it could result in a freeze-up in global lending like the one that occurred in 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

The central bank action caused global stocks to rally Thursday.

Another rise in applications for weekly U.S. unemployment benefits dampened the mood on Wall Street on Thursday. Traders took little encouragement from a better manufacturing report. The Institute for Supply Management said that manufacturing grew last month at the fastest pace since June.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 0.2 percent to close at 12,020.03. The S&P 500 index slipped 0.2 percent to 1,244.59. The tech-heavy Nasdaq inched up 0.2 percent to 2,626.

The Labor Department said initial applications rose to 402,000 last week, the second weekly increase in a row. The figures didn't change expectations for the government's monthly labor report, which comes out Friday. Economists forecast that the unemployment rate will remain at 9 percent.

Benchmark oil for January delivery was down 6 cents to $100.14 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday. The contract lost 16 cents to end at $100.20 per barrel on the Nymex on Thursday.

In currency trading, the euro rose to $1.3467 from $1.3460 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose to 77.84 yen from 77.76 yen.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-12-01-World-Markets/id-e5abcd40fb5e436780da42e40497cbc9

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