In emerging markets like China and India, the average low-end handset runs $138 and $140 respectively, according to Munster. The Apple iPhone 4 is priced about 265% higher than the average low priced model in those countries, meaning that for Apple to compete in those markets, it needs to offer a cheaper phone.
source: AppleInsider
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Opposition lawmakers are decrying the first lady?s efforts to implement a new model of government that critics call ?a totalitarian plan? to control Nicaraguans? private lives.
Congressman Alberto Lacayo, head of the minority Nicaraguan Democratic Bloc (BND), warns that Sandinista lawmakers are preparing to use their supermajority muscle in the National Assembly to pass into law Rosario Murillo?s latest political scheme: the creation of so-called ?Councils of Family, Community and Life.?
The new neighborhood organizations, a concept that is so inchoate the Sandinistas can?t even decide what they?re called (they are alternately referred to as ?Councils of Family, Health and Life?) are allegedly going to be put to vote as soon as Thursday, opposition lawmakers warn. Critics claim the creation of the councils and their inclusion in the Family Code is an attempt to repackage the unpopular Councils of Citizen Power (CPCs) and give them a new legal mandate to infiltrate people?s personal space.
??They want to control people?s private lives and households, and they have the votes in the National Assembly to pass it into law on Thursday,? Lacayo told The Nicaragua Dispatch in a phone interview. ?They are disguising the CPCs as Councils of Family and Health or Life or whatever they call it. They are just lubricating it so people don?t feel the danger when they come into your home.? ??
?The Independent Liberal Party (PLI), in its feckless and ornamental role as a minority opposition party, released a statement this week comparing the proposed family councils to the defunct ?Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS),? which in the 1980s were considered ?the eyes and ears of the revolution.?
Opposition lawmakers point to the language of First Lady Rosario Murillo?s so-called ?constitutional document? for the creation of the family councils as evidence that the Sandinistas are trying to institutionalize the CPCs while continuing to exclude all other forms of organized civil society and genuine citizen participation. CPCs are Sandinista neighborhood committees that were formed in 2007 but have never really taken off; less than 5% of the population participates in CPCs, according to polls. Critics think Murillo is trying to recast that project now under the new framework of family councils.
?These councils are the expression of organized communities that promote citizens as protagonists and the practice of values,? Murillo said recently in explaining the new family councils.
In effect, Murillo is trying to institutionalize her very particular vision of family and community values. ?Our identity is Christian, socialist and in solidarity, and the family is the central nucleus of these values, these beliefs, this culture of practices that are solidarity because the Nicaraguan people are generous and in solidarity,? Murillo said repetitively.
The proposed Councils of Family, Community and Life will promote these values in homes, neighborhoods and communities, Murillo explains. Instituting the new family councils in the Family Code the first step in big changes to come, she promised.?
?Further ahead we will see many steps in the path that will bring us to a Nicaragua that is fraternal, dignified, free, just and prosperous,? Murillo said during one of her recent daily monologues on Sandinista TV. ?We will be energized, affirming dialogue, harmony, democracy and peace. We will have more faith, more hope and more love for God, for our neighbors, for ourselves, for our Nicaragua, which is blessed and forever free. We see ourselves as Christians, Socialists and in solidarity. We see many blessings, more protected, more prosperous and more towards new victories. We see everyone, and for everyone and for the good of everyone.?
When attempting to explain how this new model will work, Murillo, the unelected mastermind and administrator of the Sandinista government, is characteristically oracular and pleonastic.
?How will this be moving forward?? Murillo said. ?Working more and better from a model of dignity, unity, fraternity that promotes self-esteem, esteem; a model that recognizes duties and rights; a model that recognizes and incorporates the values of the person, of the family, of the community to recreate the Nicaraguan society from a view of Christianity, Socialism, solidarity and responsibility. We see ourselves reunited in the identity and spirit of community, accompanying ourselves, embodying ourselves, talking and promoting actions and solutions that are our own as citizen protagonists who are responsible, in solidarity, who complement and who identify with the pride and joy as Nicaraguan families, by the grace of God. We see with great learning of communication, co-existence, generosity, friendship as human beings that we need each other and support one another in the good and bad moments, in sickness and in health, in happiness and in adversity, in need and misfortune, in celebration, and in the solutions to the struggles of day-to-day live, that among all of us we can be better.?
Can I get an Amen?
Whatever it is the first lady is talking about, Nicaraguans have reason to worry, says journalist and social commentator Sof?a Montenegro.
The ruling party already controls all the public spaces in Nicaragua, and now they are going after people?s private spaces, Montenegro warns.
?People?s intimate space is at risk,? Montenegro told The Nicaragua Dispatch. ?This is about community totalitarianism.?
The first lady?s recent ?Live Pretty? clean-up campaign is just the tip of the camel?s nose pushing under the tent. The family councils, which allegedly will work in conjunction with various government ministries to enforce the Live Pretty campaign, will be the second push all the way into people?s homes and private spaces.
?When Jehovah?s Witnesses come to your house, you can close the door on them. But now we are going to have family councils coming by the house to make sure we are living pretty?? Montenegro says.
The problem, Montenegro says, is that once the councils are created, they can be used to enforce any type of arbitrary campaign that the government implements. Even if the Sandinista Front says participation in the community councils is voluntary, Montenegro warns, ?They have mechanisms for coercion and pressuring people to join.?
While the first lady and her satraps insist the forthcoming family councils will be used to promote values and good living, critics worry the councils will act as a Trojan Horse for the government to infiltrate the last sanctuary that Nicaraguans? have from politics.
Says Montenegro, ?The only private space left in Nicaragua is the refuge of people?s homes and families, and now they are going after that, too.?
Source: http://www.nicaraguadispatch.com/news/2013/02/is-privacy-at-risk-in-nicaragua/6823
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This was a sad sight on the roads of eastern Cameroon. Dozens of logging trucks thundered towards me each day as I headed towards the border with the Central African Republic. Some of those trunks must have been hundreds of years old, destined to become furniture for people on another continent. The drivers rarely slowed down as their vehicles kicked up clouds of red dust into the air. I resulted to wearing a facemask, as did Hiromu, the Japanese cyclist I would continue to cycle with until the Congo DRC.
Vegetation and huts along the roadside were covered in this red dust. I wondered why people, like this group of Fula-speaking women, didn?t move their homes further away from the road.
Deforestation in Africa is happening at a rate four times faster than anywhere else in the World. Local people have no voice or rights to their land being stripped of its natural resources. In West Africa I saw very little virgin forest. In Central Africa it is disappearing quickly too. Were the region more stable that speed of deforestation might increase even further. Needless to say the cycling wasn?t all that enjoyable. You can read the blog post during my time in this part of Africa here.
Source: http://petergostelow.com/2013/02/19/photo-story-cameroon/
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HEBER SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) ? Perhaps there was one heartbreak too many for Mindy McCready.
The former country star apparently took her own life Sunday afternoon in Heber Springs, Ark. Authorities say McCready died of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot to the head and an autopsy is planned. She was 37, the mother of two young sons.
McCready has had at least three suicide attempts since 2005 among a series of tumultuous public events that marked much of the singer's adult life.
Speaking to The Associated Press in 2010, McCready smiled wryly while talking about the string of issues she'd dealt with over the last half-decade.
"It is a giant whirlwind of chaos all the time," she said of her life. "I call my life a beautiful mess and organized chaos. It's just always been like that. My entire life things have been attracted to me and vice versa that turn into chaotic nightmares or I create the chaos myself. I think that's really the life of a celebrity, of a big, huge, giant personality."
This time it seems the whirlwind overwhelmed McCready.
Her death comes a month after that of David Wilson, her longtime boyfriend and the father of her youngest son. He is believed to have shot himself on the same porch of the home they shared in the small wooded community of large lakefront houses about 65 miles north of Little Rock, Ark., and his death also was investigated as a suicide.
It was the most difficult moment in a life full of them. McCready issued a statement last month lamenting his death. And she called him her soul mate and a caregiver to her sons in an interview with NBC's "Today" show.
"I just keep telling myself that the more suffering that I go through, the greater character I'll have," she said, according to a transcript of the interview.
Like so many times before, McCready showed a little toughness in the midst of a personal storm, again endearing herself to her fans. But as usual, the brave face for the camera hid a much more complicated internal struggle that surfaced publicly time and again over the last 10 years.
This time, along with her remembrances of finding Wilson as he lay dying, she also answered questions about whether they'd argued earlier that evening about an affair and if she'd shot him.
"Oh, my God," the "Today" transcript reads. "No. Oh, my God. No. He was my life. We were each other's life."
It's unclear what circumstances led to McCready taking her own life, but it appears she was struggling again with twin issues that have persisted for years ? substance abuse and the custody of her children. She checked into court-ordered rehab and gave her children up to foster care earlier this month after her father asked a judge to intervene, saying she'd stopped taking care of herself and her sons and was abusing alcohol and prescription drugs.
It's not clear where her sons, 6-year-old Zander and infant Zayne, were Sunday.
A deputy stationed outside McCready's home Sunday night referred questions to the Cleburne County sheriff, who was unavailable. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the front yard and a dark-colored pickup truck sat in the driveway.
News of McCready's death spread quickly Sunday night on Twitter, with major country stars paying their respects to the onetime Nashville darling.
"Too much tragedy to overcome. R.I.P Mindy McCready," wrote Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks.
And Carrie Underwood added: "I grew up listening to Mindy McCready...so sad for her family tonight. Many prayers are going out to them..."
Melinda Gayle McCready arrived in Nashville in 1994 still in her teens with tapes of her karaoke vocals and earned a recording contract with BNA Records. She had a few memorable moments professionally, scoring her first No. 1 hit almost immediately.
"Guys Do It All the Time," a self-assured dig at male chauvinism, endeared her to female fans in 1996. She also scored a hit with "Ten Thousand Angels," and her album of that title sold 2 million copies.
Beyond that, though, she's mostly remembered for a string of dramatic moments as she spent the next 15 years chasing another huge hit. Her problems included a custody battle with her mother over one of her sons, arrests, overdoses and discord in her love life.
She made headlines in April 2008 when she claimed a longtime relationship with baseball great Roger Clemens. Published reports at the time said she met the pitcher at a Florida karaoke bar when she was 15 and he was 28 and married. Clemens denied the relationship. A decade earlier she was engaged to actor Dean Cain, but the two never married.
She also had a turbulent relationship with Billy McKnight, a country singer who is the father of her oldest son. McKnight was arrested in 2005 on charges of attempted murder after authorities say he beat and choked her.
During this period she also pleaded guilty to obtaining the painkiller OxyContin fraudulently at a pharmacy and got probation. She violated the probation with a drunken driving arrest in May 2005, a few days before McKnight was arrested. And in July 2007, she was arrested in her hometown of Fort Myers, Fla., on misdemeanor charges of scratching her mother, Gayle Inge, on the face during a scuffle and resisting sheriff's deputies.
Less than a year later, McCready was arrested and charged with violating her probation by falsifying her community service records relating to the 2004 drug charge. A month later, she entered an extended care facility for undisclosed treatment, and followed that with a 60-day jail sentence. Inge took custody of Zander.
There were at least three suicide attempts between July 2005 and December 2008.
She tried to get help in an unusual way, joining the cast of "Celebrity Rehab 3" with Dr. Drew Pinsky. McCready came off as a sympathetic figure during the show's run. Pinsky called her an "angel" and in an interview in 2010 said it appeared McCready was doing "rather well."
Pinsky helped treat McCready for love addiction on the show and said he'd referred her to professionals who could continue to help her afterward.
"A love addict basically is somebody that really didn't have a good model for intimacy in their childhood, often times traumatized in one way or another, thereby intimacy becomes a risk place, becomes an intolerable place," Pinsky said. "And so what they tend to do is attach themselves to idealized, bigger than life, unavailable others, specifically go after some public figure that's married or go after some rock star who is himself a sex addict and not interested in a relationship, and then idealize that person and actively pursue them to the point of obsession."
McCready suffered a seizure in one of the show's scarier moments. Tests showed she has suffered brain damage, something she attributed to her abusive relationship with McKnight.
McCready is the fifth celebrity to pass away since appearing on Pinsky's show and the third from Season 3. Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr and "Real World" participant Joey Kovar both died of overdoses.
In the months after her stint, McCready said she found some peace, telling The Associated Press in early 2010 that she hoped to get her career restarted, write a book about her experiences and begin production on a reality show with her brothers. She'd just met Wilson and talked openly about their relationship, although the producer and musician declined to speak on the record.
With a publicist, reporters, cameras, makeup artists and musicians swirling around her during a press day for her last album, "I'm Still Here," McCready fended off questions about a sex tape and said she and Wilson started out as friends.
"And I've never had a relationship like that before where we started completely as friends," she said. "It turned into friends really caring about each other and then it turned into love and I've never had that happen before."
At the time, Pinsky thought the relationship was on the right track: "She's an easy person to like and to care about and we hope she does well," Pinsky said. "So far so good as far as I can tell."
McCready said her main goal in 2010 was to pull her family back together: "I would like my son back with me and for my brothers and I and he to be able to go and do this (TV reality show), and I think after that I will be a pretty happy girl."
The new album debuted at No. 71 and failed to gain radio airplay. McCready's plans never materialized and she soon was in legal trouble again, this time fighting for custody.
McCready took her older son from her mother, the boy's legal guardian, in late 2011. She fled to Arkansas without permission over what she called child abuse fears. Authorities eventually found McCready hiding in a home without permission and took the boy into custody.
She and Wilson had their son in April 2012.
___
Music Writer Chris Talbott reported from Nashville, Tenn. Associated Press writer Tamara Lush contributed to this report from Tampa, Fla.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/singer-mindy-mccready-dies-apparent-suicide-042201275.html
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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Martin Scorsese has been tapped to deliver the 2013 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.
The Oscar-winning director of "The Departed" and "Raging Bull" will hold forth on his career as one of the foremost chroniclers of Catholic guilt, violence and criminality in the annual talk sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Scorsese is the first filmmaker to get the honor, a prestigious forum that in the past has drawn such leading figures in the arts and academia as Toni Morrison, Robert Penn Warren and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust. It carries with it a $10,000 honorarium.
"Martin Scorsese is a scholar of, advocate for, and icon of American cinema," said NEH Chairman Jim Leach in a statement. "He is the first filmmaker designated as a Jefferson Lecturer, but he follows in the tradition of earlier speakers like John Updike, Barbara Tuchman, and Arthur Miller in revealing a profound understanding and empathy for the human condition."
Scorsese will present the lecture on April 1 at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Scorsese has directed and produced more than 50 films, including such classics as "Goodfellas," "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver." He is currently working with Leonardo DiCaprio on "The Wolf of Wall Street," which will tell the true story of a New York stockbroker who becomes embroiled in a securities fraud case.
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Samsung has taken the Galaxy brand image to a whole new level that it's reportedly mulling pricing its new Galaxy tablet even higher than its close rival Apple's tablet. While it's no big surprise that Samsung is launching an 8-inch version of its Galaxy Note line of tablets, the latest rumors have it that the Galaxy Note 8.0 will be priced slightly higher than Apple's iPad Mini and that the device will hit the European market around the end of March.
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The new reports have emerged from Bulgaria where a local gadget retailer,?Tablet.bg?has claimed to have obtained the details on the price and release date of Galaxy Note 8.0,?Phone Arena?reports. According to the report, Samsung will launch its Galaxy 8.0 tablet at a price of some 699 Bulgarian leva (equivalent of 358 euro or $478.93). This is the 16GB Wi-Fi version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, the cheapest model. In comparison, the 16GB Wi-Fi only model of Apple iPad Mini costs 349 euro.
The 3G + Wi-Fi version of the Galaxy Note 8.0 is reportedly priced at around 869 leva, which is around 445 euros or $595.32 while the 3G version of iPad Mini is priced at 429 euros or $570. 92.
Though the rumored 'iPad Mini' killer is expected to arrive in European market by end-march, we should be looking at a U.S. release date sometime in April.
The Galaxy tablet has been leaked extensively in the past and is one of the most expected devices at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) later this month. Galaxy Note 8.0 is rumored to feature an 8-inch screen with a 1280x800 resolution display, a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, options of 16/32GB as internal storage, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, HSPA+ and LTE support and the S-Pen. On the other hand, iPad Mini has a 7.9-inch screen with a lesser 1024 x 768-pixel resolution. Galaxy Note 8.0 may run on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and may feature a 4,600mAh battery. The tablet will come with connectivity options such as Bluetooth 4.0, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and A-GPS.
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