Police arrest Occupy Portland demonstrators (AP)

PORTLAND, Ore. ? Authorities say riot police moved into a downtown Portland park area and arrested several anti-Wall Street protesters Saturday night after they refused to vacate the park.

Police Sgt. Pete Simpson says officers began detaining protesters at South Park blocks around 8:30 p.m., after the park was closed a half hour early,

He says several arrests were made but still doesn't have an exact count.

Occupy Portland demonstrators set up tents in a portion of the park that runs through Southwest Portland earlier in the day and vowed to stay through the winter, defying city officials who said overnight camping will not be allowed.

The protesters had been without an encampment since police swept through a downtown site three weeks ago, making arrests and dismantling tents.

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

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$9 for a gallon of gas? What's the price for you?

By msnbc.com staff and wire reports

A story last week?reported that?residents of Nome, Alaska, could be looking at a costly winter: $9-a-gallon gasoline.?The news,?rightfully, has some of?the 3,500 residents in the coastal town freaked out.

"It is going to kill us," said Sunny Song, owner of Mr. Cab,?which ferries children to school, nurses to their patients' homes and women to hospitals to give birth.

According to the Associated Press report, a winter storm prevented a barge that usually carries fuel from getting to shore. The most likely plan is to fly it in, but it would be costly and could be a logistical nightmare.

A gallon of gas was selling for $5.98 a gallon last week. The next barge delivery wouldn't be until next June. In the meantime, flying fuel to the city could increase the cost per gallon by $3 to $4, officials said.

To put that in context, the average price for a gallon of gas in New York is roughly $3.60. In Missouri, it's only $3.017.

To see what the price at the pump is in your neck of the woods, see AAA's updated chart .

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Source: http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/02/9171543-9-for-a-gallon-a-gas-in-alaska-whats-the-cost-in-your-state

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Congo's Kabila leading in early results

Election volunteers sit on bags containing ballots as they wait for tally sheets to be computed at the Fikin compilation center in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011. With voting finally wrapping up Thursday, the election is now moving into the next phase. Like the process of voting, the process of counting the ballots that were cast is plagued by massive logistical challenges. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Election volunteers sit on bags containing ballots as they wait for tally sheets to be computed at the Fikin compilation center in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011. With voting finally wrapping up Thursday, the election is now moving into the next phase. Like the process of voting, the process of counting the ballots that were cast is plagued by massive logistical challenges. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) ? Preliminary results from Congo's presidential election show incumbent Joseph Kabila leading opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, although the country's election chief warned only a small percentage of precincts had been counted.

With around 15 percent of votes tallied, Kabila leads with over 1,52 million, around 52 percent, according to results announced Friday. Tshisekedi is second among the 11 candidates with 997,074, or 34 percent.

Election commission president Daniel Ngoy Mulunda released the early results four days after Monday's vote, after the Election Day was extended for three days to give porters time to transport ballots from the remote corners of this giant nation.

Compiling the results was chaotic. In the capital Kinshasa, sacks of ballots brought in on the backs of poll workers piled up on grass outside the counting center, many having split open. People trampled on the ballots which had spilled on the dirt path leading into the warehouse.

Mulunda released the first results after opposition candidate Vital Kamerhe called a press conference urging the commission to publish partial results for the sake of transparency.

Complicating procedures, fake results had been posted on the election commission's website, said Mulunda. Young Tshisekedi supporters also weaved between cars at downtown intersections, selling a $1 sheet showing a different set of provisional results which had their choice of president in the lead.

Congo remains on edge after days of violence which left at least 18 dead and seriously wounded 100 more, with most of the deaths caused by troops loyal to Kabila, Human Rights Watch said in Friday.

The violence peaked on Saturday when tens of thousands of people descended on Kinshasa's airport to welcome home Tshisekedi as he returned from his final campaign tour in the country's interior. In the government crackdown that followed, at least 14 people were killed, according to the report by the New York-based rights group.

Soldiers fired into the crowd, hitting a 27-year-old mother of five in the head. Among the other victims was a 22-year-old who was shot dead while walking outside a granary near the airport. On Election Day, mobs descended on poling stations. Poll workers were beaten, and vote centers were destroyed.

Government spokesman Lambert Mende denied the accusations in the report, saying the presidential guard shot in the air.

"We are in an African city. We are Africans. And nowhere ? not in (the neighborhood of) Masina, not in the mayor's office ? no one is aware of a wake, or of a funeral. No cemetery has registered a burial. Only HRW is aware of this," he said.

Analysts are concerned that there could be further bloodshed when the election results are announced, scheduled for next Tuesday.

The U.N. Security Council on Friday condemned the bloodshed and urged all candidates and their supporters to refrain from further violent acts.

Congo's enormous territory still includes sections of the bush that are controlled by rebel groups, like in the east where the brutal Lord's Resistance Army is known to be based.

In Oriental province near the town of Faradje, Human Rights Watch says the Lord's Resistance Army attacked a group of voters on their way to vote. Three men were killed, and ten women were abducted. The report says that one of the women, who was six months' pregnant, was raped. She was later released and taken to the hospital but lost her baby.

This is only the second free election in Congo's 51-year history, and the first to be organized entirely by the government instead of by the international community. The logistical challenges are casting a cloud of doubt over the vote, and three of the 11 candidates running for president have already called for the ballot to be annulled.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-12-02-AF-Congo-Election/id-b8e876c2c4334df6b13cc874b42bc598

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Obama, Clinton to announce energy saving program

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Enlisting former President Bill Clinton as a partner, President Barack Obama is announcing a $4 billion effort to increase the energy efficiency of government and private sector buildings, aiming for fuel savings and job creation at no cost to taxpayers.

The proposal, to be announced by Obama and Clinton on Friday, would upgrade buildings over the next two years with a goal of improving energy performance by 20 percent by 2020. The federal government would commit $2 billion to the effort and a coalition of corporations, labor unions, universities and local governments would undertake the other half.

The contractors who undertake the work would be paid with realized energy savings, thus requiring no up-front federal expenditure.

"Upgrading the energy efficiency of America's buildings is one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest ways to save money, cut down on harmful pollution and create good jobs right now," Obama said in a statement.

The president will make the announcement after touring a downtown Washington office building whose owners have agreed to make more energy efficient under Obama's plan.

The program, known as Energy Savings Performance Contracts, has been in place since the Clinton administration but has been little used. Obama's announcement is yet another in a string of White House initiatives designed to address the current weak economy without having to seek congressional approval.

Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council, said private economic analyses indicate that the $4 billion plan could generate about 50,000 jobs over two years.

The program builds on an initiative that Obama launched in February and that Clinton led through his Clinton Foundation to get the private sector to invest in greater energy efficiency. Clinton already had announced commitments of $500 million in energy efficiency projects in June.

The Obama administration helped finance private sector energy upgrades through its 2009 stimulus program. But that money has begun to run out, and advocates of the new initiative say they hope the effort fills the void.

Joining Obama and Clinton will be Thomas Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-time proponent of the Energy Saving Performance Contracts.

"We have been pushing the ESPC program for more than a decade because this holds tremendous potential," Donohue said in a statement. "Despite the benefits of ESPCs, the program has been grossly underutilized."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2011-12-02-Obama-Energy%20Efficiency/id-1c4ec856433a4cf0bdcc3cdcec917dbf

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The Windows 8 Public Beta Rumored for a February Release [Windows 8]

TheNextWeb has sources at Microsoft telling them that the Windows 8 public beta will arrive in February of next year, though little is known about what new features might be included in the beta. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/xr8-bQFhoZw/the-windows-8-public-beta-rumored-for-a-february-release

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Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime

Welcome to the big leagues. The Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime feels like the first laptop-class Android tablet, with its quad-core 1.4Ghz processor, clever add-on keyboard dock, and its support for USB storage and console gamepads. This is easily the most impressive Android tablet ever. But with such startling specs, it's outstripping the weak app selection available for Google's Android Honeycomb OS. Although there are a few standout apps for the platform, the lack of a thriving Android tablet app community makes the Transformer Prime a less sure choice than it should be.

Physical Description and Battery Life
The Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime ($499 for 32GB, $599 for 64GB) is a very long, narrow tablet at 10.4 by 7.1 by .3 inches and 20.6 ounces, but it's very slim at .3 inches. It comes in silver and purple. There's a power/dock connector on the bottom, a MicroUSB slot and MicroSD card slot on the left, a standard 3.5-mm headset jack on the right and a somewhat annoyingly recessed power button on top. The tablet connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and it also has Bluetooth.

Turn the tablet on to experience a slightly altered version of Google Android Honeycomb 3.2, with some custom widgets, slightly altered icons, and some exciting new settings when you tap on the lower left corner of the screen. One of the settings boosts the sharp 1280-by-800 IPS LCD screen into an extra-bright 600 nit mode, which takes the screen from slightly dimmer than the Apple iPad 2's ($499, 4.5 stars) to somewhat brighter, albeit at the cost of battery life.

But why are you buying this without the $149 keyboard dock? The dock turns the Prime into a netbook, adding a six-row keyboard whose keys are? 94% as wide as standard laptop keys, and a trackpad below that. The keyboard's top row is all function keys, and there's a separate menu button; many Android features are mapped to keys so you won't always need to touch the screen, although you'll still have to reach forward for things like scrolling Web pages. The keys are comfortable to type on, but the trackpad button is extremely stiff.

Almost as importantly as the keyboard, the dock adds an extra battery and a full-sized USB port so you can plug in flash drives, hard drives or gaming controllers.

Tegra 3's added power doesn't mean shorter battery life. It should mean longer battery life in many cases. In our standard test - screen brightness turned to max, processor speed at normal, playing a video file until the tablet fails - we got a very respectable 7 hours 38 minutes of playback, almost exactly the life of the iPad 2.

With screen brightness at 50 percent and the power profile set to "balanced," Asus and Nvidia say they got about 10 hours of video playback. Plugging in the dock, which adds its extra battery, adds another 5-6 hours of life. This is truly an all-day device.

Performance

This is the fastest, most powerful tablet we've ever tested - and yes, that includes the iPad 2. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4Ghz each and a "companion core" which runs alone and sips power during more idle moments.

You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets. But in an app that's programmed well for this tablet (or in our benchmarks) the power comes out.

The Prime has three "performance modes" that you can set in the status bar. Power saving mode caps the processor cores at between 600Mhz and 1Ghz depending on usage, caps video frame rates at 35 fps and lowers the screen brightness, all to save power. Balanced mode caps the quad-core processor at 1.2Ghz per core. Normal mode goes all out.

In Normal mode, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619 on the Antutu system benchmark, roughly doubling the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream ($549, 3 stars), with its 1.5Ghz dual-core Qualcomm processor. Much faster RAM and CPU scores made the difference; the tablet was on par with other recent devices for database access and SD I/O. The processor had less effect on Sunspider and Browsermark browsing benchmarks, although the scores of 17ms at Sunspider and 98324 at Browsermark were among the best we've seen on a tablet. Switching the modes down to Balanced, and then Power Saving had the expected effect - first I lost about 10% of the speed, and then half.

This is a spectacular tablet for gaming. The boat game Riptide GP has more realistic water effects than on the iPad; I also played Zen Pinball and Big Top THD, both with rich, gorgeous, well-lit graphics. Adding the dock lets you plug in real gaming controllers, although it also forces you to play in landscape mode. Playing Riptide with a PlayStation 3 SixAxis controller was the best time I have had playing a game on a mobile device, ever. It's much more responsive than tilting the screen. Zen Pinball is also much more playable with real buttons, though I would have liked to be able to play it in portrait mode. (Asus says the tablet also supports some Bluetooth controllers; I just don't have any.) Touch screens just aren't the natural interface for many games. A good joystick can make all the difference.

Adobe's new PS Touch - an Android version of Photoshop - is another great example (and a potential killer app.) PS Touch lets you do very powerful, complex, multilayered transformations on images. Combine it with Autodesk's Sketchbook Pro, and you have a terrific tablet for artists. The quad-core processor greatly speeds up PS Touch: a filter that makes a photo look like an acrylic painting took 1.4 seconds as opposed to 5.3 on the dual-core Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

I ran into some bugs. The Market app stalled out a lot. The Browsermark benchmark sometimes crashed the browser. Occasionally while typing in office suites, the cursor jumped around for no apparent reason. If you plug a USB stick into the dock too quickly after docking the tablet, the tablet won't recognize any USB memory until a cold boot. Scrubbing through a 7.46GB MKV video file made the video player quit at one point; a reboot solved that, too. ?

There's only one perplexing sore point: it takes at least twice as long to cold boot this tablet as with any other tablet I've tested. The Prime takes about a minute to boot; the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ($499, 3.5 stars) and Apple iPad 2 take half that time.

Apps, Such As They Are

This is the first tablet review I've actually written on the tablet. That says a lot, but it doesn't say enough.

The Transformer Prime runs Google Android 3.2, just like most other tablets nowadays. An upgrade to Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" is coming soon, Asus pledges. It comes with all the usual Google apps, plus some custom widgets and 8GB of cloud storage from Asus.

The problem is, as always, finding apps that take advantage of the Prime's hardware is much, much harder than it should be. The vast majority of the apps in Google's and Amazon's app stores are designed to work well on small, cheap smartphones, not to show off what a quad-core tablet can do. Google steadfastly refuses to force developers to include the "Max API" flag, an existing tag which could segregate the low-power, low-res phone apps away from tablet users. Nvidia has improved the situation a bit with its Tegra Zone, a free alternative app store which spotlights games designed for its Tegra 2 and 3 devices.

I covered gaming and art apps above. For office work, you have the choice of a few office suites; I tried DocumentsToGo and OfficeSuite Pro. They're functional but quite basic. The keyboard dock works with them to enable popular keyboard shortcuts, though, so you can shift-select and then hit control-X to cut text, for instance. And you'll have to post your document online; as with all Android devices, there's no built-in support for printers.

The Android interface also doesn't have a quick way to easily flip between several windows. You can say the same about iOS, of course. But I have the Prime next to my Windows 7 netbook right now, and I'm missing the fluidity of being able to have two windows on a screen or to flip between tabs of things without poking the multitasking button at the bottom of the Android interface. The Prime's hardware can do a lot of things at once, but the software doesn't spotlight that.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/zc2J8X6cW4g/0,2817,2397083,00.asp

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Oil jumps to $101 on int'l banking plan (AP)

NEW YORK ? The price of oil surged to $101 per barrel Wednesday, as the U.S. and other countries tried to make it easier for banks to lend money and keep the global economy growing.

The Federal Reserve said it will team up with the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland to increase the flow of dollars around the world. The coordinated move should be a shot in the arm for Europe, where a festering credit crisis has slowed the eurozone economy and threatened a recession.

Separately China reduced the level of cash its banks are required to keep on hand in an effort to boost lending and ramp up the world's second-largest economy.

Stock markets soared while the dollar sank in morning trading. Major U.S. indexes were up more than 3.5 percent. The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the dollar versus other currencies, dropped 1.1 percent.

Oil, which is priced in dollars, tends to rise as the dollar falls and makes crude cheaper for investors holding foreign currency. The price of benchmark crude rose $1.14 to $100.93 per barrel in New York. At one point it was as high as $101.75 a barrel. Brent crude, used to price many foreign kinds of crude, rose 35 cents to $110.21 per barrel in London.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that oil and distillate fuel supplies grew more than expected last week. Oil and gasoline demand fell when compared with a year ago, while demand for distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, increased.

Gasoline pump prices are steady at a national average of $3.295 a gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of regular is about 15 cents cheaper than it was last month, but it's still 44 cents more than at the same time last year.

In other energy trading, heating oil was virtually unchanged at $3.0222 per gallon, and gasoline futures rose 3.77 cents to $2.5775 per gallon. Natural gas fell 7.6 cents to $3.557 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/energy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111130/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices

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