Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is Good, But No iPad Killer [REVIEW]

Unboxing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9

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Amazon expands its tablet sights with the bigger, more powerful Kindle Fire HD 8.9. Can it compete against Apple‘s iPad?

If there’s one company that deserves credit for reigniting the iPad competitor market, it’s Amazon. Despite some bugs and an overall blah design, its 7-inch Kindle Fire was the first Android tablet that made sense to consumers who gobbled it up to help the Fire grab 50% of the Android tablet market in just 6 months.

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That tablet essentially opened the flood gates for a new set of ever-more-powerful 7-inchers from, notably, Barnes & Noble and Google. All three companies have already updated their 7-inch offerings to more powerful components and higher-resolutions screens. They’re all still running Android, though Amazon and Barnes & Noble choose to hide the Google OS behind smarter and much more consumer-friendly interfaces.

All this led Apple to finally enter the mid-sized tablet space with the iPad Mini. It’s easily the best-looking tablet of the bunch, but also $ 120 more expensive than its nearest competitor.

The more interesting development, though, is Amazon‘s (and Barnes & Noble‘s) decision to go toe-to-toe with Apple’s full-size iPad and launch the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (in 4G LTE and WiFi-only). The move is akin to a middle weight boxer putting on the pounds to take on the Heavyweight world champion. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is slightly smaller (the iPad is 9.7-inches), lighter (567g vs. 625g), cheaper ($ 369 for 32 GB model vs. $ 599 for the iPad 4th Gen — Amazon subsidizes with sleep-state ads, that I do not mind) and overall somewhat less powerful. In order to win the battle, the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD better be pretty nimble on its feet, while able to throw that all important knockout punch.

Short version of this story: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 does some serious damage, but the iPad 4th Gen gets the decision and retains the tablet leader title.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is by no means a failure. In many ways, it’s as good as the smaller Kindle Fire HD, but throughout my tests I noticed odd bugs and glitches (which should all be fixable by software) and a somewhat disturbing lack of power that’s especially obvious when you put the Fire HD 8.9 next to the iPad 4th Gen

What It Is

If you’ve never seen an iPad and someone handed you the Kindle Fire HD .9, you’d likely say its jet-black, soft-to-the-touch plastic body felt good in your hands and was more than effective at all the core tasks (reading, game playing, e-mail, web browsing).

Design-wise, the 8.9 device looks exactly like the 7-inch model, complete with the too-hard to find volume and power buttons. There are no other physical buttons on this device, but Amazon chooses to hide the few it has by making them the exact same color as the chassis and flush with the body. Every time I use the tablet I do the “where’s the damn button” dance, rotating the Kindle Fire HD round and round until I feel the buttons (since I can barely see them).

I have applauded Barnes & Noble for putting the physical “N” home button right on the face of their Nook HD. Bravo for having the guts to do this. Amazon apparently looks at Apple’s iPad home button and thinks to have anything similar would be seen as “copying” the Cupertino hardware giant, when instead they should realize that it works, consumers like it and tablets without it are at a distinct disadvantage.

Amazon’s interface has you make do with a virtual, slide-out home button that is always available. Problem is, I found times when it wasn’t available. When I played Spider-Man and Asphalt 7, the tiny little left-had bar would disappear and I couldn’t exit the game unless I hit the sleep/power button.

The rest of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9′s body is solid and unremarkable (if you read my Kindle fire HD 7 review, then you know exactly what to expect.). Like the iPad 4th Gen, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 has a front-facing 720p-capable camera. It’s useful for capturing video, snapping 1 Megapixel images and, probably most important, Skype video chats. Skype has built a fairly sharp-looing Kindle Fire app, though the design doesn’t fully fit the larger 8.9-inch screen. Skype just updated its Android app for better tablet viewing and hopefully, we’ll see this update hit the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 as well.

The iPad also has an HD rear-facing camera. The Kindle fire HD 8.9 does not (Barnes & Noble leave out cameras altogether)

Not Packing a Punch

As a large-screen high-resolution tablet (though iPad’s 2048×1536 retina display beats it), the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 offers plenty of attractive screen real estate for web browsing, book and magazine reading and games. But the results can be mixed. Silk, Amazon‘s custom web browser, was occasionally less than responsive and games, though, they ran well, never looked half as good as they do on the considerably more expensive iPad 4.

Granted, you can’t always find the same high-quality immersive action games on both Android and iOS, but Asphalt 7 Heat is a notable exception and it throws the performance differences between the two tablets into stark contrast. Game play is equally responsive on both platforms: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9’s accelerometer reads my moves just as well as the iPad.

The graphics on the Kindle Fire HD, however, are reduced to blobs and blocks (palm trees without distinct leaves, buildings without discernible windows) . The iPad’s quad-core graphics simply overmatch the Kindle Fire. I have never, for example, seen an iPad draw the game as I was playing, as I did when I tried out The Amazing Spider-Man.

Additionally, I experienced more than my share of crashes with games and even magazine apps like Vanity Fair.

The Good

Not everyone, however, will compare the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 to the iPad. Some will see the $ 299 entry-level price point (for the 16 GB model) and appreciate the power, flexibility and utility of this device. Like all Fire’s before it, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 makes it easy to consume mass quantities of content. Nearly every menu option: Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, Newsstand, puts you just one click away from shopping for fresh content. If you have an Amazon account (and who doesn’t) your desired book, music or movie is just a click away. Plus, you can still easily store any of it locally, and worry about running out of storage space, or in the cloud, and never worry about space or accessibility—you can get to that purchased Kindle content from any Kindle app or registered Amazon device.

Watching movies on the tablet is a pleasure. I streamed a couple through Amazon Prime; they looked good on the 1920 x 1200 screen and the Dolby Stereo speakers produced sharp, loud, almost room-filling sound—an impressive feat not even the iPad can match.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 also includes a mini-HDMI-out port, which prompted me to connect the tablet to my 47-inch LED HDTV so we could watch Disney’s Brave. Yes, I had to get up and tap on the Kindle screen each time I wanted to pause and restart the move, but otherwise, I was pretty impressed with how the Kindle handled the task.

Obviously I yearn for an Apple Airplay-like feature on Android tablets (rumor has it one is coming), but this is the next, best thing.

There isn’t a lot to say about the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch interface that I did not say in the Kindle Fire HD 7 review. I will note, however, that the increased real estate makes the trademark task carousel seem almost too big. Icons for everything from your recently played Spider-Man game to magazine apps, books and Web sites all sit side-by-side-by side. Some, like book covers, look gorgeous.

Others like a broken web-page link look stupid. Worse yet, none of them have labels, which can occasionally make it hard to identify which app or task you’re looking at. I’m just not sure this interface metaphor is sustainable.

Personally I prefer either the clean consistent look of iOS, or the uber-user friendly, family-oriented Nook HD profile-based one. Amazon may want to take a hard look at those and start over.

Staying Connected

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is also Amazon’s first cellular-based tablet. That fact puts it even more squarely in competition with the iPad (which obviously has always had 3G models and now offers blazing fast 4G LTE ones as well on all major carriers).

Amazon’s mobile broadband plans are a little more conservative, with just the AT&T 4G LTE option (the 32 GB 4G model that I tested lists for $ 499, which is still $ 224 less than a comparable iPad 4th Gen).

In my experience, the connectivity is superfast and fairly ubiquitous. Amazon‘s $ 49 (a year) flat fee plan is attractive, but with a cap of 250MB per month of data, it’s unlikely it will satisfy the most data-hungry users. If you do need more data, users can also get 3GB and 5GB data plans directly from AT&T on the device.

At press time, Amazon had not enabled streaming video over LTE. Having it sounds nice, but even with the most generous data plans, streaming video would eat it up faster than you can say, “I’m streaming Back to the Future in HD over 4G LTE on my Kindle fire HD!”

The reality for most users is that WiFi is plentiful and you’ll be hard pressed to find a spot where you can’t connect for free or a small one-off fee. It’s the reason Barnes & Noble’s line of HD Nooks do not include a cellular option.

Review continues after FreeTime Gallery

FreeTime

Kindle HD FreeTime Start

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Perhaps the best new addition to the Kindle Fire family is not a piece of hardware or new component, but the new FreeTime app. Amazon put a lot of loving care into this parental control interface, but almost mucks the whole thing up by hiding the tool under an app that you have to scroll down to (or search) to find. By contrast profiles and age and content controls are baked into the Barnes & Noble Nook HD in a way that makes them impossible to ignore.

Even so, once you do access FreeTime, I think you’ll be pleased with the level of control it gives you. I added test profiles for my two children and then hand-picked every app and piece of content they could access. I was also able to block broadband mobile and even set time limits for access to content and overall screen viewing time (on a per profile basis). The set-up is a bit wonky and it bizarrely switches between landscape and profile screens, but I still applaud the effort. It would make sense for Amazon to move FreeTime into a device set-up screen. If the user has no additional family members or kids using the device, they can easily skip it.

To Buy or Not to Buy

Amazon’s expansive content and shopping ecosystem has always been a strong draw and it’s just as good in this large screen tablet as it was in the very first Kindle Fire. Still, you have to compare it with the equally strong iOS ecosystem, which is no slouch in the content shopping department. Apple doesn’t connect you as seamlessly to physical products, but there’s nothing difficult about shopping on Amazon.com via your iPad. It’s also notable that tablet competitor Barnes & Noble has added movie and TV viewing, rental and purchase.

Ultimately, all of these tablets are offering more and more of the same content options, apps, and features. The decision will likely come down to price, app selection, interface and overall ease of use. The Amazon Kindle fire HD 8.9 scores well on all of these, but does not always lead.

For the price, it’s a great value, but I want Amazon to focus on hardware and interface design for the next big update. Then, they may get my full endorsement.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Stone Soup for Thanksgiving: understanding bird disease through citizen science

Windowkill. Photo: Susan Spear

When somebody opens their front door to pick up the morning newspaper and sees a dead bird below their hedge, they get curious for answers. As soon as they stoop down for a closer look, an Indiana Jones adventure unfolds within the confines of their backyard. Was it poison, disease, predation, starvation, old age? Is this a fluke or widespread plague? Perhaps dead birds like this one are widely scattered across a country. But, if so, what sort of scientific method could find answers to what happened to them all? The stone soup method. In my favorite version of the folk story “Stone Soup,” a group of monks traveling through the war-torn countryside sit in the center of a quiet village and boil a stone in a large pot of water. Soon curiosity wins over the initial distrust and skepticism of impoverished villagers as each, in turn, are enticed to add a vegetable or spice. Through cooperation and sharing, the entire village feasts on delicious, nutritious soup. When my colleagues and I carry out research using citizen science methods, we are like the monks boiling stone soup. Instead of a pot, we have a big blank spreadsheet and curious folk are enticed to each add their observations, ultimately creating a robust database with observations from across a continent. Through citizen science I study healthy birds, but several of my colleagues focus on the sick and dying ones. This week in PLOS ONE, a research team led by Becki Lawson, a veterinarian and ecologist, reported a new strain of avian pox spreading in a common backyard bird in Great Britain. Citizen science participation was pivotal to tracking the outbreak, unraveling its mysteries, and informing localized studies. The new strain of avian pox entered Great Britain and spread in one family of birds, the Paridae. The Paridae include chickadees in North America, their European counterparts are various types of tits, most notably the Great Tit. By piecing together reports from citizen science participants, the team was able to track the spread of pox, starting in southeast England, moving to central England, and then into Wales in less than five years. Avian pox is not for the squeamish, so this study is a testament to what citizen scientists are willing to do. Birds with avian pox grow red, yellow, or gray wart-like lesions, particularly around the eyes, beak, and legs. The new strain makes really large lesions, so severe that they leave the bird unable to feed itself or look out for predators. The pox spreads from individual to individual through direct contact, indirect contact (like touching the same bird feeder), or through a vector that bites, like mosquitoes. There is no way to treat wild birds medically. When an outbreak occurs, people are advised to remove bird feeders to prevent birds from congregating. Also, the study is a reminder for people to periodically clean and sanitize wild bird feeders, just as you would with pets. There are numerous causes of bird deaths in Great Britain. I get the shivers from the names, such as the bacteria like salmonellosis, colibacillosis, Suttonella ornithocola, and Chlamydia psittaci, viruses like pox and fringilla papilloma, and parasites, like trichomonosis, cnemidocoptiasis, and syngamiasis. People have found birds with all of these infectious diseases in over 60 species since 2005 because thousands of individuals have followed hygienic protocols to pick up, package, and submit over 2,500 dead birds to designated veterinary labs for post mortem exams. The veterinary labs participate in the Garden Bird Health initiative (GBHi), a highly collaborative research project to investigate causes of sickness and death in British garden birds. Researchers at the Zoological Society of London collate information from two citizen science projects. First, they receive ad hoc reports, typically through the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Second, Garden BirdWatch, run by the British Trust for Ornithology, formed a systematic surveillance system in which participants provided information every week throughout the year (not just when sick or dead birds are found). Over the past few year Brits were alert and tracking the spread of this pox virus. Two years ago they also followed an epidemic of parasitic finch trichomonosis that caused a significant decline in British greenfinch populations, in research also led by Becki Lawson. The parasitic epidemic spread from the UK to the rest of Europe. The current viral pox epidemic turned the tables: this epidemic is likely invading the UK from Europe. Great Tits don’t migrate, so the new strain of pox had to arrive some other way. Working in coordination with the national efforts, ornithologists from the University of Oxford confirmed that the Great Tit was more susceptible than other species. Although the avian pox has severe effects on individual birds, in particular lowering the odds of survival for chicks and juvenile birds, researchers do not anticipate population declines as occurred with the greenfinch. In the US, citizen scientists are helping study disease and death in birds, too. The House Finch Disease Survey, which is a project by Andr? Dhondt, my colleague (and supervisor) at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has tracked an epidemic of conjunctivitis, spread by bacteria. Like pox, people can typically see the symptoms of conjunctivitis in house finches, mainly red swollen and crusty eyes, like pink eye in our children. In the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of people help monitor marine health as they take long walks on the beach. They have counted thousands of dead (beached) sea birds each year and submitted their observations to my colleague Julia Parrish through the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST). These baseline numbers are important. Unless people are paying attention, we won’t notice if there is a sudden uptick in deaths, or be able to properly estimate the impact of a catastrophe, such as an oil spill. There are plenty of misconceptions about citizen science, largely attributed to its dual achievements: public engagement and academic research. Is the purpose of making stone soup to teach people about cooperation or to produce a good meal? The intent doesn’t matter because the stone soup method achieves both. Likewise, citizen science can woo everyday people into falling in love with science AND co-create knowledge that an individual scientist could not acquire alone. References: Lawson, B., Lachish S., Colvile, K.M., Durrant, C., Peck, K.M., Toms, M.P., Sheldon, B.C., Cunningham, A.A. Emergence of a novel avian pox disease in British tit species. PLoS ONE Lachish, S., Bonsall, M.B., Lawson, B., Cunningham, A.A., Sheldon, B.C. Individual and population-level impacts of an emerging poxvirus disease in a wild population of great tits. PLoS ONE Lachish, S., Lawson, B., Cunningham, A.A., Sheldon, B.C. Epidemiology of the emergent disease Paridae pox in an intensively studied wild bird population. PLoS ONE

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Serious About Free Markets? Prove It

On Friday the Republican Study Committee, a policy shop for congressional Republicans, published a memo on how to fix copyright law. By Saturday afternoon the group’s executive director had pulled the memo, which had evidently failed to approach the subject with “all facts and viewpoints in hand.” This is Washington’s way of saying that an interest group hit the roof, and indeed, Ars Technica reports that lobbyists from the “content industry”—Hollywood and recording companies—pressured the group to renounce the memo.

Copyright being in fact broken, you can still read copies of the memo online. It lays out what copyright reform advocates have been saying for years. Copyright protections now extend 70 years past the life of the author; for a corporation, 95 years after publication. This, along with punitive laws on copyright violation, hinders creativity and innovation. These facts aren’t new. What’s new is the tone. Derek Khanna, the memo’s author, writes like an unashamed free marketeer, and in doing so manages to latch on to a larger point: Laws that help businesses often harm markets. From the memo:

Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value. We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don’t know what isn’t able to be produced as a result of our current system. (Emphasis in the original.)

Radical stuff. There’s no one in Washington to lobby for industries that don’t exist yet, and ever so briefly, Khanna and the Republican Study Committee stepped into that breach. Then they stepped back, to gather more facts and viewpoints. Here’s one: Pro-business and pro-market are not the same thing. The most pleasant place for a business is not elbows-out in the middle of a free market, but sitting alone, atop a fat monopoly. Ask your local cable provider. The larger a business gets, the more it has to protect from the companies and industries that might follow it with something better or cheaper. And the best way to protect what you have is to have it written into law.

Real markets, with real competition, are most helpful to newcomers. Small businesses and new industries create new value. Once created, they, too, move to Washington to protect it. Witness the growth of Google (GOOG) and Facebook’s (FB) lobbying operations in the Capitol. Khanna describes extended copyright protection as rent-seeking—in his words, “non-productive behavior that sucks economic productivity and potential from the overall economy.” What’s true of Hollywood and the recording industry could be said of any established industry.

Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a regular contributor to Bloomberg View, points out that larger companies can lobby for special exemptions in the tax code. This creates complexity in the tax code, which punishes smaller businesses that can’t pay for tax lawyers and don’t have anyone’s buttonhole on Capitol Hill. Zingales prefers simple regulations and simple taxes, which are harder for lobbyists to game and easier for democracies to understand. He sees this as a bipartisan problem. The left is inclined toward more regulation, and the right is pro-business, rather than pro-markets.

The direction Khanna was headed—a defense of open, competitive markets at the expense of existing businesses—is still wide open space, claimed by no party. This summer, conservatives such as Timothy Carney at the Examiner and Yuval Levin at National Review urged Mitt Romney to back markets, not businesses. But he chose not to, even though he, in his day, disrupted existing markets of his own. Some enterprising Republican can still do it. Derek Khanna in 2016! He’s young. Maybe VP.

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Bank of Canada keeps “over time” condition on rate hike

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Tim Lane repeated on Wednesday the central bank‘s message that interest rate increases will likely be needed, but only over time.

The “over time” phrase was introduced in the bank’s key guidance in its rate statement on October 23 as a way of signaling that while the next rate move is likely to be up, such a move was less imminent than it had been.

“Over time, some gradual withdrawal of monetary policy stimulus will likely be required, consistent with achieving the inflation-control target,” Lane said, according to a prepared presentation he was giving on Wednesday in Moncton, New Brunswick.

Another part of the presentation, which was posted on the central bank’s website, noted: “The Canadian economy continues to operate with a small amount of excess supply.”

The Bank of Canada is alone in the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries in signaling an intention to raise rates despite expectations of modest and unbalanced global growth.

Lane forecast “very robust growth” in emerging markets, stagnation in Europe and significant dampening of U.S. growth due to fiscal consolidation. He said Canada‘s real gross domestic product was still expected to grow at a moderate pace.

(Reporting by Randall Palmer; Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson; and Peter Galloway)

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Microsoft vs. Google trial over patents finishes up

SEATTLE (Reuters) – A Google expert witness testified on Tuesday that Microsoft will make roughly $ 94 billion in revenue through 2017 from its Xbox game console and Surface tablet that use Google‘s patented wireless technology.

Michael Dansky, an expert for Google‘s Motorola Mobility unit, testified on the last day of a high stakes trial over patents between Microsoft and Google in Seattle. The $ 94 billion figure he cited also includes a wireless adapter that Microsoft no longer sells. It was not clear how far back he was counting past revenues.

Microsoft declined comment on the figure.

The week-long trial in a Seattle federal court examined how much of a royalty Microsoft Corp should pay Google Inc for a license to some of Motorola‘s patents. Google bought Motorola earlier this year for $ 12.5 billion, partly for its library of communications patents.

Motorola had sought up to $ 4 billion a year for its wireless and video patents, while Microsoft argues its rival deserves just over $ 1 million a year.

If U.S. District Judge James Robart decides Google deserves only a small royalty, then its Motorola patents would be a weaker bargaining chip for Google to negotiate licensing deals with rivals.

The rapid rise of smartphones has sparked an explosion of litigation between major players disputing ownership of the underlying technology and the design of handsets.

Apple Inc and Microsoft have been litigating in courts around the world against Google and partners like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which use the Android operating system on their mobile devices.

Apple contends that Android is basically a copy of its iOS smartphone software, and Microsoft holds patents that it contends cover a number of Android features.

In return, Motorola and some other Android hardware makers launched countering legal action.

Before trial, Robart said testimony about patent license agreements between Microsoft, Motorola and other tech companies could be disclosed to the public, along with other sensitive financial information.

However, the judge reversed himself this week and said he was bound by appellate precedent to keep that information secret. On Tuesday he cleared the courtroom and heard two hours of testimony in secret.

During the open session, Dansky said Motorola‘s video patents are crucial to Microsoft and other tech companies, and deserve a high royalty.

“You will have a difficult time selling smart phones or tablets,” Dansky said, without Motorola‘s technology.

Robart is not expected to release a ruling for several weeks as both companies must file further legal briefs.

The case in U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington is Microsoft Corp. vs. Motorola Inc., 10-cv-1823.

(Reporting by Lisa Dembiczak; Writing by Dan Levine; Editing by Richard Pullin)

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J.R.R. Tolkien estate sues Warner Bros. over gambling, games

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The estate of “The Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien and publisher HarperCollins have filed an $ 80 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. studios over the licensing of characters and plots in online and gambling games derived from the films.

The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Monday, alleges that Warner Bros. and its subsidiary New Line Cinema – which own the merchandising rights to the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” brands – infringed on copyrights by licensing to casino slot machines, online gambling, games and downloads.

Tolkien‘s estate accuses Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., of “infringing conduct.”

“Not only does the production of gambling games patently exceed the scope of defendants’ rights, but this infringing conduct has outraged Tolkien’s devoted fan base, causing irreparable harm to Tolkien’s legacy and reputation and the valuable goodwill generated by his works,” the lawsuit stated.

The suit claimed Warner Bros. earned millions of dollars from legal merchandise licensing revenue related to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films, which have grossed nearly $ 3 billion at the global box office.

The estate of the late English author and HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., are asking for at least $ 80 million in damages.

Representatives for Warner Bros., Tolkien’s estate and HarperCollins were not immediately available for comment.

The lawsuit comes a week ahead of the New Zealand premiere of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of a new trilogy of films returning to Tolkien’s world of elves, goblins and wizards of Middle Earth, based on the “Lord of the Rings” prequel novel “The Hobbit.”

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Mohammad Zargham)

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UN says an end to AIDS in sight

LONDON (Reuters) – A United Nations report said on Tuesday that eradicating AIDS was in sight, owing to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the incurable human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease.

An aim to eventually end the worldwide AIDS epidemic is not “merely visionary” but “entirely feasible”, the report said.

Success in fighting the disease in the past decade has allowed the “foundation to be laid for the eventual end of AIDS” by cutting the death toll and helping stabilise the number of people infected in the pandemic, UNAIDS said its annual report.

Some 34 million people had HIV at the end of 2011.

Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with the disease, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001.

Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most severely affected region with almost one in every 20 adults infected, nearly 25 times the rate in Asia, there are also almost 5 million people with HIV in South, South-East and East Asia combined.

“Although AIDS remains one of the world’s most serious health challenges, global solidarity in the AIDS response during the past decade continues to generate extraordinary health gains,” the report said.

It said this was due to “historic success” in bringing HIV programmes to scale, combined with the emergence of new combination drugs to prevent people from becoming HIV infected and from dying from AIDS.

Since 1995, AIDS drug treatment – known as antiretroviral therapy – has saved 14 million life-years in poorer countries, including 9 million in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.

Some 8 million people were being treated with AIDS drugs by the end of 2011, a 20-fold increase since 2003. The U.N. has set a target to raise that to 15 million people by 2015.

Scientific studies published in recent years have shown that getting timely treatment to those with HIV can also cut the number of people who become newly infected with the virus.

UNAIDS said the sharpest declines in new HIV infections since 2001 were in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa – where new infections were down 25 percent in a decade.

Despite this, sub-Saharan Africa still accounted for 71 percent of people newly infected in 2011, underscoring the need to boost HIV prevention efforts in the region, UNAIDS said.

HIV trends are a concern in other regions also, it said.

Since 2001, the number of new HIV infections in the Middle East and North Africa was up more than 35 percent from 27,000 to 37,000, it said, and evidence suggests HIV infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia began increasing in the late 2000s after being relatively stable for several years.

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Jack Welch’s Unretirement

On Oct. 11, Jack Welch took the stage before a standing-room-only crowd at the North Ridge Country Club in Raleigh, N.C., and doubled down. “In order for the employment numbers to be where they were said to be, the economy would have to be operating at breakneck speed,” Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric (GE), said in defense of his widely derided Twitter message alluding to a partisan bias in a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The previous week he’d written: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Welch looked out at the 400 executives attending the North Carolina CEO Forum. “Do you think the economy is operating at breakneck speed? All I’m trying to do is show this number is nonsense!”

“These people,” he went on, referring to the workers who conduct the employment survey, “they may have a soul Christ would be happy with, but do you really think they’re Romney supporters? Everyone has bias, and that influences what you do.”

Photo illustration by Justin Metz; Head: Peter Foley/Bloomberg; Body: Blend Images/Corbis; Couple: Abel Mitja Varela/Getty Images

Welch wore a dark suit and striped tie, and as he shared his conspiracy theory in exchange for his standard six-figure fee, he excitedly wiggled his 5-foot, 7-inch frame around in a red armchair on stage. But Welch, who just turned 77, wasn’t finished. “If I were president,” he declared, according to Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal, who was present, “I would raise the retirement age!” And: “The trouble with government is, it has no competition—it is bloated beyond belief!”

In case it wasn’t clear, Welch “reviles” President Obama, as Welch’s interviewer, Ken Eudy, says. “Our event is actually nonpolitical,” says Rick Deckelbaum, one of the event’s organizers, chuckling a little. “Welch even joked that on the flight down to Raleigh his people told him not to talk about politics.”

Welch didn’t care. By all indications, he was soaking up the attention he’d generated using his social media bully pulpit. His suggestion that the Obama administration had fudged the employment report for political gain made headlines around the world—most of them negative. According to a person close to him, Welch was hurt by some of the mockery that rained down. The detractions ranged from calling Welch a “crazy-old-man-on-twitter” (Reuters’s (TRI) Felix Salmon) to a has-been who has “lost his game” (Fortune’s Allan Sloan). It was not the kind of attention he was used to—but it was still better than no attention at all.

On the North Carolina stage, Welch turned to Eudy, the public-relations executive and local Democrat who was questioning him: “Your party likes to divide,” Welch scolded. “I know about division—my daughters are out right now with Obama signs. … So we’ve chosen not to discuss the subject.” It was clear he relished his status as a free agent. “If I were still a CEO, I wouldn’t be saying all these controversial things.”

In conversations with friends, Welch calls himself retired, but retirement Jack Welch-style is very different than retirement for most business moguls. At one end of the spectrum is Bill Gates, who quit running Microsoft (MSFT) to battle malaria and poverty in the developing world; at the other are entrepreneurs who found wellness centers, ex-chiefs who bankroll the search for extraterrestrial life, and John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer on the lam in Belize. In between are dozens of less colorful lives lived by corporate elder statesmen, such as former IBM (IBM) Chairman Lou Gerstner, who hold part-time consulting gigs or business school professorships. Since September 2001, when he left GE, Welch has forged his own, singular path, a sort of unretirement-as-reality-show cast by himself and his third wife, Suzy. Says Jimmy Lee, vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Welch’s close friend and longtime business associate: “His agenda is being Jack.”

Welch left the corporate sector with more than $ 400 million and enjoys a gilded standard of living, flitting between his Manhattan apartment with skyline views and oceanside spreads on Nantucket and in North Palm Beach, Fla. “He plays golf, he enjoys that,” says Larry Bossidy, one of Welch’s lieutenants at GE and a former CEO of Honeywell (HON) who socializes with Welch. “But what keeps him vital and alive is his engagement in various activities. He’s not a guy who sits around and worries about things. He enjoys life in many dimensions.” Says Home Depot (HD) founder Ken Langone: “Jack has a chance now to be more of a free spirit.”

Welch declined to be interviewed for this article but has no shortage of opportunities to speak. In the last few weeks, Welch held forth at the Shale Gas Insight conference in Philadelphia and the World Business Forum in New York. After North Carolina, he went to Peru and Ecuador for the 2012 Business Decision Makers Program. He most recently appeared in Toronto at the Art of Management gathering on Nov. 20, where a $ 799 “platinum pass” granted guests access to an “exclusive cocktail reception” with Welch. In between, he’s grilled executives during the biannual operating reviews he leads for private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), and he and Suzy have entertained friends including Langone in Florida, where Suzy is learning to play golf. “I think Jack doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the guy who ran GE,” says Bob Nardelli, once a contender to replace Welch at GE who went on to run Home Depot and Chrysler. “He loves GE, but he wants his impact to be bigger, broader, and more global than that.”

Jack’s WorldPhotos: Welch: Spencer Heyfron/Redux; Others: Bloomberg (5); Getty Images (4); Michael Indresano

To better wield his influence, Welch has cultivated a large audience through Twitter (1.4 million followers); on television (CNBC, NBC (CMCSA), CNN (TWX), Fox (NWS)); on the editorial page of his friend Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper (the Wall Street Journal); on the speaker’s circuit, where he commands at least $ 150,000 for a Q&A (he doesn’t do speeches); and through other channels. Much of his energy is devoted to weighing in on whatever subject interests him—from presidential politics to the Boston Red Sox. A verbatim sampling: “Daughters home so I am watching Bachelor. What a stupid awkward show. Maybe age is my problem” (March 14, 2011); “Congratulations to Piers Morgan on new baby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (Nov. 26, 2011); and “Solar plus wind.….energy independence..,,”BAD ARITHMATIC” (Sept. 6).

“Your yield curve crests the day you retire,” says Steve Miles, a leadership consultant and founder of the Miles Group. “The further you get from the CEO job, the more provocative you have to be to get attention.”

Welch’s ongoing argument for his own relevance draws upon his legendary business reputation. He was born in Peabody, Mass., the only child of Irish immigrants, with a father who worked as a train conductor and a famously tough mother. After earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Welch joined GE’s plastics division in 1960. By the time he left 41 years later, he was credited with transforming the conglomerate into a lean and much more profitable company. At the peak of his influence, in 1999, Fortune named him “Manager of the Century.” That Welch’s methods could be crude and controversial—eliminating more than 100,000 jobs at GE, dumping waste into the Hudson River, and often keeping the financial operations of GE opaque—was mostly obscured by his ability to keep shareholders happy. Riding the bull market of the 1990s, he grew accustomed to worshipful press coverage. “CEOs were idolized,” says Bill George, a former CEO of Medtronic (MDT) who teaches at Harvard. “We were treated, frankly, as heroes, and Jack was right at the top of the list.”

The foundation for his next phase began before his departure from GE with a $ 10 million deal for his memoir, Jack: Straight from the Gut, one of the highest nonfiction advances ever. The book’s Sept. 11, 2001, publication had been planned as a sort of coronation to coincide with his retirement. After the terrorist attacks, sales didn’t meet expectations, although the book still became a bestseller. The month after its release, CD&R announced that Welch would be joining as a “special partner” to help analyze companies. Welch realizes that his role has changed. Donald Gogel, CEO of CD&R, recalls one company review Welch conducted that ended with the chief executive telling Welch that he’d go home and mull over his advice. Welch sat back in his chair and said: “ ‘What has become of me?’ ” according to Gogel. “ ‘I give all of my ideas, and people used to say, You’re right, Jack. And now they say, I’ll think about it?’  ”

Welch also obliged chief executives who wanted to bring him on as a consultant—a sort of CEO shrink. William Harrison, then the head of JPMorgan Chase, and Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActive (IACI), signed up. “We call on him a lot,” Diller says. Bill Conaty, who served as GE’s head of human resources from 1993 until 2007 and is now an adviser with Welch at CD&R, says Welch never planned to retire in the conventional sense. “I know he hated the word ‘retirement.’ ”

Welch’s personal life underwent a complete transformation in October 2001, when Suzy Wetlaufer, the 42-year-old editor of the Harvard Business Review, came to his office to interview him. The encounter led to an affair, a scandal, a divorce, and a marriage. Welch’s split from Jane, his second wife, caused the public revelation of his lavish GE retirement contract. Chastened by the outcry, Welch offered to modify the contract to eliminate most of the continuing perks on the list, giving up free use of GE’s corporate jet and access to its Fenway Park skybox.

Welch’s new wife was photogenic and press savvy. It was Suzy, people close to the couple say, who pushed Welch to become more of a pop culture personality and embrace social media. The chairman emeritus of Corporate America was suddenly part of a celebrity partnership, Jack & Suzy. They moved into a townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill with Wetlaufer’s four children. “With his marriage to Suzy, he’s reinvented himself. Without her ignition, I don’t think he would be as productive,” says Warren Bennis, founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and a friend of Welch’s. “They’re co-leaders. She’s part of the energy behind that brand. Their relationship is a key to who he’s become.”

Their joint branding exercise included a book contract with HarperCollins to write Winning, a management guide, and a series of business advice columns, first for Businessweek from 2006 to 2009 and later for Reuters, which syndicated the series to Fortune. They were moves that seemed designed, in part, to bolster Suzy’s credentials, as she had to leave her Harvard Business Review job under a cloud after getting involved with her famous subject. The couple proved that not every brand spinoff is destined to succeed. In 2009 they tried their hand at reality TV. It’s Everybody’s Business with Jack & Suzy Welch was a takeoff on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Sponsored by Microsoft, the show featured the Welches doling out business advice to executives from a real company. An episode appeared on MSN.com and later on CNBC, but no more were produced.

Welch’s unretirement took another surprising turn when he was approached by Michael Clifford, an online education entrepreneur, with the idea of launching an Internet-based business school. Clifford was interested in taking the traditional business school model and creating something “more current,” as he put it, and “less controlled by academics who had never run a company.” The Welches invested $ 2 million alongside Clifford and others in the Jack Welch Management Institute, established as part of Chancellor University, a struggling for-profit college in Cleveland. Clifford describes Jack and Suzy as “totally focused and totally passionate” about the startup. “Suzy was the ball bearing that made it happen,” he says.

“Great day working on Jack Welch MBA curriculum + finalizing staffing,” Welch wrote on Twitter on June 30, 2009, as the school was preparing to launch. And then: “Blew out back today.” On July 5, 2009, Welch was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital with discitis, a serious spinal infection that he attributed to the cortisone shot he’d taken for his back. He spent 92 days in the hospital, an ordeal that both he and his wife documented in real time. Once he was past the worst of it, Suzy tweeted: “That sound you hear is me exhaling for the first time in 22 days.”

Welch returned home diminished and frail. Despite the setback, the Jack Welch Management Institute opened in January 2010, one semester later than planned. In April that year, Bloomberg News reported that Chancellor and other for-profit colleges had been recruiting students from homeless shelters and registering them so they could obtain federal student loans, which formed the bulk of the schools’ revenue. Congressional hearings on the merits of for-profit higher education followed. Welch moved his institute to a larger, publicly traded for-profit college with a better reputation called Strayer University, in Herndon, Va. Strayer agreed to pay $ 7 million to Chancellor to buy the Jack Welch Management Institute, with 40 percent of the funds contributed by Welch. Strayer also entered a licensing agreement with Welch and agreed to pay him a royalty for use of the curriculum he and Suzy had designed. Welch’s name is a major selling point for the school, which targets midlevel executives willing to pony up $ 30,960 for 12 courses leading to an executive MBA. The institute has yet to turn a profit, but Welch has said he hopes it will one day produce more graduates than Harvard Business School. (Strayer declines to give specific numbers, but says several hundred are currently enrolled.) “Jack’s videos bring the curriculum to life,” reads the school’s promotional copy. “Additionally, all executive MBA and certificate students now have the opportunity to speak with Jack directly through a live video conference at the end of each term.”

In his video addresses, Welch riffs on topics of the day and applies them to the business world. In one featured spot, he discusses WikiLeaks: “As you go to business … err on the side of transparency internally,” he declares, “but make it clear to everybody who works in your unit that trade secrets are trade secrets!”

At the same time, the company where the Welch legend began has been suffering. The soaring GE stock price that turned Welch into a star has since fallen to $ 20, one-third its high in August 2000. GE Capital, the finance unit that Welch made an earnings powerhouse, had a near-death experience during the financial crisis and was forced to turn to Warren Buffett for a $ 3 billion bailout. GE’s uncanny ability to deliver steady earnings growth became less a sign of Welch’s genius than his knack for moving money around and drawing on a richly funded pension plan. Some of the most famous Welch management edicts—from cutting the bottom 10 percent of the workforce to being No. 1 or No. 2 in every business—turned out to be as elusive a practice within GE as in the rest of the world. To some, the so-called Welch Way didn’t just seem silly but wrong.

The analysis of Welch’s accomplishments splintered into two camps: his fans who still regard him as the business world’s General Patton—“His wisdom and his experience are second to none,” says former Campbell Soup (CPB) CEO Doug Conant—and those more critical of the imprint he left. “You can’t evaluate a CEO’s legacy in the time he was CEO. You have to look at what was laid at the successor’s feet,” says Thomas O’Boyle, author of At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit. “And on that criteria, the market cap is less than half of what it was when he left. Doesn’t that somehow count toward the consideration of what he did while he was CEO?”

There’s no shortage of old CEOs with expertise, nor, for that matter, of old CEOs with books to flog and speaking agents. None, though, has managed to turn the revelation of his expertise into an event quite like Jack Welch has. When he plays his greatest management hits for audiences around the world—“Sense early, move fast, and energize your people!”—he’s doing more than cashing a check. He’s advancing the syllogism at the heart of his post-GE success: Jack Welch was a great manager; I want to be a great manager; if I listen to Jack Welch, I, too, will be a great manager.

True or not, it’s hard to argue with the crowds. Ten thousand Chinese manufacturing representatives came to see a man who doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin in September 2011. In 2013 he’s already booked in Atlanta, Finland, and China again. The Twitter incident doesn’t appear to have harmed his appeal; on the contrary, it’s gained him followers. “When he tweeted, that was almost more of a Donald Trump move,” says Gary Koops, a managing director of Burson-Marsteller, the global PR firm. “An entire generation of MBA students and aspiring leaders still want to hear from Jack Welch. What strikes me is that he’s still viewed as a significant figure that people pay attention to.”

That’s because he’s as much a professional personality now as he ever was a CEO—a profile he and Suzy are managing as deliberately as he ever did a GE earnings presentation. The irony is that the Chinese manufacturing students could study his every tweet, audit every Jack Welch Management Institute class, and trail Welch on the speaker’s circuit for all his remaining days without mastering the secret of his retirement act. That’s because it’s not replicable.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Greek PM presses for deal on loan

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece has reacted with dismay to the European Union‘s failure to agree to release vital rescue loan funds for the debt-ridden country, with the prime minister warning it was not just Greece’s future that hangs in the balance.

The delay prolongs uncertainty over the future of Greece, which faces a messy default that would threaten the entire euro currency used by 17 EU nations.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras stressed that Greece has done what its creditors from the EU and International Monetary Fund required. “Our partners, along with the IMF, also must do what they have committed to doing,” he said.

He said that “it is not just the future of our country, but the stability of the entire eurozone” that depend on the success of negotiations in coming days.

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N.Y. police officer says not guilty of plan to cook, eat women

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York City police officer pleaded not guilty on Monday to conspiring to kidnap, torture, cook and eat women.

Gilberto Valle, 28, of Forest Hills, Queens, was charged and arrested in October with conspiring to cross state lines to kidnap the women and with illegally accessing a federal database.

Prosecutors said some of the women were acquaintances of Valle but it was not clear if he knew or had met all of them. Valle, who an official said had no prior criminal record, was not charged with carrying out any of his suspected plans.

At a brief hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Valle’s attorney, Julia Gatto, told the judge she would again seek to have her client freed on bail after two other judges previously denied her request.

Investigators uncovered a file on Valle’s computer containing the names and pictures of at least 100 women, and the addresses and physical descriptions of some of them, according to the criminal complaint. It said he had undertaken surveillance of some of the women at their places of employment and their homes.

Gatto argues that Valle, a 6-1/2 year NYPD veteran, was all talk and should be released on bail.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The case is U.S. v. Gilberto Valle, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 12-cr-847.

(Reporting by Basil Katz; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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