Iranians watch the hanging of a convicted man at the city of Qazvin, northwest of the capital Tehran, in May 2011.
Hamideh Shafieeha/AP
Iranians watch the hanging of a convicted man at the city of Qazvin, northwest of the capital Tehran, in May 2011.
Hamideh Shafieeha/AP
Amnesty International is urging Iranian authorities not to go ahead with the execution of convicted drug smuggler after the man survived a botched hanging last week.
The 37-year-old man, identified as "Alireza M", was found alive in a morgue after he was hanged at a jail in Iran's northeastern city of Bojnord.
"According to official state media, a doctor declared him dead after the 12 minute-hanging, but when the prisoner's family went to collect his body the following day he was found to still be breathing.
He is currently in hospital, but a judge reportedly said he would be executed again 'once medical staff confirm his health condition is good enough'."
The BBC quotes an Iranian official as saying: "The verdict was the death sentence, and it will be carried out once the man gets well again."
Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Program, said: "The horrific prospect of this man facing a second hanging, after having gone through the whole ordeal already once, merely underlines the cruelty and inhumanity of the death penalty."
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - America Movil, the phone company controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim, on Wednesday said it would not go ahead with a plan to boost its stake in KPN, and has not yet decided whether to keep its current position in the Dutch telecom company.
The announcement on Wednesday was - at least in the short term - a setback to the expansion plans of America Movil, Latin America's biggest phone company, which made its first foray outside of the region with its acquisition of stakes in KPN and Telekom Austria last year.
America Movil said it has not yet made a decision on what to do with its equity stake in KPN, whose share price is well below what America Movil paid. "We haven't made that decision," Arturo Elias, a spokesman for Slim and also his son-in-law, told Reuters.
The company, which had accumulated nearly 30 percent of KPN, saw that stake effectively chopped in half by a foundation set up to protect KPN shareholders' interests, which in August executed an option to acquire almost 50 percent of KPN's voting stock.
America Movil, which has never made an unsolicited offer, was taken aback by the KPN foundation's surprise move in August. Elias said at the time that America Movil had been shown "a total lack of respect.
"I think they ran out of patience," Andres Audiffred, an analyst with Ve Por Mas, said of America Movil.
The foundation, and KPN, sought a better price than the 2.40 euros America Movil offered and negotiations foundered as the Mexican company refused to budge on its offer. KPN shares closed at 2.43 euros on Wednesday.
On average, Slim's telecoms giant paid about 3.24 euros a share for its Dutch stake, including stock bought as part of a rights issue by KPN earlier this year.
KPN's independent foundation said it had not intended to scupper the deal and it was studying America Movil's latest statement.
"We have never aimed to block the deal, but to get the two parties to the negotiating table to come to a merger protocol in a suitable way," a spokesman for the foundation said.
KPN in a statement noted that America Movil "has not improved or shown any willingness to improve the intended offer" in spite of efforts made by the Dutch company.
"From the outset KPN has stated to America Movil that, in the view of the KPN Boards, the Intended Offer did not reflect sufficient value for securing a positive recommendation from the Boards," said KPN's statement.
SHORT-TERM RELIEF?
America Movil investors appeared to welcome the news, since it prevented a planned outlay of at least 7.2 billion euros ($9.52 billion). America Movil's shares soared more than 6 percent immediately after the announcement before closing 3.16 percent higher at 14.01 pesos.
The shares have been under pressure this year as investors question the value of Slim's expensive European foray.
Still, some analysts said they would not rule out a deal happening at a later date.
"The deal is unlikely to be dead. It just reached a temporary dead end," Robin Bienenstock, senior analyst at Sanford C Bernstein in London, said in an email, adding "AMX shareholders celebrated too soon".
The mobile operator is cash rich and its appetite for acquisitions is not likely to be long-dented by the KPN setback, several analysts and investors said.
America Movil has a presence in 18 countries in the Americas and more than 260 million wireless subscribers. It had turned to Europe as it began reaching expansion limits in the Americas.
The company is also facing a telecom reform effort in Mexico, which accounts for almost half of America Movil's core profit, that could shake its dominance in fixed and mobile phone services.
The company is also hoping that one potential benefit of the reform in Mexico is that it could open the way for America Movil to offer pay-TV in Mexico, something that it is currently blocked from doing.
Asked in an interview last week if America Movil was confident it will be able to enter the Mexican pay-TV market, Elias said: "I think so, I think the law is very clear. The law refers to specific obligations ... and that in fulfillment of these obligations there will be a concession."
(Additional reporting by Simon Gardner, Gabriel Stargardter and Noe Torres in Mexico City; and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; Editing by Leslie Adler and Bob Burgdorfer)
Congratulations are in order for Miley Cyrus because today we learn that her new album BANGERZ debuted in the #1 spot on the Billboard magazine 200 Album Chart. As you may be well aware, Miley has been hitting things out of the park for the past few weeks by turning everything she touches into gold. Her songs raced up the singles chart and now her album debuts atop the album chart. Is there no stopping the spawn of Cyrus? BANGERZ is Miley‘s 5th #1 album of her career. Wow. Click below to learn more.
As forecast last week, Miley Cyrus debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with her new release “Bangerz,” selling 270,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Counting her soundtrack albums as the Disney character Hannah Montana, this is her fifth No. 1 album. She topped the list with the Disney Channel TV series’ first soundtrack in 2006, as well as its big-screen film adaptation soundtrack in 2009. Cyrus herself notched No. 1s with the half-soundtrack/half-studio album “Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus” set in 2007, and then her own “Breakout” studio effort in 2008. Cyrus’ last studio album, 2010′s “Can’t Be Tamed,” debuted and peaked at No. 3 from a 102,000 start … Meanwhile, last week’s No. 1 album, Justin Timberlake’s “The 20/20 Experience (2 of 2)” drops by 80.08% in its second week and falls to No. 5 with 70,000 sold. That’s the largest second-week percentage decline for a No. 1-debuting album since Kanye West’s “Yeezus” fell by 80.26% back in late June. Falling a spot to No. 3 this week is Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same,” slipping by 44% in its third week to 83,000. Lorde’s “Pure Heroine” falls by a moderate 51% in its sophomore frame, dropping to No. 6 with 63,000.
While I hate to admit it, it’s clear that Miley Cyrus is in high demand. All the hand-wringing by her detractors has had no effect on her chart success. Personally, I’ve listened to BANGERZ a few times now and I genuinely don’t like a thing on it. Even the title track Bangers (SMS) which features our dear Britney Spears on guest vocals is kind of annoying to me. But, clearly, I am in the minority. As I understand it, Miley‘s current single Wrecking Ball debuted in the #1 spot on the British music charts so her success is not relegated to the US. I suppose we gotta give it up to Miss Miley for putting out the music that most people want to hear right now. Considering her success thus far, I suspect she’ll rack up more #1 songs in the coming weeks and months.
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
Public release date: 16-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
Public release date: 16-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Stocks surged on Wall Street after Senate leaders reached a deal that would avoid a U.S. default and reopen the government after 16 days of being partially shut down. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose to within four points of the all-time high it reached Sept. 18.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 205.82 points, or 1.4 percent, to close at 15,373.83.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 23.48 points, or 1.4 percent, to 1,721.54.
The Nasdaq composite rose 45.42 points, or 1.2 percent, to 3,839.43.
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) — Denver Broncos coach John Fox is agitated with Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for taking what he called a cheap shot at quarterback Peyton Manning.
Fox used his weekly SiriusXM NFL Radio appearance Tuesday to criticize the Colts' owner for sounding ungrateful for all Manning did for his team and city, including winning a Super Bowl in 2007.
Irsay told USA Today in an interview Tuesday that the Colts turned to Andrew Luck two years ago and fired Manning rather than pay him a $28 million roster bonus because they were looking for more playoff success.
Fox normally isn't one to criticize anyone in public, but Irsay's comments clearly struck a nerve.
The Broncos, who have won 19 of 23 games under Manning — but lost to Baltimore in the playoffs — visit the Colts on Sunday night in Manning's first return to Indianapolis as a visiting player.
Adrian Peterson's baby count is now at 5 ... 'cause a 4th woman has surfaced who has a child with the NFL star, TMZ has learned.
This time, the baby mama is Erica Syion -- a former dancer who worked at a gentlemen's club in Dallas, TX. Erica and Adrian have a 4-year-old son together.
Sources connected to the situation tell us ... the two have a financial arrangement, in which Adrian gives Erica money to pay for the kid's schooling, as well as living expenses.
We're told the two met in Houston back in 2007 ... but their relationship has deteriorated in the past few years.
Sources tell us Adrian IS involved in the child's life -- but Erica is the primary parent, with Adrian visiting when he can.
In total, Adrian has fathered (at least) 5 children -- a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old with his current girlfriend, a 4-year-old with Erica, a 3-month-old with a waitress in Minnesota. His other son, a 2-year-old, passed away last week.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_utZAtGvYvoeXGyE6bCwya00KVYmRxZHkAd1GHl6sFXr1bs7XgTDco4lkQxJMROGSPwnwtYceRYPr7LJylWEkn6vnzI9iVoMtdqtr4oAWA=s0-d){kind=small}
Share
