Monti, in Twitter Q&A, says new voting law priority for Italy

ROME (Reuters) - Outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Saturday if he wins February's parliamentary election one of his first acts would be to overhaul the voting law to improve democracy and government stability.
Monti, 69, who last week confirmed he would lead a centrist coalition in the February 24-25 vote, called himself a "bit of a pioneer" in politics during nearly 2 hours of #MontiLive tweets.
The electoral law is unpopular because party leaders select candidates and voters cannot choose their representatives. For technical reasons, it also makes forming a stable majority more difficult, leading to broad and unwieldy coalitions.
"This electoral law is not worthy of a country like Italy," said Monti of the 2005 legislation passed when centre-right rival Silvio Berlusconi was in power.
Monti and Berlusconi trail the centre-left in opinion polls and have made multiple appearances, mainly on TV, over the past week as they seek to recoup support and motivate voters who have said they do not intend to vote.
A poll by the Tecne research institute released on SkyTG24 on Friday showed Monti's grouping would likely attract slightly more than 12 percent of the vote.
That compared with 40 percent for the centre-left bloc led by Pier Luigi Bersani's Democratic Party (PD); and 25 percent for the most likely centre-right coalition of Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) and the Northern League.
In a separate tweet, Monti indicated he would "dialogue" with anyone after the vote whether he wins or not, as long as they are "reformists".
BERLUSCONI BROADSIDE
Speaking at the same time in a live interview on the website of Corriere della Sera newspaper, Berlusconi said he would never again ally himself with Monti even though he offered him the leadership of the centre-right just a few weeks ago.
"All Italian citizens, in one way or another, are suffering" as a result of Monti's 13 months in power, said Berlusconi, who says austerity has led the country into a recessionary spiral.
Monti took over in November 2011 when Italy was scrambling to avert a financial crisis and after Berlusconi, besieged by a sex scandal involving an underage prostitute, stepped down.
Berlusconi repeated on Saturday that his resignation was the result of an international plot to oust him and denied having made mistakes during his more than nine years in power.
"My only error is that I have not been able to explain what I have done for the country," Berlusconi said.
"By now (Monti's) image has become that of a person with whom I could not possibly collaborate," Berlusconi said, calling the prime minister's new alliance with two of Berlusconi's former allies a "triple disaster".
Berlusconi said a renewed accord with the Northern League may be finalized on Sunday. The Northern League has said the 76-year-old billionaire must not be the bloc's prime ministerial candidate for a sixth time.
"Monti is an enemy of the north, and stopping him from returning to government is a categorical priority for us. Who is against Monti is an ally of the League," Northern League leader Roberto Maroni tweeted on Saturday.

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Ohio sheriff confronts protesters in football rape case

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STEUBENVILLE, Ohio (Reuters) - A county sheriff under fire for how he has handled a high school rape investigation faced down a raucous crowd of protesters on Saturday and said no further suspects would be charged in a case that has rattled Ohio football country.
Ma'lik Richmond and Trenton Mays, both 16 and members of the Steubenville High School football team, are charged with raping a 16-year-old fellow student at a party last August, according to statements from their attorneys.
Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla, accused of shielding the popular football program from a more rigorous investigation, told reporters no one else would be charged in the case, just moments after he addressed about 1,000 protesters gathered in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse.
"I'm not going to stand here and try to convince you that I'm not the bad guy," he said to a chorus of boos. "You've already made your minds up."
The "Occupy Steubenville" rally was organized by the online activist group Anonymous.
Abdalla declined to take the investigation over from Steubenville police, sparking more public outrage. Anonymous and community leaders say police are avoiding charging more of those involved to protect the school's beloved football program.
The two students will be tried as juveniles in February in Steubenville, a close-knit city of 19,000 about 40 miles west of Pittsburgh.
The case shot to national prominence this week when Anonymous made public a picture of the purported rape victim being carried by her wrists and ankles by two young men. Anonymous also released a video that showed several other young men joking about an assault.
Abdalla, who said he first saw the video three days ago, said on Saturday that it provided no new evidence of any crimes.
"It's a disgusting video," he said. "It's stupidity. But you can't arrest somebody for being stupid."
The protest's masked leader, standing atop a set of stairs outside the courthouse doors, invited up to the makeshift stage anyone who was a victim of sexual assault. Protesters immediately flooded the platform, which was slightly smaller than a boxing ring.
Victims passed around a microphone, taking turns telling their stories. Some called for Abdalla and other local officials to step down from office for not charging more of the people and for what they called a cover-up by athletes, coaches and local officials.
Abdalla then climbed the stairs himself and addressed the protest over a microphone.
Abdalla said he had dedicated his 28-year career to combating sexual assault, overseeing the arrest of more than 200 suspects.
Clad in a teal ribbon symbolizing support for sexual assault victims, Abdalla later told Reuters that he stood by his decision to leave the investigation with local police. He would have had to question all 59 people that the Steubenville Police Department had already interviewed in its original investigation, he said.
"People have got their minds made up," he said. "A case like this, who would want to cover any of it up?"

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Canada meets key aboriginal demand amid blockades

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's prime minister will meet with native leaders next week to discuss social and economic issues, an olive branch to an angry aboriginal movement that has blockaded rail lines and threatened to close Canada's borders with the United States.
Stephen Harper made no mention of the aboriginal protests in a statement on Friday announcing the January 11 meeting.
But the meeting is a key demand from native Chief Theresa Spence, who has been on a hunger strike for 25 days on an island within sight of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa.
Spence's spokesman Danny Metatawabin told reporters, on the snowy ground outside her traditional teepee, that she would continue her hunger strike until she was satisfied with the outcome of next week's meeting.
Spence's hunger strike has been one of the most visible signs of a protest movement called Idle No More, which had announced plans for blockades on Saturday all along the U.S.-Canadian border.
It was not clear if these blockades would now be called off, or if there would be any disruptions at the border crossings between the two big trading partners.
The movement is not centrally organized, and Metatawabin said he would not tell others what to do. Several hours after Harper's announcement, the Idle No More website still had a call up for blockades on Saturday.
Demonstrators blocked a Canadian National Railway Co line in Sarnia, Ontario, for about two weeks until Wednesday, and there were shorter blockades elsewhere in the country, including one that delayed passenger trains between Montreal and Toronto for several hours on Sunday.
Harper said next Friday's meeting would address economic development, aboriginal rights and the treaty relationship between the government and native groups. He described it as a follow-up to a meeting with aboriginal leaders last January as well as talks in November with Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo.
"While some progress has been made, there is more that must be done to improve outcomes for First Nations communities across Canada," Harper said in a statement.
DISMAL CONDITIONS
Many of Canada's 1.2 million aboriginals live on reserves where conditions are often dismal, with high rates of poverty, addiction and suicide.
Treaties with Ottawa signed a century ago finance their health and education in a way that many experts say is now dysfunctional.
Speaking to reporters in Oakville, Ontario, Harper sidestepped a question on whether he had agreed to the meeting because of Spence's hunger strike and fear the protests could snowball like last year's Occupy Movement.
Asked about the demonstrations, he said: "People have the right in our country to demonstrate and express their points of view peacefully as long as they obey the law, but I think the Canadian population expects everyone will obey the law in holding such protests."
Idle No More was sparked by legislation that activists say Harper rushed through Parliament without proper consultation with native groups and which affects their land and treaty rights. But it has broadened into a complaint about conditions in general for native Canadians.
In her meeting with reporters after Harper's announcement, Spence said she planned to attend the meeting in person along with three of her supporters and she wanted the governor general - Queen Elizabeth's representative - and the Ontario premier to attend as well.
She stood flanked by her daughter and several supporters, some of them holding up feathers. There were several minutes of drumming and singing before she and her spokesman began talking.
When asked what she needed to hear from the prime minister in order to start eating again, she said, "a positive result because there's a lot of issues we need to discuss" and that they should discuss the issues as equal partners.

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Kuwaiti gets two years for insulting emir on Twitter

Kuwaiti gets two years for insulting emir on Twitter
KUWAIT (Reuters) - A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to two years in prison for insulting the country's ruler on Twitter, a lawyer following the case said, as the Gulf Arab state cracks down on criticism of the authorities on social media.
According to the verdict on Sunday, published by online newspaper Alaan, a tweet written by Rashid Saleh al-Anzi in October "stabbed the rights and powers of the Emir" Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah.
Anzi, who has 5,700 Twitter followers, was expected to appeal, the lawyer, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
Kuwait, a U.S. ally and major oil producer, has been taking a firmer line on politically sensitive comments aired on the Internet.
In June 2012, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.
Two months later, authorities detained Sheikh Meshaal al-Malik Al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family, over remarks on Twitter in which he accused authorities of corruption and called for political reform, a rights activist said.
While public demonstrations about local issues are common in a state that allows the most dissent in the Gulf, Kuwait has avoided Arab Spring-style mass unrest that toppled three veteran Arab dictators last year.
But tensions have intensified between the hand-picked government, in which ruling family members hold the top posts, and the elected parliament and opposition groups.

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Analysis: For tech investors, it's hard to know when to bolt

When Hewlett-Packard Co agreed to buy British software company Autonomy in August last year for $11.1 billion, two well-known investors made diametrically different bets on how the big deal would play out.
To short seller Jim Chanos, who had been raising red flags on Autonomy for years and had started shorting shares of HP in 2011, the deal was another nail in the coffin of the Silicon Valley tech giant, according to a source familiar with his thinking.
But to activist investor Ralph Whitworth, co-founder of Relational Investors LLC, it was time to commit to HP and the turnaround story the company was trying to sell to Wall Street. His fund bought more than 17.5 million HP shares after the deal was announced, and Whitworth received a seat on the company's board. This year, Relational roughly doubled its stake in HP.
In the wake of HP's decision to take an $8.8 billion write-down on the deal because of alleged accounting irregularities at Autonomy, it appears Chanos - whose call to short Enron before the energy company collapsed in a corporate scandal may be his most famous trade - was more astute.
HP's shares are down 36 percent since Relational, which declined to comment, built its stake in the third quarter of 2011.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY
Relational's big move into HP is a reminder that even smart investors can get things wrong in the fast-evolving technology sector, where once hot global names like Research in Motion and Yahoo can quickly become yesterday's news.
It is a world where a company may effectively erect barriers to entry in a market only to have them torn down by a rival with a new whizz-bang product - just as Apple's iPhone broke the dominance that Research in Motion's BlackBerry had enjoyed.
One warning sign that a tech company may be on the verge of losing its edge is when it makes acquisitions outside of its main area of expertise to move into new product lines. Savvy tech investors also say be wary of companies that experience a succession of management changes, or when a successful core business starts looking tired.
The pace of change in the technology sector is much faster than in other industries, said Kaushik Roy, an analyst at Hercules Technology Growth Capital. "It attracts new talent and capital, many startups are formed, which can be extremely disruptive to incumbents," Roy said. "In other words, yesterday's winners can rapidly become today's losers and vice versa."
In the case of HP, the company not only has had four CEOs since 1999, it has been striving to find another niche to dominate as demand for one of its core products - computer printers - wanes and as its PC business stumbles.
Or consider online search pioneer Yahoo, which has gone through six chief executives and is struggling to keep pace with Google.
Josh Spencer, a portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, said frequent turnover in the executive suite at Yahoo was a warning sign to him. Spencer said he does not own Yahoo shares and has not in the recent past.
RED FLAGS
While a company may view an acquisition as a fresh start - that is what HP was trying to say about Autonomy - some investors see it as a warning the core business is struggling.
Spencer noted that the technology industry's most successful companies - Apple and Samsung - generally have not made acquisitions and instead developed new products internally.
For Margaret Patel, managing director at Wells Capital Management, one of the first red flags she saw at HP was when former CEO Carly Fiorina bought Compaq for roughly $25 billion in 2002.
"I felt then that the acquisition was too large and expensive, and personal computers were not their core strength," said Patel, who has since avoided investing in HP.
Of course, timing can be everything even if an investor is eventually proven right. Patel missed out on a 137 percent gain in HP's stock price from the time of the Compaq deal up until the end of 2010.
PREMIUM VALUATIONS
A few money managers see a flashing yellow light in the big sell-off of Apple shares in the past few months.
Apple, the most valuable U.S. company, has shed nearly 30 percent of its value in the last three months.
Since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs - the driving force behind Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad - DoubleLine co-founder Jeffrey Gundlach has been recommending that investors short the company's shares because "the product innovator isn't there anymore."
Gundlach said he began shorting Apple's stock at around $610 and maintains that it could drop to $425. He declined to comment on Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs over a year ago and is seen by many as less visionary and innovative than Jobs.
Christian Bertelsen, chief investment officer at Global Financial Private Capital, with assets under management of $1.7 billion, said his firm began paring back its exposure to Apple this fall because he felt the expectations for the company's new iPhone5 had gotten overheated.
He said his firm dramatically took down its exposure to Apple shares when the stock hit $670 a share. "For us, the light bulb went off this fall," he said. Mind you, Apple's shares still remain up about 25 percent for the whole year.
And then there's Research in Motion. Once a leader in smartphones, it's now in danger of becoming irrelevant.
"They saw the move towards all touch-screen phones and didn't move with it," said Stuart Jeffrey, an analyst at Nomura Securities who noted how the BlackBerry 10 touch-screen phone will debut on January 30, 2013, six years after Apple released its first iPhone in 2007.
Robert Stimpson, a portfolio manager at Oak Associates Funds whose fund does not own any shares of Research in Motion, said the company's BlackBerry phones are on a downward slope and it will be tough for the company to regain its lost luster.
"The end of the road is a long, lonely journey," Stimpson said of Research in Motion. "I think they will fight the good fight for many years, probably unsuccessfully.

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The Trouble with Adam Lanza's DNA

In a rare and now controversial investigation, scientists have been asked by Connecticut's medical examiner to study Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's DNA — but the DNA community doesn't think that's such a good idea. Though details on the research are scant, University of Connecticut geneticists will apparently be looking for biological clues that might explain Lanza's extreme violent behavior. The New York Times's Gina Kolata reports that this undertaking is thought to be the first time scientists have studied the genome of a mass killer. Baylor College of Medicine's genetics professor Arthur Beaudet endorses the research, saying, "By studying genetic abnormalities we can learn more about conditions better and who is at risk."
RELATED: Nancy Lanza Reportedly Wasn't a Teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary
But the ethical implications of singling out genetic mutations to explain violent behavior trouble many other scientists, who worry that such research might be held against innocent people who happen to share some of Lanza's genetic features. Harvard Medical School's Dr. Harold Bursztajn told ABC News that he's not sure what the U. Conn geneticists will "even be looking for at this point," considering how thorny and full of false positives the link between genetic markers and violence is. So far, the strongest evidence that genetics play a role in violent behavior comes out of research on MAOA, a gene that produces a substance called monoamine oxidase. Studies from the early '90s showed that abused children with certain variations of this gene had problems regulating their aggressive impulses. But University of Pennsylvania criminologist Adrian Raine questions how crucial MAOA is in determining who actually becomes violent. University of California San Francisco geneticist Robert Nussbaum also worries about the potential for genetic discrimination:
It’s a shot in the dark that’s unlikely to show anything. If they find something associated with autism, I’m afraid that it might have the effect of stigmatizing autistic people. I can see a whole morass coming out of this.
Here are some of the many other geneticists who don't think meaningful conclusions can be drawn from such studies, fearing what the general public would make out of such information:
No conclusions can be drawn from n=1, a prioriMT @mims: Geneticists to study the DNA of Adam Lanza nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…#protectresearch
— Ashley Ng (@drng) December 25, 2012
@dgmacarthur @edyong209 This is essentially celebrity genomics. Scientifically useless but amusing in some cases. Not amusing in this one.
— Joe Pickrell (@joe_pickrell) December 26, 2012
@joe_pickrell @dgmacarthur @edyong209 I agree, but while nobody cares about Ozzy's genome, what will people with this one? Test their kids?
— Nicolas Robine (@notSoJunkDNA) December 26, 2012
Many journalists who cover genetic research for a living also remain skeptical:
Groan. Sequencing Adam Lanza's DNA will tell us what? Will prevent what? Seriously? nyti.ms/Tob8GD
— Amy Maxmen (@amymaxmen) December 26, 2012
Crazy-misguided: Geneticists are going to study the DNA of Adam Lanza to look for clues about what was wrong with him. nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…
— Christopher Mims (@mims) December 25, 2012
Genomic analysis of Adam Lanza planned - the type of project that makes you question someone's grasp of genetics nytimes.com/2012/12/25/sci…
— Ed Yong(@edyong209) December 25, 2012

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Record-breaking 17.4 million Android and iOS devices activated on Christmas Day; tablets top smartphones

More Android and iOS devices were activated on Christmas Day this year than on any other day. According to analytics firm Flurry, 17.4 million Android and iOS devices were activated during the holiday, an increase of 332% compared to an average of 4 million activations per day. This year’s numbers were found to be more than two and a half times larger than Christmas Day last year, which saw 6.8 million devices activated. Once their smartphones and tablets were turned on, consumers collectively downloaded 328 million applications.
[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps of 2012]
[More from BGR: Samsung looks to address its biggest weakness in 2013]
Interestingly, Flurry found that for the first time ever, more tablets (51% of all activations) were activated on Christmas than smartphones (49% of all activations). The big winners were said to be Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and iPad mini, and Amazon’s (AMZN) 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet.
The firm notes that “Amazon had a very strong performance in the tablet category, growing by several thousand percent over its baseline of tablet activations over the earlier part of December.

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iOS apps see Christmas sales spike shrink in 2012

Distimo just released its statistics on Christmas Day app downloads and revenue growth… and the download spike is far smaller than it was last year. Back in 2011, Christmas Day iOS app download volume spiked 230% above the December average. This year, the increase was just 87% — far below industry expectations. The revenue spike came in at 70%.
[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps of 2012]
Interestingly, iPad downloads increased by 140% this Christmas, implying that the iPhone download bounce was really modest.
[More from BGR: New purported BlackBerry Z10 specs emerge: 1.5GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 8MP camera]
A few weeks ago, AppAnnie released statistics showing that iOS app revenue growth had stalled over the summer of 2012, whereas Android app revenue growth was relatively strong at 48% over a five month period. Both Distimo and Appannie are respected companies and their analytics are closely followed by app industry professionals. Could it be that the pace of iPhone app revenue growth has slowed down sharply from 2011 levels, even if Distimo and AppAnnie numbers aren’t entirely accurate?

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BlackBerry’s all-out price war in the UK

The Curve 9320 is the last of the BlackBerry phones using the old operating system, and it is the cornerstone of RIM’s attempt to salvage its Christmas season. The UK is Research In Motion’s (RIMM) most important market in Europe. The latest Kantar World Panel numbers for August-October period showed BlackBerry’s share of the UK market crashing from 19% to 8% in a year, but RIM is now executing the most aggressive BlackBerry price campaign British consumers have ever seen in a bid to stand its ground before its new devices arrive. As the price of the 9320 crashes to rock bottom, the high-end BlackBerry Bold pricing remains at a completely unrealistic level. It looks like British operators have given up on pricier BlackBerry phones and are now putting all promotional support behind the dirt cheap 9320. What does this mean for the launch of the next generation of high-end RIM models in 2013? The British phone retail giant Phones4U just broke new ground by dropping the price of the 9320 from £150 to just £99. Traditionally, even the cheapest Curve models have cost around £130 in the UK during the first year on the market. The 9320 debuted in May and it is already breaking the 100-pound barrier. In comparison, Phones4U’s Christmas pre-paid deal for Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Ace II is £156. Nokia’s (NOK) cheapie Lumia 800 starts at £150. The price of the six-month old BlackBerry 9320 is now comparable to the Samsung Galaxy Ace — an old war-horse that first rode in the spring of 2011. At another UK retail powerhouse, E2Save, the price of the 9320 remains at £130. But on the contract phone side, E2Save is launching a monster BlackBerry campaign: the cheapest 9320 now starts at under £10 per month. This is unprecedented for a new BlackBerry device. The cheapest monthly offers for budget Android phones like the Galaxy Y and the Galaxy Ace stand at £25 and £17. High-end smartphones have contract prices starting from £35 per month. RIM has started executing an amazingly aggressive Christmas price war in the UK. This is no big surprise; according to Kantar, BlackBerry’s market share in the UK crashed from 19% to 8% between autumn 2011 and autumn 2012. The company has to stanch the bleeding now in order to maintain some leverage with British retailers before new models arrive in 2013. But what is happening to the brand perception? The first new-generation BlackBerry phones are going to be priced close to the BlackBerry Bold level. That aging flagship still costs a hair-raising £440 in the UK pre-paid market and £31-39 per month in the contract phone category. This isremarkably close to Samsung Galaxy S III pricing, a true sign of delusion. The UK operators have apparently completely given up on the Bold and RIM sees no reason to offer steep price cuts for the device. The 9320 is now the only game in town. Perhaps this makes short-term, margin management sense. Perhaps the goal is to protect the high-end BlackBerry brand. But the result is that the only deals the consumers see are the ones hawking BlackBerry phones at £99 in pre-paid and £10 per month as contract devices. These are Huawei-level prices. How on Earth is RIM going to then pivot in February and ask £500 for unsubsidized phones and £35 per month contract prices for the next-generation BlackBerry phones? This will be the branding challenge of the 2013 in the telecom industry.

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Nokia Siemens to close services unit: sources

FRANKFURT/HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia Siemens Networks' (NSN) services unit faces closure as an essential contract with Deutsche Telekom will not be extended, two people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. One person said the closure, effective en 2013 would be announced on Wednesday during a workers' meeting in Kassel. NSN Services, which generates under 100 million euros ($130.7 million) in annual sales and employs about 1,000 people, ensures that calls and data are transmitted via overhead cable networks. Deutsche Telekom sold the unit to NSN five years ago. At the time the two companies agreed on a 5-year 300 million euro services contract. The unit also counts Vodafone as a customer. The contract would not be extended, the person said. German daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung first reported about the closure of the unit. Verdi union representative Mike Doeding said that a meeting to update workers about next year's plans was scheduled for Wednesday, adding he had no idea about the message to be expected. "If they are to close the unit it would be an outrage," Doeding said. NSN declined to comment, while Deutsche Telekom referred to NSN for comment. NSN, a 50-50 joint venture between Nokia Oyj and Siemens AG, is cutting costs and plans to shed a quarter of its staff and sell product lines to focus on mobile broadband. NSN had 60,600 employees at the end of the third quarter. The telecoms equipment market is going through rough times with stiff competition from Chinese peers Huawei and ZTE as the major telecoms operators postpone investments, faced with shrinking markets due to the weak economy. France's Alcatel-Lucent is also cutting costs. On Monday, NSN said it was selling its optical fiber unit to Marlin Equity Partners, resulting in the transfer of up to 1,900 employees, mainly in Germany and Portugal.

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Digital rights groups blast Dutch computer plan

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Digital rights groups have called on the Dutch justice minister to retract a proposal that would give the country's police the right to break into computers, including foreign citizens' computers, to combat cybercrime. Minister Ivo Opstelten says investigators have the right to install Internet taps with court permission, citing the need to fight online pedophiles. That sometimes requires breaking into computers. But a coalition of rights groups — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Netherlands' Bits of Freedom — say other countries will likely follow suit and then attempt to enforce their own laws abroad. The coalition said "these local laws would not solely address cybercrime, but also issues deemed illegal in other countries, such as blasphemy and political criticism." The Dutch parliament debates the proposal this week.

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Nokia Siemens cerrará su división de servicios: fuentes

FRANCFORT/HELSINKI (Reuters) - La división de servicios de la empresa de redes Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) enfrenta su cierre debido a la cancelación de un contrato esencial con la empresa de telecomunicaciones alemana Deutsche Telekom, dijeron el martes dos fuentes con conocimiento del tema. Una persona dijo que el cierre, que se hará efectivo en el 2013, se anunciará el miércoles durante una reunión con los empleados. NSN Services, que genera ventas anuales por 100 millones de euros (130,7 millones de dólares) y emplea a unas 1.000 personas, se asegura de la transmisión de llamadas y datos por redes de cables aéreas. Deutsche Telekom le vendió la unidad a NSN cinco años atrás. NSN declinó comentar. La firma, una asociación en partes iguales entre Nokia Oyj y Siemens AG, está bajando costos y planea reducir su plantilla y vender líneas de productos para enfocarse en el negocio de banda ancha móvil. NSN tenía 60.000 empleados a fines del tercer trimestre. El mercado de equipos para telecomunicaciones está atravesando un momento complejo con una fuerte competencia de firmas chinas como Huawei y ZTE, a la vez que los operadores de telefonía posponen inversiones.

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Data: New (physical) book chronicles the virtual

NEW YORK (AP) — We question. We research. We catalog. We quantify. We aggregate, calculate, communicate, analyze, extrapolate and conclude. And eventually, if we're fortunate and thoughtful, we understand. These are the contours of the society that has taken shape in the past generation with the rise of an unstoppable, invisible force that changes human lives in ways from the microscopic to the gargantuan: data, a word that was barely used beyond small circles before World War II but now governs the day for many of us from the moment we awaken to the extinguishing of the final late-evening light bulb. This is the playing field of "The Human Face of Big Data," by Rick Smolan ("A Day in the Life of America") and Jennifer Erwitt, an enormous volume the size of a flat-screen computer monitor that chronicles, through a splash of photos and eye-opening essays and graphics, the rise of the information society. The book itself ($50, Against All Odds Productions) is a curious, wonderful beast — a solid slab that captures a virtual universe. Weighing in at nearly five pounds (a companion iPad app is available), it is being delivered Tuesday by the publisher to what it calls some of the world's most influential people, including the CEOs of Yahoo and Starbucks and Amazon, Oprah Winfrey and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The goal, say those behind the project, is to "ignite a conversation about an extraordinary knowledge revolution." You would think that capturing such a sprawling — and, one might easily conclude, inherently nonvisual — societal change would be difficult in a coffee-table book. You'd be wrong. This is one of those rare animals that captures its era in the most distinct of ways. It's the kind of thing you'd put in a time capsule for your children today to show them, long after you're gone, what the world was like at the beginning of their lives. The obvious is here, of course — the crimefighting, the moneymaking, the advertising, the breathtaking medical advances, the dark pathways of data nefariousness. But there are more unexpected tales as well. Among the pools the book dips into: —How data can provide utterly unexpected results: In Singapore, a project designed to look at why people couldn't get a taxi during a rainstorm came back with a surprising dividend — the cabs, fearful of accidents and the financial impact they cause even for drivers who may not be at fault, were just pulling over when it started to pour. Now they're changing policies to counteract that problem. —How global connectivity can beget entirely new forms of storytelling: The Johnny Cash Project invites people worldwide to share their visual representations of the iconic musician, and each submission is combined with others to create a music video that keeps changing based on the images that people are sending in. —How crowdsourcing is changing science: "Technology grants us the ability to harness wisdom from anywhere for specific projects, encouraging scientists to cooperate more, seek other points of view and share their achievements quickly — "the beginning of a democratization of discovery," writes science journalist Gareth Cook. —How machines are now communicating among themselves (though no sign yet of Skynet from the "Terminator" movies): "Humans will no longer be the center of the data solar system, with all of the billions of devices orbiting around us, but will rather become just another player, another node, in an increasingly autonomous data universe," writes technological thinker Esther Dyson. Brave new world? Of course. Yet it's easy to be unsettled by all of this. Hackers lurk everywhere; organizations like WikiLeaks are — depending on your politics — irresponsibly revealing secrets or responsibly liberating information. And anytime the notions of biology and technology meld, it's difficult not to summon images of the part-human, part cybernetic Borg from "Star Trek." In the face of so many preconceptions, what makes "The Human Face of Big Data" so engaging, so important, is its balanced tone. This is not a screed, in either direction. Technology is not greeted only as a marvel to be worshipped, nor is it cast as only a villain whose bits and bytes can blight our inherent humanity. The notion of making sense of information, of unpacking what the changes that data has wrought will mean to all of us, is the underpinning of the book. That's as it should be: As information's pathways and archives develop at breakneck speeds, we must race, too, to develop a vocabulary to describe and critique its rise. Passionate, critical thinking about a subject is still the sole purview of humanity — at least for now. "The history of mankind has always been influenced by a shortage of knowledge," technology and business writer Michael S. Malone says in one essay. "Now the opposite — an information surplus — may soon define our lives." The question, of course, runs even deeper. There is information, there is knowledge and there is wisdom. And no matter how many strong numbers we humans have at our disposal, if we can't understand the important differences between those three categories, the odds are good that we're on a path not toward 1, but toward 0. Save to the cloud and fire up the iPad tonight, sure — but do it with open eyes and probing mind. "Not everything that can be counted counts," warns a saying that Albert Einstein loved, "and not everything that counts can be counted."

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