Windows Phone 8 detailed: dual cores, Skype Integration and NFC are a go

If you thought Mango was the bee's knees, just wait till you get a hold of Apollo. No, seriously, keep waiting 'cause we have no idea when that will happen. While we still can't say when Windows Phone 8 will be making its way to a handset near you, we do have quite a few new details about the mobile OS courtesy of the folks over at PocketNow. The site managed to snag a copy of a video starring Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore talking about what's coming in the next major revision. Those of you concerned with Microsoft's inability to go toe to toe with Apple and Google on specs can breathe a bit easier as new screen resolutions (four in total) and dual-core CPUs will be supported, while those clamoring for more storage will be happy to hear that microSD support has returned -- this time in an official capacity. Rounding out the new hardware features will be NFC support, including the Beam-like ability to share content by tapping, though, it'll have the advantage of being able to share with Windows 8 based tablets and laptops as well. And, speaking of Windows 8, its similarly numbered, phone-centric sibling won't just share a UI, it'll have many of the core components, including large chunks of the kernel, networking stack and security features -- which should make porting apps from the desktop to the handset a relatively simple affair.

Amazingly enough, the list of improvements doesn't end there. If you've been wondering when Microsoft was going to put its Skype acquisition to good use, wonder no more. A Windows Phone app for the VoIP service will debut alongside Apollo and will feature deep integration with the OS, including the ability to place calls the same as you would standard voice calls. A new live tile and app called DataSmart will make it easier for users to manage their data usage and ensure they don't end up eating insane overage fees. To milk every last bit out of that data plan Windows Phone will favor WiFi over a cellular connection and can be programmed to automatically connect to carrier-owned hotspots when they're in range. And, if that weren't enough, Microsoft plans to use proxy servers to compress web pages before feeding them to the mobile version of Internet Explorer 10, not unlike Opera Mini. Those of you who doubted that Windows Phone could actually keep pace with Android and iOS, now might be a good time to reevaluate your position. Hit up the source link for a few more details.

Update: If you want to get all of the details in a nice easy to glance list head after the break for a convenient bullet point presentation.

Continue reading Windows Phone 8 detailed: dual cores, Skype Integration and NFC are a go

Windows Phone 8 detailed: dual cores, Skype Integration and NFC are a go originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/windows-phone-8-detailed/

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Document shows NYPD eyed Shiites based on religion (AP)

NEW YORK ? The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how, when looking for potential threats, they focused their spying efforts on mosques and Muslims. Police analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.

The Associated Press has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods with plainclothes officers. Its spying operations were begun after the 2001 terror attacks with help from the CIA in a highly unusual partnership.

The May 2006 NYPD intelligence report, entitled "US-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City," made a series of recommendations, including: "Expand and focus intelligence collections at Shi'a mosques."

The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion. Under FBI guidelines, which the NYPD says it follows, many of the recommendations in the police document would be prohibited.

The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran's nuclear ambition has increased again recently.

Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.

"The Palestinian community, although not Shi'a, should also be assessed due to presence of Hamas members and sympathizers and the group's relationship with the Iranian government," analysts wrote.

The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.

The document also renews debate over how the NYPD privately views Muslims. Kelly has faced calls for his resignation recently from some Muslim activists for participating in a video that says Muslims want to "infiltrate and dominate" the United States. The NYPD showed the video to nearly 1,500 officers during training.

Documents previously obtained by the AP show widespread NYPD infiltration of mosques. It's not clear, however, whether the May 2006 report prompted police to infiltrate the mosques on the list. One former police official who has seen the report said that, generally, the recommendations were followed but he could not say for sure whether these mosques were infiltrated.

A current law enforcement official, also familiar with the report, said that since it was issued the NYPD learned that Hezbollah was more political than religious and concluded that it's not effective to monitor Shiites.

Both insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.

On Thursday, Kelly described the document as a "contingency plan," though that is not mentioned in the document and there is nothing indicating what would trigger such a contingency.

"This was a 2006 document that talked about what we would do if there were hostilities involving Iran," he said. "It seems to me that it would be prudent for us to have plans in that regard."

Neither David Cohen, the NYPD's top intelligence officer, nor department spokesman Paul Browne responded to emails or phone calls from The Associated Press this week.

Iran is an overwhelmingly Shiite country, but Shiites are a small percentage of the U.S. Muslim population. By contrast, al-Qaida is a Sunni organization and many U.S. leaders consider Shiite clerics as allies in the fight against homegrown extremism. Shiites are often oppressed overseas and many have sought asylum in the West.

The document is dated just weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress that, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran."

Even now, the U.S. remains particularly concerned with Iran, not only because of its nuclear research but also because intelligence officials don't believe they know how Iranian sympathizers inside the United States would respond if the two countries went to war. By far, the largest group of Iranians in the U.S. lives in or around Los Angeles. Yet the NYPD, with a smaller Iranian population that police estimated at about 8,500 in New York City, shared the concerns about reactions to an open military conflict.

Asad Sadiq, president of the Bait-ul-Qaim mosque in the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, N.J., said the NYPD was being unfairly broad.

"If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association," Sadiq, a dentist, said after seeing his mosque in the NYPD document. "Just because we are the same religion doesn't mean we're going to stand up and harm the United States. It's really absurd."

The AP showed the document to several veteran counterterrorism analysts. None said they had seen anything like it.

"It's really problematic if you make a jump from a possible international conflict to saying therefore we need to monitor Shiite mosques writ large," said Brian Fishman, the former research director at West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center. "It doesn't follow."

For instance, the NYPD analysts focused much of the report on the Alavi Foundation, a New York nonprofit group that the federal government has since accused of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. Analysts then looked at a mosque where Alavi members prayed and that police say may have been linked to an effort to buy information about rocket technology for Iran.

There is no explanation, however, for how those suspicions warranted expanding surveillance to other Shiite mosques, including those far outside the department's jurisdiction in Connecticut and New Jersey.

"Any time that you begin to isolate certain communities from a policing perspective because you think there's risk, you have the potential that somebody overreaches," said Robert Riegle, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst who oversaw efforts to work with state and local agencies.

At the Al-Mahdi Foundation mosque in Brooklyn, worshippers intoned their prayers Wednesday while touching their foreheads to disks of clay on the floor, a Shiite tradition.

"After 1,400 years, the Shias are being targeted in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, everywhere," Imam Malik Sakhawat Hussain said after being told that his mosque was in the NYPD document. "If U.S. authorities become suspicious of the Shias, I would say we are a very oppressed community of the world."

At the Masjid Al-Rahman, a prayer hall in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, manager Abo Maher was surprised to see his mosque on the NYPD's list of Shiite locations.

"This isn't even Shia," he said. "Their information is wrong."

The police department's Demographics Unit, the secretive squad of plainclothes officers used to monitor restaurants, social clubs and other gathering spots, found similar issues in Iranian neighborhoods, one former NYPD official recalled.

Muslims make up only a fraction of New York's Iranian community so squad members returned from their rounds in Iranian neighborhoods and reported finding Jews and Christians, the former official said.

Sadiq, the New Jersey mosque president, said about 250 families ? mostly Pakistanis and Indians and few Iraqis ? attend his mosque. Every few years, he said, an FBI agent stops by, introduces himself and asks whether there's been any radical rhetoric in his mosque and whether he knows anyone with connections to Iran. The most recent meeting was just Wednesday, he said, and the NYPD would be welcome if it came openly.

The intelligence unit operates in secrecy with little outside oversight. The City Council is not told about secret intelligence programs. And though the unit operates under the auspices of a federal anti-drug task force and receives federal money, it is not overseen by Congress. The Obama administration, including the Justice Department, has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether it endorses the NYPD's tactics.

"They think that they can do whatever they want and get away with it," Sadiq said.

The document also suggests a broader international intelligence mission than the department has previously acknowledged. The NYPD has officers stationed in 11 foreign cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Tel Aviv, where they work with local police and act as the NYPD's eyes and ears overseas.

In their recommendations for the foreign liaison unit, analysts wrote that officers should: "Focus international intelligence collection on the Iranian threat, to include the activities of the IIS, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. throughout Europe and the Middle East."

NYPD officers abroad are not supposed to be spies and do not answer to the U.S. director of national intelligence or the CIA station chiefs who coordinate America's efforts to gather intelligence on Iran. In fact, the NYPD's international officers aren't even paid by the department. Rather, the program is paid for through a nonprofit foundation that raises money from corporate donors.

It has not previously been known that the NYPD would consider gathering overseas intelligence on Iranian intelligence services. The police department does not disclose details about the inner workings of the international program to the City Council, to Congress or to U.S. intelligence agencies.

___

Online:

View the NYPD document: http://bit.ly/wYrAUX

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

Follow Apuzzo, Goldman, Sullivan and Hawley at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo, http://twitter.com/goldmandc, http://twitter.com/esullivanap, and http://twitter.com/chawley1

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120203/ap_on_go_ot/us_nypd_intelligence

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Lilly Alzheimer's drug an unlikely ace in the hole (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) ? A treatment for Alzheimer's disease is the drug industry's longest shot, and any brave investors willing to place a bet on the outcome are likely to focus on Eli Lilly & Co.

Lilly and Pfizer Inc are the farthest along in developing experimental medicines for the memory-robbing disease. But Lilly, as the far smaller company, has much more upside for its share price if it hits pay dirt.

The field is littered with high-profile failures, one of the most recent being a previous Lilly compound.

Lilly's latest contender, solanezumab, is designed to bind to and mop up a protein called amyloid beta, the main component of amyloid plaque deposits in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Anticipation over the drug has built up slowly. Lilly is expected to release as soon as this summer final data from two 18-month studies of the treatment. Earlier this week, the company said an independent safety monitor had given researchers the green light to continue with the late-stage trials.

That go-ahead suggested the drug so far has sidestepped the kinds of safety issues that doomed the earlier Lilly medicine called semagacestat in 2010. With no real treatment on the market, even the slightest sign of success could bring a windfall to Lilly, Wall Street analysts say.

"If there are statistically significant positive results, showing a benefit of any kind with this drug, Lilly shares could go up as much as 50 percent or more," said Leerink Swann analyst Seamus Fernandez.

But if the trials fail, Lilly shares would likely fall no more than 10 percent, Fernandez said, noting that the share price already reflects investor skepticism of the drug's ability to slow progression of the disease.

"Lilly's own internal outlook assigns an extremely low probability; they know it's a very high risk, high reward" proposition, Fernandez said in a recent interview.

Lilly shares have risen 13 percent in the past year, compared with an 8 percent rise for the ARCA Pharmaceutical Index of large drugmakers. Many investors hold the stock for its hefty dividend, which the company has pledged to preserve in coming years despite a host of challenges.

The Indianapolis-based drugmaker badly needs big new drugs to offset plunging sales of its Zyprexa schizophrenia treatment, which in October began facing cheaper generics. Lilly also faces looming generic competition for its Cymbalta antidepressant.

The group Alzheimer's Disease International estimates there are now 36 million people with the disease worldwide and that the number will almost double to 66 million by 2030. So treating Alzheimer's is considered the Holy Grail for the pharmaceutical industry, one of the few therapeutic areas where a new medicine could achieve the multibillion-dollar blockbuster scale achieved by the likes of Pfizer's cholesterol fighter Lipitor.

"Barring success for solanezumab, we continue to see Lilly as unable to meaningfully offset the loss of its core franchises to generic entry," JP Morgan analyst Chris Schott wrote in a research report. He gave the drug a "low likelihood" of success.

THEORY BEHIND TREATMENT UNPROVEN

Lilly halted late-stage trials of semagacestat after a monitoring board took an early peek at confidential trial data and determined the pill was actually worsening patients' memories and their ability to perform daily tasks.

Semagacestat worked by blocking production of an enzyme that makes amyloid beta rather than removing that protein from the bloodstream and the brain -- as solanezumab is designed to do.

Most researchers believe amyloid plaques cause the progressive disease which afflicts more than 5 million Americans, although the hypothesis has not yet been proven.

Nearly a dozen drugs in the past decade have tried to stop buildup of the plaques or to remove them, but none have made real headway against the disease.

"Nobody has ever come up with a disease-modifying compound," said Eric Siemers, a Lilly neurologist who oversaw the failed semagacestat studies and is now in charge of the solanezumab trials.

Current medicines for Alzheimer's disease, including Pfizer's Aricept and Namenda from Forest Laboratories, temporarily improve mental function. But they don't appreciably slow progression of the disease, which is becoming ever more common due to the world's aging population.

Siemers said solanezumab would be deemed successful if it slows progression of Alzheimer's by 35 percent in patients, all of whom began the studies with mild to moderate symptoms.

"If you talk to physicians who treat these patients, they'll say if you slow it down by roughly a third, that's worthwhile," Siemers said. Should the trials succeed, he said Lilly could seek approval for the medicine as soon as 2013.

Dr. Sam Gandy, director of Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Center for Cognitive Health, said brain scans and new imaging agents in the past few years have enabled doctors to detect plaque long before symptoms of Alzheimer's develop.

"The demand for new evaluations is already skyrocketing," he said, due to the swelling number of patients with the disease and in part because of availability of the new tests. Increasingly, he is seeing patients in their 50's.

A drug that delays symptoms for just a few years would make a major difference, Gandy said.

"That's the sort of thing we want to see because Alzheimer's disease really decimates the quality of life and the cost of care begins the moment they lose their ability to be independent," Gandy said. "Every patient costs about $100,000 a year to care for, and the numbers add up quite quickly."

Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a Duke University professor of biological psychiatry and advisor to the Alzheimer's Foundation of America, said success for solanezumab would be a landmark achievement.

"I personally think the chances are almost zero," he said, noting that so many previous drugs have failed because they tried to treat people who already showed symptoms of Alzheimer's.

Doraiswamy's wariness also extends to a bapineuzumab, an injectable treatment from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson undergoing late-stage trials due to conclude in coming months. The drug blocks production of an enzyme that makes amyloid beta protein.

Patients receiving the Pfizer drug for 18 months in one small mid-stage study had an almost 25 percent lower accumulation of amyloid plaque than those receiving placebo injections, but achieved no cognitive benefits, he said.

Moreover, he said patients receiving high doses of the drug in another Phase II study had worrisome brain swelling.

If both the Lilly and the Pfizer drugs fail, but don't show toxic side effects, Doraiswamy said there is a good chance they can be tested in future trials among patients not yet diagnosed with Alzheimer's but deemed at risk of developing symptoms.

That would make them candidates for preventing Alzheimer's from taking root, the likely new frontier for drug testing.

"We're at a major crossroads," Doraiswamy said.

(Reporting By Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Michele Gershberg)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/seniors/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120201/hl_nm/us_lilly_alzheimers

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Daniel Richter at Regen Projects | Notes on Looking

Daniel Richter "MAN-AH-WARRIOR" 2011 oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm / 78.74 x 98.43" DR/M 292/00 image from Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

?I wonder if (insert name of painter friend here) has seen these? He should.?

Are these soldiers? Obviously. A cowboy lighting a cigarette, cupping his hands standing with an (Afghani? A Paki?) a pointed-beard turban guy. A classic pose, poignant ? like lovers and like that old saying, ?Last one on a match dies.?

In a film I heard Richter say of a painting from this series, one with a standing wolf peeing on a man hanging from a cliff, ?I?m sorry but I can?t help you. It?s not in my nature.? (Somehow Pink Floyd?s ?Run Like Hell? pops into my brain as I look at Richter?s paintings.) Opposite this painting is another landscape, a canyon or cleft. There is a death mask at center, a woman(?) or a ghost. She is lifting her skirts and they become also of the landscape. Two brown men confer off to one side, leaning together. The title of this one is ?The Big Smile? and I think that one can run as far as one likes with any interpretation brought to mind by the figures, the words, the paint and the combination of it all.

Daniel Richter, courtesy Regen Projects

Richter isn?t being subtle here, or anywhere in this group of paintings. Stylistically, the paintings in this show alternate between the quiet and the chaotic: landscapes that are represented like in comics and topographical maps ? on a soft colored ground lines are drawn with paint, the figures are much smaller than life size and feel like quotes from movies ? ?the cowboy? and ?the taliban? ? all are heroes to someone, and the mood in these is wistful and elegiac. The humans are seen from a distance, and are ideals, and because of the familiarity of Richter?s symbols it is easy to insert myself into these paintings.

Daniel Richter "HEY JOE" 2011 oil on canvas, 240 x 180 cm / 94.49 x 70.87" DR/M 282/00 image from Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

In the chaotic series, anti-heroic looking figures are painted in black and they run, stride, crouch, hold guns ? they are active. Their hands and eyes glow, the spaces where their bodies might be ? if they have bodies ? are tattooed with bits of the chaotic backgrounds brought forward in slash marks. In fact the backgrounds of these paintings are psychedelic, clearly they are landscapes but they are shattered and fractured, as if by PTSD, and highlighted as though viewed with night goggles or as if they are taking place in a video war game.

In all of the paintings pattern plays a role, and color. Once or twice the combinations of colors remind me of the old African National colors in the 1970s and of other signifiers from the colored past of revolutions. Two passages in two different paintings had me standing stock still for moments, racking my brain to think where ? in which favorite old painting ? I had seen a similar moment. I think this is a trick that the painter performs upon me ? he draws seamlessly from our common cultures of art, entertainment, violence, music, etc., and plants these things in his paintings.

At another point in the film I saw, Daniel Richter speaks of the effects on the ?liberated? of our constant wars for their salvation, ?Yeah, everything is going wrong, but in return we are bringing you the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the cool guitar??? and he refers to ?our image when it is applied on others.? The west does not come across well in these paintings, or perhaps it is that we are represented here by the results of our actions and not by (the glory of) our intent.

If these paintings alternate, they also seem to create a narrative among themselves, selected as they are from a much larger body of work. Characters are introduced, the soldiers move across their terrain (I wonder for a moment if this chaotic terrain is as much internal as of the world?) , the story moves along in fits and starts. In the penultimate canvas our three friends ? cowboy, taliban and stranger ? are killed, they had been standing on a Chuck Jones pinnacle in a vista of land forms but now are falling off ? struck by bullets from an unseen warrior or an unknowable drone. In the final fantastically painted canvas the soldiers are back, facing us, moving on. At the left and right of the figures Richter has placed a schematic rock and maybe a bomb blast. This is one of the places where I stood for ten minutes looking, here and in front of several other paintings in the show. These abstract spots are glorious, really. Go see.

Daniel Richter, A concert of purpose and action at Regen Projects through February 18 http://www.regenprojects.com/

Source: http://notesonlooking.com/?p=11484&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=daniel-richter-at-regen-projects

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Aussie claim about comrade's Afghan death rejected (AP)

CANBERRA, Australia ? A military inquiry on Thursday rejected an Australian soldier's allegations that a comrade died unnecessarily during a gunbattle in Afghanistan because the U.S.-led coalition provided inadequate air support.

An unidentified soldier who fought in the battle on Aug. 24, 2010, near the village of Derapet in central Uruzgan province made the claim in an email that was published a month later in several Australian newspapers. The allegations fueled fears the United States was more concerned about avoiding Afghan civilian casualties than protecting the lives of coalition partner soldiers.

The soldier claimed that the intense firefight that pitted 40 Australian and Afghan soldiers against up to 100 insurgents would have ended before Lance Cpl. Jared MacKinney was shot dead if their patrol had been supported by U.S. mortar fire and more air cover.

"That contact would have been over before Jared died if they gave us mortars," the email said. "Everyone is too scared of collateral damage," the soldier added, referring to civilian casualties.

"Air (support) took time ... and when it finally turned up, it flew around for about 25 minutes," the soldier added.

Australia's Vice Chief of Defense, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, said Thursday that an Australian military inquiry into the fatality and the allegations contained in the email found "no evidence of any substantial weakness or deficiency that contributed to his death."

MacKinney, 28, had been killed instantly by a single bullet about 30 minutes into the two hour and half hour battle. He was the only fatality among the Australian and Afghan troops, who inflicted "significant enemy casualties," Binskin said, citing the report. The email reported 20 Taliban deaths.

Binskin said U.S. F-18 Super Hornet jet fighters had been available, but using them in such close combat would have risked casualties among soldiers as well as civilians. Similarly, decisions were made not to use available U.S. 120 mm mortars or Excalibur 155 mm guided artillery shells because of the risk to troops.

A single Excalibur precision shell was fired late in the battle before the coalition force withdrew.

The inquiry endorsed the choice of support used: two Australian armored vehicles firing 25 mm chain guns and two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters that repeatedly strafed the enemy with 30 mm cannons.

Binskin said the soldier who wrote the email had been interviewed as part of the inquiry and faced no disciplinary action. The email "did not represent a genuine complaint ? simply an expression of grief," Binskin said.

"Understandably at the time the soldier wrote the email, he was grieving and searching for something to blame for the death of his close friend," Binskin added.

MacKinney's family has told the Defense Department they do not intend to make any media comment on the report.

Australia has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, the largest force provided by any country outside NATO. MacKinney was the 21st of Australia's 32 casualties in the decade-old war.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oceania/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120202/ap_on_re_as/as_australia_afghanistan

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Paula Abdul exits 'X Factor'; third to leave show (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? Simon Cowell predicted "The X Factor" would be a TV hit and eclipse his ex-employer, "American Idol." He was wrong, and now his show has been gutted of three of its five stars, including Paula Abdul, putting its future in question.

Where does Fox's "X Factor" go from here in trying to replace them and compete in a crowded field of singing contests when it returns this year for season two?

Money is an issue: Aside from its talent contracts, the show's first season was expensively promoted and lavishly produced. Whether Cowell, others producers and the network will open sufficiently deep pockets when they go in search of stars to replace Abdul and Nicole Scherzinger is an open question.

Fox's favorite son, "American Idol," reportedly wooed Jennifer Lopez with $10 million for her first season on the show and kept her with a second-season deal worth up to $20 million ? proof of Fox's continued confidence in the show, even as it ages, to earn substantial ratings and advertising dollars. Can a rookie that stumbled out of the gate expect the same?

A new host also must be hired to replace Steve Jones, who tweeted Tuesday that his departure was "a shame" but didn't give a reason for the change.

Neither did Cowell, who in a statement Wednesday saluted Abdul on her departure and gave a "massive thank you" to her, Scherzinger of Pussycat Dolls fame and Jones for their work. Fox reality chief Mike Darnell also avoided discussing reasons for the shakeup in a "We love Paula" shout out.

But Abdul cut closer to the issue.

"I've learned through my longevity in this industry that business decisions often times override personal considerations," she said in a statement, adding that she and Cowell remained friends and she was grateful for the "X Factor" opportunity.

The show had reunited Cowell and Abdul, former "American Idol" teammates. Abdul had quit "Idol" following a contract dispute and Cowell left to try to re-create the magic of "X Factor," a hit in Britain and elsewhere, in the U.S. market.

His bravado in promising a top-rated show that would eclipse "American Idol," which awkwardly also airs on Fox, proved overblown. Although "X Factor" gave Fox a stronger presence on Thursday, a lucrative night for advertising, it failed to match the No. 1 status of "Idol" and often lingered near the bottom of Nielsen Co.'s 20 top-rated shows ? good, not great.

(Even "Idol" seems to be suffering from singing-contest overload this season, with its ratings down by double-digit percentages. New competitors who may be diluting the genre's appeal include "The Voice," with Christina Aguilera and Adam Levine among its heavyweight pop star judges. )

While Abdul and Scherzinger apparently failed to live up to Cowell's standards, kicking off both the show's female stars seems less than gallant. Another woman, British pop star Cheryl Cole, lost her place at the judging table in a dispute with Cowell before the show aired and was replaced by Scherzinger.

That adds to the challenge of finding replacements: Who wants to come aboard and risk taking the fall if "X Factor" doesn't improve next season?

For now, judge Antonio "L.A." Reid appears secure. And so does Cowell ? until season two airs and Fox takes a hard look at whether his TV baby is growing into the blockbuster that Cowell promised.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? Lynn Elber is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. She can be reached at lelber(at)ap.org.

___

Online:

http://www.thexfactorusa.com

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tv/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120131/ap_en_tv/us_tv_x_factor

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Google defends change to privacy policies (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Planned changes to Google Inc's privacy policies that have caught the attention of U.S. lawmakers would not take away the control its customers have over how data is collected and used, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday

Google, whose offerings include its flagship search engine, Gmail, YouTube and Google+ products, announced last week that it was unifying 60 of its privacy policies.

When the new policy comes into effect on Wednesday, information from most Google products will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising.

By consolidating numerous product-specific privacy policies into one comprehensive policy, "we're explaining our privacy commitments to users of those products in 85 percent fewer words," said Pablo Chavez, Google's director of public policy, on the company's public policy blog.

A bipartisan group of eight U.S. lawmakers questioned whether the new policy would allow Internet users to opt-out of data-sharing systems and expressed concern about the safety of customer data, in a letter sent to Google last Thursday.

In a letter dated Monday, Chavez responded directly to the lawmakers' concerns, stressing that, "the updated privacy policy does not allow us to collect any new or additional types of information about users."

The company defended its decision to consolidate the policies, saying it would create a better experience for users, and added that most of its product-specific policies already allowed information to be shared across product lines when users are signed onto their Google accounts.

But the previous varied policies did not allow Google to, for example, recommend cooking videos when a signed on user went to YouTube after searching for recipes on the search engine, the letter said.

"We want to change that so we can create a simpler, more intuitive Google experience - to share more of each user's information with that user as they use various Google services," Chavez said in the letter.

The letter also said the company's products can still be used without signing into a Google account. Google's privacy tools remain in place under the consolidated policy, allowing users to edit information stored in their account, change personalized ad preferences and control how their data is collected and used.

Google's response was sent to Republican Representatives Cliff Stearns, Joe Barton and Marsha Blackburn, and to Democratic Representatives Edward Markey, Henry Waxman, Dianne DeGette, G.K. Butterfield and Jackie Speier - the eight legislators who expressed concern that consolidation would make it more difficult for consumers to protect their privacy.

Following a messy rollout of Google's now defunct social network, Buzz, Google and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement in March last year that requires consent if Google collects information under one privacy policy, but then changes that policy.

In a separate letter sent to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz last Friday, Markey and Barton asked for a probe into whether the changes to how Google handles consumer data violated the agreement it made with the FTC.

U.S. regulators are already looking into whether the company manipulates its search results to favor its own products, among other issues.

(Reporting By Jasmin Melvin; editing by Andre Grenon)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120131/wr_nm/us_google_privacy_policy

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