Belgian king returns over crisis

14 September 2011 Last updated at 16:27 GMT Belgian government broker Elio Di Rupo has made a final appeal to parties King Albert II of Belgium is cutting short a holiday in France to fly back to Brussels as his appointed mediator struggles to form a new government.

Yves Leterme, the caretaker prime minister, announced on Tuesday evening he was leaving the post to take up a new job in Paris.

The divided country has been without an elected government for 15 months.

Talks between Flemish and Walloon parties have reached an impasse, mediator Elio Di Rupo said.

He said he was making a final attempt on Wednesday to reach an agreement, and appealed to the parties to make a "last effort of responsibility".

"The future of the country is at stake," he said in a statement.

Disagreement centres on electoral boundaries in the linguistically and culturally divided Brussels region.

Financial markets and rating agencies are putting pressure on the country to create an effective government capable of carrying out structural reforms, and reducing debt.

Mr Leterme announced he would leave by the end of this year to take up a post at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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KAPAMILYA DEAL OR NO DEAL RETURNS WITH A NEW FORMAT!

The worldwide phenomenon that hit Philippine TV by storm is now making a big come back in the kapamilya Network! Kapamilya Deal or No Deal now sets the stage for a more exciting game with new rules and new format! Showbiz News Ngayon reported that the Endemol franchise is set to return late this year with Kris Aquino remaining as the main host. However the new show reportedly will follow a new format following the European standard. Watch out for more exciting fresh episodes of Kapamilya Deal or No Deal only on ABS-CBN!

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Yemen PM returns from Riyadh after attack on Saleh (Reuters)

SANAA (Reuters) – Yemen's prime minister became the first senior politician injured in a June assassination attempt on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to return home from Saudi Arabia, a government official said on Tuesday.

The official told Reuters Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Megawar arrived in the capital Sanaa on Tuesday evening and was greeted at the airport by hundreds of government officials and supporters.

Megawar had been receiving medical treatment in Riyadh, along with a number of other presidential aides and Saleh himself, who has repeatedly said he will return to the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state.

Yemen has been paralyzed by months of protests against Saleh's 33-year authoritarian rule.

As violence persisted, the death toll has risen in the south with Islamist militants regularly launching attacks on soldiers, security officials and tribesmen fighting alongside the army.

Four soldiers were killed and some 40 wounded on Tuesday when militants attacked troops stationed south of Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province, where militants, emboldened by months of upheaval, have taken control of three towns since March.

A security official said two militants were also killed in clashes that broke out on Tuesday and continued into the evening.

Separately, two tribesmen were killed by militants in the coastal town of Shaqra, which they seized last week.

Some tribesmen have sided with the Yemeni army to try to flush militants out of Abyan, setting up checkpoints along roads and last month launching an offensive that has so far failed to recapture much lost ground.

Yemeni warplanes on Monday night killed 5 militants in an airstrike on a checkpoint they had occupied in the al-Arqub area of Abyan, a security official said.

Tribesmen said they saw militants load dead bodies into a car and speed off toward Shaqra.

Residents of Lawdar, another Abyan town, said a suspected suicide bomber driving a motorcycle laden with explosives blew himself up by accident at dawn on Tuesday on the outskirts of the city before reaching his target.

The United States and Saudi Arabia fear that upheaval in Yemen is giving militants, who the government says belong to al Qaeda, more room to launch attacks on the region and beyond.

Opponents of Saleh accuse him of exaggerating the threat of al Qaeda and even encouraging militants in order to illustrate the dangers of Yemen without him and pressure Riyadh and Washington into backing him.

(Reporting by Mohamed Sudam and Mohammed Mukhashaf; Writing by Isabel Coles and Jason Benham; Editing by Maria Golovnina)

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Peacock flies the coop, returns -- and tweets!

This peacock went rogue on Tuesday, Aug. 2, taking its perch on a window sill in Manhattan. The Central Park Zoo said in a statement to local media this morning that it would retrieve the male bird if it did not fly home on its own and that the peacock is not a threat to anyone. The peacock is the third animal is a few months to have escaped from the zoo. A peahen and a cobra were returned without incident. 

At 6:45 a.m. the peacock took flight and is now, apparently, tweeting from somewhere in Central Park (digitally, not just in the birdly sense). The peacock has more than 1,700 followers on its @CentralPeacock Twitter feed. Check out the video below to see the peacock take flight and hear the TODAY anchors' get punny about their new feathered friend.

Frank Franklin II/ AP

A peacock on the loose after it escaped from the Central Park Zoo stands on a window ledge above Fifth Avenue Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011 in New York.

A male peacock wandered away from the Manhattan zoo and made its way to an apartment building on Fifth Avenue, where he perched on a window sill. The incident spurred a flurry of tweets.

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Android phone returns eroding sales gains?

Google

So many Android handset the reason for returns?

Some Android phones are better than others, at least to consumers who are reportedly returning them at a rate of 30 to 40 percent.

That figure is based on an unnamed TechCrunch source, "a person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers," and led Phandroid's Kevin Krause to write, "Yes, we can believe that some Android handsets are getting returned at a rate nearing 50 percent, but not Android handsets as a whole." 

Because there are so many Androids out there — dozens from the likes of Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG, just to name a handful — there is apt to be just as much variance in quality, while there is only one handset for Apple's iOS, the iPhone. In contrast, the iPhone 4 had a 1.7 percent rate in returns (51,000 phones out of about 3 million) at about this time last year.

Safety in numbers for Android, which propelled it to the top of smartphone sales at the beginning of the year, may also be its undoing, especially as the iPhone continues to spread to other carriers.

TechCrunch's John Biggs says that to the "average" phone user, "Android is a maze." (Cue the inevitable back and forth between fanboys and Google plussers, and carry on in the comments below.)

We'll keep looking for back-up for those return rates, but here's one CEO, Motorola's Sanjay Jha, who does seem to blame Android for his company's handset returns:

70 percent of all smartphone returns tend to be for software reasons. We're beginning to understand now what has been going on ...  One of the good and problematic things about Android is that it's very, very open, so anyone can put third party apps in the marketplace without any testing process. There is a way of taking malicious applications off the marketplace, but generally for power consumption, for CPU utilisation, for some of those things those applications are not tested.

We're now beginning to understand the impact that has. Remember Android is really, truly multitasked, so you can run 64 parallel applications at the same time, and it has an impact on consumer experience. We're beginning to understand why 70 percent of the devices are coming back — because they're downloading third party applications and the impact that has on the performance of the device."

(Thanks, Mobile-Device.biz for its transcription of Jha's remarks at a technology conference in June.)

More stories:

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.

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Read More

Android phone returns eroding sales gains?

 Google

So many Android handset the reason for returns?

Some Android phones are better than others, at least to consumers who are reportedly returning them at a rate of 30 to 40 percent.

That figure is based on an unnamed TechCrunch source, "a person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers," and led Phandroid's Kevin Krause to write, "Yes, we can believe that some Android handsets are getting returned at a rate nearing 50 percent, but not Android handsets as a whole." 

Because there are so many Androids out there — dozens from the likes of Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG, just to name a handful — there is apt to be just as much variance in quality, while there is only one handset for Apple's iOS, the iPhone. In contrast, the iPhone 4 had a 1.7 percent rate in returns (51,000 phones out of about 3 million) at about this time last year.

Safety in numbers for Android, which propelled it to the top of smartphone sales at the beginning of the year, may also be its undoing, especially as the iPhone continues to spread to other carriers.

TechCrunch's John Biggs says that to the "average" phone user, "Android is a maze." (Cue the inevitable back and forth between fanboys and Google plussers, and carry on in the comments below.)

We'll keep looking for back-up for those return rates, but here's one CEO, Motorola's Sanjay Jha, who does seem to blame Android for his company's handset returns:

70 percent of all smartphone returns tend to be for software reasons. We're beginning to understand now what has been going on ...  One of the good and problematic things about Android is that it's very, very open, so anyone can put third party apps in the marketplace without any testing process. There is a way of taking malicious applications off the marketplace, but generally for power consumption, for CPU utilisation, for some of those things those applications are not tested.

We're now beginning to understand the impact that has. Remember Android is really, truly multitasked, so you can run 64 parallel applications at the same time, and it has an impact on consumer experience. We're beginning to understand why 70 percent of the devices are coming back — because they're downloading third party applications and the impact that has on the performance of the device."

(Thanks, Mobile-Device.biz for its transcription of Jha's remarks at a technology conference in June.)

More stories:

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.

View the original article here

Read More