Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Sony’s radical PlayStation 4 controller concept: A motion-control device you can split in half

While Nintendo (NTDOY) has been busy innovating with unique controllers on the Wii and Wii U, Sony’s (SNE) DualShock controller for its PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 has remained virtually the same since 1997. A newly discovered patent reveals Sony might be planning on a radical overhaul of the DualShock for the PlayStation 4 that’s rumored to arrive next year. U.S. patent 20120302347A1 details a “hybrid separable motion controller” that resembles a DualShock controller with two PlayStation Move sensor balls attached to it. Much like how the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controller combo separated the left and right hand input, the Sony controller patent goes one step further by allowing the two halves to be split and combined at any time – all without reducing the amount of buttons available.

The patent also highlights the inclusion of a “connection sensor for determining whether the controller is in a connected configuration or a disconnected configuration.”

One of the PlayStation Move’s biggest disadvantages is that it’s a separate controller and not the default one. As a result, most developers either saw it as merely a Wii Remote clone or as a niche controller with a limited install base not worth programming special controls for. If Sony were to include proper 1:1 motion controls within the default PS4 controller without turning its back on the “core” controller, it could greatly appeal to casual and core gamers.

Such a controller can be considered a natural evolution of the current DualShock 3 controller that sports limited motion controls using its three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope.

Of course, the controller is only a patent that may never make it to market, so don’t get your hopes up if it doesn’t happen.

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Show sheds light on Handel’s hidden “Messiah” helper

LONDON (Reuters) – Anyone dusting off their copy of George Frederic Handel‘s “Messiah” in the run-up to Christmas this year might spare a thought for the unsung hero of the piece.

Without Charles Jennens, experts argue that the 18th century oratorio would never have been created, robbing Western choral music of one of its greatest works.

Handel House Museum, located in the cozy London home where the German-born composer spent much of his life, is seeking to put the record straight about a man who, for many reasons, has been passed over by history.

“The Messiah would not have been written without him,” said the museum’s director Sarah Bardwell of Jennens, who lived from 1700 to 1773.

For landowner and patron of the arts Jennens, the words to the Messiah were an expression of deeply held Protestant beliefs, and he was determined that Handel, a composer he had long championed, set it to music.

The words, famously opening with “Comfort ye”, are not Jennens’ own but carefully selected verses from the Bible as well as a small number of psalms from the Book of Common Prayer.

“If you listen to the words it’s all to do with your relationship with God as in the individual, there’s none of the big theological questions,” Bardwell told Reuters.

“Everyone can relate to the Messiah, even beyond Christianity on some level,” she added. “I think that’s why Jennens is so instrumental.”

FRIEND AND BENEFACTOR

Jennens, whose family fortune came from iron, was a friend of Handel and a major backer, subscribing to his music and providing the texts for “Saul”, “Belshazzar”, “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” and probably “Israel in Egypt”.

So important did Handel consider Jennens that he referred to “your oratorio Messiah” in a letter to the librettist and made a detour on his way home from its premiere in Dublin to visit Jennens and tell him of its success with audiences.

The exhibition, “The Man Behind Messiah”, includes Handel’s autographed score of Saul which Jennens also annotated, suggesting changes to the composer’s work including a different entry point for the words “impious wretch”.

Yet Jennens’ name never appeared on scores, helping to explain why his contribution is largely unknown. An intensely private man, Jennens had reasons for remaining anonymous.

As a “non-juror”, or someone who did not endorse the Hanoverian royal dynasty that succeeded the House of Stuart, he was effectively barred from holding positions of authority.

And when, late in life, he published groundbreaking single-volume editions of some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, he was attacked by a rival, Shakespearean commentator George Steevens (Eds: correct), and, thus, once again overlooked.

“It’s another reason he becomes kind of cut out of history,” Bardwell explained. “It’s been a fascinating insight into how people can just be written out of history.”

Ironically, despite his fundamental role in the Messiah and some of Handel’s other great oratorios, Jennens was not the biggest fan of a work that took less than a month to compose.

“He just thought Handel maybe rushed it off too quickly,” said Bardwell. Ruth Smith, the curator of the exhibition, believes Handel had the manuscript for about 18 months before he started work on it.

“For it to be rattled off in three weeks, I think Jennens felt that maybe he hadn’t done himself justice.

“I don’t think he ever quite got over his opinion that it wasn’t as good as he had hoped it was going to be. I think that also doesn’t help his reputation. I’m not sure he ever quite recovered from that.”

The Man Behind Messiah runs until April 14, 2013.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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Wood stoves, extreme cold blight air at Alaska’s “North Pole”

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Santa may need more than Rudolph’s bright nose to get through the grimy North Pole atmosphere.

North Pole, Alaska – the Fairbanks suburb, not the spot at the top of the globe – has posted some of the nation’s worst air-quality readings in recent days, thanks to high levels of wood smoke streaming into stagnant cold air.

Concentrations of particulates have made North Pole’s air “very unhealthy,” meaning children, the elderly and other vulnerable people should stay indoors and all residents should refrain from prolonged exercise, according to local government officials.

The “very unhealthy” classification was given in the past few days. A search of airnow.gov – the government portal which monitors air quality – did not reveal any other U.S. community currently with such poor quality air.

The problem stems from residents’ dependence on wood-burning stoves for heat in an extremely cold region prone to pollution-trapping temperature inversions, said officials with the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the regional government.

“As long as it’s cold and the air is still, we have a particulate problem,” said Jim McCormick, a technician with the borough’s Air Quality Division.

With temperatures in some spots below minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit (-34.4 C) and no relief forecast until next week, the air is expected to stay dirty, McCormick said.

As of Friday, particulate pollution in North Pole was worse than in Beijing, which is notorious for chronic air pollution, a Fairbanks newspaper columnist reported, although Reuters was unable to verify the claim independently.

Dermot Cole of the Fairbanks News-Miner said his research found only one city in the world, Guangzhou in southern China, with particulate readings that are currently worse than those in North Pole.

Alaska’s pristine, mountainous landscapes suggest crystal clean air. But the city of Fairbanks also has had recent problems, with air quality classified by the borough on Friday as “unhealthy” – not as dire as in North Pole, but still triggering warnings against outdoor activities.

The entire Fairbanks North Star Borough has been plagued for years with wintertime air pollution. It is consistently in violation of federal air-quality standards and is required under federal and state laws to come up with measures to clear the air, although they have proved elusive.

A local program that allowed residents to swap out old wood stoves for more efficient models was halted by an anti-regulation initiative that borough voters passed in October.

“That stopped it cold,” McCormick said.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor and Vicki Allen)

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Cargo plane crashes in Brazzaville, 3 dead

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) — A cargo plane owned by a private company crashed Friday near the airport in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, killing at least three people, officials said.

The Soviet-made Ilyushin-76 belonged to Trans Air Congo and appeared to be transporting merchandise, not people, said an aviation official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The plane was coming from Congo‘s second-largest city, Pointe Noire, and tried to land during heavy rain, he said.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in the Makazou neighborhood, located near the airport, but emergency workers were hampered by the lack of light in this capital, which like so many in Africa has a chronic shortage of electricity.

“At the moment, my team is having a hard time searching for survivors in order to find the victims of the crash because there is no light and also because of the rain,” Congolese Red Cross head Albert Mberi said.

He said that realistically, they will only be able to launch a proper search Saturday, when the sun comes up.

Reporters at the scene fought through a wall of smoke. Despite the darkness, they could make out the smoldering remains of the plane, including what looked like the left wing of the aircraft. A little bit further on, emergency workers identified the body of the plane’s Ukrainian pilot, and covered the corpse in a blanket.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze of a part of the plane that had fallen into a ravine. They were using their truck lights to try to illuminate the scene of the crash. Although the plane was carrying merchandise, emergency workers fear that there could be more people on board.

Because of the state of the road connecting Pointe Noire to Brazzaville, many traders prefer to fly the roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Africa has some of the worst air safety records in the world. In June, a commercial jetliner crashed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people, just a few days after a cargo plane clipped a bus in neighboring Ghana, killing 10.

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Study: DVRs now in half of US pay-TV homes

NEW YORK (AP) — A new survey finds that digital video recorders are now in more than half of all U.S. homes that subscribe to cable or satellite TV services.

Leichtman Research Group‘s survey of 1,300 households found that 52 percent of the ones that have pay-TV service also have a DVR. That translates to about 45 percent of all households and is up from 13.5 percent of all households surveyed five years ago by another firm, Nielsen.

The first DVRs came out in 1999, from TiVo Inc. and ReplayTV. Later, they were built into cable set-top boxes. The latest trend is “whole-home” DVRs that can distribute recorded shows to several sets.

Even with the spread of DVRs, live TV rules. Nielsen found last year that DVRs accounted for 8 percent of TV watching.

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No charges against Chris Brown in Fla. phone grab

MIAMI (AP) — Grammy-winning singer Chris Brown won’t be charged with a crime after a woman claimed he snatched her cell phone when she tried to take his photo outside a Miami Beach club.

A memo released Friday by the Miami-Dade County State Attorney‘s office concludes there is no evidence that Brown intended to steal the phone in February or that he deleted the photo. One or the other is necessary for him to be charged.

Prosecutors say that Brown tossed the phone from his limo and that it was picked up by security.

A felony charge against the 24-year-old might have triggered a violation of his probation for his 2009 assault on singer Rihanna, who was his girlfriend at the time. The two have recently collaborated on a new duet.

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WHO: 2 more cases of new virus in Jordan

LONDON (AP) — International health officials have confirmed two more fatal cases of a mysterious respiratory virus in the Middle East.

The virus has so far sickened nine people and killed five of them. The new disease is a coronavirus related to SARS, which killed some 800 people in a global epidemic in 2003, and belongs to a family of viruses that most often causes the common cold.

The two cases date back to April and are part of a cluster of a dozen people, mostly health workers, who fell sick in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Zarqa, Jordan. Officials are investigating whether the 10 other people who grew sick in Zarqa also were infected and how the virus might have spread.

“It’s too early to say whether human-to-human transmission occurred or not, but we certainly can’t rule it out,” said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl.

One of the Jordanian cases was a 40-year-old female. All of the other patients to date have been men. The new virus has so far been identified in patients from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Scientists haven’t found any links between the sporadic cases of the coronavirus so far, first detected in September. “We don’t know how the virus gets around and there are more questions than answers right now,” Hartl said.

Several of the patients sickened by the new coronavirus have had rapid kidney failure and others have suffered severe pneumonia and respiratory illnesses. The virus is most closely related to a bat virus and scientists are also considering whether bats or animals like camels or goats are a possible source of infection.

Scientists are also considering whether fruit contaminated by animal droppings may have spread the virus.

Still, not all of the cases had contact with animals and WHO said it was possible the virus was spread between humans in the Jordan hospital and in a cluster of cases in Saudi Arabia, where four members of the same family fell ill and two died.

WHO says the virus is probably more widespread than just the Middle East and recommended that countries test any people with unexplained pneumonia.

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African Union asks UN for immediate action on Mali

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — In an open letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the president of the African Union urged the U.N. to take immediate military action in northern Mali, which was seized by al-Qaida-linked rebels earlier this year.

Yayi Boni, the president of Benin who is also head of the African Union, said any reticence on the part of the U.N. will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the terrorists now operating in Mali. The AU is waiting for the U.N. to sign off on a military plan to take back the occupied territory, and the Security Council is expected to discuss it in coming days.

In a report to the Security Council late Wednesday, Ban said the AU plan “needs to be developed further” because fundamental questions on how the force will be led, trained and equipped. Ban acknowledged that with each day, al-Qaida-linked fighters were becoming further entrenched in northern Mali, but he cautioned that a botched military operation could result in human rights abuses.

The sprawling African nation of Mali, once an example of a stable democracy, fell apart in March following a coup by junior officers. In the uncertainty that ensued, rebels including at least three groups with ties to al-Qaida, grabbed control of the nation’s distant north. The Islamists now control an area the size of France or Texas, an enormous triangle of land that includes borders with Mauritania, Algeria and Niger.

Two weeks ago, the African Union asked the U.N. to endorse a military intervention to free northern Mali, calling for 3,300 African soldiers to be deployed for one year. A U.S.-based counterterrorism official who saw the military plan said it was “amateurish” and had “huge, gaping holes.” The official insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

Boni, in his letter, said Africa was counting on the U.N. to take decisive action.

“I need to tell you with how much impatience the African continent is awaiting a strong message from the international community regarding the resolution of the crisis in Mali. … What we need to avoid is the impression that we are lacking in resolve in the face of these determined terrorists,” he said.

The most feared group in northern Mali is al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, al-Qaida’s North African branch, which is holding at least seven French hostages, including a 61-year-old man kidnapped last week.

On Thursday, SITE Intelligence published a transcript of a recently released interview with AQIM leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, in which he urges Malians to reject any foreign intervention in their country. He warned French President Francois Hollande that he was “digging the graves” of the French hostages by pushing for an intervention.

Also on Thursday, Islamists meted out the latest Shariah punishment in northern city of Timbuktu. Six young men and women were each given 100 lashes for having talked to each other on city streets, witnesses said.

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Associated Press writer Virgile Ahissou in Cotonou, Benin and Baba Ahmed in Bamako, Mali contributed to this report.

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Dear President Obama: My White House petition requires your magical powers

By Chris Wilson

Since President Barack Obama won reelection, the White House website for citizen petitions has received secession requests from all 50 states. In the case of Texas, more than 100,000 people have endured the inconvenience of entering their name and email address in order to support the state’s bid for autonomy. Apparently, in a sign of Americans’ growing distaste for physical activity, 2012 is the year when people stopped threatening to move to a foreign country if their candidate lost the presidency. Instead, they want foreign countries to move to them.

The forum-happy Internet activism crowd has never had a realistic sense of what happens when you to plug government directly into the Ethernet port. This is what happens: In addition to petitions for secession, you get ones calling for Bigfoot to be recognized as an endangered species, naturopathic medicine to be covered by Obamacare, and funding for a Death Star beginning in 2016.

The petition website, called We the People, is not very useful as a guide to what Americans really care about. But it is useful as a guide to how people think of what the government can do, down to the specific words the authors use in the petitions.

Of the 300 most recent petitions, only three request that the government “protect” something—states rights, email privacy, the planet—while seven request that it “recognize” something—same-sex marriage, hate groups, and so forth. Dozens ask that Obama “grant” or “allow” a certain privilege, while only a few suggest he “ban” an action or “prevent” an outcome.

The interactive below arranges the petitions into a tree structure by the principal verb in the title. When you click a blue dot, the tree expands to show all the petitions that begin with that verb. You can mouse over those branches to see the original wording of the petition and search for any word you like by typing a phrase into the box at the top.

 

Bigfoot aside, most of the petitions on the site are earnest. This does not mean they are all sane. About 37,000 people have signed a petition suggesting that it be illegal to offend the prophets of major religions. Another petition demands recognition that Israel is responsible for 9/11—that one with only some 600 signatories.

But many present very good ideas. There’s one for reforming the Electoral College and another that suggests all scientific papers based on taxpayer-funded research should be freely accessible online.

If there is one binding force behind the petitions, it is that most of them request that Obama intercede in matters that he has no authority over or rightful business meddling with, regardless of where one comes down on the subject of big government. While the site is technically designed to lobby the government, most petitions appear personally directed at Obama.

Even the petitions to secede are written in a tone of distinct obeisance: “Peacefully grant the state of Connecticut to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own new government.” Oregon’s petition is particularly careful to specify that there are no hard feelings: “Allow Oregon to vote on and leave the union peacefully and remain an ally to the nation.”

Secession always seemed to me to be something that, by definition, you did without asking permission. (Mutual breakups are as rare in history as they are in love.) But for all the rampant anti-government sentiment in America, many people still believe the president is an omnipotent force who can pass laws on a dime, ban unsavory behavior, manipulate foreign countries with precision, expel citizens at will and otherwise bend the world to his fancy.

This does not mean people love the government. We know they do not. But they still want it to fix their problems with as little trouble as possible.

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There are some great open-source tools, like Python’s Natural Language Toolkit, that can automatically identify verbs and objects in sentences with fairly high accuracy. But a lot of human intervention is still required to clean up the results. I posted the code for retrieving the petitions from the White House website on my Github page, and the White House offers the full code for the petitions website on its Github page. Questions or comments? Email me at [email protected]
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