'No good comes from prejudice', judge tells boat race protestor jailed for six months

Trenton Oldfield, 36, smirked in the dock as Judge Anne Molyneux described his actions as planned, deliberate, disproportionate and dangerous, noting that he had shown no regret.

"You made your decision to sabotage the race based on the membership or perceived membership of its participants of a group to which you took exception," she said.

"That is prejudice."

She told Olfield that every individual and group of society was entitled to respect.

"It is a necessary part of a liberal and tolerant society that no one should be targeted because of a characteristic with which another takes issue," she added. "Prejudice in any form is wrong.The judge, sitting at Isleworth Crown Court, west London, noted that Oldfield smiled as she spoke.

But as she sentenced him to six months behind bars, he looked stunned and slowly shook his head from side to side.

Oldfield was convicted of causing a public nuisance after throwing himself into the River Thames on April 7 this year, bringing a sudden halt to the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race.

He told the court during his trial that the race was a symbol of elitism in government.

But Judge Molyneux said he had shown no regard for the thousands who had gathered on the banks of the Thames to watch the race, the many others watching at home on television or the sacrifices of the rowers whom had trained for many months.

She noted that the first thought of all those who came to his help was to protect his safety and that the event was a "free spectacle open to all".

Read More

8:19 AM | 0 comments

What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

The mountain-lodge gathering felt like an annual shareholders’ meeting, with department heads offering optimistic forecasts backed by charts, graphs and photos. Except that the 50 or so attendees wore jeans and sneakers and sat at round tables in a faux log cabin 7,700 feet above sea level and at least 20 degrees cooler than the Nevada desert below. And what they were discussing was not a corporation but a very unusual project.

A jammed schedule was handed out, with most of the dozen or so presentations lasting less than 10 minutes. The schedule featured updates from a number of Hsieh’s deputies on how they were spending the project’s money, including: Andrew Donner, a veteran of the 1990s Vegas real estate boom, on the $200 million that the project is investing in land and buildings; Don Welch, a former Citigroup banker, on the $50 million the project is spending on small businesses; and Andy White, a former start-up founder, on the $50 million going to tech companies. Hsieh’s cousin Connie was scheduled to discuss the remaining $50 million, which is to be used for education. A woman sat off to the side with a digital timer, ready to yank anyone offstage who went over his or her allotted time.

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”

Read More

8:13 AM | 0 comments

Bomb Blast Rocks Beirut, Killing at Least Eight

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A large bomb exploded in the heart of Beirut’s Christian section on Friday, and Civil Defense officials said at least eight people were killed. The blast injured many others, shattered windows for blocks and spread panic in a city where memories of sectarian violence from Lebanon’s long civil war have been resurrected by the conflict in neighboring Syria.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

Enlarge This Image

Bilal Hussein/Associated Press

The explosion at the heart of the Christian section of Beirut on Friday injured many and shattered windows for blocks.

Enlarge This Image

Hasan Shaaban/Reuters

A wounded man was helped after the blast.

Enlarge This Image

Mahmoud Kheir/Reuters

A car burned at the site of an explosion in Beirut on Friday.

The identities of the dead were not immediately clear, and there was no word on who was behind the blast, which the authorities said had been caused either by a car bomb or a bomb hidden in the street or under a vehicle parked in the affluent Sassine area, about two blocks from a gleaming shopping center.

Shattered glass fell from buildings several blocks away. One car’s blackened and ripped hulk appeared to have been thrown on top of another by the blast. Shutters were askew on a traditional Lebanese house across the narrow street. Fire trucks, ambulances, police and soldiers crowded the neighborhood.

Not far behind them came phalanxes of politicians marching in suits and ties from all directions to point fingers — but also to plead that Lebanon not get dragged into tit-for-tat killings or a return to the sectarian conflict that convulsed this Mediterranean seaside city during the 1975-1991 civil war.

The explosion shook the neighborhood just before 3 p.m., sending black smoke rising over the Sassine area, a wealthy shopping and residential district. Beirut cellphones were jammed as people spread the news.

Residents and politicians noted that the explosion took place in the same area where a bomb hit the headquarters of the Christian Phalange Party in 1982, assassinating its leader, Bashir Gemayel, just after he had been elected president.

Civil Defense officers who rushed to the scene picked pieces of flesh off a security fence and put them into plastic bags. Wounded people, many of them elderly residents of the neighborhood, were emerging from houses, sobbing. One woman walked in a bloodied nightgown.

In an upstairs apartment near the blast, Lily Nameh, 73, said she had been taking a nap with her husband, Ghaleb. “I thought it was an earthquake,” she said. “Suddenly everything was falling on us.” Her husband said “It felt like a plane landed on the building.”At a sporting club near the beach, where Beirut business people and wealthy residents were whiling away a hazy, unseasonably hot afternoon on terraces, people could be heard repeating the news. Several got up to leave the beach immediately.

The physical scars of the civil war that tore apart Beirut’s central downtown are hardly evident today in the vibrant districts of Ashrafiyeh in the largely Christian east and Hamra in the largely Muslim west. Once strongholds of Christian and Muslim factions, they are now usually peaceful areas full of pubs and restaurants where Lebanese mix freely. But vestiges of the divisions remain evident with posters of the leaders of each sect killed over the years in political violence.

Read More

8:10 AM | 0 comments

What we won't be seeing with Windows Phone 8 Apollo

Microsoft unveiled its latest mobile phone operating system last week – Windows Phone 8 – at its Windows Phone Summit developer’s conference in San Francisco. ITProPortal rounded up all of the rumours and speculation surrounding the Apollo release a day before the keynote and then live blogged all of the happenings from the conference.

WP8 will be built upon the same codebase as the Windows 8 desktop OS and will bring in support for multi-core processors, HD screen resolutions and removable storage.
While that's what we can expect to see, what about the things we won't? To complement our article in the top 5 features of Windows Phone 8, and to draw a complete picture of the new platform, here's what Windows Phone 8 will not be bringing.
A good array of handset manufacturers
When Windows Phone 7 officially launched in October of 2012 there were four key mobile phone manufacturing partners, all developing handsets running from the Windows Phone 7 OS. These were Dell, HTC, LG and Samsung. The following year, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango was launched and this gave Microsoft the opportunity to bring in more partners; specifically ZTE, Acer, Fujitsu and Nokia. Nokia has been the most notable addition, with the Finnish company dropping its own Symbian mobile phone operating system in favour of Windows Phone for its flagship handsets.
Going into the Windows Phone Summit, the number of companies making Windows Phone 7 handsets stood at eight. By the end of the summit this had halved to four after Microsoft announed that Nokia, Huawei, Samsung and HTC will be making phones running WP8. This will undoubtedly lead to less choice in terms of handsets, which could very well hamper the new platform's uptake.
Support for older handsets 
There have been many rumours and much speculation leading up to the launch of Windows Phone 8 Apollo, surrounding the fact that existing Windows Phone 7 devices won’t be upgradable to WP8. Microsoft confirmed this rumour to be true by stating, "Windows Phone 8 will not run on existing devices". This means that no current Window Phone 7 mobile phone user will be able to update their device to the new platform.
This will leave a good number of handsets – only months-old – unable to be updated to the Windows Phone 8 OS, even though many are considered flagship models. These include the likes of the Nokia Lumia 900, which has only just gone on sale. Microsoft has unveiled a slight work-around to this disappointing news by confirming that a Windows Phone 7.8 update is coming, which will include features from Windows Phone 8. Although it is unclear what these features might ultimately be, the new start screen will be available.
Microsoft confirmed at the Windows Phone Summit conference that devices running Windows Phone 8 will be supported with updates for at least 18 months - from the device’s launch. This guarantees that WP8 adopters won’t be left out of any major platform updates in the same way as current Windows Phone 7 handsets owners will be.

Read More

5:06 AM | 0 comments

Google Nexus 7 tips and tricks

Quickly customize your Nexus 7 Android tablet using these easy personalization tips.

The $199 Nexus 7 tablet from Google is one of the most approachable full-fledged Android tablets I've played with. Instead of the "Tron"-inspired graphic motifs and deliberately opaque navigation elements that defined Honeycomb (Android 3.0), the Nexus 7 feels like it was made for a human being.

But while Google's new emphasis on its media services (video, music, books) makes this tablet feel a little like more a Kindle Fire than a high-end Android tablet, there are number of customizations you can make to the Nexus 7 to make it uniquely your own.
In the above CNET How To video, I'll show you how to quickly customize your Nexus 7 experience. You'll learn how to add and delete home screen widgets, create folders for your apps, increase the system font size, and even how to open the lock screen by blinking your eyes.

Read More

5:05 AM | 0 comments