Race for Seat That Was Once Obama's Stirs Passion in Illinois - New York Times

“Isn’t that something that would just make your day, to read the headlines on the morning of Nov. 3: ‘We took back that U.S. Senate seat’?” Dan Cronin, chairman of the DuPage County Republicans, hollered to an expo center filled with Republicans.

“Oh my God!” Mr. Cronin went on. “I’d have to lie down! I’m telling you; it would be a remarkable experience.”

More is at stake in the race here than merely the balance of power in the Senate. Senator Roland W. Burris, a Democrat who was appointed to the post and is not seeking election, may hold this seat for the moment, but it remains, in the minds of loyalists of both parties, Mr. Obama’s.

And that is adding a layer of intensity and ferocity — and the attention of the president himself — in the final weeks of a campaign that has been punctuated by unexpected developments.

Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican who has long represented a north suburban Congressional district, and Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat and Illinois treasurer, remain locked in a close fight, some polls suggest.

A large chunk of voters — 17 percent in one recent Chicago Tribune/WGN television poll — is undecided, despite seemingly endless, harsh television advertising and a constant run of news coverage. To hear some voters tell it, left to decide is a basic question that has taken a central, often ugly, role in this race: Who can one actually believe?

Mr. Kirk, 51, was once seen by some as having an upper hand. He had years of experience and a voting history that could appeal to a state that has, historically, elected moderate Republicans. But then came a string of questions about his descriptions of his own history, and he ended up acknowledging misleading statements about his record as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer.

Despite his relative inexperience, Mr. Giannoulias, 34, has pulled off a statewide election once before, and was expected to benefit from his party alliance. These days, Republicans hold no statewide offices in Illinois, and Democrats control both chambers in the state legislature.

But Mr. Giannoulias’s campaign, too, was upended by events: This year, federal regulators seized the bank his family owned, where he had once been a senior loan officer. Reports that the bank had made loans to people with connections to organized crime did not help. Mr. Giannoulias has insisted that the struggles of his family’s bank were not unlike those of many Americans whose businesses were devastated by the recession.

The questions and revelations have had an effect on the images of both candidates.

“I don’t trust either one of them,” said one voter, Nancy Melin, as she ate lunch Wednesday in downtown Chicago, “so I wouldn’t feel good about voting for either of them.”

When the Chicago Tribune poll, conducted Sept. 24-28, asked which candidate was more honest and trustworthy, the results were mixed: 35 percent said Mr. Giannoulias; 30 percent said Mr. Kirk; 16 percent said neither; and 18 percent did not know. Ms. Melin, who said she often voted for Democrats, said she was considering not voting in this race.

Mr. Obama’s relationship to Mr. Giannoulias has drawn special notice on all sides. Although the White House initially encouraged at least one other Democrat to run for the seat, Mr. Obama is making his second visit home on Mr. Giannoulias’s behalf. On Thursday, he is to appear at two fund-raising events (one is a small dinner party). Next week, Michelle Obama is scheduled to come. And others in the administration have offered encouragement, too; on Saturday, Arne Duncan, the education secretary, played in a basketball tournament here with Mr. Giannoulias and told reporters he was a “big, big fan of Alexi.”

Republicans (who note that Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator Scott P. Brown and others have come here to help Mr. Kirk) often point to Mr. Giannoulias’s ties to the president as a rallying cry for their own candidate and as a way to dismiss Mr. Giannoulias.

Mr. Cronin, for example, offered this description of Mr. Giannoulias before his Republican rally: “A basketball buddy and a pal of Barack Obama, and that’s his résumé, period.”

Republicans, too, are pleased to remind voters that the seat in question was at the center of a corruption scandal that enveloped the former governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat. Mr. Blagojevich, who is awaiting a second trial on charges that he tried to sell an appointment to complete Mr. Obama’s Senate term, appointed Mr. Burris.

If voters here are talking about their doubts about the candidates, the candidates are talking about the economy. “Why would we want to put the same people who created this mess in charge and give them a promotion to the United States Senate?” Mr. Giannoulias said in an interview on Wednesday, referring to Congressional Republicans.

Mr. Kirk said he believed the race would turn on the economy. “I’ll give it to you short and sweet,” he told the crowd here. “I’m the candidate who would spend less, borrow less and tax less to fix our economy.”

As if this Senate seat were not wrapped in enough unusual circumstances, there is another one. Voters will be asked to vote twice in this race on Nov. 2: once for the six-year term to start in 2011, and a second time for the few remaining weeks (yes, weeks) of Mr. Obama’s term, which, a court has ruled, must be filled in a simultaneous special election.

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from Chicago

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New Facebook tools invite users to stay longer - Los Angeles Times

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, introducing the changes at a news conference, said, "It's a core part of our belief that people own and have control of all the information they upload." (Paul Sakuma, Associated Press / October 5, 2010)

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled tools that give users freer access to the data they've sent the website and make it easier for them to interact with smaller circles of friends, features that analysts say could increase sharing and time spent on what is already the world's largest social networking service.

Facebook will also now allow its more than 500 million users to more closely monitor and control what personal data third-party applications access via a dashboard. The move is likely to appease some concerns of lawmakers and privacy watchdogs who have complained that Facebook does not adequately protect the privacy of its users.

The three new features, the result of two months of intense work at the company, started rolling out to users Wednesday. Last week, Facebook launched new photo features including high-definition images and better tagging.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes at a news conference at his company's Palo Alto headquarters, his first public appearance since last Friday's debut of "The Social Network." Zuckerberg declined to discuss the movie that explores the controversial founding of the 6-year-old company. He had previously called the movie "fiction."

"It's a core part of our belief that people own and have control of all the information they upload," Zuckerberg said.

Rather than blasting information to all of their friends, Facebook users can now put their friends in different groups and send messages and chat with people in those groups.

"What we've created here out of the box blows everything else away," Zuckerberg said. "We think that's what people are going to want to use."

Facebook already offered a feature that let users create custom friend lists, but only 5% of users took the time to do that, Zuckerberg said. Users can create groups to share baby pictures with family members, reunion information with high school pals or exercise tips with fellow joggers, for example.

"People are undoubtedly going to take to this," Forrester Research analyst Augie Ray said. "Once people get invited to a group and understand how it is used there is going to be a natural gravitation toward using it."

That gravitational pull could yank users away from other sites that offer popular groups services such as Yahoo and Google.

Facebook users will also be able to download all the information they have uploaded to the site, answering a key criticism that Facebook is a "closed" site that does not allow users to export their information.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, addressed that concern last week at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The "download your information" feature will give users a ".zip" file with all the photos, videos, status updates, friends lists and other information they put on the site.

Despite strides, Facebook continues to be dogged by privacy concerns. In August, Facebook rolled out a new feature called Places that lets users share their locations, prompting complaints from some privacy watchdogs. Facebook responded by requiring users to opt in to the service.

Facebook is banking on its rising popularity to generate advertising sales, which makes up the bulk of its income. Revenue is expected to hit at least $1.4 billion in 2010, up from $700 million to $800 million last year. The privately held company is valued at nearly $34 billion.

Erica Newland, in a blog post for the Center for Democracy & Technology, said the new features "demonstrate that Facebook has listened to past criticisms about its practices and is ready to play a leadership role when it comes to user privacy."

Privacy watchdog Jeffrey Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, disagreed, saying Facebook hadn't gone far enough in giving consumers access to the data it collects on them and what it does with that data.

"Facebook is still operating as a largely stealth data collection platform, allowing advertisers to target users through nontransparent means," Chester said. "Facebook is a huge privacy problem."

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

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Why Cisco Umi Doesn't Have What Chambers Wanted - PC World

With Cisco's introduction of its Umi home TelePresence system on Wednesday, a vision that Chairman and CEO John Chambers has been talking about for years finally saw the light of day. But one piece of his dream is still missing.

Cisco introduced TelePresence for enterprises in late 2006 and not long afterward began promising a version of the high-definition videoconferencing system for home use. Chambers, one of the biggest cheerleaders for that concept, has referred to it repeatedly over the past few years as part of his vision of a world connected over a high-speed "network of networks."

As Chambers predicted, Umi lets consumers with a high-definition TV and a good broadband connection see their family and friends while they talk, all in the comfort of their living rooms. But nearly every time he has referred to home TelePresence, Chambers has asked listeners to picture themselves watching a sports event on live TV while bantering back and forth long-distance with friends or relatives on the same TV. That's not possible in the Umi product Cisco announced on Wednesday.

The problem with making Chambers' vision a reality turns out to be more complicated than simply implementing a "picture-in-picture" feature in Umi, according to Philip Graham, vice president of engineering and chief technology officer for Cisco's TelePresence business.

While Umi users can talk to each other in real time, the action of a live sporting event often doesn't appear in a synchronized way in two different homes, Graham said. Part of the reason has to do with delays in the networks that deliver the broadcast across a continent from where it's taking place to where it's being viewed. But a major culprit is the DVR (digital video recorder), which can introduce a noticeable delay, he said. If a DVR is recording a program while it's being broadcast, typically the viewer is actually seeing the DVR's recording of the show, which it can't deliver in exactly real time, Graham said.

Therefore, if one viewer is recording the game on a DVR while the other isn't, or even if they both are, the action may not appear on both TVs at the same time. That makes it very awkward to talk about the game as it's taking place, Graham said.

Cisco wants to solve this problem, but to do so it will have to work with broadcasters and cable companies, which have never had to make sure shows were perfectly synchronized in viewers' homes, Graham said.

"It requires a lot more work, with people who don't have to do that today," Graham said.

One solution Cisco is looking at is a system of signaling to the broadcaster that a viewer is watching the event while participating in a Umi session with someone else who was also watching it. The idea is that the broadcaster, tipped off by that signal, could switch on a system to synchronize the program on both viewers' TVs, Graham said. He did not give an estimate for when this feature may be offered.

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Better living through palladium - msnbc.com

Alan Boyle writes:This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for decades-old breakthroughs in the use of palladium to help synthesize useful compounds — a process that took the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 13 pages to explain. The easy way to explain it is to say palladium is a rare metal that acts as a catalyst or "matchmaker," marrying ingredients to produce all sorts of useful things for flat-screen displays, cancer drugs, asthma medicines and more.

"Any undergraduate who's taken chemistry is starting to see this in textbooks as really important chemistry," Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society, told me today. Francisco is a chemistry professor at Purdue University and hence a colleague of one of the laureates named today, Purdue's Ei-Ichi Negishi.

Negishi, along with the University of Delaware's Richard Heck and Hokkaido University's Akira Suzuki, were honored for their work in the 1960s and '70s to develop a technique called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling in organic synthesis. That's quite a mouthful, but it simply means they found a way to use palladium atoms to build smaller molecules into larger ones, The atoms act as "marriage brokers," in the words of Inside Science News Service's Steve Miller. Here's what Francisco told Miller:

"Think of palladium as the mutual friend who brings two people together for a handshake," Francisco said. "Palladium brings the right carbon atoms from two molecules together, performs the introduction, and then moves on."

The palladium atoms themselves emerge unchanged by the process, ready to introduce more carbon atoms to each other.

"The beautiful thing about this chemistry is it's very fundamental ... it can create new carbon bonds and certain functional groups that normally would be very difficult to create, in a very easy, very facile, very efficient way," Francisco told me.

Francisco said most chemists knew it was just a matter of time before Heck, Suzuki and Negishi won a Nobel for their work. "At the time, I don't think the Nobel laureates really anticipated just how broadly that chemistry would be applied, but it was," he said.

So what kinds of products have been created through palladium-catalyzed cross coupling?

Pharmaceuticals: Painkillers ranging from synthetic morphine to naproxen (which is marketed under brand names such as Aleve or Midol Extended Relief). Asthma medicines such as montelukast (marketed as Singulair). Anti-cancer drugs such as synthetic Taxol as well as the candidate drug discodermolide (a synthetic version of a poison found in a Caribbean marine sponge) and diazonamide A (which appears to be effective in fighting colon cancer). Potential anti-viral drugs such as dragmacidin F (which affects the herpes virus and HIV). Antibiotics such as modified vancomycin (to fight MRSA infections).

Plastics: Heck developed the chemical reaction that now bears his name in order to create styrene, a major component in polystyrene plastic.

Electronics: Reactions involving palladium are used to optimize the blue light in organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which have found their way into ultra-thin flat-screen displays. The Heck reaction also comes into play for producing resins used in electronic fabrication (such as Dow Chemical's Cyclotene).

... And more: The Heck reaction is a key step in the production of the herbicide Prosulforon. The Suzuki reaction is used to manufacture a fungicide known as Boscalid. And strangely enough, researchers reported just this year that they put palladium together with graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that earned two other researchers the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Palladium-graphene hybrids could be used as catalysts for the Suzuki reaction, to produce new strains of polymer circuitry and liquid crystals.

"What's exciting about this is it's a case where fundamental chemistry has led to innovations in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries that bring benefit to the general public," Francisco said. "What can be more exciting than using fundamental chemistry to improve the lives of people worldwide? That's cool stuff."

Visit the brand-spanking-new Cosmic Log page on Facebook and hit the "Like" button. You can also follow @boyle on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

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Verizon says iPhone announcement would come from Apple - Apple Insider

Verizon says iPhone announcement would come from Apple

By Josh Ong

Published: 08:30 PM EST

A Verizon executive responded to reports of a Verizon iPhone by telling the press that any news would come from Apple, not Verizon.

Macworld reports that Verizon President and COO Lowell McAdam made the comments at a press conference at the CTIA conference in San Francisco.

When asked to comment about a story from The Wall Street Journal that Apple will begin building a Verizon-compatible iPhone by the end of the year, McAdam dismissed the story as "one of those things that rolls out every few weeks whether there's a basis for it or not."

"I can't give you any insights," he continued. "But I think Apple is the one that has to make that announcement."

McAdam remains hopeful that a deal will eventually be reached, especially as Verizon rolls out its Long-Term Evolution 4G data network.

?What I?ve always said is I expect at some point in time our business interests are going to align," McAdam said. "I think things like LTE are another great reason why they?d want a device or tablet on that network. But I don?t have anything to say today about timing.?

In September, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg downplayed rumors of an upcoming Verizon iPhone by telling investors that he hopes Apple will work with Verizon to sell an LTE 4G smartphone.

Despite the remarks, rumors have persisted that a CDMA iPhone will arrive in early 2011.

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Sludge cleanup begins in Hungary as search for victims goes on - CNN International

Toxic sludge slams Hungarian villages4 people dead, 6 missing, 116 injured in southwest HungaryWorkers use metal sticks to poke for more victimsFlow may reach the Danube River

Devecser, Hungary (CNN) -- Rescue workers searched Wednesday for six elderly people missing at Kolontar, one of three villages in southwest Hungary that was hit Monday by a wave of toxic red sludge from an alumina plant reservoir that burst.

Wearing chemical protection suits, the workers used metal sticks to poke through muck three-feet deep (1 meter) for the presumed victims, reported MTI, Hungary's official news agency.

At least 116 people were injured, eight of them seriously, when the mishap occurred Monday afternoon, the agency said. Most of them were flown to hospitals in the capital, Budapest.

The reservoir has been repaired and the flow from the pool has halted.

But the material that flowed out of the reservoir continued to pose a threat. On Wednesday, more than 500 National Disaster Management Authority staffers and soldiers and employees of Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company (MAL), the company that owns the alumina plant's reservoir, were trying to halt the advance of the sludge before it reaches the Danube River's tributaries, said Jeno Lasztovicza, head of the defense committee, according to MTI.

The sludge had already reached the Marcal River, which flows into the River Raba, which empties into the Danube. It was expected to show up in the Danube as soon as this weekend, said Imre Szakacs, head of Gyor-Moson-Sopron County's defense authority, MTI said.

Emergency workers were pouring plaster and fertilizers into the Marcal River in hopes that it would bind with the sludge and counter its alkalinity before it reached the Danube, the continent's second-longest river, some 70 km (43 miles) north, reported MTI.

But the material will have been neutralized by the time it reaches the Raba, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter told reporters.

Untreated, the sludge contains heavy metals, which cause burns and eye irritation, he said.

Four people -- two children ages 1 and 3, an elderly woman and a 35-year-old man whose SUV overturned in the sludge -- have been confirmed dead in the environmental disaster, which occurred 160 km (99 miles) west of Budapest, near the town of Ajka.

Residents were advised not to eat produce from gardens that were covered when the dam burst, releasing at least 1 million cubic meters of thick red mud.

It was not clear when residents evacuated from affected areas in the villages of Kolontar, Devecser and Somlovasarhely would be able to return home, nor were the long-term consequences clear.

A state of emergency has been declared in three counties, the State Secretariat of Governmental Communications said.

In a statement on its website, MAL said it "offers its honest condolences to the relatives of all of the victims who lost their lives in the catastrophe."

CNN's Nic Robertson contributed to this story.

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