Aerosmith puts on Boston street concert on Memory Lane

BOSTON (Reuters) – Thousands of music fans clogged a Boston street on Monday to hear Grammy award-winning rock band Aerosmith perform a free concert in front of the apartment building where the musicians began their career four decades ago.

The band blared out hits including “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” from the back of a specially converted tractor-trailer while area residents hung out windows, sat on balconies and stood on rooftops to hear the noontime concert.

“It feels like the world stood still for this. It feels like it was yesterday,” lead singer Steven Tyler told Reuters in an interview after the concert.

The band played to mark the release of its 15th studio album, “Music from Another Dimension,” due out on Tuesday.

Aerosmith’s five members signed a plaque that Boston plans to mount outside the apartment building in the Allston neighborhood where they lived in the early days of a career that has brought them four Grammy awards and more than 20 Top 40 hits.

“That used to be my bedroom,” lead guitarist Joe Perry yelled to a woman looking out a second-story window.

The crowd of thousands included teenagers holding signs declaring that they had skipped school to see the show, celebrities such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and fans whose history with the band went back to its 1970 founding.

“I always loved Aerosmith. They were one of the first rock bands I got into growing up in Brazil,” said Michelle Fernandes, 43, waiting for the concert to start.

When she moved to the United States in 2003, Fernandes was surprised to learn that she was working in an office down the street from where her favorite band got its start, Fernandes said.

“How cool is that?” she said.

The band has always kept up its ties to a city that is home to hundreds of thousands of college students.

“When there’s groups of young people like there are in colleges towns like this, there’s a lot of passion,” Tyler said. “We love that.”

While the band relished the chance to see its old neighborhood, Perry declined to go into the apartment, where the band wrote songs including “Movin’ Out.”

“I didn’t want to go into it to see what it looked like today because I like the memory of what it was when we were there,” Perry told Reuters. “I didn’t want to see it all polished and spiffed up.”

On Thursday Aerosmith resumes its tour with a show in Oklahoma City.

(Reporting By Scott Malone; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Bill Trott)

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A Write-Off That Shows Tax Reform Will Be No Game

Theodore Jones has had season tickets on the 43-yard line at Tiger Stadium, home of the perennial football powerhouse Louisiana State University, for almost 20 years. The seats, along with two others, cost him $ 5,340. That’s $ 1,640 for the tickets’ face value, plus $ 3,700 in mandatory donations that Jones gets to write off. The Baton Rouge lawyer lobbied Congress for that tax break back in 1986. It now benefits thousands of sports fans, and based on data compiled by Bloomberg, costs the U.S. Treasury more than $ 100 million a year.

Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans say they’ll slash many deductions to broaden the tax base and help fund a 20 percent tax cut across the board. The problem is, there are hundreds of write-offs and each has a rabid fan base. The ticket deduction would be tough to jettison because it’s “often associated with state institutions,” says Marcus Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division. “In a lot of states, a significant percentage of the adult population went to some state institution, has an allegiance to the athletic teams, and represents a considerable voting bloc.”

For sports that draw big crowds, colleges typically assign a face value to a ticket and then demand a donation as a condition of sale. Fans wrote off that donation for years. But in 1986 the IRS ruled that the ticket premiums weren’t deductible. During that year’s debate over tax reform, LSU’s then-athletic director asked Jones, a lobbyist for the state of Louisiana, to fight to preserve the exemption. He approached the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long, who crafted an amendment with the late Texas Representative J.J. Pickle that allowed ticket buyers at LSU and the University of Texas at Austin to write off 100 percent of their donations. In 1988, Congress made all public and private colleges eligible for the break but reduced the deductible amount of the donation to 80 percent. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the same year that the write-off would cost the Treasury less than $ 500,000 a year.

While there’s no national tally of how many schools are benefiting from the break or the exact amount it costs taxpayers, Bloomberg assembled a snapshot of the data through public records from 54 state universities in six of the largest football conferences. The 34 that track ticket donations received a total of $ 467.2 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year. As much as $ 373.7 million of that is deductible. Based on a 28 percent individual tax rate, that would cut federal revenue by $ 104.6 million. (The universities surveyed don’t break out corporate purchases.)

The actual loss may be much greater. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who’s written 12 books on the business of sports, says, based on Bloomberg’s sampling, sports fans could well be paying colleges $ 1 billion a year in tax-deductible ticket donations.

Colleges have come to rely on the money to prop up teams that don’t make any revenue and to fund student-athlete scholarships. “Those kinds of deductions are like fertilizer to a farmer. They increase the yield,” Jones says, paraphrasing a line Long used when President Jimmy Carter wanted to cut the business write-off for the three-martini lunch. Over the years, Zimbalist says, the IRS has attacked various tax breaks for universities until it’s gone “blue in the face” and has “basically succumbed” to Congress’s unwillingness to budge.

LSU is counting on Congress to continue to stand firm. It’s doubling the number of luxury boxes and premium club seats at its 92,542-seat stadium. That’ll enable the school to increase revenue from seat donations by as much as $ 15 million, according to R.G. Richard, who heads LSU’s booster organization. Even after the expansion, there’ll be a waiting list of 1,600 fans ready to empty their pockets for season tickets—and take advantage of the perk that goes with them, as long as it’s available.

The Football-Ticket Tax Break

• College teams can require a donation for tickets, on top of the official price.
 
• At LSU, donations range from $ 210 to $ 3,000 per football ticket.
 
• Schools use the cash to support teams that don’t make money and for scholarships.
 
• There’s a perk for ticket buyers. They can write off 80 percent of their donation.
 
• For the U.S. Treasury, all this means a loss. In fiscal 2010-2011 it was more than $ 100 million.

The bottom line: A tax break for people who buy college sports tickets costs the federal government more than $ 100 million a year.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Chinese women’s rights activist sent to labor camp again

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman who has campaigned against the strict one-child policy has been sent to labor camp for one and a half years, the third time she has been detained for criticizing the government, her husband said on Tuesday.

Mao Hengfeng, who lives in Shanghai, was seized in Beijing by a team of security officials on September 20 when she was petitioning the authorities for the rights abuses she suffered during her previous labor camp sentences, her husband, Wu Xuewei, told Reuters.

Mao’s sentence comes as authorities round up dissidents ahead of the ruling Communist Party‘s all-important congress, which starts on Thursday and will usher in a generational leadership change.

Wu said he received a letter from the authorities late on Monday informing him that Mao had been sentenced to a labor camp for “disturbing social order”, which he said was unfounded.

“She is not guilty and she didn’t break any laws,” Wu said. “They are fabricating offences, making up evidence to lock up people who did not commit crimes in prisons and labor camps.”

Wu said he has no idea about Mao’s whereabouts. She was last known to be held at the Yangpu district police detention centre in Shanghai. Calls to the centre went unanswered.

China’s stability-obsessed rulers are taking no chances to ensure an image of harmony as President Hu Jintao prepares to transfer power as party leader to anointed successor Vice President Xi Jinping.

Mao, who has three daughters, has been petitioning the government since she was dismissed in 1988 from her job at a soap factory after becoming pregnant a second time, in contravention of the one-child policy.

While calls to scrap the policy have grown louder amid an ageing population, China has been cautious about dropping a scheme implemented to spare the country the pressures of feeding and clothing millions of additional people.

One of China’s most famous dissidents, the blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng, has focused on campaigning against forced abortions connected with the policy.

Mao, 50, was sentenced in February 2011 to a labor camp for conducting “illegal activities”. In 2010, she was sentenced to one and a half years of “re-education through labor” on charges of “disturbing the public order” for a protest at the trial of jailed 2010 Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo.

Then, she was released six months early from a labor camp in Anhui province because of poor health, Wu said, adding that he is worried about Mao because of her high blood pressure.

(Editing by Ben Blanchard)

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Ericsson eyes steady growth despite global downturn

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Telecoms gear maker Ericsson expects slower expansion in the more profitable services segment of its business and the same level of growth in its core mobile network equipment market, it said on Tuesday.

Competition and increased product commoditization have pressured prices in the industry for years. Europe’s debt crisis and weaker global growth squeezed vendors further.

The result is that Ericsson has seen profitable network sales slipping while it has gained from telecoms carriers outsourcing many of their operations, boosting sales of services like network management.

“This development will naturally imply a future business mix for Ericsson with more recurring software and services revenues,” CEO Hans Vestberg said in a statement.

“However, hardware will always be part of the mix and a key differentiator for Ericsson.”

Ericsson said it expected the market for telecoms equipment to show compound annual growth of 3-5 percent over the 2012-2015 period, the same as its previous forecast for 2010-2013.

The company, the world’s biggest supplier of mobile network infrastructure, said it expected growth of 4-6 percent in key segments of the overall market, but saw a slightly slower expansion in services compared to recent years.

Services have grown rapidly in recent years and hit 45 percent of group sales in the third quarter.

In the third quarter, Ericsson’s core profit fell 42 percent due to slower orders and a shift in business mix to less profitable contracts.

The company repeated that it expected this mix to continue over the next 3 to 4 quarters.

Rivals have also been suffering. Alcatel-Lucent said it may sell assets to strengthen its balance sheet after posting a second straight quarterly loss.

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard; editing by Patrick Lannin)

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Cautious reformers tipped for new China leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s ruling Communist Party will this month unveil its new top leadership team, expected to again be an all-male cast of politicians whose instincts are to move cautiously on reform.

Sources close to the leadership say 10 main candidates are vying for seven seats on the party’s next Politburo Standing Committee, the peak decision-making body which will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years.

Only two candidates are considered certainties going into the party’s 18th congress, which starts on Thursday: leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping and his designated deputy, Li Keqiang, who are set to be installed as president and premier next March.

Of the remaining eight contenders, only one has the reputation as a political reformer and only one is a woman.

Following are short biographies of the candidates, including their reform credentials and possible portfolio responsibilities.

XI JINPING

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Considered a cautious reformer, having spent time in top positions in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, both at the forefront of China‘s economic reforms.

Xi Jinping, 59, is China‘s vice president and President Hu Jintao’s anointed successor. He will take over as Communist Party boss at the congress and then as head of state in March.

Xi belongs to the party’s “princeling” generation, the offspring of communist revolutionaries. His father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war. Xi watched his father purged and later, during the Cultural Revolution, spent years in the hardscrabble countryside before making his way to university and then to power.

Married to a famous singer, Xi has crafted a low-key and sometimes blunt political style. He has complained that officials’ speeches and writings are clogged with party jargon and has demanded more plain speaking.

Xi went to work in the poor northwest Chinese countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official. He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and later gained a doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi was promoted to governor of southeastern Fujian province in 1999 and became party boss in neighboring Zhejiang province in 2003.

In 2007, the tall, portly Xi secured the top job in China‘s commercial capital, Shanghai, when his predecessor was caught up in a huge corruption case. Later that year he was promoted to the party’s standing committee.

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LI KEQIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen as another cautious reformer due to his relatively liberal university experiences.

Vice Premier Li Keqiang, 57, is the man tipped to be China‘s next premier, taking over from Wen Jiabao.

His ascent will mark an extraordinary rise for a man who as a youth was sent to toil in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

He was born in Anhui province in 1955, son of a local rural official. Li worked on a commune that was one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s. By the time he left Anhui, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.

He studied law at the elite Peking University, which was among the first Chinese schools to resume teaching law after the Cultural Revolution. He worked to master English and co-translated “The Due Process of Law” by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

In 1980, Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections. Party conservatives were aghast, but Li, already a prudent political player, stayed out of the controversial vote.

He climbed the party ranks and in 1983 joined the Communist Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.

Li later served in challenging party chief posts in Liaoning, a frigid northeastern rustbelt province, and rural Henan province. He was named to the powerful nine-member standing committee in 2007.

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WANG QISHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer and problem solver with deep experience tackling tricky economic and political problems.

Wang Qishan, 64, is the most junior of four vice premiers and an ex-mayor of Beijing. But he has a keen grasp of complex economic issues and is the only likely member of the Standing Committee to have been chief executive of a corporation, leading the state-owned China Construction Bank from 1994 to 1997. As such, he may take a leading role in shaping economic policy, including trade and foreign investment.

Wang is an experienced negotiator who has led finance and trade negotiations as well as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States. He is a favorite of foreign investors and has long been seen as a problem solver, sorting out a debt crisis in Guangdong province where he was vice governor in the late 1990s and replacing the sacked Beijing mayor after a cover-up of the deadly SARS virus in 2003.

Wang is also a princeling, son-in-law of a former vice premier and ex-standing committee member, Yao Yilin. His possible portfolio could be chairman of the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber-stamp parliament), head of parliament’s advisory body, executive vice premier (responsible for economic issues) or the party’s top anti-corruption official.

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LIU YUNSHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash.

Liu Yunshan, 65, may take over the propaganda and ideology portfolio for the Standing Committee.

He has a background in media, once working as a reporter for state-run news agency Xinhua in Inner Mongolia, where he later served in party and propaganda roles before shifting to Beijing.

As minister of the party’s Propaganda Department since 2002, Liu has also sought to control China‘s Internet, which has more than 500 million users. He has been a member of the wider Politburo for two five-year terms ending this year.

Liu has not worked directly for the Communist Youth League, but is aligned to it through his lengthy career in an inland, poor province, long ties to the party’s propaganda system and close relationship with Hu Jintao.

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LI YUANCHAO

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States.

Li Yuanchao, 61, oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials as head of the party’s powerful organization department. On the Standing Committee, he could head the fight against corruption.

Li, whose father was a vice-mayor of Shanghai, has risen far since his parents were persecuted and he was a humble farm hand during the Cultural Revolution.

Politically astute, Li can navigate between interest groups, from Hu’s Youth League power base to the princelings.

As party chief in his native province, Jiangsu, from 2002 to 2007, Li oversaw a rapid rise in personal incomes and economic development, attracting foreign investment from global industrial leaders such as Ford, Samsung and Caterpillar.

He earned mathematics and economics degrees from two of China‘s best universities and a doctorate in law. He also spent time at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

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ZHANG DEJIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative trained in North Korea.

Zhang Dejiang, 65, saw his chances of promotion boosted this year when he was chosen to replace disgraced politician Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. He also serves as vice premier in charge of industry, though his record has been tarnished by the downfall of the railway minister last year for corruption.

Zhang is close to former president Jiang Zemin who still wields some influence. He studied economics at Kim Il-sung University in North Korea and is a native of northeast China.

On his watch as party chief of Guangdong, the southern province maintained its position as a powerhouse of China‘s economic growth, even as it struggled with energy shortages, corruption-fuelled unrest and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

- – - – -

ZHANG GAOLI

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer with experience in more developed parts of China.

Zhang Gaoli, 65, party chief of the northern port city of Tianjin and a Politburo member since 2007, is seen as a Jiang Zemin ally but also acceptable to President Hu, who has visited Tianjin three times since 2008. Zhang is an advocate of greater foreign investment and he introduced financial reforms in a bid to turn the city into a financial center in northern China.

He was sent to clean up Tianjin, which was hit by a string of corruption scandals implicating his predecessor and the former top adviser to the city’s lawmaking body. The adviser committed suicide shortly after Zhang’s arrival.

A native of southeastern Fujian province, Zhang trained as an economist. He also served as party chief and governor of eastern Shandong province and as Guangdong vice governor.

Zhang is low-key with a down-to-earth work style, and not much is known about his specific interests and aspirations. But with his leadership experience in more economically advanced cities and provinces, including party secretary of the showcase manufacturing and export-driven city of Shenzhen, he could be named executive vice premier.

- – - – -

WANG YANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform.

Wang Yang, 57, is party chief of the export dependent economic hub of Guangdong province. He was not included in a list of preferred Standing Committee candidates drawn up by Xi, Hu and Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to sources close to the leadership, but is firmly in the running.

Born into a poor rural family in eastern Anhui province, Wang dropped out of high school and went to work in a food factory at age 17 to help support his family after his father died. These experiences may have shaped his desire for more socially inclusive policies, including his “Happy Guangdong” model of development designed to improve quality of life.

Concerned about the social impact of three decades of blistering development, he lobbied for social and political reform. However, this approach has drawn criticism from party conservatives and Wang has more recently adopted the party’s more familiar method of control and punishment to keep order.

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YU ZHENGSHENG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Relatively low-key but considered a cautious reformer.

Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is party boss in China‘s financial hub and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai.

His impeccable Communist pedigree made him a rising star in the mid-1980s until his brother, an intelligence official, defected to the United States. His close ties with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, spared him the full political repercussions but he was taken off the fast track.

Yu bided his time in ministerial ranks until bouncing back, joining the Politburo in 2002. However, the princeling’s age would require him to retire in 2017 after one term.

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LIU YANDONG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Uncertain.

Liu Yandong, who turns 67 this month, is the only woman given a serious chance to join the Standing Committee but is considered a dark horse. She is a princeling also tied to President Hu’s Youth League faction.

If promoted, she could head up parliament’s advisory body, but her age would also force her to retire after only one term.

Her bigger challenge is that no woman has made it into the Standing Committee since 1949. Not even Jiang Qing, the widow of late Chairman Mao Zedong, made it that far.

Liu, daughter of a former vice-minister of agriculture, is currently the only woman in the 25-member Politburo, a minority in China‘s male-dominated political culture. She has been on the wider Politburo since 2007 as one of five state councilors, a rank senior to a cabinet minister but junior to a vice-premier.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard, Benjamin Kang Lim and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing. Additional reporting by Chris Ip, Grace Li, Jean Lin, Young Wang, Alice Woodhouse and Julie Zhu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

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Bac Films shops Gael Garcia Bernal starrer to AFM buyers

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Bac Films International has picked up sales duties on “The Ardor,” an Amazon-set feature from director, Pablo Fendrik.

Gael Garcia Bernal, left, and Alice Braga will star in this modern day Western, which is being sold at this week’s American Film Market.

Bernal will play an Amazon shaman who seeks revenge in the jungle after witnessing an attack. The film is due to start filming in March. Bac‘s AFM slate also includes Baltasar Kormakur‘s real life survival tale “The Deep,” which is Iceland’s entry for the 2013 foreign film Oscars.

Other films that Bac is handling at the AFM include “Hidden Diary” with Catherine Deneuve.

The film tells the story of an independent and single woman who lives in Canada. She is pregnant. Her parents still live in France in the small town she grew up. But while visiting them for holidays, she discovers her grand-mother’s hidden story, a woman who gave up her home and family in the fifties and never came back. Audrey will try to know more about it and this investigation will force her own mother to reveal a secret deeply buried.

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HSBC earmarks more for US fines

5 November 2012 Last updated at 03:47 ET

HSBC bank has put aside a further $ 800m (£500m) to cover potential money-laundering fines in the US as it announced a fall in quarterly profits.

The bank had already put aside $ 700m after a US Senate report published in July said lax controls had left it vulnerable to money laundering.

Pre-tax profit for the three months to the end of September was $ 3.5bn, down $ 3.7bn from a year earlier.

However, the bank said underlying profits in the quarter had increased.

They totalled $ 5bn, more than double the figure recorded for the same quarter a year ago.

Europe’s largest bank also put aside a further £223m to cover UK payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling claims. This brings the total the bank has set aside for PPI compensation to £1.3bn and the total for the UK banking industry as a whole to almost £13bn.

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Merkel coalition agrees welfare changes as poll looms

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s center-right coalition reached agreement on Monday on contentious social welfare issues that it hopes will bolster its support in the countdown to federal elections next September.

After nearly eight hours of talks that underlined the degree of discord simmering within her three-party government, Merkel and other leaders agreed to scrap an unpopular health surcharge and to introduce extra child benefits, coalition leaders said.

Merkel’s junior coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), are particularly eager to impress voters after opinion polls have regularly shown them failing to clear the five percent threshold for staying in parliament next year.

The FDP has long had to accept that tax cuts, one of the party’s traditional policy cornerstones, are not possible at a time of fiscal austerity, with Merkel leading the euro zone’s efforts to overcome its three-year-old sovereign debt crisis.

Instead, the FDP has pushed hard for abolition of the 10-euro-per-quarter payments for visits to the doctor, saying they have spawned red tape without reducing waiting times.

Merkel’s FDP health minister, Daniel Bahr, rejected the center-left opposition’s charges that the deal amounted to an attempt to bribe voters ahead of a state election in Lower Saxony in January and federal elections in September.

“This is about helping our citizens. It’s not about whether opinion polls are better are worse from week to week but making the right decision for Germany,” Bahr told German radio.

The coalition, plagued by squabbles since taking power in 2009, aims to balance Germany’s budget by 2014, helped by robust economic growth that has bucked the euro zone trend, although strong tax revenues are expected to tail off next year.

“HORSE-TRADING”

In return, the FDP reluctantly backed benefit payments for parents who keep their toddlers at home, a policy championed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), the conservative Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

Critics, including in the FDP, CDU and the opposition say this will keep women out of the workplace and children of poorer immigrants out of kindergartens where they would learn German and integrate.

The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who have taken a more assertive political stance since choosing former finance minister Per Steinbrueck as their candidate for chancellor next year, have vowed to challenge the child benefit plan in court.

The payments will only start from next August, shortly before the federal election, to coincide with the deadline for the government to provide kindergarten places for all toddlers.

SPD parliamentary floor leader Thomas Oppermann denounced the coalition deal as political “horse-trading” and told German radio: “Taxpayers will be financing this election gift”.

In their talks, billed as the last chance to launch large projects in this parliament, coalition leaders also spoke about investment in transport and steps to help poorer pensioners.

Economy Minister Philipp Roesler, the FDP leader, said the costs of the deal would be financed from the hefty surpluses of health insurance schemes, meaning the changes “contribute directly to the target of a balanced budget for 2014″.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, attending G20 talks in Mexico, was absent from the meeting, but ensured there would be no generous tax promises by bringing forward the balanced-budget goal set by Germany’s “debt brake” law by two years from 2016.

Merkel’s conservatives remain the most popular force in German politics with 38 percent support, an opinion poll published showed on Sunday, well ahead of the SPD’s 29 percent.

But the poll, published in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, confirmed the FDP, on just 4 percent, would fail to win seats in the new Bundestag, or lower house of parliament. The SPD’s favored coalition partner, the Greens, were on 13 percent.

Such electoral arithmetic suggests Merkel might have to build a ‘grand coalition’ with the center-left SPD after the 2013 election, like the one she led from 2005 until 2009.

(Reporting by Thorsten Severin and Andreas Rinke; Writing by Gareth Jones and Stephen Brown; Editing by Paul Simao and Alistair Lyon)

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Nexus 10: Can Google Compete With the iPad? [REVIEW]

The Nexus 10

The Nexus 10 has a gorgeous 10-inch display with a resolution of 2560×1600.

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: 13 Popular E-Books That Cost Under $ 3]

After finding success with the Nexus 7, Google expands its tablet lineup with the Nexus 10. The 10-inch tablet features an incredibly high-resolution screen and packs a lot of power into a thin, lightweight package.

Moreover, at a starting price of $ 399, the Nexus 10 is competing head-to-head with Apple’s fourth-generation iPad and Amazon’s 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD. So how does the Nexus 10 stack up to other Android tablets? Can it compete with the iPad? To find out, we spent five days with the tablet.

[More from Mashable: Top 5 Apps Your Kids Will Love This Week]

Build Quality

Samsung designed the Nexus 10, but the look and feel is pure Google. The device is extremely light — but unlike some Android tablets (I’m looking at you, Galaxy Note 10.1), it doesn’t feel cheap.

The device has a nicely curved shape — almost oval-like. The two stereo speakers are nestled into the side and blend in with the backing. Speaking of the back, it’s rubberized and feels great in the hand. I never had a fear of dropping the tablet, its grippy nature adding a sense of substantiality to the device in spite of its svelte frame and weight. The back of the device can get warm with heavy use, but it doesn’t feel hot.

The device weighs a bit less than the third-generation iPad and is just as thin (technically it’s even thinner but we’re talking half a millimeter, which is almost impossible to quantify by sight or touch).

The only odd part of the device is how the Nexus 10 Book Cover connects. There is a plastic panel at the top of the rear side of the device that can be removed. From there, you snap the cover into place. The cover works like a Smart Cover — lift it up, the device turns on. The cover fits well and adds virtually no bulk to the device, but I dislike the method of getting it on and off.

In addition to a micro-USB cable which can be used for charging, there is also a micro-HDMI port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Apparently there is also a dock connector for easy charging, but we haven’t seen accessories that support it yet.

The Screen

As with most tablets, the story behind the Nexus 10 is all about the screen. The Nexus 10 sports a super-high resolution 2560×1600-pixel display. To put that in perspective, my 27-inch iMac’s resolution is 2560×1440.

This gives the the Nexus 10 a higher pixel density than even the iPad. In actual real-world usage, I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between the clarity of the two displays. I tried with text and with the same 1920×1080 video file — both looked fantastic.

Blacks on the Nexus 10 are very black and colors pop. I used the screen in a variety of lighting conditions and only in direct sunlight did I have an issue with the screen. Bottom line: It’s great.

Of course, the one downside of having such a high-resolution screen is that just like with the iPad Retina, imperfections are readily apparent. For instance, while Google has updated all its app icons to look great on the high resolution screen, most other app makers haven’t.

Because of the way Android’s user interface elements are built, most apps tend to look fine on the high resolution display — even without specific optimizations — but apps that use bitmaps for UI elements/buttons or core graphical components and don’t have high-resolution assets will look pixelated.

The web is really the biggest culprit — most websites haven’t shifted to a Retina-ready web. That’s improving as more high-resolution displays enter the market, but a caveat of having such a high-resolution display is that some sites and images just won’t look great. I think it’s a worthy trade-off for everything else you get with a high-density display.

The Nexus 10 has a 16:10 aspect ratio. This makes the screen well-suited for video and certain games, but maybe not as ideal for reading books or magazines.

Bottom line: The screen is fantastic.

The OS

With Android 4.2, Google has an interesting way of refining its existing Android experience. To wit, 4.2 still has the name “Jelly Bean,” same as Android 4.1. Unfortunately, I was unable to test some of the newest 4.2 features with the Nexus 10 because they aren’t ready. When the devices start shipping to customers, Google says the update will be in place.

I’m a big fan of Android 4.1/4.2, especially on a tablet. Because this is a Nexus tablet, it avoids using any skins such as TouchWiz or Sense. This is a good thing, because I find that the pure Google experience is getting better and better.

With other large-screen Android tablets we’ve reviewed, I’ve often run into force-closes and problem managing memory. That’s not the case with the Nexus 10. I didn’t see any force-close errors, and the OS managed tons of running apps without a hitch.

I did find that the tablet was less buttery smooth than the Nexus 7. This was particularly true when scrolling in web pages or in some third-party apps. I wouldn’t call it sluggish — but there is a sense of lag that you don’t see on the Nexus 7 or on the iPad.

If you’re new to Android, the Nexus 10 is a good starter device because Jelly Bean 4.2 strikes a nice balance between working out of the box and offering options for more personalized customization.

Battery Life and Performance

The Nexus 10 boasts a huge 9000 mAh battery. I wasn’t able to run conclusive battery tests, but I’ve only had to plug it in once since Wednesday — and that’s with fairly continuous use.

The dual-core A15 processor is extremely fast and I didn’t sense any lag with high-resolution graphics or games. Playing Grand Theft Auto III was lag-free.

Google says the Wi-Fi on the device is better than the competition — but in my tests, I couldn’t see any benefits or deficits against my other gear. I have a dual-band 802.11n router and typically run everything off of 5Ghz N for minimal interference. NFC and Bluetooth are also built into the tablet and both worked well.

The Nexus 10 has two cameras — a rear 5-megapixel camera and 1.9-megapixel front camera. Both are unremarkable. The front-facing camera works well for Skype or Google+ hangouts. The rear camera is acceptable, if not outstanding.

The Nexus 10 is a solid performer and it compares well with the iPad and other large-screen tablets on the market.

Apps (Or Lack thereof)

The biggest problem with the Nexus 10 has nothing to do with the hardware itself. It’s the apps. Or more directly, the tiny number of apps optimized for its display.

While Apple is proud to boast about its 275,000 iPad-optimized apps, Google is nearly silent about the number of apps designed for for Android tablets. Worse, the discovery process for apps optimized for large-screen Android tablets is nearly non-existent.

This is less of a problem for smaller tablets, such as the Kindle Fire HD and the Nexus 7. After all, with 5-inch phones in the wild, scaling up for a 7-inch form-factor isn’t much of a stretch. When it comes to a 10-inch device, however, upscaled phone apps aren’t a great user experience.

More distressingly, the number of big-name apps with Android tablet-optimized versions is ridiculously small. Twitter doesn’t have an Android tablet app. Neither do Rdio, Spotify, The Weather Channel, The New York Times, eBay, LinkedIn, Skype (though Skype works just fine with tablets), Dropbox and many, many more. For the most part, the non-tablet versions of the apps work just fine on the Nexus 10, but the overall experience leaves something to be desired.

Flipboard is available on Android phones and on smaller tablets but I couldn’t even install it from Google Play. I was able to install the app via Amazon’s Appstore, but was presented with a warning that the app hadn’t been optimized for such a large screen. Sure enough, I wound up looking at an upscaled version of the phone interface, rather than a tablet.

In recent months, Google has started to take a more proactive approach, advising developers on tablet guidelines and curating collections of tablet-ready apps, but it doesn’t change the fact that finding apps to take advantage of the Nexus 10′s display is difficult in the best of circumstances.

Ultimately, I keep harping on the app situation because it’s the biggest issue facing not just the Nexus 10, but all large-screen Android tablets. Until the app situation is addressed in a meaningful way, it’s hard to recommend the Nexus 10 over the iPad — and that’s a real shame.

Using the Device

App issues notwithstanding, I found myself really enjoying the Nexus 10, especially for web browsing and watching video.

The tablet is light and its feather weight was really evident when I went back to my third-generation iPad after spending a few days with the Nexus 10 non-stop. The iPad felt heavy by comparison and I missed some of Android’s best features — such as easy access to settings from any screen.

I do want to note that as much as I enjoyed the tablet in landscape, I didn’t love using it in portrait. It’s just too tall and too narrow. I read a lot on my iPad — especially magazines — and the experience is nearly perfect. We’ll be discussing the magazine situation on the Nexus 10 (and Android in general) in a future article, but suffice to say, it’s not as enjoyable on a 16:10 device because the ratio really works against reading.

The same is true for reading regular books. Where the Nexus 7 makes a perfect sized e-reader, the Nexus 10 suffers because of its size. Books are best read in two-page side-by-side mode in the Kindle and Google Books apps, but in portrait, the screen feels too narrow.

Final Verdict

There are so many great things about the Nexus 10 — its screen and build quality, its great battery life and fast performance — not to mention the UI enhancements with Android 4.2. It’s a really solid device, except for one glaring, unavoidable reality: The apps.

Google has done an admirable job with all of its apps, and for those who never stray from the Google ecosystem, the tablet is a joy to use. For everyone else, using upscaled phone apps (often with forced orientations) is a frustrating use of what is otherwise such an excellent tablet.

For the average user, I’d have a hard time recommending the Nexus 10 over the fourth-generation iPad, because the iPad’s extra $ 100 cost is worth the greater tablet ecosystem. But the Nexus 10 is far and away the best large-screen Android tablet hardware I’ve used. If nothing else, it’s a solid example of what is possible on Android. With any luck, it will encourage Android developers to start making tablet-friendly apps.

What do you think of the Nexus 10? Sound off in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.

The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.

Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.

The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.

The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.

Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.

In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.

Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.

The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.

The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.

Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.

FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION

The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.

Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.

They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.

“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.

The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.

A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.

In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.

(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)

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