MADRID — A passenger train derailed in northwestern Spain on Wednesday night, killing at least 35 people and leaving hundreds injured, officials said.
Alberto Nunez Feijoo, president of the region of Galicia, said at least 35 people aboard the train were killed.
LOS ANGELES — A 16-year-old has been arrested for allegedly using social media to organize a mob of teens to attack and rob pedestrians on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, police said Wednesday.
The teen is believed to have incited a chaotic crime spree, dubbed a “bash mob,” at the busy Los Angeles intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, Officer Bruce Borihanh said. The teen’s name was withheld because he is a juvenile.
NEW YORK — A New York City street gang member was sentenced to death on Wednesday in the execution-style slayings of two undercover police officers in 2003 – the latest chapter in a case that’s seen his original death sentence overturned, his behind-bars affair with a prison guard exposed and the massive cost of his defense questioned.
It took a jury only about five hours to reach the decision in federal court in Brooklyn in the case against Ronell Wilson.
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Police made numerous arrests inside the Wisconsin’s Capitol building on Wednesday, more than two years after tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the rotunda in Madison to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) budget reforms.
The Associated Press reported that Capitol Police arrested “about two dozen people” who were in the building to take part in a weekly tradition called the Solidarity Singalong, an anti-Republican display that began during the 2011 budget protests.
The arrests mark the first time Capitol Police have clamped down on protesters since William Conley, the same federal judge who recently blocked a controversial state anti-abortion law, ruled that larger groups of protesters would need a permit to gather.
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Video from China shows the rescue of a young girl who appears to have gotten her head stuck in a railing 24 stories above the ground.
The widely reported incident occurred on Saturday, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which cites footage released by China’s state broadcaster CCTV.
Firefighters in China’s Hubei province were called after neighbors heard the five-year-old girl crying and discovered her clinging to the outside of the railing. The child had been left locked alone in the apartment when she decided to climb out a window, according to reports.
There are two major paths you might go down when you’re attempting to see what’s different in the change-over from Android 4.2 or 4.2.x over to 4.3 Jelly Bean: one is behind the scenes, the other – right up front. What we’re going to be doing is taking a mostly up-front approach, sourced straight from Google’s guides, tuned here for the common user while we keep the developer back end in mind: those bits and pieces are put in place for your machine to work well – here’s what you’ll be well off knowing.
Google has added a collection enhancements in the performance features already built-in to Jelly Bean, this including vsync timing, triple buffering, reduced touch latency, CPU input boost, and hardware-accelerated 2D rendering. You’ll find that this hardware-accelerated 2D rendering is now optimized for the stream of drawing commands.
While this doesn’t end up changing a lot for those of you that just want to open their phone and kick up some dust with a high-powered graphics-intensive game, your device’s GPU will thank you for the more efficiently rearrangement and merging of draw operations. This renderer can also now use multithreading across multiple CPU cores to perform “certain” tasks.
You know what that means?
If you’re all about making the most of your multi-core processor (like most hero phones these days employ), you can now make them dance for your 2D rendering! Of course, again, that may not mean a lot for the lay person, but check down in the GPU profiling area in the Developer Bits section later in this run-down – see how you can see it with pretty live graphs and rings!
Google’s Android 4.3 adds on improved rendering across the board, but centers again on the rendering of shapes and text. Efficiency in these areas allow circles and rounded rectangles to be rendered with higher quality, while text optimizations come into play when multiple fonts are used near one another, when text is scaled at high speed (think about zooming in) and when you’ve got oddities like drop shadows and CJK (complex glyph sets) lurking around.
This all ties in with OpenGL ES 3.0 and Google’s adoption of said system for Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. We’ll be attacking this bit of system integration, that is Khronos OpenGL ES 3.0, in a separate article – for now you’ll just want to know that this expands developer abilities to bring high-quality graphics and rendering to apps with new tools included in the official Android Native Developer Kit (NDK).
You’ll also find that custom rotation animation types have been added with Android 4.3, meaning you’ll be seeing apps choosing to use “jump-cut” and “cross-fade” when you turn your device on its side rather than just “standard” as you’re seeing now. Along with this, believe it or not, the ability to lock the screen to its current orientation has only just been introduced with Android 4.3 – helpful for camera apps, especially.
Android 4.3 Jelly Bean builds on an accessibility framework allowing simulations to be run on devices – this means your device will believe it’s being tapped, touched, etcetera, while you’re running these commands from a separate machine. Google notes that the user can: “perform basic operations, set rotation of the screen, generate input events, take screenshots,” and a whole lot more.
We’ll be waiting for this set of abilities to be expanded beyond the developer realm and into the remote control Android smartphone universe. This sort of usability has already begun with display mirroring – now it’s time to get weird with it.
Developers will now be able to make user of On-screen GPU profiling. This data comes up in real time and shows what your device’s graphics processing unit(s) are doing and can be accessed in your Developer Options under settings. If you do not see these settings right out of the box, it’s just because you’ve not un-hidden them yet (this is default in all Android iterations above 4.2).
To un-hide Developer Options, go to Settings – About phone – Build number, and tap the Build number of your device 7 times quickly. From there you’ll be in business. Android 4.3 offers a collection of developer abilities behind the scenes, also including a set of enhancements to Systrace loggin.
With the Systrace tool, developers are able to visualize app-specific events inside the software they create, analyze the data that’s then output, and use Systrace tags with custom app selections to understand the behaviors and performance of apps in ways that are both easy to understand and in-depth enough to expand well beyond analysis tools of the past.
One of the most important additions to Android in this update for the business owner or employee that needs a bit more security than the average user is the addition of Wi-Fi credential configurations for individual apps to connect with WPA2 enterprise access points. Google adds API compatibility with Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) and Encapsulated EAP (Phase 2) credentials, just like they’ve always wanted.
Android 4.3 adds KeyChain enhancements which allow apps to confirm that commands entered into them – passwords, for example – will not ever be exported off the device itself. This is what Google calls a “hardware root of trust” for the device, and they suggest that it cannot be broken, “even in the event of a root or kernel compromise.” That’s hardcore.
This security is expanded with an Android Keystore Provider which can be used by one app that will then store a password that cannot be seen or used by any other app. This key is added to the keystore without any user interaction and locks the the data down the same way the KeyChain API locks down keys to hardware.
You’ll also want to have a peek at our exploration of Restricted Profiles and Google’s expanded vision for multiple users on one device. Built-in kid-proofing!
Google will be pushing Android 4.3 over the air to Nexus devices starting today – for models like the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10, and SOON for the HTC One Google Play edition and Samsung Galaxy S 4 Google Play edition. As for the rest of the Android universe – we’ll just have to wait and see! There’s always the hacker forums, and stick around our Android portal for the news when it pops up!
SlashGear 101: Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, what’s new? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives blocked an attempt Wednesday to end funding under the 2001 law that granted the White House authority to fight what has turned into an endless war.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Congress overwhelmingly passed the two-page Authorization to Use Military Force, specifying that the president can “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
The AUMF was invoked to invade Afghanistan and has since underpinned the use of drone strikes around the world, the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects — potentially including Americans — and the operation of the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, among other things.
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Ryan Reynolds is trying to rid himself of his former bachelor life … again.
The Hollywood A-lister has tried and struck out twice in selling his Hollywood Hills bachelor pad. But this time, the 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom home is on the market for a lowered price of $1.599 million. It appears this property has never been that close to his heart; the actor tried to sell it in 2009 when he was married to Scarlett Johansson (and they were living elsewhere) and then tried selling again in 2011.
2012 proved a busy year for the heartthrob (best known for “The Green Lantern,” “The Proposal” and “Buried”) — he married blond siren Blake Lively (“Gossip Girl,” “Savages” and “The Town”). The two have a home in Bedford, NY.
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Bees are amazing creatures. The yellow-and-black-striped little things make honey and royal jelly and, given a little bit of guidance, completely stellar sculptures made out of wax. In recent years, artists have picked up on the talent.
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