Category: News

It appears that we’re about to see more cheap and inexpensive Mediatek-powered 1080p smartphones on the horizon. We already knew that Sony was making plans on introducing some quad-core devices for a budget price– but Lenovo, Huawei and ZTE are among 20 or so manufacturers expected to launch devices with the MediaTek MT6589 quad-core chip. In case you’ve forgotten, the MT6589 is an ARM Cortex A7-based units that utilizes all the bells and whistles that can be found in competing chipsets, but at a fraction of the cost. The result is the ability to see some pretty sexy smartphones with 1080p capabilities for a low, low price– just like what we’ve seen with the world’s cheapest smartphone that was recently introduced.

Expect to see the a bigger batch of Mediatek-powered 1080p to be shipped between now and April.

source: Digitimes

Come comment on this article: More Mediatek-powered smartphones with 1080p displays are on the way… and soon

You’ve been asking for it and it has arrived. The BlackBerry Z10 is now available for purchase in the U.S. We were on hand at the BlackBerry Experience event in New York City to capture all the action and excitement. We then headed downtown to witness the first official BlackBerry Z10 being sold on American soil at midnight on March 22, 2013.

Here’s Manny, an eager fan who “just had to be the first” to get his hands on the new BlackBerry Z10 in the United States. He was met with cheers from the crowd as he held up his newly activated device.

Just up the street, and a few hours earlier in Times Square, we celebrated the launch with fans, retailers, partners and a few surprise musical acts. Folks got a chance to go hands-on with the BlackBerry Z10 and were treated to performances from Janelle Monae, Young the Giant and DJ Ztrip & friends Questlove and Ludacris. It was truly a special evening for all.

As BlackBerry 10 continues to roll out in markets across the globe, stay tuned to the Inside BlackBerry Blog to know when BlackBerry 10 smartphones will be coming to a region near you. Have you picked up your BlackBerry Z10 yet? Share your experience with the community in the comments below.

You may recall that on the night of Samsung’s Unpacked event when they revealed their new Galaxy S 4 smartphone, HTC decided to try some new, more aggressive tactics in their battle for market share. It appears the fun did not stop there as some new tweets have surfaced and then disappeared, but not before folks could grab some screenshots.

The latest skirmish started on March 20th when Samsung’s UK office responded to a Twitter user with, “Four is always better than one.” In the response, they made sure to tag their HTC UK counterparts. Of course, HTC’s office responded with a tweet that read, “Plastic is not fantastic, my friend!” Both tweets were full of happy emoticons, but they couldn’t mask the underlying friction between the companies.

Since the tweets started to gain some notoriety, they have been deleted and the initial tweet from the unrelated user has been marked as private.

source: GSMArena

Come comment on this article: More HTC v Samsung Twitter shenanigans surface

Carriers have passed information to the European Commission’s antitrust chief about the contracts Apple makes them sign, according to a report in The New York Times. The Commission says it is looking into the information, although it stops short of calling them formal complaints, meaning it is not obliged to consider a formal investigation into the matter.

The details of this information remain sketchy, although the report suggests that French carriers are concerned that Apple’s contracts hold back competition by setting excessively high quotas for iPhone sales, thereby making it difficult to assign marketing resources to rival smartphones. While no one is forcing the operators to sell the iPhone, they really want to do so because customers want it, and that means agreeing to Apple’s demands. The terms of such contracts are always secret.

Here’s a statement sent out on Friday by Antoine Colombani, spokesman for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia:

“The markets for smartphones and tablets are very dynamic, innovative and fast-growing. Samsung’s growing market position and the success of Google’s Android platform are good reasons to believe that competition is strong in the markets for smartphones and tablets.

“The Commission has been made aware of Apple’s distribution practices for iPhones and iPads. There have been no formal complaints, though. The Commission is currently looking at the situation and, more generally, is actively monitoring market developments. We will intervene if there are indications of anticompetitive behaviour to the detriment of consumers.”

I find it hard to believe this will come to anything. As the statement suggests, iOS devices are not the only game in town — in fact, the iPhone only has around 25 percent share of the smartphone market across the five biggest European economies. Apple certainly has a lot of weight to throw around in the mobile market, but nowhere near enough as to constitute a monopoly.

A good (though not perfect) point of comparison here would be Intel, which found itself the subject of a $1.45 billion EU fine back in 2009 for abuse of its dominant position. Intel, which utterly dominated the x86 processor market as it does now, gave secret kickbacks to computer manufacturers and retailers for not stocking AMD-based products. It even paid manufacturers to delay or cancel the launch of non-Intel products.

That was a clear-cut case of illegal practices, hurting consumers by limiting their choices. It’s hard, if not impossible, to argue that consumers in the EU do not have easy access to non-Apple mobile devices. In the Intel case, those manufacturers and retailers did not seriously have the option of telling the chipmaker to show itself the door. In this Apple business, the anonymous carriers in question could likely have done what U.S. Cellular did, and just not stock the iPhone. There are plenty of alternatives.

I suspect that the carriers in this situation are simply trying to weaken Apple’s hand in contract negotiations, and that the Commission is highly unlikely to step in and help.

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• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

The world lost one of its literary giants today. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has died at the age 82.

For Nigerians, Achebe was a national treasure. He was the first African writer to attract international acclaim, and an outspoken leader with far-reaching influence on both politics and culture. Emeka Okafor, who produced the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania 5 years ago and is Achebe’s relative, says, ”He was in many ways the conscience of Nigeria. Unflinching in his critiques, a monumental figure.”

For me, Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was my first real glimpse at Africa beyond the negative headlines (famine, disease, war) and the nature documentaries. His story was a stark portrayal of the devastating impact of colonization on traditional African societies, told through the lens of a single individual. It changed the way I think, helping me see the much bigger picture behind the headlines from Africa (and elsewhere), and understand the true impact of colonization on the continent.

The young Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie captures this notion beautifully in her TED Talk, given almost exactly 50 years later. As she says, to understand Africa today, you have to begin the story earlier.

A particularly moving line in this talk: “Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.”

T-Mobile will launch its much-anticipated LTE network next week, but thanks to OpenSignal we’ve gotten what is probably an early preview of T-Mo’s launch markets. OpenSignal collects crowdsourced signal and speed test data from phones all over the country, and a lot of T-Mobile LTE data points have started popping up on its map.

OpenSignal has recorded more than 1,500 signal strength readings in eight metropolitan areas from devices connected to T-Mobile’s network: Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Bay Area. OpenSignal has mapped those signal readings on its blog, though it represents multiple signal readings as single data points, largely to respect the privacy of the testers.

Though the network isn’t commercially launched, OpenSignal CEO Brendan Gill told me that its crowdsourced app is popular with engineers at all of the carriers for ad hoc network measurements. What we’re most likely seeing, Gill said, is a bunch of technical workers from T-Mobile and its vendor partners that have the OpenSignal app loaded and running on their test devices. A good indication of this is that one of the devices sending data is a Samsung Galaxy S4, which isn’t yet available to the general public.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray has already confirmed that its LTE network is complete in Las Vegas and Kansas City, so test data from those cities is hardly a surprise. We’ve also seen evidence of the network in NYC: A GigaOM reader mapped out a cluster of cells in Astoria, Queens, and T-Mobile has given several live 4G demos to reporters in Manhattan.

The other five areas are new, but because of their importance you would expect them to show up early on T-Mobile’s national rollout schedule. OpenSignal recorded the biggest concentrations of tests in San Jose, Calif., and surrounding Bay Area cities like Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. OpenSignal even tracked tests in the East Bay, but recorded none in San Francisco proper.

The Seattle area had the second highest concentration of readings, many of them around Bellevue, which just happens to be the location of T-Mobile’s national headquarters. Las Vegas yielded many data points as well, though the signal readings in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York and San Diego were much more sparse.

OpenSignal also recorded about a dozen speed tests on T-Mobile’s LTE network, averaging an impressive 25 Mbps on the downlink and 8 Mbps on the uplink (though keep in mind that the network is largely empty so there’s no congestion). The speed tests were so few because they must be manually initiated, while OpenSignal’s app takes signal strength readings automatically on a regular basis.

Gill said that he’s fairly convinced that these eight markets will be among the first to launch based on the activity OpenSignal is tracking, though he cautioned that his conclusions don’t constitute a scientific study. The results are dependent on a fairly limited pool of people using OpenSignal’s app, so there are likely many more cities with live LTE networks that the company couldn’t track.

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• A look back at mobile in the third quarter
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

Although smartwatches haven’t caught on yet, we are about to see a major push from all the major manufacturers. We already know Samsung, Google, and Apple will come out with their own smartwatch in the near future. LG is the next manufacturer to jump into the ring as a source familiar with the matter told the Korea Times. It was also revealed that they are working on something similar to Google Glass

“It is one major part of many currently non-commercialized products under development by LG Electronics,” said the source. “The company has spared no efforts to invest in products that it believes are must-haves to stay ahead technology wise in the market, whatever the situation maybe.”

The assumption is the watch will sport the Android OS, but they could opt for Firefox since they will be launching a Firebox phone later in the year. Companies like LG and Samsung have an advantage over Apple in that they make their own display panels and could very well implement the flexible style in their first offering.

It will be interesting to see if LG and Samsung make these watches useful to owners of any Android phone or only their branded phones. By choosing the latter, they create more of an echosystem for themselves and force users to buy their products, similar to the Apple approach. I’m hoping for the former, but not having a good feeling about it.

source: Korea Times

Come comment on this article: LG is prepping their own smartwatch as well as something similar to Google Glass

The deployment of smart meters combined with the growth of cloud computing infrastructure has created opportunities to build business models around the volume of emerging energy data. Estimates indicate that when smart meters are fully deployed, they will generate 1,000 petabytes of data a year, about five times the amount of data on AT&T’s network.

That said, challenges remain in terms of dealing with utilities as business customers, getting consumers interested in their own energy behavior, standardizing protocols for effective device-to-device communication, and providing a compelling ROI case beyond just energy efficiency. Energy efficiency plays that use data to solve customer problems and leverage decades of software development and advances in big data will attract investment dollars.

To read the full report, go to GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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• Big data meets the smart grid
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

The cloud brings tremendous flexibility and scalability to enterprise hosting, but it is not a panacea. For online retailers and other businesses with a critical online presence, security concerns, performance sensitivity, custom applications or compliance requirements, traditional, dedicated servers will remain an essential component of their architecture for years to come. Blending hosting strategies requires a special set of management tools and an ability to shift between paradigms as a business grows, as well as choosing partners that understand your business processes.

In this webinar, our panel of experts will discuss:

• How to determine which applications require customizable infrastructure (cloud versus dedicated)
• Security and regulatory concerns
• Management challenges in a hybrid environment
• How to address storage, platform lock-in and other growing pains
• Vendor selection and integration

Speakers include:

• Cormac Foster, research director, GigaOM Research

• Dan Olds, GigaOM Research analyst and founder and principal analyst, Gabriel Consulting Group, Inc.

• John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Rackspace for “Hybrid hosting: customizing your infrastructure for your growing business,” a free analyst webinar on Monday, March 25, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

Ed. note: This post was first published on the official blog of healthcare.gov. You can see the original post here.

Three years ago, the Affordable Care Act ushered in a new day for health care.

Since then, more than 6.3 million seniors and people with disabilities with Medicare have saved more than $6.1 billion dollars on prescription drugs.  Nearly 71 million Americans got expanded access to preventive service at no charge through their private insurance plans, and 47 million women now have guaranteed access to additional preventive services without cost sharing. More than 3.1 million young adults who were uninsured were able to gain coverage by being able to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until they turned 26.  And parents no longer have to worry about insurers denying coverage to their children because of a pre-existing condition.

Americans are getting more value for their health care dollars due to the health care law. Affordable Care Act initiatives are promoting coordinated care; paying for quality, not quantity; and dramatically reducing fraud and waste, contributing to the slowest growth in national health spending in 50 years. 

Consumers also saved $2 billion in 2012, because of programs to review premium rates and to require insurers to provide rebates if they do not spend at least 80 percent of premiums on care, rather than overhead, such as executive pay and marketing.  And the law’s initiatives have extended the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight years.

read more

If you’re a deadbeat dad and looking to stay off the child support radar, it may be wise to refrain from posting pics of yourself rolling in cash on Facebook. Or, you could just pay your child support.

But if you’re not going to pay up, please understand that your Facebook photos are public, and that investigators are most likely checking them in order to build a case against you.

This story comes from Milwaukee, where a 23-year-old man is facing three felony counts of failure to pay child support. And it isn’t looking too good for him after some specific Facebook photos emerged.

Christopher Robinson is facing up to 11 years in prison, and Facebook photos he posted showing him posing with cash and bottle of booze aren’t helping.

Although Deputy District Attorney in the case Kent Lovern won’t speak on pending cases, he did tell ABC News that Facebook is becoming a much more useful aid in these types of investigations.

“Facebook has become a repository for information that we may not…know about,” he says.

If the office gets a complaint on failure to pay child support, Facebook can then be tapped to help the investigation. Upon judge’s orders, the DA can have access to the Facebook profile and find any damning evidence – photos or otherwise.

“It is an investigative tool,” says Lovern. “It can be effective in assisting in the investigation and prosecution of certain criminal targets.”

So, when the DA finds photos of money and tons of things bought with money, it kind of ruins the story that the target doesn’t have to resources to pay.

Or, once again, let me be the first to suggest that you just pay the child support. Then you can make it rain all over Facebook with no worries.

Being a Republican governor in a blue state can be difficult, especially if that governor may rumored to be gearing up to run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tried to walk the fine line between his constituents and the national Republican base on social issues this week. A significant portion of that base is highly religious and opposed to homosexuality. On the other hand, Democrats in the New Jersey have recently been criticizing the Governor for failing to take a stand on a bill making its way through the New Jersey legislature that would ban the practice of what is known as “gay conversion therapy” in the state.

The practice of “gay conversion therapy” is based on the belief that a person’s sexuality can be changed. Most often such programs in the U.S. are associated with fundamentalist Christianity. The American Psychiatric Association has condemned the practice as unethical.

This week, Christie finally took a position on the issue. Sort of.

A spokesperson for the governor told The Star-Ledger that Christie does not “believe in conversion therapy” and that he believes sexual orientation is determined at birth. However, the same spokesperson declined to say whether Christie would sign a ban into law. Christie has said that while he is generally opposed to bills that restrict parental decisions, the conversion therapy bill could be an exception.

Governor Christie still maintains his opposition to gay marriage, and in the past has vetoed a bill to legalize it. That position could change in the future, though, as Senator Rob Portman’s turnaround on the issue last week demonstrated.

Apple may have left out a lot of useful features when its iOS Podcasts app first showed up in the App Store last year, but the latest revision shows the company has not given up on improving it just yet. When Apple last updated the app, I found it was missing some key features that would prevent serious podcast listeners from using the app on a day-to-day basis. Most of the gaps, like not having the ability to create playlists, have been closed, and Apple now has a solid contender in the genre of serious podcasting apps.

To demonstrate those improvements, here’s a comparison between the update to Podcasts (Free, Universal) and my current favorite podcasting app, RSSRadio Premium ($2.99, Universal).

Episodes to keep on the device

Episodes to keep

To start, managing downloaded episodes and choosing which episodes you want to keep on your device is important when you have limited storage space. As an example, one way to configure news podcast settings is to set your app to download only the most recent episodes, and to keep only the most recent episode.  This helps keep your list of episodes up to date, without taking up too much space on the device.  These setting would be configured differently for an episodic podcast where you want to listen to each and every episode produced.  Apple’s Podcasts offers just as good of control over your downloaded episodes as any other podcast app out there.

Download and notification settings

Download settings

This is an area where podcasts apps struggle: scheduling the downloading of new episodes. It’s not clear if Apple is breaking its own rules of when an app can be running and implement a scheduling mechanism that seamlessly downloads new episodes as soon as they are available. Other apps tend to struggle with this: they have to invent timed schedules or implement a notification system in order to wake up the app and fetch new episodes to automatically download. Apple’s download scheduler is about the best there is right now.  When a new episode is available, it just shows up.

Notification settings

When it comes to notification settings, Apple allows you to control just how and when you are notified of a new episodes availability. Many of the top podcasting apps out there offer exactly the same level of control.

Show and episode Information

Show information

“Show information” is information about a collection of episodes. You really just want to see the status of the entire list of episodes that are available, and manage how each episode is to be downloaded. Apple’s interface for managing shows is on par with what you need to get the job done.

Episode information

The same is true when it comes to each individual episode’s information: what you are looking for are things like the show notes. Apple’s Podcasts app has them right where you would expect them to be.

Now Playing user interface

Now Playing

While Apple may have updated the look of the now playing user interface to exclude the reel-to-reel tape deck, what is has implemented in its place is right on par with the rest of the podcasting app pack. You can increase the playback speed, set a timer for when to stop playback, share the currently playing episode with friends, and control where the episode is played via AirPlay. Forward, reverse, play and pause are easy to access as well. Really a nice clean implementation.

Podcast playlist

Podcast playlist

Playlists let you have control over the content you want to listen to. You may download and manage 20 different podcasts, but that does not mean you want to listen to all of them all of the time. Apple calls this new feature “My Stations,” but it really is just a playlist. The one thing that Apple did that I really like here is it added the ability to manually set the order of your playlist.  That way you can listen to your podcasts the way you want. Most podcasting apps only allow for the list to be sorted by earliest or latest.

Overall, Apple has done a really great job with the Podcasts app this time around. Rather then try to reinvent the genre, it picked the best features already out there and caught up with the pack.  There really are no gaping holes in the implementation as there were previously. In fact, Apple’s app will likely become my new go-to podcasting app. With a solid implementation for downloading new episodes, a clean Now Playing interface, and the ability to control the sort order of my playlists, there really is not much left to ask for.

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Final Book Now Available

In response to a request from Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Homeland Security sponsored a National Academies study to assess the safety and security risks of spent nuclear fuel stored in cooling pools and dry casks at commercial nuclear power plants. The information provided in this book examines the risks of terrorist attacks using these materials for a radiological dispersal device. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel is an unclassified public summary of a more detailed classified book. The book finds that successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. A propagating fire in a pool could release large amounts of radioactive material, but rearranging spent fuel in the pool during storage and providing emergency water spray systems would reduce the likelihood of a propagating fire even under severe damage conditions. The book suggests that additional studies are needed to better understand these risks. Although dry casks have advantages over cooling pools, pools are necessary at all operating nuclear power plants to store at least the recently discharged fuel. The book explains it would be difficult for terrorists to steal enough spent fuel to construct a significant radiological dispersal device.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Conflict and Security Issues | Environment and Environmental Studies

Kickstarter, and services like it, have changed how entrepreneurs fund and market their products, but as many young inventors have found, manufacturing and distribution are still a business governed by old rules. And while the manufacturing woes that can come with a widely successful Kickstarter project have been documented, it’s also worth delving into the trouble of fulfillment and distribution — namely, one you’ve made your widget, how do you get it out to customers?

It’s a topic that came up recently during a conversation with SparkFun, the retailer of DIY electronics kits headquartered in Boulder, Colo. While sitting at a table with Nathan Seidle, the CEO of SparkFun and Pete Dokter, the director of engineering, we discussed the impact of Kickstarter on the firm’s business. In general, Kickstarter is great marketing for the DIY movement that SparkFun is dependent on, and it is happy to supply boards for prototypes.

However, once you start talking about huge production runs of an electronic board for the next big widget, or even worse, fulfilling those orders, Seidle is leery.

He pointed to the MaKey MaKey campaign of 2011 as an example. The MaKey MaKey team, which was building a kit for would-be hardware hackers, worked with SparkFun ahead of the campaign to guarantee the production of the needed boards and for fulfillment. If the MaKey MaKey campaign was successful, SparkFun would manufacture and assemble the product and then ship it out.

What happened next was a nightmare for SparkFun, which to this day is still seeing at least two returns a week from the product. The problem wasn’t a bad product, but bad data. As Seidle puts it, Kickstarter doesn’t have checks in place to ensure people don’t enter the wrong address or make other mistakes when ordering a product.

The result was that about 40 percent of the data Kickstarter sent over on behalf of Makey MaKey needed clarification. That led to SparkFun’s customer service people trying to verify addresses — one example: is there a Houston, South Africa? — and it is still leading to returns. Seidle vowed to avoid that side of the business from this point forward.

Luckily a quick check among the people doing current and former Kickstarter projects shows that there are plenty of companies that will offer fulfillment for Kickstarter orders, and most entrepreneurs plan to use them. But it’s yet another sign of the holes we need to fill if we’re going to make the transition from the more traditional large-scale manufacturing process or the traditional funding models for a crowd sourced future.

It’s also a good idea to double and triple check your address when you enter it into Kickstarter.

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Whatever is happening to all those Asian savers? Apparently they are turning into big time borrowers.

RBS contends in a note today that in a swathe of Asian countries (they exclude China and South Korea) bank deposits are not keeping pace with credit which has expanded in the past three years by up to 40 percent.

Some of this clearly is down to slowing exports and a greater focus on the domestic consumer.  Credit levels are also rising overall in these economies because of borrowing for big infrastructure projects.  But there are signs too that credit conditions are too loose.

Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand are the three countries where credit is expanding most rapidly, according to RBS.  And in terms of household indebtedness, ratios in  Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore now exceed 65 percent of GDP (that’s not terribly far off US households’ debt-GDP ratios of around 80 percent)

RBS analysts acknowledge that these levels by themselves do not seem daunting. But they warn: 

What is however worrying is the pace of credit growth. …The combination of rapid credit disbursals and more importantly, the on-going divergence between credit disbursals and GDP growth implies that the system is becoming more vulnerable to income and interest rate shocks.

The analysts cite the example of Singapore  where household liabilities rose to 74 percent of GDP from 61 percent in the 2008-2012 period.  The corresponding increase in  household wealth was almost entirely concentrated in property, leaving households exposed to a decline in property prices or higher interest rates.

There are other potential consequences too. The rise in borrowing comes at a time when labour productivity across much of Asia is declining (see graphic). This divergence eventually will hit the region’s balance of payments — India, Indonesia and Thailand are already deficit countries while Malaysia’s surplus has fallen sharply.  Second, the rise in credit is impacting banks’ loan-deposit ratios (see graphic).

Signs are that savings rates are declining while there has also been a shift away from buying financial assets into gold or real estate — low interest rates are an effective deterrent to savers. RBS says:

This diversion…implies that unless deposit growth picks up, the current pace of credit growth can not be sustained. For deposits to rise, deposit rates need to rise and in real terms. The mismatch between lending and deposits also implies monetary tightening has been insufficient.

If Panic Room taught me anything – it’s that burglaries are scary things. Men with guns trying to ransack my home are scary enough, but it becomes even scarier when said burglar breaks out the colorful squirt guns filled with semen.

A very unlucky man encountered such a scenario in January after a couple of burglars, including 21-year-old Eric Miller, broke into a house looking for one of the people who lived there. Their target wasn’t present, but they decided to make an example of the roommate sleeping on the couch.

The men reportedly held the unlucky roommate at knifepoint as they beat and pistol-whipped him. After the beating, Miller reportedly pulled out a squirt gun filled with semen and sprayed it on his face. After the heinous crime was committed, Miller said “Now you’re like the rest of my (expletives), covered in semen.”

It’s not said what kind of squirt gun was used, but I like to think it was this one:

After all of this, Miller turned himself in to police. He was convicted with first-degree burglary, but not before the judge considered tacking on a sexual motivation charge. It was the prosecutor’s opinion that Miller didn’t get any sexual gratification out of it. Miller will spend 18 months behind bars.

[The Bellingham Herald via Geekosystem]

First Lady Michelle Obama visited the Fisher House at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to celebrate Easter early with military families. Accompanied by First Dog, Bo, and an Easter basket full of cookies, the First Lady decorated Easter cards with military children.

First Lady Michelle Obama participates in a pre-Easter celebration with military families and children at the Fisher House, located at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., March 20, 2013. As part of her Joining Forces initiative, the First Lady visited The Fisher House, a program that supports military families by welcoming them to stay at the House while their loved one receives specialized medical care. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

In her work with Joining Forces, Mrs. Obama applauds organizations which aid active and veteran service members and military families. “The Fisher Houses, as you all know, are just so important to families who are recuperating,” said the First Lady in her remarks. “And all around the country, they are as beautiful and as welcoming and as comforting as you guys are experiencing here.”

The Fisher House is a program established to assist families in need and to ensure that they are provided with the comforts of home in a supportive environment while their loved ones receive care.

Mrs. Obama invited the participating families to this year’s Easter Egg Roll, which takes place on the South Lawn of the White House.

Following her visit with the military families at the Fisher House, Mrs. Obama visited wounded warriors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

CAPT Todd Veazie is Executive Director of Joining Forces in the Office of the First Lady.