NKorea's parliament meets amid nuclear tension

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? After weeks of war-like rhetoric, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gathered legislators Monday for an annual spring parliamentary session taking place one day after top party officials adopted a statement declaring building nuclear weapons and the economy the nation's top priorities.

The meeting of the Supreme People's Assembly follows near-daily threats from Pyongyang, including vows of nuclear strikes on South Korea and the U.S.

Pyongyang has reacted with anger over routine U.S.-South Korean military drills and a new round of U.N. and U.S. sanctions that followed its Feb. 12 underground nuclear test, the country's third. Analysts see a full-scale North Korean attack as unlikely and say the threats are more likely efforts to provoke softer policies toward Pyongyang from a new government in Seoul, to win diplomatic talks with Washington and to solidify the young North Korean leader's military credentials at home.

On Sunday, Kim and top party officials adopted a declaration calling nuclear weapons the "the nation's life" and an important component of its defense, an asset that wouldn't be traded even for "billions of dollars." Pyongyang cites the U.S. military presence in South Korea as a main reason behind its drive to build missiles and atomic weapons. The U.S. has stationed tens of thousands of troops in South Korea since the Korean War ended in a truce in 1953.

North Korea also has threatened in recent days to shut down a jointly run factory complex in the North ? the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean rapprochement. But officials in Seoul say hundreds of workers traveled as usual across the heavily armed border to the North Korean factory Monday as they have throughout the rising tensions.

"I have no idea about what it will be like when I go to the North Korean side. It seems OK to be here, but we will be living there in a tense situation for a week," Kim Won-soo, a South Korean manager working in Kaesong, said before his departure Monday from Paju, South Korea.

While analysts call North Korea's threats largely brinkmanship, there is some fear that a localized skirmish might escalate. Seoul has vowed to respond harshly should North Korea provoke its military. Naval skirmishes in disputed Yellow Sea waters off the Korean coast have led to bloody battles several times over the years. Attacks blamed on Pyongyang in 2010 killed 50 South Koreans.

South Korea's new president, Park Geun-hye, is pursuing a policy that seeks to re-engage North Korea with dialogue and aid after five years of standoff. But she told her military Monday to set aside political considerations and respond strongly should North Korea attack.

Meanwhile, deputies to North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly gathered in Pyongyang. The SPA schedule Monday was unclear.

Under late leader Kim Jong Il, North Korea had typically held a parliamentary meeting once a year. But Kim Jong Un held an unusual second session last September in a sign that he is trying to run the country differently from his father, who died in late 2011.

Parliament sessions, which usually are held to approve personnel changes and budget and fiscal plans, are scrutinized by the outside world for signs of key changes in policy and leadership.

At a session last April, Kim was made first chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, the body's top post.

On Sunday, Kim presided over a separate plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party, which set a "new strategic line" calling for building both a stronger economy and nuclear arsenal.

North Korea's nuclear weapons are a "treasure of a reunified country" not to be traded for "billions of dollars," according to a statement issued by state media after the meeting. North Korea's "nuclear armed forces represent the nation's life, which can never be abandoned as long as the imperialists and nuclear threats exist on earth."

Sunday marked the first time for Kim to preside over the committee meeting, a top decision-making body tasked with organizing and guiding the party's major projects. The last plenary session was held in 2010, according to Seoul's Unification Ministry, and before that in 1993.

The plenary statement also called for strengthening the moribund economy, which Kim has put an emphasis on in his public statements since taking power. The U.N. says two-thirds of the country's 24 million people face regular food shortages.

The North also named former Prime Minister Pak Pong Ju as a member of the party central committee's powerful Political Bureau, a sign that he could again play a key role in the North's economic policymaking process. Pak reportedly was sacked as premier in 2007 after proposing a wage system seen as too similar to U.S.-style capitalism.

Pak is reform-minded and his promotion sets him up for further advancement and "for him to take the lead in the North's economic policies," said Cheong Seong-jang at South Korea's Sejong Institute.

___

Follow Foster Klug at www.twitter.com/APKlug.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nkoreas-parliament-meets-amid-nuclear-tension-045319187.html

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MetroPCS promotes T-Mobile deal after advisers pan it

(Reuters) - MetroPCS Communications Inc urged shareholders to support its proposed merger with Deutsche Telekom AG's unit T-Mobile USA after two proxy advisory firms recommended that shareholders vote against it.

Proxy advisers Glass Lewis and ISS have backed efforts by two key activist investors to block the deal by recommending that shareholders vote against it at a special meeting on April 12.

MetroPCS said in a letter to shareholders on Monday there could be no assurance it would be able to deliver better shareholder value as a stand-alone wireless company.

But the company's shares closed up 1 percent on Monday as at least some investors bet that the advisory firm's recommendations could lead to a better deal.

Glass Lewis said late Thursday that the deal undervalued MetroPCS's contribution to the combined company. ISS said MetroPCS could thrive as a stand-alone company.

Madison Dearborn Partners, the second-largest shareholder, has thrown its weight behind the deal.

But Paulson & Co, the biggest MetroPCS shareholder, has said it would vote against the deal and P. Schoenfeld Asset Management, an owner of about 2.5 percent of MetroPCS shares, is leading a proxy battle against the transaction.

Another set of funds run by Westchester Capital Management, filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court Thursday seeking an injunction to halt the planned shareholder vote. Westchester funds own over 3 percent of MetroPCS shares.

Roy Behren, a portfolio manager at the firm, said that Deutsche Telekom would need to adjust the terms of its offer, including the proposed $21 billion debt level of the combined company, to win over shareholders.

"They would need to adjust the equity participation split. We would prefer less debt and we certainly would want a lower rate for the inter-company debt," Behren said.

"If the terms were to be modified, Deutsche Telekom would be able to get a lot of the larger shareholders back on board," he added.

Under the terms of the reverse merger announced in October, Deutsche Telekom would end up with 74 percent of the combined company, and MetroPCS would declare a 1-for-2 reverse stock split and pay $1.5 billion in cash to its shareholders.

T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 mobile provider in the United States, and MetroPCS want to pool their spectrum resources and networks in order to better compete with larger rivals Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp.

If the MetroPCS deal collapses, it would be a huge blow for Deutsche Telekom, since in 2011 it had to abandon its plan to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T for $39 billion because of opposition from U.S. regulators.

MetroPCS shares closed up 15 cents or more than 1 percent at $11.05 on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday.

(Reporting by Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore, Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Maju Samuel, Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Leslie Gevirtz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/metropcs-urges-shareholders-vote-t-mobile-deal-121325061--finance.html

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NY gov postpones budget trip to Buffalo, Rochester

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo has postponed his trip to western New York to sign the state budget that was passed by the Legislature last week.

Cuomo's office says Monday morning that weather conditions have forced the postponement of the trip.

The governor was scheduled to hold ceremonial signings of the spending plan at noon Monday at the University of Buffalo's South Campus and at 2:15 p.m. at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. There's no immediate word on when the trip will be rescheduled.

Lawmakers completed passage of the $135 billion budget late Thursday night, three days before the March 31 deadline. That gave the state its third-consecutive on-time budget.

Cuomo and legislative leaders call the spending plan a family-friendly, business-friendly and middle-class-friendly budget.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ny-gov-postpones-budget-trip-152245184.html

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Visualized: JetBlue and ViaSat test Fly-Fi in-flight WiFi... from the ground

Gogo's ground-to-air transmitters typically mandate evaluating service while jetting around the country above 10,000 feet. Sure, you don't need to waste fuel flying around an empty airliner, but even the company's small jet can burn through quite a bit of cash. ViaSat, on the other hand, can do much of its service testing on the ground, using that fairly ordinary Ford van pictured just above. The reason, of course, relates to the location of the company's transmitter -- namely, the ViaSat-1 satellite, positioned some 22,000 miles above the ground. In the air, planes will actually be nearer to the orbiting device, rather than farther away, and assuming a line-of-sight link from the road, the truck can work out kinks at a fraction of the cost.

That white dome atop the van, which is similar to the device that'll soon be mounted on JetBlue's fleet, maintains a constant connection by rotating instantly as the van moves -- if the vehicle's heading changes, the antenna array will turn, too, so it's always pointed directly at the sat in the sky. You may have seen ViaSat's van driving down Southern California's freeways, but the rig has just arrived in Orlando, for some additional testing a few degrees away from the company's Carlsbad home. Assuming all goes well here, you'll be shooting around the web courtesy of Fly-Fi in no time at all.

Filed under: Transportation, Wireless

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ANrb0GD5rtk/

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Body of pilot who fell 2,500 feet from plane found in Tennessee

By Tim Ghianni

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) - Search crews in rural Tennessee have found the body of a man who fell an estimated 2,500 feet to his death after the cockpit canopy of his airplane opened, officials said on Saturday.

"They found him in a tree line, not too far off the road," about a half-mile from a volunteer fire station, said Bob Gault, spokesman for the Bradley County Sheriff's Office.

Gault said he would have to wait until the National Transportation Safety Board completes an investigation before confirming reports that the man was not wearing his safety harness and that the plane had gone into a nosedive at the time of the accident late on Friday afternoon.

Emergency personnel from Bradley County as well as a Tennessee Highway Patrol helicopter were called into the search for the missing man after his co-pilot was able to fly the plane back to Collegedale Municipal Airport after the accident, according to Gault.

Local reports said that man who died was an experienced pilot who was being trained to fly the plane, which he had recently purchased.

Gault said the single-engine aircraft left Collegedale Municipal Airport just outside Chattanooga between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Friday. The flight path took them over southern Bradley County, a rural area with many farms and few communities.

"There were two pilots on board," Gault said. "At some point during their flight, the canopy on the aircraft malfunctioned and, as a result, one of the pilots was ejected."

Search efforts from the air and on the ground were unsuccessful Friday night and resumed on Saturday morning. Gault said the fact that the body was in a tree line probably kept it from being spotted from the air.

The names of the pilots involved have not been released. A worker at the airport who asked not to be identified said both men were experienced pilots and "real nice guys."

(Editing by Nick Carey and Gunna Dickson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/body-pilot-fell-2-500-feet-plane-found-195402250.html

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Rajan Menon: Confronting What We Don't Know About the Korean Crisis

War cries, threats and counter-threats, moves and counter-moves are emanating from the Korean peninsula. Pundits have pronounced on what's going on and where things are headed. So this may be a good time to engage in some humility and to reflect on how little we know.

To make things easy, let's start with what we do know, as a matter of fact.

North Korea has a young (he's 30), untested leader, Kim Jong-un, who has been at the helm for barely a year, following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, a domineering presence. The Korean peninsula is crammed with soldiers and armaments, more so than any other place on the planet. A war would thus be a catastrophe -- no question about it.

There's no way that the United States could stay clear: it has alliance with South Korea and 28,000 troops stationed there.

Ditto for Japan, which hosts some 49,000 U.S. forces (11,000 are offshore) and over 80 American military installations, and would come under immediate attack by North Korea.

North Korea is the weaker side, based on the standard measures of power. The South has a GDP that's close to 40 times the size of the North's and a defense budget larger than the North's entire GDP. Its arsenal is much more advanced than the North's, which consists of Chinese and Soviet weaponry dating back to the 1970s, much of it even older.

The United States is treaty-bound to defend South Korea; North Korea lacks an identical arrangement with China, its principal patron.

Now for what we don't know, which is where the problems begin.

Who's calling the shots in North Korea? Is it the young, unseasoned Kim Jong-un? If so, he may fear that looking weak during his first big test will undermine irreparably his newly acquired authority. That might induce him to ramp up the rhetoric and to back it up with bold moves. That's one possibility and it's worrisome. Another is that he doesn't want to lose his newly acquired patrimony and will look for ways to wind down this crisis. There's no way to tell what's in his mind, though, apart from guesswork.

Or are North Korea's generals, much older men, who have held their posts for many years, running the show, at least during this crisis? If that's the case, how does the world look to them? For all their bluster, they are experienced military professionals and should -- I emphasize the word -- understand what the balance of power is and realize that they can't win a war and that it would bring down the North Korean state. Well, that's a plausible conclusion.

But maybe the old warriors of Spartan North Korea have contempt for South Korea's leaders, seeing them as American lackeys. Maybe they believe that the South, because of its astonishing economic success, has become a bourgeois society that's too addicted to creature comforts and the good life to risk war, or to prevail if it occurred anyway. The generals may also believe that their military machine is in fact as formidable as their boasts proclaim. Well, these too are reasonable inferences.

South Korea has a new and untested leader as well, indeed its first woman president, Park Guen-hye. She also may be under pressure to demonstrate that she's tough enough for the job -- and in Korea's male-dominant culture, no less. (It was hardly accidental that North Korea's propaganda machine blasted her "venomous swish skirt," whatever that means.) And, like Kim, Jong-un, she has big shoes to fill. Her father, strongman-president Park Chung-hee, a general before he seized power in a 1961 coup, ruled with an iron hand for 18 years.

But how exactly will this legacy shape her thinking now? Again, there's more than one possibility, especially because we haven't really seen her in action; she been in office for barely three months.

What about South Korea's alliance with the United States? This crisis overlaps with the U.S.-South Korea "Foal Eagle" military exercises (which have enabled Washington to flex its muscles by, for example, flying its B-52s and the B-2 stealth bomber over South Korean airspace). Does that reassure South Korea, or make it overconfident, risk-prone, and determined to get Kim to back down? Or does the alliance give the United States, which doesn't want to get dragged into a war, the influence to ensure that Seoul exercises caution in what it does and says? These too are questions to which there are no incontrovertible answers.

Then there's China. Does Beijing, as is sometimes assumed, have a lot of leverage with North Korea because of the aid it provides Pyongyang? Or does North Korea just take China's money, because it knows China needs to prop it up, and then do what it wants, as some say is the case? If it's the latter, Beijing, which has been urging calm (as has Russia), may be little more than a bystander. We should hope that what Beijing says does matter to Pyongyang. The problem: we don't know what the China factor amounts to.

The upshot is that we're in crisis where the wrong decisions could lead to calamitous consequences -- now that's a certainty. But good decisions require -- in addition to wisdom and luck -- good information. That's where the deficit is. Too many important, yet essential, questions have more than one plausible answer, in part because, when it comes to North Korea, there's no such thing as expertise, only varying degrees of ignorance.

There's another problem. Crises like these are notorious for generating what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Under conditions of extreme stress (like crises that could lead to war), those responsible for making big decisions cling to established ideas and practices, which become security blankets.

Leaders under acute pressure become resistant to new information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, precisely when they should be engaged in nuanced thinking. They misread the signals sent by the other side, filtering them through persisting perspectives. They overestimate their strengths and chances for success, and underestimate the other side's power and resolve.

They become convinced of their reasonableness -- and convinced that this is evident to the adversary. They dwell on the pressures that constrain their freedom of choice and see themselves as victims of circumstance. But they believe that the other side has plenty of choice but has chosen to act the way it is acting deliberately and out of animosity and malice. If both sides are caught in this cognitive trap, it becomes hard to tamp down crises.

Some wars, like World War II, are started deliberately, by aggressors or gamblers. Others, such as World War II, occur because fear, foolishness, misperception, and hubris combine to create a terrible outcome that no one wanted. This is the slip-slide path to war.

Full disclosure: I've bet that the current crisis on the Korean peninsula will not boil over into war, that the diatribes will be dialed down and that deterrence will prevail. But if there is a war, it will be produced by the forces that precipitated World War I. And psychologists will have a better explanation for it than generals will.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajan-menon/fessing-up-to-what-we-don_b_2985651.html

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Which of These Apple Patents Will Ever See the Light of Day?

The patent office publishes oodles of Apple patent applications each week. It also grants a ton of them, allowing Apple to protect its IP against competitors. Whether it actually uses any of that IP in its products is another matter ...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/vL_NYN8GP8Q/

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