Follow along with CNET as we dive into Huawei's announcements for CES 2013. The press conference starts at 1 p.m. PT on Monday, and CNET will be there to cover it live. We have a live blog full of news and analysis.
You can tune in to the blog here:
CNET's live coverage of Huawei's 2013 CES press conference
Editors' note: This story has been updated since it was originally published to correct the time of event to 1 p.m. PT.
Photograph by Nenad Saljic
A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.
Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.
(Read more about full moons.)
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Micah Albert
A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.
The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Jason Ching
Published January 4, 2013
Jan 6, 2013 4:52pm
(Junko Kimura/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama will nominate former senator Chuck Hagel to be his next Secretary of Defense tomorrow.
Senior officials within the administration and Capitol Hill confirmed the pick to ABC News today after the Nebraska Republican had emerged as a frontrunner among potential candidates several weeks ago.
Hagel, 66, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and businessman who served in the senate from 1997 to 2009. After having sat on that chamber’s Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, he has in recent years gathered praise from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board as well as the policy board of the current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
But the former lawmaker faces an upscale battle in the coming confirmation hearings in Congress; critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at his record toward Israel and what some have called a lack of experience necessary to lead the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy or its operations.
Progressives have also expressed concern about comments he made in 1998, questioning whether an “openly, aggressively gay” James Hormel could be nominated to an ambassador position by then-President Clinton. Hagel apologized for the comments last month, adding that he also supported gays in the military – a position he once opposed.
Who Is Chuck Hagel? Meet Obama’s Top Pentagon Pick
The friction with his former colleagues has left a degree of uncertainty in the air going into the hearings. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell demurred when asked whether he would support the man who, in 2008, he had championed for his candidness and stature in foreign policy.
“I’m going to wait and see how the hearings go and see whether Chuck’s views square with the job he would be nominated to do,” he told George Stephanopoulos.
Senator Lindsey Graham was more blunt in his opposition to Hagel on CNN. The Georgia Republican called Hagel an “in your face nomination,” and said he “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history.”
If confirmed, Hagel will join a crop of new cabinet members expected to join the president in his second term, including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was nominated in December to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
ABC’s Elizabeth Hartfield and Devin Dwyer contributed reporting.
Got a secret message to send? Say it with silence. A new technique can embed secret data during a phone call on Skype. "There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed," says Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. So his team's SkypeHide system lets users hide extra, non-chat messages during a call.
Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karaś and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype "transmits" silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech.
The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them. The Skype receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end, the team has found. "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult," says Mazurczyk. They found they could transmit secret text, audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.
The team aims to present SkypeHide at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France, in June.
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MILAN, Italy: Lazio closed the gap on Serie A leaders Juventus to five points on Saturday thanks to two late goals in a dramatic 2-1 win over nine-man Cagliari.
The Biancocelesti were kept on a level footing by the determined visitors from Sardinia in a comparatively incident-free first half.
But Vladimir Petkovic's men made their intentions far clearer in a dominant second half when Abdoulay Konko's 79th minute strike levelled Marco Sau's opener for Cagliari before a late penalty from Antonio Candreva sealed the win.
German veteran Miroslav Klose was a threat throughout the match, but saw several efforts blocked, off target or charged down.
Despite creating more chances, Lazio looked in danger of suffering a shock upset or at least having to settle for a draw.
And that feeling intensified when Sau was allowed to run free on the edge of the area just after the hour mark to beat one defender before sending a delightful angled shot past Federico Marchetti in the Lazio goal.
Petkovic immediately replaced Uruguayan midfielder Alvaro Gonzalez with Candreva, and the Italian tested Michael Agazzi in the 78th minute with a right-foot strike.
A minute later the hosts pulled level thanks to Konko's tap-in from a corner, and came close to taking the lead when Giuseppe Biava tested Agazzi with a header from Hernanes' cross.
In the 83rd minute Cagliari 'keeper Agazzi was yellow carded for time-wasting, a caution that was to prove crucial minutes later.
Lazio continued to press, and were rewarded eight minutes from time when the referee pointed to the spot after Agazzi came off his line and clashed with Klose just after the German had got an off-target lob away.
Agazzi was shown a red card, and Cagliari suffered further ignominy when midfielder Andrea Cossu was sent off for protesting.
Cagliari's second goalkeeper Vlada Avramov came on in place of Agazzi but the Serbian could not stop Candreva's penalty strike, which widened the gap on Fiorentina to four points ahead of La Viola's hosting of Pescara Sunday.
Juventus have the chance to restore their eight-point cushion when they host Sampdoria on Sunday, when Inter, in fourth nine points adrift, visit Udinese.
Fifth-placed Napoli, at 10 points off the pace, host Roma while Siena will look to cause an upset at AC Milan.
- AFP/de
This could have been Mars back before the dinosaurs built a super space ramp to our planet, at least according to software engineer and artist Kevin Gill.
What if the Red Planet weren't always in that constant state of blushing? Kevin Gill, a software engineer who also re-engineers planets every now and then, imagines Mars might long ago have looked quite a bit more like the aqua-green marble we call home.
To create the above image, Gill used data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), picked an arbitrary sea level, and used a script to cover all the surfaces of Mars below that line with a nice shade of royal blue. From there, Gill writes on Google+ that it was a combination of some earthly textures borrowed from NASA and Gill's own imagination -- adhering of course to the kind of strict logic you'd expect from a career engineer... and an artist.
There is no scientific reasoning behind how I painted it; I tried to envision how the land would appear given certain features or the effects of likely atmospheric climate. For example, I didn't see much green taking hold within the area of Olympus Mons and the surrounding volcanoes, both due to the volcanic activity and the proximity to the equator (thus a more tropical climate). For these desert-like areas I mostly used textures taken from the Sahara in Africa and some of Australia. Likewise, as the terrain gets higher or lower in latitude I added darker flora along with tundra and glacial ice. These northern and southern areas' textures are largely taken from around northern Russia. Tropical and subtropical greens were based on the rainforests of South America and Africa.
Paint by number, you have met your match.
Of course, Gill points out that "this wasn't intended as an exhaustive scientific scenario" but hopes some of his assumptions will prove to be true. Here's hoping the Curiosity rover has a secret time machine built in that NASA hasn't told us about yet, so we can see just how close Gill is to the real deal.
Here are a few alternate views Gill cooked up:
A wet Mars with its own Atlantis adrift in a vast sea.
Here's a closer view of the Martian land mass with added oceanic action:
(Via The Register)
Photograph by Nenad Saljic
A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.
Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.
(Read more about full moons.)
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Micah Albert
A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.
The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.
Published January 4, 2013
Photograph by Jason Ching
Published January 4, 2013
As Steubenville, Ohio, prepares for the high-profile rape trial of two high school football players, officials, battling allegations of a cover-up, announced the creation of a new website today to debunk rumors and create what they said would be a transparent resource for the community.
"This site is not designed to be a forum for how the Juvenile Court ought to rule in this matter," the website, called Steubenville Facts, said.
A timeline of the case, beginning with the alleged gang rape of a 16-year-old girl at a party on Aug. 11-12, 2012, is posted on the site. Summaries of Ohio law relating to the case and facts about the local police force including statistics on how many graduated from Steubenville schools, is included.
The case gained national attention last week when hacking collective Anonymous leaked a video of Steubenville high school athletes mocking the 16-year-old female victim and making crude references to the alleged rape.
Steubenville Herald-Star, Michael D. McElwain/AP Photo
"It's disgusting, and I've had people calling, numerous people call here, upset, they have seen it, one woman, two women were crying, because of what they witnessed," Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said. "It really is disgusting to watch that video."
Anonymous has called for more arrests, however Steubenville Police have said their hands are tied.
"Steubenville Police investigators are caring humans who recoil and are repulsed by many of the things they observe during an investigation," the website said, addressing the video. "Like detectives in every part of America and the world, they are often frustrated when they emotionally want to hold people accountable for certain detestable behavior but realize that there is no statute that allows a criminal charge to be made."
Occupy Steubenville, a grassroots group, estimated 1,300 people attended a rally today outside the Jefferson County Courthouse, where rape victims and their loved ones gathered to share their stories.
The father of a teenage rape victim was met with applause when he shared his outrage.
"I've tried to show my girl that not all men are like this, but only a despicable few," he said. "And their mothers that ignore the truth that they gave birth to a monster."
Authorities investigated the case and charged two Steubenville high school athletes on Aug. 22, 2012.
The teenagers face trial on Feb. 13, 2013 in juvenile court before a visiting judge.
Attorneys for the boys have denied charges in court.
Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
(Image: Cityscape/a.collection/Getty)
"You would die if you crashed right now." Would such a warning make you take your foot off the accelerator? That's the idea behind a scheme to warn drivers of the consequences of speeding developed by engineers at Japan's Fukuoka Institute of Technology and heavy goods vehicle maker UD Trucks, also in Japan. They are developing what they call a "safe driving promotion system" that warns drivers what kind of crash could ensue if they don't slow down.
Their patent-pending system uses the battery of radar, ultrasound sonar and laser sensors found in modern cars and trucks to work out the current kinetic energy of a vehicle. It also checks out the distance to the vehicle in front and keeps watch on its brake lights, too. An onboard app that has learned the driver's reaction time over all their previous trips then computes the likelihood of collision - and if the driver's speed is risky, it displays the scale of damage that could result.
The warning that flashes up could vary from something like a potential whiplash injury due to a rear-end shunt to a fatal, car-crushing collision with fire. The inventors hope this kind of in-car advice will promote safety more forcefully than current warning systems, which merely display the distance to the vehicle in front. "A sense of danger will be awakened in the driver that makes them voluntarily refrain from dangerous driving," they predict.
CARACAS: Hugo Chavez's top aides have gone on the offensive, accusing the opposition and media of waging a "psychological war," as Venezuela's cancer-stricken president battles a serious lung infection.
The closing of ranks followed a high-level gathering of top Venezuelan officials in Havana with Chavez, amid growing demands to know whether he will be fit on January 10 to take the oath of office for another six-year-term.
"The official version of what is happening is unsustainable," the head of the main opposition coalition, Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, said in an interview with AFP and digital news outlet Noticias24.
Aveledo said it would make more sense for the government to acknowledge "the truth" and use it to prepare the country for what is to come. But it "doesn't want to admit that the president is absent."
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas disclosed that Chavez, who was convalescing in Havana after a fourth round of surgery last month, was suffering from a "severe pulmonary infection" that had led to a "respiratory insufficiency."
But Vice President Nicolas Maduro made clear on his return from Cuba Thursday that there were no plans for a transfer of power from Chavez before the inauguration.
Venezuela's constitution calls for new elections to be held within 30 days if the president is unable to take the oath of office or dies during his first four years in office.
Diosdado Cabello, the speaker of the Chavista-controlled National Assembly, has said the president could be sworn in at a later date before the Supreme Court.
All eyes here are on a session Saturday of the National Assembly in which Cabello was expected to be re-elected speaker, for signs of what course the government intends to take.
In a television appearance, Maduro and Cabello went out of their way to deny rumours of an internal power struggle between them, with Maduro saying they had sworn before Chavez that they would remain united.
"We are here more united than ever," said Maduro, who is Chavez's handpicked successor. "And we have sworn before comandante Hugo Chavez, and we reaffirmed to him today in our oath... that we would be united with our people."
Maduro attacked a report in the Spanish newspaper ABC alleging a power struggle between the two, and accused the opposition of "lies and manipulation, a campaign to try to create uncertainty."
"We know that the United States is where these manipulations are being managed," he said. "They think that their time has come. And we have entered a kind of crazy hour of offensive by the right, here and internationally."
In a televised statement, Villegas warned "the Venezuelan people about the psychological war that the transnational media complex has unleashed around the health of the chief of state, with the ultimate goal of destabilizing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."
In Washington on Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied that US officials were meddling in Venezuelan affairs, but acknowledged there had been contact with Venezuelans "from across the political spectrum."
"There's no 'made-in-America' solution here. This has to be something that Venezuelans have to do," Nuland said.
Chavez was re-elected October 7 despite his debilitating battle with cancer and the strongest opposition challenge yet to his 14-year rule in Venezuela, an OPEC member with the world's largest proven oil reserves.
But he has not been seen in public since he underwent a long and complicated surgery for a recurrence of cancer in Cuba on December 11, and officials have acknowledged that his recovery has been difficult.
The rector of the Central University of Venezuela, Cecilia Garcia Arocha, proposed sending a team of medical experts to Havana to assess his condition. Opposition leader Antonio Ledezma said it should include opposition figures.
Cancer was first detected by Cuban doctors in June 2011, but the Venezuelan government has never revealed what form of the disease Chavez is battling.
Medical experts say infections are common and often fatal in cancer cases because chemotherapy treatments for the disease involve suppressing the victim's immune system, leaving the patient vulnerable.
"Up to 50 per cent of deaths of patients affected by solid tumours are provoked directly or indirectly by infections," Doctor Thierry Berghmans of the Jules Bordet Institute hospital in Brussels said in a report.
A 1990 study in the European Journal of Cancer found that "major infections" resulted directly or indirectly in 24 per cent of deaths of cancer patients in intensive care units.
- AFP/jc
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