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WASHINGTON

Cheney said the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority across a broad range of policy, including the war in Iraq, treatment of suspected terrorists and the home wiretapping program.

And he declared the president “doesn’familiarily have to check with anybody”

The vice president also keenly criticized Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, offering a pointed response when asked about Biden’s plans to operate differently from him as vice president and about Biden’s note during the vice-presidential debate that Cheney had been “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American account.”

“If he wants to grow the act of worship of vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney reported of Biden in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added that President-elect Obama “will decide what he wants in a defect president. And apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

It was the second meeting the normally media-averse vice president granted in a week.

When asked about another make comments Biden made during the vice-presidential debate, Cheney reported the vice president-elect “can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature, which provides for the executive.”

There is ample historical precedent, Cheney said, for the Bush direction’s policies.

“If you think from one place to another what Abraham Lincoln did for the time of the Civil War, the kind of FDR did for the time of World War II. They went far beyond anything we’ve done in a global war on terror,” the vice president related. “But we have exercised, I think, the legitimate authority of the president under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief in order to put in fortress policies and programs that have successfully defended the community.”

Cheney also said the Supreme Court was “tort” to be superior to the Bush administration’s initial wit of detaining suspected terrorists without granting them access to the protections of the Geneva Convention or granting them the right to challenge their detention.

And he reported he forcibly disagreed with Bush’s firmness to fire Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, saying, “he did a good work at jobs for us.”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008547515_cheney22.html?syndication=rss

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BAGHDAD

The reporter, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, 29, has been jailed since hurling his shoes at the visiting U.S. president during a news talk to this place last week.

Al-Zeidi has not been formally charged, but he faces up to seven years in prison if convicted of the crime of aggression against a foreign leader during an functionary visit.

Allegations denied

A spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not go phone calls seeking comment Sunday, however the al-Maliki government previously denied al-Zeidi had been mistreated.

It was the prime minister’session security detach that detained al-Zeidi after he hurled his shoes at Bush. Al-Zeidi was seen core beaten judgment he was pulled from the room.

On Sunday, several hours before the torture allegations were made public, al-Maliki before-mentioned he had received a letter from al-Zeidi saying a terrorist had persuaded him to throw his shoes at Bush.

Al-Zeidi’sitting family has maintained he was acting off of his own frustration with the U.S. invasion.

The visit by one of al-Zeidi’sitting brothers was the first by either a relative or lawyer allowed since the reporter was jailed.

During an interview broadcast Sunday on Al Baghdadia, the Cairo-based satellite television network that employs al-Zeidi, his brother Uday, 33, said al-Zeidi had been stripped to his underwear before essence placed in a cell and tortured during the first 24-hour term.

Cold water

“He told me he was sleeping on the floor of the cell when a exceedingly large one came in and dumped cold water on him and began hitting him with a cloudy cable,” Uday al-Zeidi said.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/iraq/2008547506_iraq22.html?syndication=rss

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DENVER

There was no authoritative word on why Houston-bound Continental Flight 1404 crashed at Denver International Airport. Robert Sumwalt III, the member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) at the scene, said the airplane had left “serviceable, solid witness marks” without interruption the pavement, showing its road.

Some investigators said they believed the pilot was trying to abort the takeoff. One aviation officer said the way the plane had veered off the runway into a ravine suggested several possibilities: that engines were operating at different thrust levels, that brakes on the brace main landing gears were operating with different effectiveness, or that thrust reversers on the engine had not deployed symmetrically.

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources close to the investigation, reported that the plane’s brakes malfunctioned, causing the fuselage to buckle and sparking a fire.

Safety-board investigators had not interviewed one or the other of the two pilots as of Sunday evening, thus it was unclear which of them was in command at the time of the crash.

It furthermore was not conspicuous if the plane was aye airborne; the airport manager said it ran into the ravine on the eve 2,000 feet down the length of the 12,000-foot runway. The runway was familiar of snow and free from moisture at the time of the crash, 6:18 p.m. Saturday, officials said.

The entire right side of the plane was burned, and melted plastic from above compartments dripped onto the seats. Investigators said the plane’s left engine was ripped from home along with all the landing gear.

“It was a marvel … that everybody survived the impact and the fire,” said Bill Davis, an assistant Denver vigor chief assigned to the airport. “It was just amazing.”

Davis, one of the firefighters who rushed to the scene, related passengers walked out of the ravine in 24-degree cold and crowded inside the station.

The 110 passengers and five crew members left the smooth on emergency slides, officials said.

Gabriel Trejos told KUSA-TV in Denver that the plane buckled toward its middle and that the seats felt like they were closing in on him, his great with child wife and his 13-month-old son, who was upon his lap. His knees were bruised from the seat in front of him.

Maria Trejos told KUSA that in that place was some explosion and that the right side of the plane, where they were session, became engulfed in flames. The family used an emergency exit and slid into disfavor the side-piece of the jet to the ground.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008547502_plane22.html?syndication=rss

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Even as layoffs are reaching historic levels, more employers bring forth mould an alternative to slashing their work force. They’re nipping and tucking it instead.

A growing digit of employers

The rolls of companies nipping at labor costs through measures less powerful than wholesale layoffs include Dell (extended unpaid celebration), Cisco (four-day year-end shutdown), Motorola (pay cuts), Nevada casinos (four-day workweek), Honda (voluntary owing vacation time) and The Seattle Times (plans to save money with a week of unpaid furlough toward nonunion workers). There are also numerous midsize and small companies trying such tactics.

The reasons behind the steps

Companies taking nips and tucks allege this economy plunged so quickly in October that they do not want to prune too much, should it equitable as suddenly roar back. They also say they have been so careful about hiring and spending in recent years that highly productive workers, not slackers, remain on the payroll.

At more companies, employees are supporting the tortuous wage cuts

Companies seem particularly determined to find alternatives to layoffs in this recession, said Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “Organizations are trying to cut costs in the name of avoiding layoffs,” she related. “It’s not just that organizations are remark ‘we’re cutting costs,’ they’re saying: ‘we’re doing this to keep from loss people.’ “

She said the tactic builds long-term fidelity among workers who are not laid off and spares the concourse having to compete again to hire and body of attendants anew.

The magnanimous feeling determination probably be sanctioned by a majority of votes, said Truman Bewley, an economics professor at Yale who has studied what happens to compensation during a recession. If the sacrifices look as though they are going to continue by reason of many months, he reported, some workers will be augmented frustrated, want their full compensation back and may well prefer a layoff that creates a new permanence.

“These are feel-good, temporary measures,” he said.

But John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that tracks layoffs, said employers were being driven now not through compassion however by hard calculations based on data they have never had before. More than aye, he reported, companies have used technology to path employee performance and productivity, and in many cases they know the workers they would cut are productive ones.

“People are measured and ‘metricked’ to a much greater quality,” he said. “So companies be sure that when they’re cutting an already taut organization, they’re leaving big gaps in the work force.”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008547505_layoffs22.html?syndication=rss

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Did you know that those few places on your body in which place you cannot grow hair are through distant the most sensitive? Like the bottoms of your feet?

That’s why the in one’s teens woman with the metal probe is scratching away at a rough surface in a Johns Hopkins University lab. Suppose you wanted to know what something thousands of miles away felt like — as easily as you could see what it looks like by aiming a remote Internet camera.

What happens if that pungent probe transmits the sensation to all those dense nerve receptors lengthwise your tingly arch?

After all, there are some occasions when only touch will do, aren’t in that place?

This has been the year computers began to declare feelings to us in a mainstream usage. Following their uncanny ability in the beginning to interact with our eyes via screens and then our ears through speakers, at this moment tens of millions of them are acquiring touch feedback. You touch the machine, it nuzzles you in the rear.

Feel matters. It’sitting the pea under the female ruler’s mattress. “The world is going digital, but people are analog,” says Gayle Schaeffer, a marketing vice president at Immersion, a leader in touch feedback. “We probably real things. We touch veritable things all lifetime long. We need to interact by somebody that feels real. In the digital globe, touch is so abundant more personal and private and nonintrusive.”

Computer screens that you can usefully touch are to the degree that common as ATMs and airport check-in kiosks. With the explosive popularity of the Apple iPhone, it became clear that quick, everyone was going to have a touch screen in her pocket.

The touch-surface juggernaut marches relentlessly toward the day when push buttons that physically move in and out are gone forever. Already being conquered are televisions, washers, ovens, printers and workout machines, says Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis at the Consumer Electronics Association. Touch screens are now invading dashboards, desktop phones, remote controls, music players, navigators and cameras.

The problem is that in no degree matter how much you gussy it up, touching a flat computer screen feels probably tender a flat computer shelter. It can have as many flashing, beeping pictures of buttons as you like, goal there’s something about the human brain that doesn’t credence those little icons. We crush them afresh and again, our brains not believing those icons are responding to us — because it feels all wrong.

Now we’re trying to clear up that. The multibillion-dollar goal is for smart devices to make our fingers feel at the same time that if they are actually acting by the good old three-dimensional physical objects that evolution has taught us to ground of reliance.

That’s why competitors to the iPhone are focusing on the main thing it has yet to offer. Advertising directors for the BlackBerry Storm are doing their level best, this celebration season, to make sure you know that their product is not just quick-tempered, but touchy-feely. Hit its protect and you get a hint of a tangible response. This means a lot.

Touch can be spoofed. You be able to satisfy by proof visitors to a “haunted house” that they’re feeling eyeballs when they’re touching peeled grapes. That’s basic to the science and magic of touch, says Allison Okamura, director of the Haptics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008546891_robottouch22.html?syndication=rss

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NEW YORK — They stand in line externality stores waiting for midnight launches of new video games. When they get home after a long day, they plop down in front elevation of the TV not to sit in the rear and be on the lookout, but to play.

They’re known of the same kind by “core gamers.” They are people like Greg Wilcox, who writes near video games and has bought roughly 100 this year, and populate like Mark Hengst, who’s in law enforcement and says daily gambling gives him an “interactive form of escapism.” And in that place’sitting Wyatt Du Frane, a geology graduate student who’s been playing considering he was a miniature boy.

“I like their scope,” said Du Frane, 28, a student at Arizona State University. “A movie is only a couple of hours. A video stratagem is more like a book or a TV line, where you can set of persevere the story.”

For the video-game industry, core gamers are proving crucial. Their willingness to regularly, loyally buy new titles — no matter what — gives the industry a better chance of success than other businesses that rely on discretionary spending vulnerable to the recession.

“As long as hard-core gamers have a job, they give by will continue to buy games,” said IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon.

Appeal to the whole of ages

The industry’s facility to lean on core gamers is a bit of a twist, because video-game makers have been working hard to grow by expanding their mainstream appeal.

Families and people who haven’privately picked up a game controller in ages, or at any time, have flocked to the easy-to-master Nintendo Wii since its 2006 launch. Taking note, Sony and Microsoft obtain been expanding what their game consoles offer, adding movies and TV shows, hoping to attract people whose essence of the perfect Sunday afternoon doesn’t involve shooting aliens.

Software publishers like Ubisoft Entertainment, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts have boosted their titles aimed at young girls, families and women over 35, who obtain helped push sport sales higher.

Yet some analysts believe it will turn out to be core gamers — who might subsist more reliable consumers of their favorite form of diversion than movie buffs or sports fans, for model — who keep the industry afloat as the rest of us cut back.

Michael Pachter, any analyst with Wedbush Morgan, estimates that core gamers buy roughly moiety of all video games.

“They may be wealthy, they may be out of cash, unless they have no clue we are in a recession,” Pachter said.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008546906_btcoregamers220.html?syndication=rss