Friday 27 February 2009

Get an iPhone 3G for free — in Japan


Is Japanese wireless carrier SoftBank making way for a new version of the iPhone, or are sales just sluggish? Who can say, but from Friday through the end of May, you can sign up for an 8GB iPhone 3G in Japan for a grand total of zero.AppleInsider and CrunchGear report that starting Friday, SoftBank's new "iPhone for Everybody" campaign (translated page is here) will offer the 8GB iPhone for free, so long as you sign up for a new two-year contract. The promotion apparently runs through May 31.
Meanwhile, SoftBank will sell the 16GB iPhone for a steeply discounted price—just 11,520 yen (about US$119), and you can even pay for the handset in monthly installments, which come out to less than $5 a month during the two-year service agreement. 

SoftBank subscribers will still have to pay monthly voice and data charges, of course, although as AppleInsider notes, the carrier is chopping its standard data plan (about US$62 a month) by more than 25 percent.

Here in the U.S., of course, the iPhone 3G is still $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB model—although if you're a Reward Zone member at Best Buy, you can snap up an 8GB iPhone 3G for $99 (through February 28 only).

So, what's the deal? Hard to say; as CrunchGear points out, Apple has yet to release iPhone sales figures for Japan, while Ars Technica speculates that SoftBank might be struggling to fulfill its promised sales goals for Apple given the worldwide economic crisis.
http://tech.yahoo.com
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Thursday 26 February 2009

About Barack H. Obama


Barack H. Obama

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African—American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.
http://www.whitehouse.gov
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Official: Budget projects $1.75 trillion deficit

From msnbc news at Feb. 26, 2009,President Barack Obama is sending Congress a budget Thursday that projects the government's deficit for this year will soar to $1.75 trillion, reflecting efforts to pull the nation out of a deep recession and a severe financial crisis.

A senior administration official told The Associated Press that Obama's $3 trillion-plus spending blueprint also asks Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy in 2011 and cut Medicare costs to provide health care for the uninsured.

The new budget also plans for additional financial bailouts of up to $750 billion, a senior administration official told NBC News. But the White House believes that as the economy improves it will get roughly $500 billion back, so the expected cost to taxpayers is $250 billion. 

The official told The Associated Press that the administration felt it would be prudent to ask for additional resources to deal with the financial crisis, the most severe to hit the country in seven decades. He called the request a "placeholder" in advance of a determination by the Treasury Department of what extra resources will actually be needed.

The spending blueprint Obama is sending Congress is a 140-page outline, with the complete details scheduled to come in mid- to late April, when the new administration sends up the massive budget books that will flesh out the plan.

Fierce debate likely However, the submission of the bare budget outline was certain to set off fierce debate in Congress over Obama's spending and tax priorities. The budget document includes additional requests for the current year and Obama's proposals the 2010 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.

The president wants Congress to extend the $400 annual tax cut due to start showing up in workers' paychecks in April, and it extends the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 for couples earning less than $250,000 per year. Those tax cuts were due to expire at the end of 2010.

To pay for the middle-class tax relief and the effort to increase health coverage, Obama's budget makes significant cuts on the rate of growth in other areas of health care seeks to trim a variety of other government programs, including subsidies earned by farmers with revenue of more than $500,000 a year.

The budget would also seek savings in military weapons purchases. It would raise taxes on wealthy hedge fund managers and corporations, eliminating tax incentives U.S. companies now have to move jobs overseas, something Obama repeatedly mentioned during the presidential campaign.

Even with all the savings, the cost of the $787 billion economic stimulus bill will push the deficit for this year to $1.75 trillion, a level — as a percentage of the economy — not seen since World War II. The deficit is expected to remain around $1 trillion for the next two years before starting to decline to $533 billion in 2013, according to budget projections.

Obama's plan proposes achieving $634 billion in savings on projected health care spending and diverting those resources to expanding coverage for uninsured Americans. The $634 billion represents a little more than half the money that would be needed to extend health insurance to all of the 48 million Americans now uninsured.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
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Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama( born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until November 2008, when he resigned following his election to the presidency.

Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago prior to earning his law degree, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama was elected to the United States Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

During his tenure as Senator, he served on several committees, including the Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, Veterans' Affairs, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

After a particularly close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary against rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination as a candidate for president, becoming the first major African American candidate for president. In the 2008 general election he defeated Republican candidate John McCain and was sworn in as president on January 20, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org

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