Real Madrid Vs. Barcelona

All eyes will be on Luis Suarez on Saturday as the striker makes his Barcelona debut at Real Madrid.
El Clasico between Barca and Real Madrid has always been the biggest event on the Primera Division calendar but Suarez's return from his four-month ban for biting Giorgio Chiellini at last summer's World Cup adds extra spice to an already highly-anticipated encounter.
Luis Enrique now has a decision to make as to whether he starts his marquee signing on the bench or goes with a three-pronged attack with Suarez, Neymar and Lionel Messi.
But the Barca coach has confirmed that Suarez will feature.

"Today I cannot play this game but you will have assurance he will play minutes," he told Spanish media at his pre-match press conference. "How many? I do not know."It's an important occasion for him and he will have minutes."

The head coach is highly unlikely to split the Argentinian and the Brazilian, who have scored 13 goals between them in the last five games and opposite number Carlo Ancelotti is refusing to get distracted by Suarez's potential debut.
When asked by Spanish radio station Cadena SER if he had a particular plan for facing the former Liverpool man, Ancelotti simply replied: "No, I do not know who will play on Saturday."
While Suarez is in line to play his first El Clasico, Barca midfielder Andres Iniesta is a veteran of such affairs and will make his 30th appearance in the fixture at the Bernabeu.
The Spain international will be the man expected to supply the service to his three prolific team-mates and he admits the entire squad is excited about Suarez's availability.
"He's happy to be available and the rest of us are happy about it too," he told a press conference. "We hope he performs as well as he has always done."
Away from the Luis Suarez show, Messi is on the brink of making Primera Division history as he sits just one goal behind Telmo Zarra's record of 251.
The Bernabeu would be the perfect place for the 27-year-old to break the record and Iniesta would be delighted to see him do it, if only because a Messi brace would mean things were going well in the game.
"I just want to see him get past the record, that'd be a good sign for us and mean we are in with a chance of winning," he said.
Barca currently sit at the top of the table, four points clear of Real who are third, and Iniesta is not losing focus on the task at hand amid all the hype surrounding the occasion.
"We will be going there with the intention of winning," he said. "It'd be a big mistake to think that we've got a four-point lead and even if we lose we'll still be top.
"We're just thinking about playing well, winning and stretching our lead in the table, which would be important, but not decisive at this stage of the season."
Luis Enrique has Sergio Busquests back in full training but he has not yet been given the all-clear by the medical staff to play.
James Rodriguez is set to play in his first El Clasico after starring against Liverpool in midweek and he has hailed the spirit in the camp ahead of the crunch clash.
"It will be a tough and complicated match," he told www.realmadrid.com.
"I want to approach it calmly, responsibly and also really be up for it, in order to help the team get the win.
"I'm in good form as is the whole squad. We have a strong group of players and are united, mentally speaking."
Rodriguez is set to keep his place with Isco being the man likely to drop out, with the potential return of Gareth Bale after Ancelotti admitted: "When well, Bale plays."
Ancelotti also revealed that Pepe is a doubt with a knock, but Sergio Ramos is in line to return, while Dani Carvajal could also take the place of Alvaro Arbeloa.
Cristiano Ronaldo, who has 13 career goals against Barcelona, will be looking to continue his run of having scored in every league game this season with 15 goals in seven games.

By AOL.

Google Nexus 9 tablet, Nexus 6 smartphone with Lollipop unveiled

Google has unveiled the it's latest tablet in order to overtake Apple's iPad. Google has also released the Nexus 6 with the newest OS Lollipop.

Kim Jong Un absent from annual North Korea celebration

For the second time in less than a month, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has failed to attend a national event. The young leader's sudden absence from the public eye has fuelled speculation about his grip on power.
North Korea's Worker's Party celebrated its 69th anniversary on Friday, but notably without its biggest supporter: Kim Jong Un.
Since rising to power three years ago, Kim has marked the national holiday by visiting the Kumsusan palace mausoleum in Pyongyang, where his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, and his father, Kim Jong Il, are both interred.
This year Kim's name did not appear on the guest list published by North Korea's state media. However, a flower arrangement in his name was reportedly lain at the statues of his predecessors.
The man seen as North Korea's number two, Hwang Pyong So, was reportedly in attendance.
Kim, who is thought to be 30 or 31 years old, last appeared in public on September 3 when he attended a concert alongside his wife. Speculation about his health had already been circulating since the summer after he was seen walking with a noticeable limp in July.
Last month, North Korea state media reported that he was "suffering discomfort." The rare comment about the dictator's health was broadcast in late September hours before a parliamentary session, which he also did not attend.
While his sudden absence has fed the rumor mills, South Korea's Unification Ministry spokeperson, Lim Byeong Cheol, reassured reporters on Friday that a delegation from North Korea had delivered greetings from the young dictator during a surprise visit to Seoul last week.
"So it appears it is being normally ruled by Kim Jong Un," ministry spokesman Lim Byeong-cheol said.
Kim Jong Un rose to power three years ago after his father, Kim Jong Il, died of a heart attack. The young leader has maintained a high-profile in the North Korean media and has repeatedly attempted to exert his power by threatening to attack South Korea and the United States.

kms/lw (AP, AFP, Reuters)
Deutsche Welle - October 2014

Just how seriously is Canada’s voice taken now?

It was a moment made-to-order for Stephen Harper’s dark way of talking about the world. Going back to the 2011 election, the Prime Minister has often portrayed Canada as an island of safety in a global sea of dangers. Sometimes that imagery comes off as alarmist, but the rhetoric works when the topic at hand is the rise of Islamic State extremism in Syria and Iraq. So, when Harper rose in the House of Commons last week to make his case for joining U.S. President Barack Obama’s air campaign against the terrorists, he sounded very much himself in framing the disturbing new threat. He also said that deploying CF-18 fighter jets was necessary to maintain Canada’s international standing. “If Canada wants to keep its voice in the world—and we should, since so many of our challenges are global—being a free rider means you are not taken seriously,” Harper said.
Perhaps inadvertently, though, Harper suggested a question: Just how seriously is Canada’s voice taken now? Conservatives’ claims about having restored Canada’s clout on the world stage have always rested heavily on their reinvestment in the military. But Harper’s early defence-spending hikes turned to cuts after the 2009 recession, while he staged a tactical retreat from his high-profile pledge to buy F-35 jets to replace the aging CF-18s—eroding his image as an unwavering builder of the Canadian Forces’ might. After more than eight years of his rule, does Canada’s military reputation really rank noticeably higher? As Obama assembled his coalition to bomb Islamic State (also know as ISIS), the U.S. signed up a raft of other allies days, or even weeks, before Canada, including bigger military powers such as France and Britain, but also the likes of Australia, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Of course, standing on defence isn’t the only measure of Harper’s strength or weakness in the world. Back before his 2006 election win, he set Canada-U.S. relations as the litmus test. As Opposition leader in 2002, Harper delivered a tough attack in the House on then-prime minister Jean Chrétien’s “consistent and complete inability” to bolster Canadian economic interests in the U.S. As PM, however, Harper hasn’t fared better. American border restrictions remain a serious Canadian government frustration. The low point came in early 2012, when Obama told Harper there would be no quick approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to siphon Alberta crude to U.S. refineries. A wounded Harper sent out Joe Oliver, then his natural resources minister, to tell reporters the “decision by the Obama administration underlines the importance of diversifying and expanding our markets, including the growing Asian market.”
For those who remember Harper’s opposition days, that message delivered by Oliver, now Harper’s finance minister, had an ironic ring to it. Back in his 2002 assault on Liberal foreign policy, Harper had derided Chrétien’s attempts at diversifying Canada’s trade beyond the U.S. as an unrealistic echo of the so-called “third option” pursued by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, “which did not work then and is not working now.” Harper learned the hard way that there was something to the old Liberal position that Washington’s intransigence leaves Canada no choice but to cultivate trade options overseas. Still, Conservative fans of his no-nonsense style can at least take solace in the way Harper has ditched the old soft-power Liberal brand of multilateralism—the ethos behind former preoccupations such as creating the International Criminal Court, or a treaty to ban land mines—for much sterner stuff.
Or has he? In the days leading up to a key Harper speech at the United Nations late last month, advance stories were full of confident predictions about which world issues he would tackle. After snubbing the General Assembly for three years—ever since his government’s embarrassing failure to win a UN vote for a temporary seat on its Security Council in 2010—the PM had to be returning to blast Russia for incursions into Ukraine and to denounce Islamic State outrages in Iraq. Or so it was assumed. As it turned out, he spoke almost entirely about an aid initiative to improve the health of mothers and newborns. Alluding only vaguely to border tensions in Eastern Europe and bloodshed in the Middle East, he urged UN members to look past violent conflicts to “the long-term opportunities and efforts that can truly transform our world.”
It was a classically Canadian internationalist plea, issued in the New York temple to multilateralism held sacred by Harper’s most bitter critics. Was this really the same Harper who had so often scoffed at Canada’s historic approach to the UN as a matter of  “going along to get along”? Even more scornfully, he once summed up his foreign-policy philosophy this way: “It is no longer to please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations.” But, with the maternal and child health initiative, a growing preoccupation of Harper’s for several years now, he is clearly trying to put his stamp on what looks like the sort of UN-focused project his Conservatives used to mock Liberals for championing.
It would be an absurd stretch to suggest that the Harper who championed the Forces, was suspicious of the UN, and assigned enormous importance to Canada-U.S. economic relations, has disappeared. But he has found those pillars too unsteady to bear the full weight of his foreign policy. It’s been a steep learning curve. Before he won power in 2006, he had barely travelled outside Canada and had focused almost exclusively on domestic issues, mostly economic and constitutional. “Since coming to office,” he told Maclean’s in a 2011 interview, “the thing that’s probably struck me the most in terms of my previous expectations—I don’t even know what my expectations were—is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but, in fact, that it’s become almost everything.”
Harper inherited the most challenging overseas file in a generation: Afghanistan. Five weeks after being sworn in as Prime Minister on Feb. 6, 2006, he was on a Kandahar airfield telling the assembled troops, “You can’t lead from the bleachers; I want Canada to be a leader.” His Conservatives backed that up by boosting annual defence spending from about $15 billion the year before they took power to closer to $20 billion. Impressive as that top-line figure is, though, it hardly tells the whole story.
David Perry, a senior analyst at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute in Ottawa, offers perhaps the most fine-grained analysis of Canada’s military budget available, outside of classified documents. Perry says defence spending, adjusted for inflation, is actually lower today than it was in 2007. He points to four consecutive years of shrinking outlays on new military hardware, a trend he now calls “seemingly irreversible.”
Perry even argues that there never was any sharp divide on defence between Liberal and Conservative times. The real watershed came in 2005, he contends, when the Liberals, flush with surpluses after slaying the deficit, reinvested heavily in the Department of National Defence. Taking over the following year, Harper built on that new spending policy, to be sure, but only until the 2009 recession. Since then, according to Perry’s analysis, spending restraint has again been the order of the day, with defence absorbing fully a quarter of all federal spending cuts in last spring’s budget.

Your old iPhone would make an amazing, musical lamp

It's October, which means there's a good chance you have a spare last-gen iPhone laying around and aren't quite sure what to do with it. You could sell it, of course, but if you feel like hanging on to it for sentimental purposes, you could always use it as a fancy ultra-modern musical lamp. With an at-home 3D printer and the help of Kwambio, you can do just that.
Kwambio is a new web platform on which designers can sell their designs to anyone with a capable 3D printer. It just launched, and while the number of people who have a 3D printer at home is just starting to ramp up, one designer on the service has created a simple iPhone accessory that lots of people are going to love.
In short, it's an elegant, simple arm that holds your iPhone. While in its nook, the phone can used as a lamp by turning on the flashlight feature, and since the bottom of the iPhone remains exposed, it can remain plugged into a charging cable and can even pump out some Spotify or iTunes music over Wi-Fi. According to Kwambio, the lamp -- which was designed by Ivan Zhurba -- can fit the iPhone 4/4s and 5/5c, and a version for the new iPhone 6 is already on the works.
It's probably one of the best ways to repurpose an old iPhone I've ever seen. Now I just need to invest in a 3D printer to make it a reality.

 

Mike Wehner

TUAW- October 1st, 2014