Thursday, June 21, 2012

With no deal, Holder faces contempt vote (CNN)

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TSX suffers biggest drop of 2012 on growth fears

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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Romney Likely to Follow Obama's Lead on China

Romney

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa.

Should Mitt Romney become president, he likely would use the same kind of nonconfrontational approach to China that occupants of the Oval Office have used for over four decades, says one foreign policy analyst.

Since the 1970s, U.S. presidents have sought to persuade Beijing to make economic and social reforms. In foreign policy circles, this is called trying to "integrate China into the international order," as Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon put it Tuesday.

U.S. presidents from both political parties for decades have sought to "convince China it is best served playing ball with us the way the rest of the world does," O'Hanlon said during a forum in Washington. O'Hanlon, also a Johns Hopkins University professor, said he sees no evidence that Romney would alter that course.

Yet, Romney has been tough on Beijing on the campaign trail, claiming he would, as president, formally call China a currency manipulator. Romney also has said Beijing uses the lure of cheap labor to rob Americans of jobs.

[Gallery: Egyptians Rise Up Against Ruling Military.]

But, as Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, noted last week, the U.S.-Chinese relationship "is much more complicated and much more sophisticated" than even was the U.S.-Soviet relationship during the Cold War.

One main reason is China holds much more U.S. debt than any other nation or global institution. Some foreign policy officials and experts believe this alone will keep U.S.-Sino relations stable because if Beijing picked a fight with Washington, not only would it cripple the United States's ankles but it would do permanent damage to its own knees.

Still, O'Hanlon and other former national security officials and experts cautioned during a forum at the American Enterprise Institute that the U.S. should prepare for a more aggressive Beijing, which for years has been rapidly building its military force.

O'Hanlon said a major military buildup is exactly what should be expected of a rising global power. But he cautioned Washington against becoming complacent.

Dan Blumenthal, an AEI analyst, warns that as the U.S. Navy's fleet shrinks, China is building warships. "In terms of classes and amounts of ships being built [by China] today far outnumber what [the U.S.] is doing," Blumenthal said.

China's military buildup is aimed at keeping U.S. naval forces "far away," while being able to "strike very hard at Taiwan," its island neighbor that it still claims and the U.S. is treaty-bound to defend.

The Obama administration is in the midst of shifting U.S. foreign and military policy toward Asia after a decade of intense focus on the Middle East. The White House has decided to place Marines in Australia and two shore-hugging ships in Singapore, and has announced sales of small amounts of things like helicopters to some Asian allies as part of that shift.

But Blumenthal warns "those things come up short."

John T. Bennett covers national security and foreign policy for U.S. News & World Report. You can contact him at jbennett@usnews.com or follow him on Twitter.

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Solar nanowire array may increase percentage of sun's frequencies available for energy conversion

ScienceDaily (June 20, 2012) ? Researchers creating electricity through photovoltaics want to convert as many of the sun's wavelengths as possible to achieve maximum efficiency. Otherwise, they're eating only a small part of a shot duck: wasting time and money by using only a tiny bit of the sun's incoming energies.

For this reason, they see indium gallium nitride as a valuable future material for photovoltaic systems. Changing the concentration of indium allows researchers to tune the material's response so it collects solar energy from a variety of wavelengths. The more variations designed into the system, the more of the solar spectrum can be absorbed, leading to increased solar cell efficiencies. Silicon, today's photovoltaic industry standard, is limited in the wavelength range it can 'see' and absorb.

But there is a problem: Indium gallium nitride, part of a family of materials called III-nitrides, is typically grown on thin films of gallium nitride. Because gallium nitride atomic layers have different crystal lattice spacings from indium gallium nitride atomic layers, the mismatch leads to structural strain that limits both the layer thickness and percentage of indium that can be added. Thus, increasing the percentage of indium added broadens the solar spectrum that can be collected, but reduces the material's ability to tolerate the strain.

Sandia National Laboratories scientists Jonathan Wierer Jr. and George Wang reported in the journal Nanotechnology that if the indium mixture is grown on a phalanx of nanowires rather than on a flat surface, the small surface areas of the nanowires allow the indium shell layer to partially "relax" along each wire, easing strain. This relaxation allowed the team to create a nanowire solar cell with indium percentages of roughly 33 percent, higher than any other reported attempt at creating III-nitride solar cells.

This initial attempt also lowered the absorption base energy from 2.4eV to 2.1 eV, the lowest of any III-nitride solar cell to date, and made a wider range of wavelengths available for power conversion. Power conversion efficiencies were low -- only 0.3 percent compared to a standard commercial cell that hums along at about 15 percent -- but the demonstration took place on imperfect nanowire-array templates. Refinements should lead to higher efficiencies and even lower energies.

Several unique techniques were used to create the III-nitride nanowire array solar cell. A top-down fabrication process was used to create the nanowire array by masking a gallium nitride (GaN) layer with a colloidal silica mask, followed by dry and wet etching. The resulting array consisted of nanowires with vertical sidewalls and of uniform height.

Next, shell layers containing the higher indium percentage of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) were formed on the GaN nanowire template via metal organic chemical vapor deposition. Lastly, In0.02Ga0.98N was grown, in such a way that caused the nanowires to coalescence. This process produced a canopy layer at the top, facilitating simple planar processing and making the technology manufacturable.

The results, says Wierer, although modest, represent a promising path forward for III-nitride solar cell research. The nano-architecture not only enables higher indium proportion in the InGaN layers but also increased absorption via light scattering in the faceted InGaN canopy layer, as well as air voids that guide light within the nanowire array.

The research was funded by DOE's Office of Science through the Solid State Lighting Science Energy Frontier Research Center, and Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Sandia National Laboratories.

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Ahead of the Bell: Adobe shares slide on weak view

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Asus Nexus 7 Google tablet to be a snip at $200 (?150)?

Google's upcoming Asus Nexus 7 tablet is likely to be priced at around $199 (?150ish) according to some part suppliers.

Set to be unveiled next week at Google I/O, the oft-rumoured Google Nexus tablet will also come with just one camera (front-mounted) and only a Wi-Fi connection rather than a 3G or 4G data package.

These concessions, according to Digitimes' supply chain sources, are to keep the price low and competitive with Amazon's bargain-basement Kindle Fire tablet.

Cheap and cheerful

We already made an educated guess at a $200 starting price for the Nexus tablet given than it's going to be a 7-inch slate so we're giving a little more credence to Digitimes oft-inaccurate sources this time.

Another tit-bit worth noting is that the sources say that Asus will release the 7-inch tablet under its own banner in August, undercutting Google with a price tag of $159-179 (around ?100-150).

Either way, all should become clear at Google I/O next week, with the event kicking off on Wednesday June 27.

From Digitimes

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Spain crisis: Pressure eases on key borrowing rate

Spain's Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro scratches his face during a control session at the Spanish Parliament, in Madrid, Wednesday, June 13, 2012. The interest rate Spain would have to pay to raise money on the world's bond markets continued to rise Wednesday amid worries that a planned bank bailout might not be enough to save the country from needing an overall financial rescue. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Spain's Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro scratches his face during a control session at the Spanish Parliament, in Madrid, Wednesday, June 13, 2012. The interest rate Spain would have to pay to raise money on the world's bond markets continued to rise Wednesday amid worries that a planned bank bailout might not be enough to save the country from needing an overall financial rescue. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

(AP) ? Spain's sky-high borrowing rates have edged down somewhat and the finance minister has again denied that the country will need a full-fledged bailout of its public finances.

The yield on the Spanish benchmark 10-year bond is down to 6.88 percent, below the 7 percent interest rate that eventually forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to ask for international financial help.

Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro said Wednesday that Spain won't need the same kind of assistance "because it does not need to be rescued."

Spain has requested bailout money for its banks hurting from a property boom that went bust. Audits are due Thursday that will help Spain determine how much it needs from a ?100 billion ($126 billion) lifeline to be set up by the 17-nation eurozone.

Associated Press

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