Hundreds gather for traditional new year county hunt

A FEW hundred people turned out in Carmarthen on Monday morningto cheer the riders of the traditional new year's county hunt.

The dozen riders of Carmarthenshire Hunt, with their houndsweaving and chasing among the crowd, trotted into Guildhall Squarewhere they were met with applause and cheers.

Hunt master Mike Watts, dressed in a red tunic, doffed his blackriding helmet to the onlookers. His speech was all but drowned outhowever by about 20 anti-hunt protestors who, armed with placards,started singing behind him.

Mr Watts said to the crowd: "I just want to say -- but I can'tget a word in edgeways -- happy new year and to thank you forsupporting …

Oil Prices Steady at $68 a Barrel

SINGAPORE - Oil prices held steady around $68 a barrel in Asian trading Monday on lingering concerns U.S. gasoline supplies are still not meeting peak summer demand.

Light, sweet crude for July delivery edged down 2 cents to $67.98 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange midmorning in Singapore. The contract rose 35 cents to settle at $68 a barrel Friday, its highest close since September.

"There's still the ongoing problems with getting enough gasoline ready," said Tobin Gorey, a commodity strategist with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.

Analysts said traders continue to react to last week's report by the U.S. Energy Department's Energy …

Military wants more time before gay ban ends

The Pentagon wants more time before the ban on gays serving openly in the military is reversed.

A senior military official says that while President Barack Obama has been clear that he wants to repeal the ban, there is no specific timeline to do it. The official says that leaves room that the military wants to use to make sure the eventual change goes well.

The official …

Tax Sales of Firearms in State

Sometimes lawmakers must settle for less simply to get a foot inthe door. So it is, with House Bill 471, which creates the FirearmTax Act in Illinois.

Sponsored by Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago), thelegislation would impose a tax on all businesses that sell firearms.Proceeds would be allocated to trauma centers.

The bill would change the rate of taxation from $20 to 15percent on the purchase price of handguns and all concealable weaponsrequiring a 72 hour waiting period. It also would tax at 5 percentof the purchase price a rifle, shotgun or other long gun requiring a24-hour waiting period.

The tax would raise …

China manufacturing index up in December

BEIJING (AP) — China's manufacturing index rose in December to 50.3 percent, a slight rebound after a greater-than-expected fall in November.

The state-affiliated China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing said Sunday that its purchasing managers index, or PMI, rose 1.3 percentage points from 49 percent in November.

November's figure had been well below the 50-level that signifies expansion, and marked the first contraction in manufacturing activity since early 2009.

Federation analyst Zhang Liqun said the rebound signaled China should not expect to see a big slowdown in economic growth in 2012.

A competing Chinese survey released Friday, the HSBC China …

AP Interview: UN proposal unlikely to resolve dispute with Macedonia, Greek minister says

Greece does not consider a new U.N. proposal will resolve its dispute with Macedonia over the country's name, its foreign minister said Thursday, and Athens will block its neighbor from joining NATO next week unless the issue is settled.

U.N. mediator Matthew Nimitz presented a new proposal on Tuesday to try to solve the 17-year-old dispute that threatens to disrupt NATO's expansion plans.

But Nimitz's suggestion "is some distance away from the goals we are seeking for a solution that is clear, practical" and can be implemented, Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

"We have sent our …

No child left behind? Don't believe education reform hype Our school communities should question the law's hidden consequences and hypocrisy.

It sounded like such a good idea. The year-old federal No ChildLeft Behind Act was sold to the American people as a means ofbringing about public school improvement through higher expectationsof all children and new requirements for accountability.

Sadly, the devil is in the details. Our school communities shouldactively question the hidden consequences, unspoken agenda andhypocrisy of the act.

It calls for annual testing of our students from third to eighthgrade and throughout high school. Results must be broken down bydemographic categories, including minorities, low-income, specialeducation and limited-English students. In every school, all of thesegroups must …

Wheel alignment basics

Consider this a primer in ride height, steering and suspension angles, and types of adjustment for the alignment apprentice.

Wheel alignment is the most critical part of collision repair. Achieving proper specs on a vehicle's four wheels is, in many cases, the best proof the body and chassis have been restored accurately. Any deviation from manufacturer's specs indicates something is wrong with the repair.Vehicle safety and your customers' lives are at stake, so pay close attention as we discuss toe, camber, caster, steering axis inclination (SAI), scrub radius and the need for four-wheel alignments.

Even though this article provides a useful overview of alignment theory, …

McCain marks anniversary of US disabilities law by vowing to support expansion

Republican presidential candidate John McCain is pledging support for a proposal to expand protections for disabled people under an 18-year-old landmark civil rights law.

Speaking from Arizona by satellite to a disabilities forum in Columbus, Ohio, McCain said Saturday that revisions to the Americans With Disabilities Act must leave no doubt that it was intended to protect from any discrimination based on physical or mental disabilities.

The Supreme Court generally has exempted from the law's protection people with partial physical disabilities, as well as people with physical impairments that can be treated with medication or devices such as hearing …

Suspect in hospital after police shootout: ; State troopers chase man into woods after raid

DAILY MAIL STAFF

A heavily armed drug suspect wearing body armor was shot severaltimes by State Police in Webster County today when he fled into thewoods and raised a rifle at troopers, authorities said. Kenneth M.Plymale, 46, of Camden-on-Gauley was being treated at SummersvilleMemorial Hospital this afternoon following the 8:15 a.m. incident,according to a State Police news release.

Police had to shoot the suspected drug trafficker several timesand use a specially trained police dog before they could subdue him,the release stated.

According to the report, the arresting officers discoveredPlymale was wearing body armor after he was down. It is stillunclear …

Miami Stifles No. 18 B.C. for 17-14 Win

MIAMI - If this was Larry Coker's final game at Miami, at least the Hurricanes sent him off with a victory. Kirby Freeman threw for 181 yards and a touchdown, Javarris James' 2-yard run in the third quarter put Miami ahead to stay, and the Hurricanes' defense stifled No. 18 Boston College in rallying for a 17-14 win Thursday night.

The Hurricanes (6-6, 3-5 Atlantic Coast Conference) snapped a four-game losing streak and became bowl-eligible. Soon, they'll know if they'll actually get an invitation to the postseason - and if the embattled Coker will be coaching. A decision on his future at Miami could be announced as early as Friday, and speculation has been widespread for weeks …

China, Japan, S. Korea join LA Galaxy in tourney

League champions from China and South Korea, and the holder of Japan's league cup, will join the Los Angeles Galaxy in the Pan-Pacific football championship for two doubleheaders starting Wednesday.

South Korea's Suwon Bluewings will face China's Shandong Luneng in Wednesday's first game, followed by the match between the Galaxy and Japan's Oita Trinita.

The losers will meet in Sunday's third-place game, with the winners playing later for the championship.

Shandong won the Chinese Super League for the second time in three seasons last year. Suwon took the K-League title under coach Cha Bum-kun, the South Korean national team's all-time leading …

Police, gangs fight deadly gun battle in Pakistan's biggest city

Pakistani police were embroiled in a deadly gunbattle with gangsters Wednesday in a notorious slum district of the country's biggest city.

Police in Karachi sent 100 officers and four armored vehicles into the city's Lyari district Wednesday in a bid to arrest underworld kingpins who have been fighting a bloody turf war, Lyari police chief Imran Shaukat said.

But officers met with stiff resistance from gang members armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades.

Shaukat said there were "a few casualties, some fatal." He said at least one gangster was killed and police also suffered casualties.

Pakistan's new government has vowed to improve law and order in Karachi, a chaotic port city of 15 million that functions as the hub of both Pakistan's legal and illegal economies.

Gangs operating in Lyari, an impoverished district with warren-like streets, are accused of involvement in extortion, kidnappings, drugs and weapons trafficking.

Shaukat said police were bringing in reinforcements and hoped to finish the operation Wednesday evening.

Cubs at Reds

TODAY: 6:35 p.m. TV: Ch. 9. Jeff Pico (3-6) vs. Tom Browning(11-4).

TOMORROW: 6:35 p.m. TV: Ch. 9. Rick Sutcliffe (9-10) vs. JackArmstrong (2-5).

THURSDAY: 6:35 p.m. TV: Ch. 9. Jamie Moyer (6-11) vs. DannyJackson (16-5).

CUBS UPDATE: Cubs, who are 19-11 against left-handed starters,face two this series. Rafael Palmeiro is hitting .356 againstsouthpaws. Pico, who has 2.76 ERA as a reliever, replaces GregMaddux (forearm bruise) for one turn. Frank DiPino has two victoriesand two saves in last seven appearances. In previous 12 startsbefore beating St. Louis 5-1 Saturday, Moyer had a 3.00 ERA, but onlya 3-5 record because of lack of offense.

REDS UPDATE: Reds have handful of league leaders, includingbullpen of setup man Rob Murphy, who leads league in games (57), JohnFranco, who is tops in saves (25). Rookie Chris Sabo leads indoubles (34). Jackson, the third league pitcher to win 16 games, haswon six straight and is ahead in complete games (10). Kal Daniels isbest at getting on base (.396). Eric Davis is tied with KevinMitchell in game-winning RBI (12).

Aussie basketball TV ad slammed as racist

SYDNEY (AP) — A promotional television advertisement has outraged several African-American former stars of the National Basketball League who said a scene featuring a black player hopping into bed with a white couple is insensitive and racist.

The commercial shows a series of Australian basketball players throwing a ball around a suburban house. Near the end, Sydney Kings forward Taj McCullough, who is African-American, leaps onto a white couple's bed and nuzzles up to the woman. McCullough is the only black player featured in the commercial.

Former Melbourne Tigers player Darryl McDonald slammed the advertisement.

"It puts black Americans in a bad light," McDonald, who is also African-American, told Sydney's Daily Telegraph. "That commercial has nothing to do with basketball. Nobody else would present their sport this way."

In a statement on Friday, the NBL defended the ad as "lighthearted and fun."

"We believe viewers and supporters will certainly see the promo in the light in which it was intended, and we note the overwhelming feedback from the public that this is indeed the case," the NBL said.

But Cal Bruton and Leroy Loggins, African-Americans who became naturalized Australians after starring in Australia's domestic league in the 1980s with the now defunct Brisbane Bullets, were both highly critical of the concept of the advertisement.

Bruton said it was particularly insensitive because it calls to mind the case of former Brisbane Bullets player Bryant Matthews. Matthews, an African-American, was convicted in 2007 of raping a white woman who was in bed with her partner at the time of the attack.

Although Bruton was hesitant to dub the spot overtly racist, he did say it was in "poor taste."

"To be portrayed in that light, to me, just was a little bit below the belt," Bruton told The Associated Press on Friday.

Bruton was born in New York but moved to Australia 31 years ago and is the father of Australian Olympian CJ Bruton.

The elder Bruton said the ad also illustrates the differences in sensitivities toward racial attitudes between Australia and the U.S. During his career, he recalled, Australians often referred to him as "the brilliant Negro guard."

"You wouldn't ever see an ad like that of Kobe Bryant jumping into bed in America," he told the AP.

Loggins, who played for Australia at the 1992 Olympics, said the depiction in the ad was off key.

"I couldn't believe it," Loggins told the Telegraph. "Why would you show a black American jumping into bed with a man's wife to promote basketball? I don't even know how someone could think up a commercial like that. You would never see any other sport in the world, that takes themselves seriously, portraying a black athlete that way."

The Ten Network has been airing the commercial for the past two weeks. Ten's head of sports marketing, Sam Heard, said on Friday there were no plans to pull the ad.

"It is designed as a fun, lighthearted promo highlighting the fact the NBL is back in people's homes, on free-to-air television," he said, declining to comment further.

Ex-Oil Exec Says He Paid Alaska Lawmaker

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The former head of an oil field services company testified Wednesday that he paid a lawmaker nearly $8,000 to help keep him in office and advocate for the construction of a natural gas pipeline tapping the state's vast North Slope Reserves.

Bill Allen, former chairman of VECO Corp., testified that he paid $7,993 to former House Speaker Pete Kott in an inflated invoice for a flooring job to Kott's business. Kott wanted the extra money so he could hire his son to run his re-election campaign, Allen said.

"He was going to run again and he needed his son to help him," Allen said.

Kott is charged with conspiracy to solicit financial benefits for his service as a legislator, extortion "under color of official right," bribery and wire fraud, which involved improperly discussing legislative business by phone. If convicted of all charges, Kott could face up to 55 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Kott is accused of accepting the inflated invoice, a $1,000 reimbursement for a check Kott gave to the re-election campaign of former Gov. Frank Murkowski and a $2,750 political poll paid for by VECO. Prosecutors say he was also promised a job as a lobbyist for VECO.

Kott's attorney denies the charges, saying the $7,993 was an advance for a flooring job Kott's business could not carry out in 2006 because of the disruption caused by the federal corruption investigation.

Defense attorney James Wendt also said Kott was not aware of the poll VECO performed on Kott's House race, which he lost in 2006, and that he was not promised a job.

Allen and former VECO vice president Rick Smith pleaded guilty in May to extortion, conspiracy and bribery of legislators. Allen has not been scheduled for sentencing.

Wiretapped phone conversations and surveillance tapes played at trial showed Kott plotting strategy, reporting legislative developments and taking direction from the company officials.

Former Republican Reps. Bruce Weyhrauch and Vic Kohring are also charged with bribery. Weyhrauch's trial has been delayed, while Kohring's is scheduled for next month.

Allen testified Wednesday that in March 2006, he handed Kohring $1,000, in part because he was a friend who could not afford food or lodging, and in part because of his loyalty to Allen's cause.

"He slept in his office because he didn't have money to get a room," Allen testified. "Sometimes he didn't have enough money to eat ... I would say 50 percent because he was a friend and 50 percent that he was right on and would produce" on the proposed petroleum profits tax.

Next week [Edition 2]

Next week In go! Denise Van Outen tells us about life as a mumand why she's ready to wax top comedians for Comic Relief

Judge delays case involving FBI's GPS tracking

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge is delaying a college student's lawsuit against the FBI for putting a GPS tracking device on his car without a warrant.

The student, Yasir Afifi of San Jose, California, asked for the delay until the Supreme Court decides a related case. The high court plans to hear arguments in the next term over the case of Washington nightclub owner Antoine Jones, convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. An appeals court threw out Jones' life sentence because police tracked his Jeep for a month by GPS without a warrant.

Other courts have upheld the use of warrantless GPS tracking.

The FBI admits it put the GPS on Afifi's car but will not reveal why. The Egyptian-American student says he has done nothing to attract FBI attention.

Romanian leader backs controversial gold mine

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Romania's president says he supports a controversial gold mining project in western Transylvania, where 300 tons of gold and 1,600 tons of silver lie.

President Traian Basescu says "any country that has resources must use them" and the investment by Canada's Rosia Montana Gold Corp. will bring jobs. He says Monday the project "has been buried since 1997" because of cowardly politicians.

Opponents say building the open-cast mine would damage ancient monuments and destroy a mountain face. They have also criticized the gold-extracting process for using cyanide.

Rosia Montana says it will be careful to preserve the environment. The company still needs to get certain permits to go ahead with the project.

Analysis: Florida Tests McCain, Romney

Republican John McCain proved Tuesday night he is not just the darling of independents.

In a presidential primary closed to all but registered Republicans in Florida, the Arizona senator rolled past Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.

"Thank you, Florida Republicans, for bringing a former Florida resident across the finish line first in _ as I have been repeatedly reminded lately _ an all-Republican primary," McCain told cheering supporters Tuesday night in Miami.

Florida was the first test of how McCain and Romney might fare in a large and hugely diverse battleground state.

And it set the stage for the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primaries, a nationwide contest in which more than 20 states hold elections _ most of them Republican-only contests like Florida's. McCain already has a lead in several of those bigger states.

In Florida, McCain won across a broad swath of voters: older people, Hispanics, moderates, liberal Republicans and, of course, independents, according to exit polls. He was essentially tied with Romney among veterans, and while Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee shared the lead among born-again Christian voters, McCain only trailed slightly.

Florida Republicans also considered McCain the likeliest Republican to win the November general election and the one most qualified to be commander in chief, according to exit polls for The Associated Press and the television networks.

It was a crucial victory for a man long considered a maverick by his party's establishment. His victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina carried asterisks because they were open contests in which he had heavy support from independents.

"The rap on him has always been that he might be popular among independents but not that popular among the people who are actually going to decide the nomination, and that's Republicans," said GOP consultant Whit Ayres. "And this victory puts a stake through the heart of that criticism."

Yet the race for the Republican nomination is far from over; the wealthy Romney has more money than McCain, enough to make it a two-man contest through Feb. 5.

"But this victory ought to allow John McCain to raise a lot of money in a hurry from people who see the train leaving the station and want to get on board," Ayres said.

Until now, the Republican race had been a muddle, McCain winning New Hampshire and South Carolina victories, Romney winning his home state of Michigan, Huckabee winning Iowa.

Florida ended the aspirations of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who dominated Republican polls throughout 2007 but saw his lead evaporate once the voting began this month. Giuliani planned to drop out of the race and endorse McCain, according to GOP officials.

Giuliani initially tried to compete in early states _ he spent more than $3 million on TV ads in New Hampshire and ran radio ads and sent mail to voters there and in Iowa _ then decamped to Florida last month, where he waited out the early contests and tried, unsuccessfully, to hold onto his lead.

Florida also is a blow to Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Iowa caucuses. The underfunded Huckabee has been unable to break out beyond his base of born-again Christian voters and finished second behind McCain in South Carolina and third in New Hampshire and Michigan. Now Huckabee is trying to compete in Southern states, such as Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee on Super Tuesday.

While Florida is the fourth-largest state and its Republican electorate is highly diverse _ young, old, whites, Hispanics, moderates, conservatives _ a primary victory does not ensure a general election win.

Primary turnout is a small fraction of turnout in the general election, as illustrated by the small percentage of Hispanics, about one in 10, who voted in Tuesday's GOP primary. Overall, Hispanics are more than 20 percent of Florida's population.

What it insures is momentum, and for now, momentum is what matters.

The winner of the Republican primary walks away with all 57 of Florida's delegates to the Republican National Convention. It's a small number, considering it takes 1,191 to win the nomination, but it is the biggest number of delegates awarded so far.

At some point, McCain's popularity among independents can be argued as a general election strength rather than a primary election liability.

"If you want to win the White House, you need those people," said Rich Galen, former adviser to Fred Thompson, the actor-politician who dropped out of the presidential race. "If I were McCain's guys, I would be saying this is not a negative, this is a positive."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE: Libby Quaid covers the Republican presidential race for The Associated Press.

Visualizing ion relaxation in the transport of short DNA fragments

ABSTRACT lon relaxation plays an important role in a wide range of phenomena involving the transport of charged biomolecules. Ion relaxation is responsible for reducing sedimentation and diffusion constants, reducing electrophoretic mobilities, increasing intrinsic viscosities, and, for biomolecules that lack a permanent electric dipole moment, provides a mechanism for orienting them in an external electric field. Recently, a numerical boundary element method was developed to solve the coupled Navier-Stokes, Poisson, and ion transport equations for a polyion modeled as a rigid body of arbitrary size, shape, and charge distribution. This method has subsequently been used to compute the electrophoretic mobilities and intrinsic viscosities of a number of model proteins and DNA fragments. The primary purpose of the present work is to examine the effect of ion relaxation on the ion density and fluid velocity fields around short DNA fragments (20 and 40 bp). Contour density as well as vector field diagrams of the various scalar and vector fields are presented and discussed at monovalent salt concentrations of 0.03 and 0.11 M. In addition, the net charge current fluxes in the vicinity of the DNA fragments at low and high salt concentrations are briefly examined and discussed.

INTRODUCTION

The ion atmosphere surrounding a charged particle, or polyion, in solution can be perturbed from its equilibrium value in a number of ways. In a sedimentation velocity experiment, where the driving force is a centrifugal force, the ion atmosphere tends to lag behind the translating charged particle (Booth, 1954). This ion relaxation, in turn, retards the motion of the polyion resulting in a larger translational friction coefficient, or smaller sedimentation constant, relative to an equivalent uncharged particle. Similarly, a dilute suspension of charged particles placed in a shear field exhibits a larger viscosity than the corresponding suspension of uncharged particles (Booth, 1950b; Sherwood, 1980; Sherwood, 1981; Allison, 1998). In this article, steady state shall refer to a polyion that translates with constant velocity in a viscous fluid due to the presence of a constant external driving force. In steady-state free solution electrophoresis, the driving force is a constant external electric field. In this case, the ion atmosphere is distorted both by the electric field and by the transport of the charged particle through the fluid (Booth, 1950a; Wiersema et al., 1966; O'Brien and White, 1978; Stigter, 1978a,b). Ion relaxation reduces the electrophoretic mobility, and this relaxation effect becomes more significant as the charge on the polyion increases. Over the last few years, boundary element (BE) methods that account for ion relaxation have been developed, and this has made it possible to estimate the free solution electrophoretic mobility of rigid model polyions of arbitrary size and charge distribution (Allison, 1996). This approach has been applied to lysozyme (Allison and et al., 1997) and short DNA fragments (Allison and Mazur, 1998). When ion relaxation is included, calculated mobilities of 20-bp DNA fragments in 0.11 M KCl agree with experimental mobilities (Laue et al., 1996) to within a few percent. For a 27-bp fragment in 0.04 M Tris acetate, calculated and experimental (Stellwagen et al., 1997) mobilities agree to within 10-15%. Furthermore, ion relaxation reduces the mobility at 0.11 M KCl by 25% relative to the predicted mobility in its absence (Allison and Mazur, 1998). A final electrooptical phenomenon worthy of mention involves orienting macroions in solution by external electric fields and monitoring this by optical birefringence or dichroism. Partial orientation occurs as a result of the interaction of the external field with the electric dipole moment of the macroion. Whether the dipole is permanent or induced can be distinguished by field reversal techniques (Tinoco and Yamaoka, 1959) or by the field strength dependence of birefringence/dichroism (Stellwagen, 1981). DNA fragments have been extensively studied by these methods (Elias and Eden, 1981; Stellwagen, 1981; Hagerman, 1981; Diekmann et al., 1982; Porschke, 1994), and the dipole is primarily, though not exclusively, induced (Elias and Eden, 1981; Stellwagen, 1981). In this example, the induced dipole moment develops as a consequence of ion relaxation (Fixman and Jagannathan, 1981). The above cases serve to illustrate that ion relaxation plays an important role in biophysics and the transport of macroions in general.

As discussed above, it is now possible to account for ion relaxation in modeling the transport of rigid macroions of arbitrary shape and charge distribution, and this approach has been used to calculate electrophoretic mobilities and intrinsic viscosities for DNA fragments and lysozyme. The purpose of the present work is to provide visual demonstration of the relaxation effect by looking at various scalar and vector fields around short DNA fragments. The present study is similar to that of Stigter's 1980 paper on spherical colloid particles (Stigter, 1980). We shall focus on free solution electrophoresis, but by doing so, it is also possible to examine the sedimentation problem as well. Provided the external electric field is sufficiently weak that the electrophoretic mobility is independent of field strength, one can view electrophoresis as a superposition of two transport cases (O'Brien and White, 1978). In case 1, the polyion translates at constant velocity through a stationary fluid in the absence of an electric field. This, however, corresponds to sedimentation velocity. In case 2, the polyion is held stationary but is subjected to a constant electric field. Steady-state electrophoresis corresponds to that superposition of the two cases that results in a net force of zero acting on the polyion.

is sufficiently weak so that only terms linear in the perturbing field(s) need to be accounted for. Including ion relaxation at the level of the primitive model requires solution of the linearized Navier-Stokes (for solvent flow), Poisson (for charge/ion distributions), and ion transport equations. It should be emphasized that these equations are coupled and must be solved simultaneously. This can be achieved in general by an iterative boundary element procedure, which is described in detail elsewhere (Allison, 1996). In the present work, we shall concentrate on only a few key features of the method in an attempt to keep the mathematics to a minimum. Let j^sub alpha^(r) denote the average local current density (in ions per second per unit area) in some convenient frame of reference. It can be written as the sum of convective, diffusive, and "direct force" currents:

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Perturbed ion densities

When a DNA fragment or some other polyion is placed in a centrifugal (sedimentation) or electric (electrophoresis) field, the ion atmosphere is distorted from its equilibrium value. At sufficiently low centrifugal or (external) electric field strengths, the extent of distortion, or ion relaxation, varies linearly with the strength of the imposed field and vanishes at zero field strength. Consider first a 20-bp DNA fragment in 0.03 M KCl at 20 deg C translating at steady state in a direction parallel to the cylinder axis at a velocity of 5.00 X 10^sup -4^ cm/s in response to a centrifugal force. If the fragment was in a centrifuge cell located 6.5 cm from the axis of rotation, a spin rate of approximately 2000 rpm would be necessary to achieve this velocity. Under these conditions, a plot of the counterion density n+(r) versus position r would be virtually identical to a plot of the corresponding equilibrium counterion density n^sub +o^(r). Shown in Fig. 1 is the difference plot in the counterion density, (delta)n+ = n+ - n+o. The DNA is translating in the direction of the arrow and white/black shades correspond to maximal excesses/deficiencies of counterions, respectively. A neutral shade of gray corresponds to (delta)n+ = 0 and is also used to represent the DNA interior for reference. It is seen that the greatest deficiency occurs at the leading edge of the polyion (toward the bottom of the figure) and the greatest excess is immediately behind it. At equilibrium, DNA is surrounded by an atmosphere of predominantly positive ions. As it moves, however, the front end continually enters regions of the fluid in which the positive ion concentration falls below this equilibrium value, and this accounts for the deficiency in front of the polyion. A complementary argument can explain the excess of counterions behind. In a reference frame that moves with the polyion, a steady-state distribution of mobile ions prevails, which reflects a balance of ion flow due to convection, diffusion (against a concentration gradient), and direct forces as summarized by Eq. 3. We shall return to this point later. From Fig. 1, (delta)n+ is seen to be dipolar in character and falls off gradually with distance. The relative difference in charge density, (delta)p = p rho^o, is shown in Fig. 2 where p = q(n+ - n_). All quantities have been scaled to give relative extrema that are about the same in the two figures. Although similar, it is seen that the charge density approaches the equilibrium value more quickly with distance from the polyion surface than the counterion density. The co-ion atmosphere also contributes to ion relaxation, particularly at intermediate distances from the polyion surface. Fig. 3 is similar to Fig. 2 (a contour plot of delta rho) except that the driving force is now an electric field directed opposite the polyion flow direction and is chosen sufficiently strong (1 V/cm) so that the polyion translates at the same velocity as in Figs. 1 and 2. It is clear on comparing Figs. 2 and 3 that the perturbed steady-state charge densities are very similar regardless of the nature of the driving force. It should be emphasized that the driving force in Figs. 2 and 3 are not identical in magnitude, but the steady-state velocities are.

The contour plots shown in the first three figures come from BE calculations of model polyions made up of 144 triangular plates, and what is being plotted is a two-dimensional cut in a plane that includes the cylinder axis. As the charge distribution has been approximated by a line charge, the scalar and vector fields considered in this work should be axially symmetric to a good approximation provided the external flow/electric field is collinear with the cylinder axis. Careful inspection of these density plots show that they are not entirely symmetrical about the rod axis as they should be. This is due to noise in the computations. The similarity between ion relaxation in sedimentation (Fig. 2) and electrophoresis (Fig. 3) is expected, in part at least, because both scalar fields represent solutions of the same coupled equations, but subject to different boundary conditions. Also, Onsager relations have been derived that relate the two processes of electrophoresis and sedimentation (de Groot et al., 1952), and these have been partially confirmed (Stigter, 1980). However, it is not true that u/u^sub 0^ = mu/mu^sub 0^ where u and uo are the (magnitudes of the) polyion sedimentation velocities in the presence and absence of ion relaxation subject to the same centrifugal force, whereas mu and mu^sub O^ are the electrophoretic mobilities in the presence and absence of ion relaxation but subject to the same external electric field strength. From calculations on a 144-plate model (20-bp DNA at 20 deg C at 0.03 M KCl and the polyion translating end-on as shown in Figs. 1-3), u/uo = 0.937 and (mu^sub )||^/(mu)^sub ||O^ = 0.720. These results are qualitatively consistent with the predictions for sedimentation (Booth, 1954) and electrophoresis (Booth, 1950a) of charged spheres. The orientationally averaged electrophoretic mobility predicted by the model is -4.05 X 10^sup -4^ cm^sup 2^/V s, and the experimental value under very similar salt conditions is -3.71 X 10^sup -4^ cm^sup 2^/V s (Wooll, 1994). Closer agreement between model calculations and experiment can be achieved by doing a series of calculations on models with varying number of platelets and extrapolating to the limit of infinite plate number (Allison and Mazur, 1998).

It should be emphasized that the magnitude of the ion relaxation seen in Figs. 1-3 is directly proportional to the magnitude of the polyion velocity (u), or external electric field (e). In Fig. 1 where u = 5 X 10^sup -4^ cm/s, the range in (delta)n^sub +^/c^sub +o^ (c^sub +o^ equals the counterion concentration far from the polyion) is ~+/-9 X 10^sup -6^. The range seen in Fig. 2 is approximately the same as this as the perturbation of greatest magnitude occurs near the polyion surface where the co-ion concentration is very small. In Fig. 3, the polyion translates at the same velocity as in Fig. 2 but is also subjected to an e-field of 1 V/cm in a direction opposing the flow direction of the polyion, and this corresponds to steady-state electrophoresis. The range in (delta)p/qc^sub +0^ in this case is ~+3 X 10^sup -4^, which, in terms of absolute magnitude, is substantially larger than the relaxation effect seen in the case of sedimentation. The fact that Figs. 2 and 3 appear very similar is due to the much narrower spacings of the contours in Fig. 2 relative to Fig. 3. Fig. 4 is similar to Fig. 3, but the KCl concentration has been increased from 0.03 to 0.11 M. The close similarity between the perturbed charge densities seen in these two figures shows that the relative ion relaxation effect is similar at the two salt concentrations for fragments of this length. However, the range in (delta)p/qc^sub +0^ at 0.11 M is ~+/-6 X 10^sup -5^, which is 5 times smaller than the range seen at 0.03 M. Thus, although the relative relaxation effect does not vary strongly with salt concentration, the absolute relaxation effect does and decreases with increasing salt concentration. A curious feature of electrophoresis at these two salt concentrations is that the absolute range in Sp is approximately the same.

In addition to contour density plots of DNA translating parallel to the cylinder axis, similar plots for DNA translating perpendicular to the cylinder axis exhibit dipolar character similar to what is seen in Figs. 1-4 when the contour plane bisects the midpoint of the cylinder. Fig. 5 shows an example of this for the electrophoresis of 20-bp DNA at 0.11 M KCl. Figs. 6 and 7 show bp for 40-bp DNA at 0.03 and 0.11 M KCl, respectively. The fragments are undergoing steady-state electrophoresis in an external field of 1 V/cm directed parallel to the axis of the cylinder. Arrows at the center of the polyion indicate the direction of polyion flow. The magnitude of the drift velocities are 5.58 (0.03 M) and 5.09 x 10^sup -4^ cm/s (0.11 M), respectively. Somewhat different contour shadings/spacings are used in the 40-bp plots compared with the 20-bp plots to emphasize the differences at the two salt concentrations. Similar to the 20-bp plots, Figs. 6 and 7 show that ion relaxation is largely dipolar in character with a nodal plane ((delta)(rho) = 0) that bisects the center of the cylinder and is perpendicular to the cylinder axis. It is interesting to note from Fig. 6 that ion relaxation is not confined to the very ends of the fragment, but extends quite far along the chain from the ends. Keep in mind that the cylinder diameter is 2 nm and the reciprocal of the Debye-Huckel screening length, kappa-1, equals 1.74 nm and 0.91 nm at 0.03 M and 0.11 M KCl, respectively. Qualitatively, it would appear that ion relaxation is significant at distances up to several kappa-1 from the ends of the fragment in steady-state electrophoresis.

At the same ambient salt concentration, the absolute range in (delta)(rho) for the electrophoresis of DNA translating parallel to the cylinder axis for the 40-bp fragment is approximately the same as the 20-bp fragment. This does not necessarily imply that the induced electric dipole moment for a rod translating parallel to its axis varies linearly with length as ion relaxation effects are evidently diffuse in character and not confined to the very ends of the rod. At the present time, we are investigating the induced electric dipole moment of DNA fragments and the related problem of their electric polarizability (Fixman and Jagannathan, 1981). The extended nature of the perturbed ion densities seen in these figures does raise concern about how long range end effects are in transport properties such as the electrophoretic mobility of short DNA fragments. For a rod translating parallel to its axis in an external field, it has been argued that end effects on the electrophoretic mobility should become negligible in the limit of a very long rod (Stigter, 1978b). For DNA modeled as a rod in 0.11 M KCl and translating parallel to the rod axis, BE calculations have shown that ion relaxation reduces electrophoretic mobility by approximately 32%, 25%, and 20% for 20-bp, 40-bp, and 60-bp fragments, respectively (Allison and Mazur, 1998). Thus, end effects may very well become negligible for very long rods as proposed by Stigter, but their contribution to parallel electrophoresis appears to be quite long range.

Velocity fields

In addition to the perturbed ion and charge density plots considered previously, it is worthwhile to also consider how ion relaxation influences various vector fields such as the actual fluid velocity v(r) in the vicinity of a sedimenting or electrophoresing particle. First of all, consider the velocity field v^sub o^(r) of a sedimenting 20-bp DNA fragment in the absence of ion relaxation translating with velocity u^sub o^ in a direction parallel to the cylinder axis. The velocity field is shown in Fig. 8 for a plane of fluid that passes through the cylinder axis. The reference frame is chosen to be stationary relative to the laboratory, and the instantaneous velocity is downward in the figure. The actual value of uo is unimportant provided its magnitude is sufficiently small to insure low Reynolds number flow conditions (Happel and Brenner, 1963). A value of 5 X 10&sup -4^ cm/s is used here as a reference value. We shall also assume stick boundary conditions hold, which means v^sub 0^(r) = uo^sub 0^ for points r on the polyion surface. Also, the upper and lower portions of the capped cylinder models have been cut away in Fig. 8 to illustrate more clearly the flow pattern near the particle. These fields are generated numerically by a BE procedure described elsewhere (Allison, 1996). As can be seen, the velocity field falls off rather slowly with distance away from the particle, and the pattern is similar to the velocity field profile for a sphere (Stigter, 1980). For a sedimenting DNA with ion relaxation, the flow pattern is similar to that shown in Fig. 8. If we compare two DNA fragments subject to exactly the same centrifugal force but one with ion relaxation accounted for and the other with ion relaxation ignored, the sedimentation velocity of the fragment with ion relaxation included would be smaller. In our reference example, ion relaxation would reduce the sedimentation velocity from 5.00 X 10^sup -4^ to 4.68 X 10^sup -4^ cm/s in 0.03 M KCl and from 5.00 X 10^sup -4^ to 4.86 X 10^sup -4^ in 0.11 M KCl. This is due to the fact that the sedimenting fragment in the absence of ion relaxation is entirely equivalent to the sedimentation of an uncharged particle of the same size and shape. The charged particle with ion relaxation sediments more slowly as it experiences additional frictional drag brought about by the tendency of the atmosphere to lag behind the polyion itself. In what follows, the difference velocity field, or relaxation field, shall be plotted:

where the 0 subscript refers to the analogous unrelaxed case. The difference fields for sedimentation are shown in Figs. 9 (0.03 M) and 10 (0.11 M KCl). At the particle surface, the difference fields point in a direction opposite to that shown in Fig. 8, which is due to the fact u is in the same direction as uo but smaller in magnitude. For our reference example, the magnitude of (delta)v is 0.32 x 10^sup -4^ and 0.14 x 10^sup -4^ cm/s at 0.03 and 0.11 M KCI, respectively. Thus, the absolute magnitude of the vectors at the polyion surface are 6.4% (Fig. 9) and 2.8% (Fig. 10) as large as those of the surface vectors in Fig. 8. Comparing the relaxation field plots with the Stokes field plot of Fig. 8, it is clear that the relaxation fields fall off more quickly with distance and that they also exhibit a substantial salt dependence. At high salt, the relaxation field falls off more rapidly with distance than at low salt. Figs. 11 and 12 show the corresponding relaxation fields for steady-state electrophoresis at 0.03 and 0.11 M KCI, respectively. The DNA fragment is placed in an electric field of 1 V/cm (directed in the direction of bv at the polyion surface). In the absence of relaxation, the DNA translates along the long axis under steady-state conditions with a velocity of 5 X 10^sup -4^ cm/s. Ion relaxation reduces these velocities to 3.60 x 10^sup -4^ and 4.10 X 10^sup -4^ cm/s at 0.03 and 0.11 M KCl, respectively. Thus, the magnitude of the relaxation fields at the polyion surface in Figs. 11 and 12 are 28% and 18% as large as the magnitude of the Stokes velocity field at the polyion surface (Fig. 8). Although similar to the previous figures for sedimentation, the corresponding relaxation fields for electrophoresis fall off even more quickly with distance. Fig. 13 is similar to Fig. 12 but represents a blow-up of the relaxation velocity field in the vicinity of one end of the polyion. Also note in Fig. 13 that there is a small reversal of the relaxation field at some distance from the polyion surface. Keep in mind, however, that these relaxation velocities are not actual velocities but difference velocities according to Eq. 5. Consequently, the actual velocity field does not reverse itself. At 0.11 M, the fall-off in the relaxation field appears sufficiently rapid that thin double layer theories (O'Brien, 1983; Solomentsev et al., 1993) may actually be appropriate.

Current fluxes

Finally, we would like to examine current fluxes around 20-bp DNA. Shown in Fig. 14 is the difference current, j^sub d^ = j^sub +^ - j^sub _^ at 0.002 M KCl in the case of steady-state electrophoresis. The frame of reference is chosen to be stationary relative to the polyion. In the lab frame, the DNA moves downward in the figure and the electric field points upward. Near the DNA, the difference current is dominated by the flux of counterions j^sub +^, and it is worth considering which term(s) on the right side of Eq. 3 dominate the transport process. It cannot be the convective term as in a frame of reference stationary with respect to the polyion, n^sub alpha^v would vanish at the polyion surface and reach some plateau value at some distance. This, however, is inconsistent with Fig. 14. The direct force term (third term on the right side of Eq. 3) is expected to be dominated by the + ions interacting with the e field and be greatest near the polyion surface. This, however, would yield a flow pattern directed upward (along e) in Fig. 14. Close to the sides of the DNA, the flow pattern is seen to be just the opposite of this. This leaves the second term, which corresponds to diffusion against a concentration gradient. From Fig. 3, we know that there is an excess of counterions at the top end of the fragment and a deficiency at the other end. Also, the counterion concentration will be greatest near the polyion surface. Thus, the flow pattern near the sides of the DNA in Fig. 14 is entirely consistent with what one would expect if Eq. 3 were dominated by the diffusion term. Shown in Fig. 15 is exactly the same vector field but at the higher salt concentration of 0.11 M. It is worth noting that the sign of j^sub d^ close to the sides of DNA is reversed relative to Fig. 14 despite the fact the e values are the same in the two cases and the u values are at least in the same direction. Based on our previous discussion, it is clear that the direct force term in Eq. 3 dominates the ion flux at 0.11 M salt whereas the diffusive term dominates at low salt. Similar studies over a range of salt concentrations reveal that the general flow pattern seen in Fig. 15 occurs except at very low salt (less than ~0.005 M monovalent salt).

We can offer the following simple physical interpretation of this phenomenon. In general, a DNA fragment undergoing steady-state electrophoresis and moving parallel to the long axis of the molecule will have one end that is rich in counterions and one end that is poor in counterions. At low salt, the primary source of counterions for the poor end is diffusion, against a concentration gradient, of counterions from the rich end (and sides) to the poor end. At high salt, the primary source of counterions for the poor end is the bulk solution where they are now present in abundance. As the + ions in the bulk solution tend to move in the general direction of e, this is reflected in the flow field for j^sub d^.

CONCLUSIONS

The primary objective of this work has been the graphic illustration of the phenomenon of ion relaxation in the transport of short DNA fragments. Contour plots of counteflon and/or charge density have been presented for both 20- and 40-bp fragments at 0.03 and 0.11 M monovalent salt (KCl). Ion relaxation extends out distances of order kappa^sup -1^ from the ends of the fragment for the DNA translating parallel to its cylinder axis. The relaxation effect is similar for sedimentation and electrophoresis, but there are differences. In addition, vector plots of the Stokes field and the relaxation velocity field are presented for both sedimentation and electrophoresis of 20-bp DNA. The relaxation effect falls off rapidly with distance, and this fall-off is more rapid at higher salt. These results are qualitatively similar to an earlier study of charged spheres (Stigter, 1980). Finally, the charge current flux around the 20-bp fragment is examined at 0.002 and 0.11 M KCl. At the lower salt concentration, the charge flux is dominated by diffusion against a concentration gradient, but at the higher salt concentration, the dominant term involves the force on the counterions by the external electric field. The charge current flux plays a central role in the theory of conductance of polyelectrolytes (Stigter, 1979), and the results presented here will be expanded upon in future work.

This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants MCB-9807541 (to S.A. Allison) and MCB-9807550 (to T.M. Lane).

[Reference]

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Allison, S. A., M. Potter, and J. A. McCammon. 1997. Modeling the electrophoresis of lysozyme. II. Inclusion of ion relaxation. Biophys. J. 73:133-140.

Booth, F. 1950a. The cataphoresis of spherical, solid non-conducting particles in a symmetric electrolyte. Proc. R. Soc. London. 203A: 514-533.

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Diekmann, S., W. Hillen, B. Morgeneyer, R. D. Wells, and D. Porschke. 1982. Orientation relaxation of DNA restriction fragments and the internal mobility of the double helix. Biophys. Chem. 15:263-270. Elias, J. G., and D. Eden. 1981. Transient electric birefringence study of the persistence length and electric polarizability of restriction fragments of DNA. Macromolecules. 14:410-419.

Fixman, M., and S. Jagannathan. 1981. Electrical and convective polarization of cylindrical macroions. J. Chem. Phys. 75:4048-4059. deGroot, S. R., P. Mazur, and J. T. G. Overbeek. 1952. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the sedimentation potential and electrophoresis. J. Chem. Phys. 20:1825-1829.

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Hagerman, P. J. 1981. Investigation of the flexibility of DNA using transient electric birefringence. Biopolymers. 20:1503-1535. Happel, J., and H. Brenner. 1963. Low Reynolds Number Hydrodynamics.

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McQuarrie, D. A. 1976. Statistical Mechanics. Harper and Row, Publish

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O'Brien, R. W. 1983. The solution of the electrokinetic equations for colloidal particles with thin double layers. J. Colloid Interfac. Sci. 92:204-216.

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O'Brien, R. W., and L. R. White. 1978. Electrophoretic mobility of a spherical colloidal particle. J. Chem. Soc. Faraday II. 74:1607-1626. Porschke, D. 1994. DNA double helices with positive electric dichroism and permanent dipole moments: non-symmetric charge distributions and "frozen" configurations. Biophys. Chem. 49. 127-139. Sherwood, J. D. 1980. The primary electroviscous effect in a suspension of spheres. J. Fluid Mech. 101:609-629.

Sherwood, J. D. 1981. The primary electroviscous effect in a suspension of rods. J. Fluid Mech. 111:347-366.

Solomentsev, Y. E., Y. Pawar, and J. L. Anderson. 1993. Electrophoretic mobility of nonuniformly charged spherical particles with polarization of the double layer. J. Colloid Interfac. Sci. 158:1-9. Stellwagen, N. C. 1981. Electric birefringence of restriction enzyme fragments of DNA: optical factor and electric polarizability as a function of molecular weight. Biopolymers. 20:399-424.

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Stellwagen, N. C., C. Gelfi, and P. G. Righetti. 1997. The free solution mobility of DNA. Biopolymers. 42:687-703.

Stigter, D. 1978a. Electrophoresis of highly charged colloidal cylinders in univalent salt solutions. I. Mobility in transverse field. J. Phys. Chem. 82:1417-1423.

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Stigter, D. 1978b. Electrophoresis of highly charged colloidal cylinders in univalent salt solution. II. Random orientation in external field and application to polyelectrolytes. J. Phys. Chem. 82:1424-1429. Stigter, D. 1979. Theory of conductance of colloidal electrolytes in univalent salt solutions. J. Phys. Chem. 83:1663-1670. Stigter, D. 1980. Sedimentation of highly charged colloidal spheres. J. Phys. Chem. 84:2758-2762.

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Wooll, J. O. 1994. Investigation of pd(A)Zo pd(T)20 in the analytical electrophoresis apparatus. Ph.D. Thesis. University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH. Table 3, page 51.

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[Author Affiliation]

Stuart A. Allison,* Hua Wang,* Thomas M. Laue,# Timothy J. Wilson,# and John O. Wooll#

*Department of Chemistry, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, and #Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Rudman Hall, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824-3544 USA

[Author Affiliation]

Received for publication 9 November 1998 and in final form 5 February 1999.

Address reprint requests to Dr. Stuart Allison, Department of Chemistry, Georgia State University, University Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30303. Tel.: 404-651-1986; Fax: 404-651-3099; E-mail: chesaa@panther.gsu.edu.

EMC 3Q Profit Up Sharply on Sale

BOSTON - EMC Corp.'s third-quarter profit jumped 77 percent, driven by growing sales of data storage software and hardware as well as a hefty gain from selling an ownership stake in fast-growing software maker VMware Inc.

Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC said Thursday its net income for the July-September period was $492.9 million, or 23 cents per share, compared with a profit of $283.7 million, or 13 cents per share, in last year's third quarter.

Revenue rose 17 percent to $3.29 billion from $2.82 billion a year ago, exceeding the consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial, who expected revenue of $3.12 billion.

Shares rose 4 percent, or 92 cents, to $23.45 at the open of trading.

EMC recorded a one-time gain of $115.2 million in the quarter, primarily from its sale of a 6-million share ownership stake in VMware to Cisco Systems Inc. Excluding that gain, EMC's profit was $377.8 million, or 17 cents per share, matching analysts' per-share profit expectations.

EMC said it will increase the amount of a stock buyback program from $1 billion to $2 billion. So far this year, EMC has bought 73 million EMC shares, returning $1.1 billion to shareholders.

In a conference call with analysts, EMC said it has no plans to sell off more shares of VMware, whose August stock debut was the biggest technology stock offering since Google debuted three years earlier. EMC spun off a 10 percent stake and remains the majority owner.

"We are very pleased with the performance of our asset mix, and have no futher plans to distribute more VMware shares," said Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and chief executive, and also chairman of VMware.

EMC's third-quarter revenue from software licenses jumped 25 percent, outpacing the 9 percent growth in the storage systems business at EMC, whose rivals include IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Network Appliance Inc. Revenue from professional services and systems maintenance, a smaller business segment than the other two, grew by 25 percent.

EMC's North American business posted a 15 percent sales gain, compared with 21 percent growth overseas.

EMC did not offer specific expectations for full-year financial performance, but, as it did in July, said it remains on track to beat guidance outlined in January for a profit of 64 cents per share on revenue of at least $12.7 billion. Analysts expect a profit of 69 cents per share on revenue of $12.89 billion.

"Based on our results year-to-date and our expectations for a solid fourth quarter, we are now very clearly on track to exceed the annual financial targets we set in January," said Chief Financial Officer David Goulden.

EMC's stock had been stagnant in recent years. But it's gained more than 70 percent this year, a rise largely tied to VMware's IPO, but also on demand for data storage services and growth at many of EMC's recently acquired businesses.

EMC, which acquired VMware in 2004, now owns 86 percent of the software maker after the August IPO. Before the stock offering, Cisco and another Silicon Valley heavyweight, Intel Corp., bought small pieces of VMware, which already is one of the five top-valued software companies worldwide.

VMware specializes in so-called "virtualization" software that enables a single computer to function like multiple machines, which means that companies spend less on equipment - and less on energy in their data centers.

VMware last quarter posted revenue of $354 million, up 90 percent from a year ago.

The Littlest Enemies: Children in the Shadow of the Gulag

Deborah Hoffman. The Littlest Enemies: Children in the Shadow of the Gulag. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. ix, 189 pp. Bibliography. $22.95, paper.

Deborah Hoffman begins her new book with the following sentence: "All translations involve choices, and this volume is no exception." It is not the translator's search for the right word or the appropriate sentence structure that is meant here. Hoffman made a drastic choice when she transformed the original Russian six- hundred page Deti GULAGa : 19181956 [Children of the Gulag] into a less-than-two-hundred-page collection. While Deti GULAGa contained many official documents concerning children, Hoffman made the decision to include only the first-person narratives of or about children. Treating "the narratives as personal experiences rather than academic texts," the editor hoped that it would "make them more likely to live on in the reader's memory and serve as a reference point, however slight, for future social, economic, or legislative policy discussions" (p. viii). The result is anon-academic edition: the "Brief Glossary" contains nine terms; there are no supporting references; and the bibliography is three pages in length.

All these figures aside, what do the first-person narratives of The Littlest Enemies offer? First of all, one has to point out the high quality of translation: children's words are rendered accurately and carefully. Mistakes in original Russian letters are conveyed inventively in their English versions, giving each little enemy his or her own voice. The material is divided into five unequal sections; each of them begins with abrief introductory comment. The first two sections, "Revolution and Civil War" and "The 1920s: Between Two Worlds" are quite short. The first contains four stories in total: two of them written by �migr� Russian schoolgirls and another two composed by besprizorniki (waifs, street children). The second section consists entirely of letters written by children to Krupskaya, Kalinin and other Soviet dignitaries. Contrary to the book's title, most of the authors of these petitions are not enemies of the Soviet state. They write to complain about utter poverty, about the lack of books, or about a butting cow.

An enormous concentration of suffering and desperation pervades sections 3 and 4, "Collectivization" and "From Famine to Terror". Many materials in these sections were collected by two Russian societies, "Memorial" and "Vozvrashchenie" [Return] in the late 1980s and 1990s. These personal accounts vary in size. Some are just a few lines long, describing the loss of a large family and wondering at the end "how was it possible to endure it all" (p. 126); others only a few pages long, but all painstaking in their rueful similarities - the parents' arrest, the children's anguish, and the squalid conditions of orphanages. The last section, "War and Its Aftermath" contains similar materials as well as stories of children seized in German and Soviet population resettlements.

What do these simple children's accounts add to the familiar picture of the suffering under Stalin's rule? Surprisingly, the most memorable narratives are those that defy the uncomplicated binary picture of the mighty totalitarian state punishing vulnerable helpless children. Maria Solomonik's family escaped from the places of exile and arrest several times (pp. 52-72); twelve-year-old Elda Fridman travelled alone for three months in order to reach her mother's place of exile (pp. 154-155); Mark Malyavko, the director of the Kardymovo children's home, managed to instill dignity and pride in his wards. In one of the most memorable of such stories, Aldona Volynskaya begins with the familiar scene of the parents' arrest, but her first children's home was disbanded because the older children shamed the younger ones for "playing and not thinking about how many people had been arrested" (p. 164). She was sent to another orphanage, where children were constantly hungry, and the director was stealing even their meagre personal possessions. For a short time, during the German occupation, children forgot their hunger: they were working, and nobody was robbing them. Volynskaya' s story does not have a happy ending, but at least she was not a typical passive victim: she and her friends were taken to Germany; three of them escaped, were captured, and ended up in a concentration camp. Volynskaya was liberated by Soviet troops and then rearrested as the daughter of enemies of the people. She managed to escape prison and get an education, constantly concealing her past from the authorities. She ended her story with the following: "Now I'm on first-category disability and completely alone (I was sterilized in the concentration camp). The desire to help others helps me to live" (p. 168).

Deborah Hoffman's book commands enormous human interest. It will be a captivating read for the general public, and its materials will be beneficial for undergraduate courses. Still, students of Russian history should be advised to read the original Russian edition, Deti GULAGa, which creates an intriguing juxtaposition between the constant droning of the government documents about "the speediest improvements" and the reality of children's suffering, or they should consult another recently published English translation, Children of the Gulag co-edited by Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky.

[Author Affiliation]

Elena Krevsky, University of Alberta

Atty: Muslim students' speech rights not absolute

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Ten Muslim students broke the law by shouting down a speech by an Israeli diplomat at the University of California, Irvine in a carefully drafted and executed plan that flouted repeated calls to behave by campus officials, a prosecutor said Monday.

Defense attorneys countered that students acted within the law when they stood up, one by one, and read from pre-scripted statements and never intended to halt Ambassador Michael Oren from speaking about U.S.-Israel relations.

Attorneys delivered closing arguments in the case that has stoked a spirited debate about free speech not just in the courtroom but in the affluent suburban community south of Los Angeles.

Many of the facts of the case are not in dispute: The students carefully planned their February 2010 protest and were escorted out by security officials.

Jurors in the case will be asked to decide whether students broke the law or were exercising a right to demonstrate freely.

The students face misdemeanor charges of conspiring to disrupt a meeting and disrupting a meeting. If convicted, they could face sentences ranging from probation with community service and fines to a year in jail.

The case also raised questions about prosecutorial discretion, with some members of the public calling the trial a waste of taxpayers' money. Other community members have said the defendants were being singled out because they are Muslim.

In his closing argument, prosecutor Dan Wagner told jurors the students acted as censors to block the free flow of ideas and infringed on the rights of 700 people who had gone to the campus that evening to hear Oren. He said emails among members of the Muslim Student Union showed students were aware they could be arrested before the protest.

"The right to free speech is not absolute," Wagner said before a packed courtroom of more than 180 people in Orange County, with more observers waiting outside. "If hecklers' vetoes were allowed, then nobody, nobody, none of us would have the right to free speech."

Defense attorney Reem Salahi said the students followed a series of protests at UC Irvine and elsewhere during which demonstrators shouted during lectures but weren't arrested or sanctioned.

In this case, UC Irvine officials expressed their displeasure with students' actions during the demonstration but didn't give hard rules on what was or wasn't permitted, she said.

"This is merely an admonition to be polite," she said. "But in America, we don't prosecute people for being impolite."

Salahi — who represents two of the defendants — said students never intended to stop Oren from speaking but instead wanted to express their views — perhaps unpopular that evening — on the Israeli government's actions in Gaza.

On Monday, Wagner and defense attorneys also showed dueling pie charts breaking down how much time the students demonstrated, how much time their supporters cheered, and how much time Oren spoke in an effort to prove whether the meeting suffered a significant disruption.

Near the end of her argument, Salahi said she wanted to share a personal story related to the trial but Wagner objected and Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson said she couldn't proceed.

She paused for a moment then told the jury, "I can't tell you the story — I got shut down," to thunderous applause from the courtroom.

That brought an admonition Wilson, who said he would clear the courtroom if there was another outburst from the public.

Defense attorneys will continue their arguments Tuesday.

In 2010, the students were initially cited, released and disciplined at UC Irvine, which revoked the Muslim Student Union's charter for a quarter and placed it on two years of probation.

Nearly a year later, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas filed criminal charges against 11 students. The move prompted an outcry from the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of Jewish, Muslim and campus groups.

The filing also sparked a media frenzy, and Wilson eventually issued a gag order to prevent prosecutors and defense attorneys from arguing the case outside the courtroom. The charges against one defendant were later dropped.

Many of the students have since graduated from UC Irvine and the nearby University of California, Riverside.

On Monday, Wagner showed video clips of university officials pleading with demonstrators to behave and respect academic freedom. He also showed numerous emails among members of the Muslim Student Union planning the disruption and calculating who was willing to get arrested.

The correspondence, Wagner said, reveals students knew the risk of their actions and later tried to cover up that the organization was involved in the protest.

"It was always a plan to break the rules," he said.

Obama to host lawmakers for cocktail party

President Barack Obama has invited Republican and Democratic lawmakers for drinks at the White House as they consider his economic recovery bill that still faces opposition.

White House aides say about two dozen key members of Congress were invited to the Executive Mansion Wednesday evening. The guest list includes six House Democrats, six House Republicans and five senators from each party.

The event is expected to start after the House considers Obama's $825 billion economic recovery bill that he has championed virtually daily in his young presidency.

Obama went to Capitol Hill Tuesday to meet with Republicans, some of whom have called some parts of his plan "insane."

Croatia defender Simunic joins Hoffenheim

Croatia central defender Josip Simunic is joining Hoffenheim from Bundesliga rival Hertha Berlin on a three-year contract.

Hertha said late Tuesday that Simunic, 31, activated a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave immediately. Neither Hertha nor Hoffenheim gave further details of the transfer.

Simunic is expected "to give our team further stability in a central role and pass on his years of experience," Hoffenheim manager Jan Schindelmeiser said. "I am sure that our young players will benefit greatly from him on and off the field."

The arrival of Simunic, who had been with Hertha for nine years, follows Hoffenheim's signing last week of 18-year-old Argentina midfielder Franco Zuculini.

Hoffenheim finished seventh last season, its first in the top division.

LA man convicted of 4 murders charged with 4 more

A man serving life in prison for four killings was charged Friday with four more cold-case murders that could make him eligible for the death penalty, prosecutors said.

Michael Hughes, 51, was charged with four counts each of murder and rape and one count of sodomy by force, said prosecutor Bobby Grace.

The new case alleges he raped and murdered three women and a teenager from 1986 to 1993. Autopsies done at the time concluded the victims were sexually assaulted and strangled, Grace said.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office did not know whether Hughes had a lawyer to represent him in the new case. His arraignment has not been scheduled.

Los Angeles police detectives assigned to investigate unsolved murders linked Hughes to the murders using DNA samples from the women's bodies, he said.

The victims include a 15-year-old girl killed in suburban Inglewood's Imperial Park in January 1986; a 36-year-old woman who was found in a school stairwell in May 1986; a 30-year-old woman found in a garage in August 1990; and a 32-year-old woman killed in June 1993.

In 1998, Hughes was convicted of murdering Teresa Ballard, Brenda Bradley, Terri Myles and Jamie Harrington in 1992 and 1993.

Henry can see himself playing in MLS _ someday

Thierry Henry can see himself following David Beckham's path and leaving Europe to join Major League Soccer _ someday.

"Why not?" he said Wednesday night following a charity soccer match. "I love America. I love it here. And whenever I come here, I feel free. Hopefully, one day. You never know what's going to happen. But at the moment, I'm still over there."

Following France's first-round elimination at the European Championship last week, the elegant 30-year-old forward came to the United States. The celebrity match, played on a tiny field in the Chinatown section of Manhattan, benefited the foundations of Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash and New York Red Bulls midfielder Claudio Reyna, the former U.S. national team captain.

Fans crowded into the small field, ringing the playing area. Chelsea's Solomon Kalou, who played for Ivory Coast on Sunday in a World Cup qualifier at Abidjan, was a late addition. Participants included former Liverpool stars Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman, the NBA's Leandro Barbosa and Baron Davis, and Jozy Altidore, who just left the Red Bulls to join Spain's Villarreal.

"I'm here on vacation, enjoying the town," Henry said. "It's an amazing town. I love New York. It's not the first time I say it. I come here quite often. It's pretty nice."

Henry said he can walk the streets of New York and not be bothered.

"Sometimes I do get recognized, but I feel free when I'm here, so that's the most important thing," he said. "I love it."

He left Arsenal after the 2006-7 season and signed a four-year contract with Barcelona, which finished third in La Liga behind Real Madrid and Villarreal.

Henry has a French record 45 goals in 102 international appearances. Since Les Bleus were eliminated with a 2-0 loss to Italy last week in Zurich, Switzerland, he has not watched Euro 2008.

"It has nothing to do with painful. The memory is gone," he said. "I know who won today, but that is it."

Henry is friends with Nash, who invited him to play just before Reyna was able to contact him.

"Because he got to him quicker, he was on his team," Reyna said outside Replay, the SoHo store where the post-match party and auction was held.

Reyna hopes to get Argentina's Lionel Messi for next year's charity event. Reyna used the match as part of his rehabilitation from a back injury, and noted the level of play was not too fierce.

"A few of the boys were out late last night," he said. "You knew that was going to happen."

CENTENARY SNAPSHOT

2000 -

Presidents:

2000-2001 Charles (Chuck) Chandler, FCA

2001-2002 Frank Barr, FCA

2002-2003 Robin Elliott, FCA

2003-2004 John Cowperthwaite, FCA

2004-2005 Barb Carle-Thiesson, FCA

2005-2006 Amed Naqvi, FCA

* So far this decade, membership has already grown from 8,000 to over 9,000.

* The year 2000 saw the launch of the CA School of Business, which replaced the separate educational delivery systems of the four western provinces with one unified program.

* In 2003, BC Institute members voted in favour of adopting universal continuing professional development.

ICABC Chronicles: Presidents

The president of the ICABC sets the direction for our organization, determining, with the help of Council, which policies the Institute will adopt. The president also serves on committees at the national level.

It wasn't always this way. One hundred years ago, the Institute's president was most concerned with encouraging accountants to become members. Our first president-William T. Stein, FCA-led fewer than ten members during his first year in office, and most of the issues he faced as leader involved finding enough members to support the fledgling organization.

Stein's efforts were successful, but as the number of ICABC members increased over the years, so too did the number of issues faced by ICABC presidents and their respective councils; some of these issues-like providing students with quality education, protecting the public interest, and staying current with business developments-are still key issues today.

91 presidents in 100 years

Despite being 100 years old, the Institute has only had 91 presidents (Amed Naqvi, FCA, is the 92nd). Of these 91 presidents, five served multiple terms.

William T. Stein was both the first and the longest-serving president, occupying the position from his 1905-06 term until 1911-12. The following ICABC members also served multiple terms as president: George F. Gyles, FCA (1921 -22 and 1937-38); J. Haydn Young, FCA (1923-24 and 1940-41); William R. Carmichael, FCA (1924-25 and 1931-32); and William G. Rowe, FCA (1935-36 and 1939-40).

John B. Woodthorpe, CA (1920-21 and 1922-23) served one-and-a-half terms, resigning in the middle of his second. In his resignation, Woodthorpe was accompanied by the Institute's then secretary, Alfred L. C. Chalk, CA. Both men were among several Institute members to leave BC during the early 1920s in pursuit of success elsewhere. Following their departure in late 1922, then vice-president Hall C. Chiene, FCA, assumed the role of president. Chiene stepped down six months later, however, after Hayden Young was elected president in the subsequent election.

Succession planning

Looking back over the past 100 years, the Institute's executive roster reveals that several vice-presidents did not ultimately serve as president. In fact, the succession pattern we follow today did not actually emerge until the early 1940s-the 1941/42 Council to be exact. Since then, each first vice-president has gone on to serve as president.

Opening the door

Of the Institute's 91 past presidents, only three are women: Heather Shannon, FCA, the first woman to serve as ICABC president (1987-88); Alison Morse, FCA, the Institute's second female president (1997-98); and Barb Carle-Thiesson, FCA, the immediate past president.

As an interesting aside, discussions about a potential merger with the CMAs took place during the terms of two of these three women: Shannon and Carle-Thiesson.

Looking forward

It's impossible to predict what the next century will bring. What is certain is that the BC CA profession will continue to evolve with the times, and future ICABC presidents will continue to help the Institute address any market, technological, and global developments as they arise.

A personal thank you

As the Institute's centenary year comes to a close, I'd like to thank those of you who contributed stories to our centenary website. This website will remain online at www.ica.bc.ca/100, and additional stories and recollections are still welcome.

I'd also like to thank those of you who attended one or more of our centenary events. Thank you for helping us celebrate this milestone for the CA profession in BC!

[Author Affiliation]

By Sarah Stephen, Communication Coordinator

Grassroots open source inches into the mainstream

Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.

Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.

Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.

And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.

Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.

Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.

And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.

So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.

Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.

On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.

And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.

Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.

I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."

In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.

Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.

For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.

It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Grassroots open source inches into the mainstream

Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.

Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.

Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.

And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.

Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.

Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.

And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.

So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.

Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.

On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.

And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.

Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.

I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."

In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.

Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.

For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.

It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Grassroots open source inches into the mainstream

Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.

Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.

Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.

And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.

Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.

Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.

And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.

So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.

Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.

On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.

And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.

Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.

I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."

In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.

Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.

For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.

It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Grassroots open source inches into the mainstream

Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.

Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.

Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.

Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.

And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.

Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.

Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.

And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.

So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.

Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.

On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.

And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.

Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.

I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."

In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.

Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.

For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.

It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.