Ubuntu se mete en los celulares con un sistema operativo propio

Al igual que otras plataformas que buscan una convergencia entre el mundo móvil y la PC, Canonical confirmó el arribo de su sistema operativo Ubuntu a los dispositivos móviles. Disponible en una primera instancia como una instalación no oficial para la línea de smartphones Nexus 3, la versión de Linux utilizada en más de 20 millones busca posicionarse como una alternativa ante un mercado dominado por compañías como Apple y Google, junto a las propuestas de Microsoft con Windows Phone y Research in Motion con sus teléfonos BlackBerry.

La compañía dio un primer paso en febrero de 2012 con Ubuntu for Android , una distribución para “mejorar” el Android convencional.

La versión actual es un sistema operativo que sólo comparte con Android el uso de sus drivers (ambos están basados en Linux), pero no usa una máquina virtual Java, por lo que los 700.000 programas con las que cuenta Android no estarán disponibles directamente. Ubuntu tendrá su propia suite de aplicaciones, y permitirá la suma de nuevas que estén programadas en HTML5 o sean nativas.

Canonical también planea lanzar un teléfono de diseño propio que llegaría al mercado en 2014, pero no brindó mayores detalles sobre el fabricante involucrado. Los recientes cambios en la interfaz de Ubuntu, denominada Unity, marcaron una tendencia en la distribución hacia la interacción en pantallas sensibles al tacto, y este lanzamiento representa un primer paso de la distribución para ingresar en el mundo móvil de los smartphones y las tabletas.

Las prestaciones de una PC, en un dispositivo de bolsillo

Según Mark Shuttleworth, CEO de Canonical, en un principio esta versión de Ubuntu apunta a los entusiastas de la plataforma, pero con una rápida expansión hacia el resto de los usuarios. “Por primera vez en la historia los usuarios de los teléfonos celulares pueden tener las prestaciones completas que tiene en una PC, y tenemos una ventaja en esto”, dijo el ejecutivo.

Así lo explica Mark Shuttleworth en video, mostrando los gestos que permiten controlar Ubuntu móvil:

El concepto se asemeja a la modalidad presentada por Motorola con su teléfono Atrix , que se convertía en una PC al ser conectado en una base que servía de conexión con un monitor. A su vez, el móvil también podía ser utilizado como una notebook mediante un dispositivo denominado lapdock.

Aún no disponible para su descarga, la presentación formal de Ubuntu para teléfonos ante el público será en la feria Consumer Electronic Show de Las Vegas, en donde LA NACION estará presente para la cobertura de los primeros lanzamientos del año que realizará la industria.

En busca del podio móvil

Con los dispositivos basados en iOS y Android, varias compañías disputan ser la alternativa a las plataformas dominantes. Microsoft busca de la mano de Nokia posicionar a Windows Phone junto a fabricantes como HTC y Samsung. La compañía de Redmond también desea aprovechar la integración con Windows 8 para sacar provecho de su dominio en el mundo de las PC, un segmento en lento retroceso frente a los teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas.

En este punto, la integración entre las PC y los dispositivos móviles también forman parte de los objetivos de Apple, que replicó el exitoso modelo App Store en su línea de computadoras con Mac OS X, utilizado en el iPhone y la tableta iPad, mientras que Google mantiene su apuesta en su plataforma basada en la nube con servicios como Gmail y Drive, entre otros.

Por su parte, Research in Motion presentará su nueva plataforma BB10 , un demorado lanzamiento que tendrá lugar a fines de este mes y con el que busca recuperar el terreno perdido en los últimos años con un renovado teléfono móvil tactil basado en el sistema operativo QNX, utilizado en su tableta Playbook.

Dentro de este pelotón de contendientes también se encuentra Firefox OS , un competidor que más se asemeja a la filosofía de la plataforma de Canonical y que ofrece un sistema operativo basado en el navegador web de la fundación Mozilla. Cuenta con el apoyo de las principales operadoras de telecomunicaciones y apunta a contar con un teléfono de costo accesible para mercados emergentes.

Por su parte, un grupo de desarrolladores responsables de Meego, la plataforma utilizada por Nokia para el N9, se reunieron para presentar a Sailfish OS , un sistema operativo basado en Linux que se encuentra en una incipiente etapa de desarrollo y que planea tener también, al igual que Firefox OS y Ubuntu, un teléfono para mediados de este año.

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From “Les Misérables” to “The Hobbit,” holiday movies are getting longer

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Moviegoers rushing out to catch “Django Unchained” or “The Hobbit” over New Year’s should consider packing an overnight bag.

The average length of a holiday movie has been larded up by nearly 10 minutes since 2011, according to a survey of the running times of the top 10 box office films of the final weekend of the year. They ran well over two hours.

Moreover, the top 10 grossing holiday movies of 2012 were nearly 25 minutes longer than they were just two years ago.

Of the five top earners last weekend, only one film, the family flick “Parental Guidance,” clocks in at under two hours. In contrast, three of those movies, “Django Unchained,” “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “Les Misérables,” eat up roughly 160 minutes of ticket-buyers’ time.

And that group doesn’t even take into account hits like “Skyfall” (143 minutes), “The Avengers” (143 minutes) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (165 minutes) or limited release films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” (160 minutes), all of which boast the kind of languorous pacing usually reserved for a David Lean epic.

The capacious running times are testing moviegoers’ patience, as well as bladders. In the Los Angeles Times Monday, Steven Zeitchik bemoaned the series of false endings in films like “Lincoln” and “Life of Pi.” He argued that several accomplished filmmakers are piling on the climaxes and prolonging the ending credits in a way that undermines the emotional impact of their word.

“Hollywood films are struggling to find the exit,” Zeitchik wrote. “Stories that seem to end, end again, and then end once more. Climactic scenes wind down, then wind up. Movies that appear headed for a satisfying resolution turn away, then try to stumble back.”

Also crying out for a bloodier approach in the editing suite was Variety’s Josh Dickey. The swollen run times aren’t just artistically necessary, he noted – they actually damage a film’s box-office take.

“It turns out that a long runtime causes no positive or negative reaction during a film’s marketing period,” Dickey wrote. “And for really big event movies, viewers sometimes feel a longer movie gave them their money’s worth (call it the TGI Friday’s portion-size effect). But once a film gets playing, social response suggests long length can stall its word-of-mouth momentum, usually emerging as secondary complaint – but a persistent one.”

It’s certainly true that exhibitors favor shorter running times for films, because it allows them to cram in more showings on a given day. Despite Dickey’s fears, however, the expansive lengths of movies like “Lincoln” (145 minutes) and “Les Misérables” (157 minutes) haven’t scared off moviegoers.

Both movies will likely gross more than $ 100 million domestically.

Overall, the domestic box office is poised to shatter records with $ 10.8 billion in revenue. Attendance will also likely be up 6 percent by the time 2012 wraps up.

Admittedly, surveying the top 10 grossing films of a particular calendar weekend is a small sample size, but it does appear that audiences and critics are noticing that they are checking their watches more frequently as they follow Bilbo’s adventures in Middle-Earth or Jean Valjean’s travails.

It’s not clear, however, that this is a seasonal anomaly. A decade ago, films like “Gangs of New York” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” similarly strained audience’s endurance. The average length of the top 10 films during 2002 was 126.6 minutes, just two minutes shorter than the average this year.

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Link between health care spending, quality unclear

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Whether states, hospitals and smaller practices that spend more money on health care provide better treatment is still an open question, according to a new review of past studies.

“This is really one of the central issues we’re grappling with today in health care,” said Peter Hussey from the RAND Corporation in Arlington, Virginia.

The topic is especially pressing because although the United States spends more of its budget on health care than any other wealthy nation – and is spending more each year – the World Health Organization ranks its health system 37th.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the U.S. spent nearly $ 2.6 trillion on health in 2010 – equal to just under 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Hussey and his colleagues analyzed results from 61 studies that compared health care spending with outcomes on both small, hospital-wide scales and broader state-wide levels.

Some of those studies looked at whether hospitals that spent more money per patient had fewer in-hospital deaths, or if their doctors and nurses better followed guidelines. Others compared states’ Medicare spending with how well their older residents were treated for a range of conditions.

“The bottom line was that no matter how you drill down into the results, at every level the results are just all over the map,” Hussey told Reuters Health.

“It’s totally unclear what the real relationship is.”

Twenty-one of the 61 studies showed higher spending was tied to better outcomes for patients, such as fewer deaths. However, 18 studies found a link between more spending and worse outcomes, and 22 showed no difference or an unclear association based on spending, according to findings published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

For example, in one 2010 study the one-quarter of hospitals with the highest spending per patient had better quality scores than the lowest-spending hospitals when it came to treating people with heart failure, but were worse at treating pneumonia patients.

Many of the studies compared certain types of spending with potentially unrelated outcomes, according to Hussey. Others didn’t take into account how sick patients were initially when looking at how they fared in different situations.

Hussey said there are likely some places in the health care system where spending can be cut without reducing quality – but so far, it’s unclear what those areas are.

GETTING DOCTORS INVOLVED

Although health spending is a hot-button issue, doctors are typically focused on getting their patients better and not on how much that might cost, according to Dr. Alyna Chien, from Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“Putting the two together – meaning you want to improve quality or maintain quality while decreasing costs – is even more complicated,” said Chien, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the new study.

One hurdle is that most doctors don’t have any idea what the drugs they prescribe or the tests they order actually cost – for the patient or the health care system in general, she told Reuters Health.

“You need physicians to know some of that information because they also have to talk to the patient about what they care about,” Chien said.

“Sometimes patients just think more (treatment) is better,” without knowing that a cheaper option might be just as effective.

The researchers both said further studies are needed to help address overspending in the U.S. Researchers should look for links between specific types of spending and outcomes that are likely to be directly related, according to Hussey.

And cost analyses should be included in studies of new treatment options, Chien said.

“Having that price tag information would help people know which intervention is easier to implement or sustain,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/U4xDkh Annals of Internal Medicine, online December 31, 2012.

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Avis buys car sharing firm Zipcar

2 January 2013 Last updated at 11:54 ET

The global car hire firm Avis Budget has agreed to buy Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing firm, for $ 500m (£307m).

The car hire giant is buying into the fast-growing sharing market, which it says is worth $ 400m in the US.

Zipcar has 767,000 members, who pay an annual joining fee and then are charged by the hour to use its cars.

Avis is paying $ 12.25 per share for Zipcar, almost 50% more than the shares were trading at, at the end of 2012.

Zipcar, whose shares surged after the announcement, have three quarters of the US market.

Its most recent results showed that membership numbers had increased by almost a fifth at the end of 2012, and industry analysts suggest that rate of growth is set to continue.

When it floated on the Nasdaq exchange last year, Zipcar said it thought the US car sharing market would be worth $ 3.3bn by the end of the decade, up from $ 250m in 2009.

Similar growth rates are forecast for the European market, with analysts suggesting revenue of 2.6bn euros in 2016, up from 220m in 2009.

Continue reading the main story

Avis Budget Group’s acquisition should be seen as strategic; it is based on a prediction that people will increasingly want to buy ways to get around, referred to as mobility solutions, rather than buying cars.

On any given journey, more and more people will be choosing between shared cars or taxis, subways or trains, bicycles or old fashioned shoe leather, and smartphone technology is making it easy for them to mix and match.

Moreover, at a time when it appears to be more important to see and be seen in the world of social media, the car as a status symbol is losing its lustre.

The motor industry is doing all it can to adjust, though the big players’ responses often come across as sluggish, leaving gaps in the market for newcomers such as Zipcar to emerge.

“We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company,” said Ronald Nelson, chairman and chief executive of the Avis Budget Group when he announced the Zipcar deal.

Car sharing has become popular in cities as individual cars are kept in residential streets, outside workplaces or student accommodation, and some people find using the service cheaper than owning their own car.

It cuts out servicing and maintenance costs and the cost of fuel is included in the hourly charge.

Avis Budget wants to accelerate the growth of Zipcar by putting more cars in more locations. It also plans to adopt some of Zipcar’s technology across the existing group.

Car sharing clubs give members a smartcard which they use to open the car, eliminating the need to go to an office to collect and return keys.

Some of the major car rental companies. including Hertz and Enterprise, have launched their own car sharing operations in the past few years.

Zipcar was founded in 2000 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take the European car-sharing idea to the US.

It has grown into the world’s biggest car-sharing firm, helped by recent mergers with US rival Flexcar and the purchase of UK company Streetcar and Spain’s Avancar, which it bought to expand its European operations.

Avis dropped from the second to the third largest car rental firm in the US in 2010, when Hertz took over Dollar Thrifty. Avis hopes to complete the purchase of Zipcar during early 2013.

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GM recalls 145,628 mid-sized pickups for hood latch issue

(Reuters) – General Motors Co said on Thursday it is recalling 145,628 mid-sized pickup trucks globally as the hood could open unexpectedly due to a possible missing latch.

Of the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon pickups affected by the recall, 118,800 are in the United States, 15,264 are in Canada, 7,492 are in Mexico and the rest are exports, GM said.

GM is recalling the model year 2010 to 2012 trucks because the hood may be missing a secondary hood latch, so if the primary latch is not engaged the hood could open and block the driver’s view and increase the risk of a crash, according to documents filed with the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

There are no reports of crashes or injuries related to the issue, and there are four known cases of the secondary hood latch being missing, GM said.

GM said it will notify owners and instruct them to inspect their trucks for the presence of a secondary hood latch or take the truck to a dealer for inspection. If the secondary latch is missing, a new hood will be installed, the company said.

Dealers were notified of the issue on December 18 and GM expects to begin mailing letters to owners on January 17, according to NHTSA.

(Reporting By Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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Four Android productivity apps you should use in 2013

Happy New Year! Like most folks, I am working on some resolutions for 2013. One resolution I have is to be more productive. One way I am going to do this is by using my Android phone better. Now there are apps that I have, but really have not used to their fullest. As I work on this resolution, I might discover even better apps. For now I will focus on these impressive apps that can make anyone more productive.

I use Hootsuite on the computer, but rarely find myself engaging with it on my smartphone. With Hootsuite, you can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts. The free version allows for up to five accounts and one member of your team to access the account. There is a pro version with a monthly fee, in which you can have more accounts and team members and helpful analytics tools.

The design of the app is very good. If you sync the web version to mobile, you will have everything automatically downloaded to the phone. When viewing content, you swipe left or right to change columns or streams. If you are in the middle of a stream, simply tap the top menu bar to automatically return to the top. The app allows for multiple profiles and scheduled tweets. My goal is to keep up with my feeds and tweets in real-time rather than waiting until I get to a computer.

Another web service that I started to use, but find myself not using it to the fullest. Producteev is a web-based task management service. With Producteev you can work as an individual or in a team by setting up workspaces and then organize tasks by labels. For each task you can assign a priority, due date, and share with team members, if you have any. Overall, this is a great service, since I like making lists, even though I rarely remember having made them.

The Producteev app is available for all platforms. The app has a very clean interface and is easy to find tasks. Probably the best way to keep up with tasks is to use the different widget for the home screen. Seeing the widgets will help keep those key tasks in the forefront of your mind. The app will work offline and syncs in the background.

I read blogs every single day, especially those related to new apps, Android, or mobile news. The only way I can do that is via my Google Reader. I find myself trying to catch up each day on the computer (just like with Twitter activity) when I would be better off reading a little bit over time during the day. NewsRob is a Google Reader that I have had for years. The interface is very clean and easy to use. The developer created a bunch of customizations options, which really make this reader stand out.

With NewsRob you can set up a notification of new articles, how you synchronize with Google and when, how many articles to keep in your cache, and more. If you set up folders within Google Reader, NewsRob will download the folders, too. This enables you to read the posts by blog or folder. The app provides a very clean blogpost display optimized for smaller screens. With each post you can zoom in or out, mark a post read or unread, view in the browser, and share the link to email or services such as Evernote. There is a free version of the app.

The last task I need to work on to be more productive is to keep up with the calendar. I find myself checking on the computer, after the fact, finding out that I am either late or forgot about a meeting or appointment. Using Google calendar is a good place to start, but I have not found the standard calendar app on my Droid was all that helpful.

Business Calendar is a very capable calendar app that has a ton of features. The app lets you view your calendar in a number of different views, and has search and favorite-calendar features, to name a few. The option of viewing different calendars, color coding and being able to easily add, delete, and edit events is helpful. The ability to use widgets for reminders is important. The pro version has over 10 different sizes and allows for the import or export of calendar files in the iCalendar format. Business Calendar also has a free version.

So my top goal or resolution for 2013 is to be more productive. I think using these apps more will help me accomplish that goal. Are there any apps you have but not using to their fullest? What resolutions do you have for 2013?

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn’t register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It’s a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose “turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food,” said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, “we don’t see those changes,” he said. “As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn’t turned off.”

What’s convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

“It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose,” said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. “Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn’t mean you can’t ever have them,” but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal’s new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

“Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner,” said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study’s inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness “cannot be ignored,” said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: “This is an even greater pile of rubbish” than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

“We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it,” Flegal’s boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. “However, it’s clear that being obese is not healthy – it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements.”

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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US may skirt ‘fiscal cliff’ but faces higher taxes

WASHINGTON (AP) — A last-ditch tax deal in the Senate might let the U.S. economy escape the worst of the so-called fiscal cliff and avoid going back into recession. But even if the House goes along, the tax increases likely coming in 2013 will dent economic growth anyway.

In the early hours of the new year, the Senate voted to end a long stalemate and raise taxes on upper-income households, extend long-term unemployment benefits and postpone decisions over government spending cuts, officials said. But any deal needs approval from the House.

About $ 536 billion in 2013 tax increases were scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, along with $ 109 billion in cuts from military and domestic-spending programs, if Democrats and Republicans could not reach agreement.

Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo, said he expects budget policy, including the higher taxes in the Senate plan, to shave 0.8 percentage points off economic growth in 2013. The economy doesn’t have much growth to give. Vitner predicts it will grow just 1.5 percent in 2013, down from 2.2 percent in 2012.

The biggest hit to the economy is expected to come from the end of a two-year Social Security tax cut. The so-called payroll tax is scheduled to bounce back up to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent in 2011 and 2012, amounting to a $ 1,000 tax increase for someone earning $ 50,000 a year.

“Even with this deal, fiscal policy will still be a net drag on economic growth,” Vitner said. “The expiration of the payroll tax holiday will reduce after-tax income for all workers and hit lower to middle income families the hardest.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that the higher payroll tax will reduce economic growth by 0.6 percentage points in 2013. The other possible tax increases — including higher taxes on household incomes above $ 450,000 a year — will slice just 0.15 percentage points off annual growth, Zandi said.

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France counts 1,193 cars torched on New Year’s Eve

PARIS (AP) — A New Year’s Eve tradition for some in France of torching empty, parked cars has continued.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday that 1,193 vehicles were burned overnight around the country, where the stunt began in the 1990s.

There was no way to compare this figure to recent ones because the conservative government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy stopped making the numbers public while he was in office. But the rate of burned cars was apparently steady. On Dec. 31, 2009, 1,147 vehicles were burned.

For some, the decision of France’s current Socialist government to resume making public figures of New Year’s Eve’s torched cars is unwise.

Bruno Beschizza, a security chief for Sarkozy’s UMP party, said on iTele TV that publishing the numbers motivates youths to commit such crimes.

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