It happened with yesterday’s crash landing of flight 1549, it happened with the Mumbai attacks, the Continental Airlines jet that skidded off the runway, the California wildfires and so on.

Twitter is a fantastic place to find breaking news, but Twitter posts are short and sometimes ill-informed. Or even wrong. So, while Twitter is an amazing tool for finding the story, it isn’t the best place to get the whole story.

For comprehensiveness, most of us turn to traditional news outlets, such as those aggregated by Google News. But Google News relies on algorithms to rank stories, and while the algorithms are pretty good, they aren’t necessarily as fast as the news.

That’s why Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh created TweetNews. TweetNews takes Yahoo’s news results and compares them to emerging topics on Twitter, in effect using what’s most popular on Twitter as an index for determining the importance of news stories.

In other words, TweetNews uses Twitter to rank stories that are so new they may not have enough inbound links for algorithm-based ranking systems to prioritize them.

The result is a search engine mashup that tracks breaking news stories ranked by Twitter search results, offering faster updates, better relevance and more in-depth coverage than either source by itself.

In a blog post explaining the ideas behind TweetNews, Singh outlines the frustration many felt when searching for news on the Mumbai attacks: “Twitter messages were providing incredible focus on the important subtopics that had yet to become popular in the traditional media… what I found most interesting… was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly enough yet.”

That inspired Singh to create the TweetNews mashup, combining the real-time search Yahoo’s BOSS tools with the freshness of Twitter. As an added bonus each story listed in TweetNews’ results also shows the relevant tweets, which themselves often have additional links. A quick search this morning for “flight 1549″ yielded seven unique links from just the top result.

TweetNews is not only a fantastic resource, but might well be the best mashup we’ve ever seen. The remarkable part is that Singh was able to create it with less than one hundred lines of code — a testament to the power of Yahoo Boss and APIs like Twitter’s.

And don’t look to TweetNews to be the final word on using Twitter to prioritize other web content. As Singh says, the idea “definitely deserves more exploration.” To that end, the source code is available for download and we’ll be sure to let you know if we see any more interesting examples.

The 3-year-old litigation, brought by Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and others, rests on the so-called “hot news” doctrine the Supreme Court first recognized in a 1918 case concerning the unauthorized and immediate republication of wire service reports.

A New York federal judge said Theflyonthewall.com breached the doctrine, which allows suits for re-reporting time sensitive “hot news.” Research that Theflyonthewall.com re-posted or alluded to on its site was designated for the banks’ clients that earn the firms not less than $50,000 to $100,000 in trading commissions yearly, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled.

Thursday’s ruling comes as rightsholders are invoking the hot news doctrine to counter a swell of news regurgitation sites. In July, for example, The Associated Press defeated All Headline News in a court battle requiring the aggregator to stop rewriting and publishing AP stories.

Theflyonthewall.com, which has deals with Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and about 5,000 paying clients in all, claimed it obtained the research through reporting, by having “hefty relationships with people in the know.” The New Jersey company claimed that, since at least 2006, it was a legitimate media outlet in a case weighing how far researchers can go to block redistribution of their findings and conclusions.

Judge Cote tipped the scales of justice on the side of the banks and their clients. The ruling, which is being appealed, could have ramifications for other real-time, financial news sites.

“We believe that the decision is at variance with existing case law, and will appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals,” Theflyonthewall.com’s attorney, Glenn Ostrager, said in a Friday e-mail. “We fully expect that the financial press will vigorously support Theflyonthewall with amicii briefs to the Circuit Court on the grounds that the recommendations are news which the financial press regularly reports.”

Theflyonthewall.com’s practices, the judge wrote, were interfering with the banks’ ability to profit (.pdf) from their research. The banks’ clients were also being harmed by not getting exclusive, pre-market access to market-moving news, Cote wrote.

“The firms’ intellectual capital, and their substantial investment in producing high-quality equity research is ultimately justified only by the role that research plays in driving commission revenue,” Cote ruled. “The greater the perception of value, the more that clients are willing to pay to gain and retain access to that research by directing their trading business to the firm.”

But Cote did not altogether bar Theflyonthewall.com from distributing the banks’ findings.

She wrote that the hot news doctrine, in combination with the “goal” of intellectual property, “is to provide an incentive for the production of socially useful information without either under- or overprotecting the efforts to gather such information.”

For research acquired before the market’s 9:30 a.m. East Coast opening, Theflyonthewall.com must wait until at least 10 a.m. before it publishes that information, the judge said. It must also wait two hours to publish the banks’ buy-and-sell reports it obtains during the intra-day trading cycle.

“Nothing will make as much of a difference as the way we educate our sons and daughters,” Obama said, after meeting with schoolchildren at an elementary school in Falls Church, Va. “The countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, and I refuse to let that happen on my watch.”

Under the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program, states are competing for a share of $4.35 billion in federal funding aimed at spurring public schools to make student achievement the core of their programs. That includes potentially evaluating, and paying, teachers according to how well their students perform.

The initial funding was included in the economic stimulus act that the president signed into law in February, with the deadline for states to apply for that money arriving today. There is not enough money to go around for the states that are interested in it, the White House says.

Obama plans to include a bid for another $1.35 billion for the program in the 2011 budget that he proposes next month. That will enable not only more states, but also individual school districts to apply for some of the money, according to the White House.

Obama said today that the apparent popularity of the “national competition” is “a sign of how much states and schools believe this nation will benefit them.”

By expanding the program, the president said, “we’re going to raise the bar for all our students and take bigger steps toward closing the achievement gap that denies so many students, especially black and Latinos, a fair shot at their dreams.”

The first winners of the first Race to the Top awards will be announced in April, with a second round of applications from states be due in June and those grants to be awarded in September.

As a stage for the promotion of expansion of the program, the White House chose Graham Road Elementary School, one of the lowest-income yet highest-achieving schools in Fairfax County, Va. Nearly 80 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price meals and 95 percent are African American or Latino. In 2008, the White House says, all of the school’s sixth-graders met Virginia’s reading standards, and 96 percent met math standards.

Five years ago, Graham Road started a program of tougher standards, testing, teacher evaluation and professional development aimed at boosting achievement.

The federal program encourages the design and implementation of “rigorous standards and high-quality assessments, by encouraging states to work jointly toward a system of common academic standards that builds toward college and career readiness,” the White House says.

It also is intended to attract and retain “great teachers and leaders in America’s classrooms” with expanded support for teachers and principals, and new methods of teacher evaluation and pay.

The Department of Education says the program focuses on boosting academic standards, recruiting and keeping effective teachers, tracking student performance and turning around the lowest performing schools.

This entry was posted on January 19, 2010 at 4:21 pm and is filed under News, Political News, Social News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

CAIRO – The Saudi billionaire whose investment firm is one of the biggest stakeholders in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. said he is looking to expand his alliances with the media giant, in the latest indication that his appetite for growth remains robust even as his company retrenches.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of the Saudi king and who was listed last year by Forbes as the world’s 22nd richest person, met with News Corp.’s chief executive Rupert Murdoch on Jan. 14 in a meeting that “touched upon future potential alliances with News Corp.,” according to a statement released by his Kingdom Holding Co. late Saturday.

Media reports have indicated that News Corp, parent to Fox News and Dow Jones & Co., among others, may be thinking of buying a stake in Alwaleed’s Rotana Media Group, which includes a number of satellite channels that air in the Middle East.

Neither company has commented publicly on the possible deal, but the talks offer an indication yet that such an agreement may yet be in the offing.

Kingdom Holding’s statement said Alwaleed is already the second largest stakeholder in News Corp., with 5.7 percent of the shares of the media company. The stake is held through Kingdom Holding, in which Alwaleed holds a 95 percent stake.

The investment company has a diverse portfolio, ranging from hotels to shares in Apple, eBay and Citigroup.

Alwaleed, and the investment firm, were hit hard by the global meltdown.

He has since focused on shoring up borrowing power, in part through a recent decision to transfer 180 million of his shares in Citigroup to Kingdom Holding. In a statement last week, he described the move — valued at about $600 million — as key to facilitating future borrowing and growth.

The Saudi royal also met last week with Citigroup’s chief executive Vikram Pandit, according to a statement by Kingdom Holding e-mailed Sunday.

Alwaleed told Pandit that the “honeymoon is now over,” a clear indication that one of the banking giant’s largest investors wants solid results this year, according to a transcript of an interview that aired Thursday on Fox Business News.

“I told him that clearly the market gave you two years leeway, but I think now it’s time to deliver,” Alwaleed said. “And 2010 is really for him is year to make it or break it, and he has to deliver. ”

Alwaleed raised his stake in Citigroup to 5 percent in late 2008 from less than 4 percent in a move that came as the company was facing a possible collapse. Kingdom Holding says Alwaleed is the single largest shareholder in Citigroup.

Citigroup has repaid the money it borrowed from the U.S. government during the financial crisis, but still faces a new fee to be levied on banks by the Obama administration to recoup $120 billion in taxpayer money used to support faltering companies.

Alwaleed said he was opposed to the move, arguing that “I believe taxing the banks right now is not the right time at all.”

“It’s like you have a patient just coming out of ICU, intensive care unit, and all of sudden bang him with another tax. I think it’s too much, it’s too early for that if it’s going to have that happen,” he said, according to the transcript.

The $120 billion recovery goal is the most that administration officials expect to lose from the government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out banks, automakers and other financial firms.

Alwaleed’s Rotana already has an alliance with News Corp.

In 2008, the two companies teamed up to bring Fox Movies to the Arab world and then last year, Rotana and Fox International Channels signed a multi-year output deal with The Walt Disney Co. to provide a range of programing to viewers in the Middle East, according to the statement by Kingdom Holding.

Alwaleed has also been meeting with officials in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich emirate that recently bailed out Dubai, its glitzy neighbor awash in debt.

A statement by Kingdom Holding said the Saudi royal met with senior officials in Abu Dhabi, which holds the presidency of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven semiautonomous city-states.

Abu Dhabi’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, alleges “fraudulent misrepresentations” by Citigroup over the fund’s $7.5 billion investment in the banking giant. ADIA has said it is seeking compensation or an exit from the deal.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Prayers of thanksgiving and cries for help rose from Haiti’s huddled homeless Sunday, the sixth day of an epic humanitarian crisis that was straining the world’s ability to respond and igniting flare-ups of violence amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince.

Haitian police struggled to scatter hundreds of stone-throwing looters in the city’s Vieux Marche, or Old Market. Elsewhere downtown, amid the smoke from bonfires burning uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, faces hidden by bandanas.

A leading aid group complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the U.S.-controlled airport. The general in charge said the U.S. military was “working aggressively” to speed up deliveries.

Beside the ruins of the Port-Au-Prince cathedral, where the sun streamed through the shattered stained glass, the priest told his flock at their first Sunday Mass since Tuesday’s earthquake, “We are in the hands of God now.”

But anger mounted hourly that other helping hands were slow in getting food and water to millions in need.

“The government is a joke. The U.N. is a joke,” Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, said as she lay in the dust with dozens of dying elderly outside their destroyed nursing home. “We’re a kilometer (half a mile) from the airport and we’re going to die of hunger.”

Water was delivered to more people around the capital, where an estimated 300,000 displaced were living outdoors. But food and medicine were still scarce.

The crippled city choked on the stench of death and shook with yet another aftershock Sunday. On the streets, people were still dying, people were on their knees praying for help, pregnant women were giving birth on the pavement, and the injured were showing up in wheelbarrows and on people’s backs at hurriedly erected field hospitals. Authorities warned that looting and violence could spread.

At the Vieux Marche, police tried to disperse looters by driving trucks through the crowds, as hundreds scrambled over partly destroyed shops grabbing anything they could. As he ran from the scene with a big box of tampons, Love Zedouni shouted: “I’ve got no idea what this is, but I’m sure you can sell it.”

Police used tear gas to scatter looters at street markets near the collapsed presidential palace. At the Cite Soleil slum, moments after police drove by, a reporter spotted a gunman stealing a bag of rice from a motorcycle rider.

“This is one of the most serious crises in decades,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he flew into the Haitian capital. “The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming.”

A reliable death toll may be weeks away, but the Pan American Health Organization estimates 50,000 to 100,000 died in the 7.0-magnitude tremor, and Haitian officials believe the number is higher.

Celebrating Mass outside the once-proud pink-and-white cathedral, now a shell of rubble where a rotting body lay in the entrance, the Rev. Eric Toussaint preached of thanksgiving to a small congregation of old women and other haggard survivors assembled under the open sky.

“Why give thanks to God? Because we are here,” Toussaint said. “What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.”

Mondesir Raymone, a 27-year-old single mother of two, was grateful. “We have survived by the grace of God,” she said.

But others were angry.

“It’s a catastrophe and it is God who has put this upon us,” said Jean-Andre Noel, 39, a computer technician. “Those who live in Haiti need everything. We need food, we need drink, we need medicine. We need help.”

Were his parishioners being helped? Toussaint was asked. “Not yet,” he replied.

The U.N. World Food Program was “pretty well on target to reach more than 60,000 people today,” up from 40,000 the previous day, WFP spokesman David Orr said. But U.N. officials said they must raise that to 2 million within a month. The U.S. aid chief, Rajiv Shah, told “Fox News Sunday” he believed the U.S. distributed 130,000 “meals ready to eat” on Saturday, but the need was much larger. “We’re really trying to address it,” he said.

In a further sign of the delays, the aid group CARE had yet to set a plan for distributing 38 tons of WFP high-energy biscuits in outlying areas of Haiti, CARE spokesman Brian Feagans said Sunday. He did not say why.

The Geneva-based aid group Doctors Without Borders put it bluntly: “There is little sign of significant aid distribution.”

The “major difficulty,” it said, was the bottleneck at the airport, under U.S. military control. It said a flight carrying its own inflatable hospital was denied landing clearance and was being trucked overland from Santo Domingo, almost 200 miles away in the Dominican Republic, delaying its arrival by 24 hours.

French, Brazilian and other officials had earlier complained about the U.S.-run airport’s refusal to allow their supply planes to land. A World Food Program official told The New York Times that the Americans’ priorities were out of sync, allowing too many U.S. military flights and too few aid deliveries.

The U.S. has completely taken over Port-au-Prince airspace and incoming flights have to register with Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, said Chief Master Sgt. Ty Foster, Air Force spokesman here.

“You won’t have the stray cats and dogs allowed to come into the airspace and clog it up,” he said.

On Sunday, WFP spokesman Gregory Barrow in Rome was more positive, speaking of “extremely close cooperation” with the U.S. at the airport. But a coordinator here for Spain’s international development agency, Daniel Martin, complained that their aid supplies had been diverted to Santo Domingo, and Doctors Without Borders spokesman Jason Cone said the U.S. military needed “to be clear on its prioritization of medical supplies and equipment.”

The on-the-ground U.S. commander in Haiti, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, acknowledged the bottleneck problem. “We’re working aggressively to open up other ways to get in here. The ports are part of that,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The White House said Sunday the U.S. Coast Guard ship Oak had arrived at Port-au-Prince harbor, rendered useless for incoming aid because of quake damage, and use heavy cranes and other equipment to make the port functional.

Other U.S. help was on the way: Some 2,000 Marines should arrive off Haiti on Monday, Keen said, reinforcing 1,000 U.S. troops on the ground.

The general reported “increasing incidents of violence,” as a weakened Haitian police force and U.N. peacekeeping contingent were overwhelmed.

In the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Delmas, a crowd gathered Sunday around the bodies of two accused looters, who had been beaten to death by angry residents. Onlookers said they were among 4,000 prisoners who escaped when the main prison collapsed in the quake.

Angry survivors loitered amid piles of burning garbage in the Bel-Air slum. “White guys, get the hell out!” they shouted in apparent frustration at the sight of more and more foreigners in their streets who were not delivering help.

They also sounded furious with President Rene Preval, who hasn’t been seen at a rescue site or gone on radio to address the nation since the quake struck.

“Preval out! Aristide come back!” some shouted, appealing for a return of the populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in 2004. From his South African exile, Aristide said last week he wants to return to Haiti, but spoke of no concrete plans to do so.

Work went on, meanwhile, perhaps in its desperate final hours, to find survivors buried in the vast rubble of Port-au-Prince.

At the U.N. headquarters destroyed in the quake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after Secretary-General Moon visited the site, where U.N. mission chief Hedi Annai and at least 39 other staff members were killed. The rescued man was talking and smiling as he was whisked away for medical treatment. Hundreds of peacekeepers and other U.N. staff remain missing.

And at a collapsed Caribbean Supermarket where search teams from Florida and New York City worked overnight, a policeman reported that three people had been pulled out alive around 6 a.m.

More than 1,700 rescue workers had saved more than 70 lives since the quake, a U.N. spokeswoman said in Geneva.

“There are still people living” in collapsed buildings, Elisabeth Byrs told The Associated Press. “Hope continues.”

In such conditions, she said, people might survive until Monday.

___

Associated Press writers contributing to this story included Alfred de Montesquiou, Mike Melia, Tamara Lush, Jonathan M. Katz, Gregory Bull and Edith M. Lederer in Port-au-Prince; Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva, and Jill Lawless in London.