Russians to cut Putin's party majority in vote: poll (Reuters)

MOSCOW (Reuters) ? Russians will strip Vladimir Putin's ruling party of its huge majority in parliament at the December 4 election, narrowing the paramount leader's room for legislative maneuver when he returns to the Kremlin, a leading pollster predicted on Friday.

Based on its last major opinion survey before the election, Russia's biggest independent pollster said the United Russia party would win about 252-253 places in the 450-seat lower house of parliament, down from the 315 it has now.

If the party's majority is cut to 28 seats, Putin could still push through laws after the March 4 presidential vote he is almost certain to win, but he would have to enlist other parties' support for big changes like constitutional amendments.

The decline in support reflects what pollsters say is a sense of fatigue with the entrenched party and even with Putin, whose approval ratings remain high but who was jeered in public at a martial arts fight in Moscow last Sunday.

"The feeling is rising that the elections are being manipulated, are dishonest, and that is delegitimizing the entire system of power," said Lev Gudkov, director of Levada-Center which carried out the poll.

"United Russia is conducting quite a weak electoral campaign," Gudkov told reporters in Moscow.

"It doesn't really have much of a program."

Putin has tasked President Dmitry Medvedev with leading United Russia into the parliamentary election, and has hinted a poor showing by the party could affect his plan to appoint Medvedev as prime minister in a job swap announced in September.

United Russia could cede 50 seats to the Communist Party and the nationalist LDPR, the Levada poll showed.

"Campaign-wise, I don't see much of it actually," said Vitaly, a 30-year-old driver in Moscow who said he supported Putin.

"They give out calendars with the United Russia logo on them, but calendars are not enough. I don't see any party going and talking to people. There needs to be more campaigning."

PUTIN RATING

An outburst of boos and whistling at Putin by fans at a martial arts fight last Sunday, and a sharp fall in opinion poll ratings earlier this month, had raised concerns Putin may be losing his legendary political touch.

Signs of disenchantment with Putin, who ruled as president from 2000-08, are extremely worrying for the Kremlin's political managers: Putin's self-portrayal as the anchor of Russian stability depends on his popularity.

But in Levada's November 18-21 poll, Putin's approval rating rose to 67 percent from a decade low of 61 percent recorded at the beginning of the month. Medvedev's was flat at 62 percent.

"Putin will easily win in the first round because the political field is managed and opponents have been sidelined," Gudkov said of the presidential election, which the upper house of parliament said on Friday would take place on March 4.

Supporters say Putin is popular because he brought order after the chaos which accompanied the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, though opponents say he has crafted a brittle political system too dependent on his own patronage.

Levada predicted the Communist Party would come second in the parliamentary election with about 94 seats, followed by LDPR, winning 59 seats, and the Just Russia party with 44 seats.

"There are a range of polls which show fatigue with this party," said Boris Dubin, an expert at Levada, said of United Russia.

He said there was a perception among voters that United Russia had not "achieved earth-shattering successes in either cementing stability or increasing living standards."

(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova, Alexei Kalmykov and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Sophie Hares)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111125/wl_nm/us_russia_election_poll

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NASA's Massive Curiosity Rover Nears Launch toward Mars

News | Space

The rover formerly known as the Mars Science Laboratory should tackle some of the biggest questions about Mars?assuming it can survive an elaborate touchdown


Mars Science LaboratorySTANDING TALL: NASA's giant Curiosity rover should reach the surface of Mars in August 2012. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Don't be fooled by the innocuous name?Curiosity,?NASA's new Mars rover, is a brute.

Curiosity, which is slated to launch Saturday morning on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, is the biggest planetary rover ever built. The six-wheel-drive robot is three meters long?longer than a Smart ForTwo mini car?and its headlike mast rises 2.1 meters above the ground. With a suite of 10 science instruments, Curiosity weighs in at nearly 900 kilograms, more than NASA's last three Mars rovers combined. [Read more about Mars exploration in this special report.]

To put its size in perspective, consider that Curiosity is scheduled to touch down in August 2012, just over 15 years after NASA's first Mars rover began exploring the Red Planet. That rover, Sojourner, stood about 30 centimeters high. Curiosity is designed to roll over obstacles twice that tall.

But brute force is not everything?it's what's inside that counts. "We have our generic bigger and better answer" for what is new about the $2.5-billion Curiosity, says John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist, notes that the rover's technology is simply superior to that of its predecessors?the cameras have better resolution, for instance, and can take high-definition video.

And unlike its predecessors, Curiosity will not depend on sunlight to carry out its mission. Instead its power will come from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?a 4.8-kilogram supply of radioactive plutonium 238 that decays to produce heat. Devices called thermocouples turn some of that heat into electricity, providing about 110 watts to the rover. (The heat also keeps the rover's systems warm enough to function.) Plutonium 238 has a half-life of more than 80 years, so Curiosity may be able to exceed its 23-month nominal mission lifetime by several years.

But the real key to Curiosity's capabilities are two instruments that can make definitive chemical analyses of what the Red Planet is made of. "This is a mobile chemistry laboratory," Grotzinger says. In fact, the Curiosity moniker came along only in 2009, when a Kansas sixth grader named Clara Ma won a naming contest. Prior to that, the mission was known more straightforwardly as the Mars Science Laboratory. The rover's chemical analyses should dig into what Mars was like billions of years ago, when it was wetter and could have featured niches conducive to life.

The two key geology instruments, an x-ray diffraction unit and a multipurpose sample-analysis system, will be fed by a robotic arm that can scoop up soil or drill into a rock to collect a powdered sample from the interior. The x-ray diffraction instrument will aim a beam of x-rays at samples to reveal their structure and composition, making possible definitive identifications of specific minerals. The sample-analysis instruments, on the other hand, can taste the composition of the surrounding atmosphere or heat solid samples to 1,000 degrees Celsius to release trace compounds within.

With its chemistry tools, Curiosity may help shed some light on all-important methane. Some research indicates that methane, a molecule that has mainly biological origins on Earth, is seeping from Mars in plumes that hint at ongoing geologic?or possibly even biological?activity there. If Curiosity encounters methane in the atmosphere, the rover can make isotopic analyses of the gas to help determine the methane's origin.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=3827131facbd9be92d968425580f68a4

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Divorce in the Age of Twitter

shutterstock_67550296Divorce.? It happens to the best of us.? As emotionally heart wrenching as it can be, it?s even worse now that we?re living out our lives on the public stages of Facebook, Twitter and the like.? If the recent very public separation of Ashton and Demi is any indication, it?s only going to get worse.? As a former physician, current internet entrepreneur, and ever-curious observer of the human condition, I?m fascinated by how the internet is broadly shaping our culture, and the day-to-day implications this has on our interpersonal relationships.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/j9sLbwS1Tbc/

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Microsoft Lync coming to Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone next month

Heads up, corporateers. Just like the company previously hinted, Microsoft Lync will soon make its smartphone debut. Currently, the enterprise instant messaging client (formerly known as Microsoft Office Communicator) has only been available to Mac and PC users, but all that is set to change next month when the software becomes available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone. Curiously, Microsoft's New Zealand outfit had formerly stated that Symbian would be among the mix, although its mention is entirely absent from this announcement. Granted, the news seems rather informal at this point, and there's only so much you can cram into 140 characters.

Microsoft Lync coming to Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone next month originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Electronista  |  sourceMicrosoft Australia (Twitter)  | Email this | Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/25/microsoft-lync-coming-to-android-blackberry-ios-and-windows-ph/

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Occupy Wall Street plans benefit album for itself (AP)

NEW YORK ? Occupy Wall Street has a benefit album planned with Jackson Browne, Third Eye Blind, Crosby & Nash, Devo, Lucinda Williams and even some of those drummers who kept an incessant beat at Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

Participants in the protest movement said Wednesday that "Occupy This Album," which will be available sometime this winter, will also feature DJ Logic, Ladytron, Warren Haynes, Toots and the Maytals, Mike Limbaud, Aeroplane Pageant, Yo La Tengo and others.

Activist filmmaker Michael Moore is also planning to sing.

Jason Samel, a musician who is putting together the disc, said the goal is to raise between $1 million and $2 million to help fuel the movement that is protesting income disparity.

"It's really going to be an amazing help for years to come," Samel said.

Money raised will go through the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice. The initial plan is that half of the proceeds will go to the New York movement that was based in Zuccotti Park until being kicked out last week, and the other half to offshoots across the world who apply for specific projects, he said.

There's a long history of benefit albums, from George Harrison's "Concert for Bangla Desh" that raised millions for flood victims through Unicef in 1971, and the "We Are the World" single in the 1980s, which raised more than $60 million for famine relief in Africa.

Amnesty International also announced Wednesday that it will put on sale in January a 75-song set of Bob Dylan covers by various artists to benefit the human rights organization.

The Occupy Wall Street album will be available in digital form first, with plans for a physical CD still unclear.

The music will generally be a mixture of live cuts and new songs. Third Eye Blind, for example, has already posted its song, called "If There Ever Was a Time," which specifically addresses the protest movement.

Haynes has offered a live version of "Rivers Gonna Rise," a song from his last disc.

Some little-known artists who have participated in the protest will also be included, such as Kaneska Carter and Matt Pless, who wrote "Something's Got to Give."

"The lyrics convey a universal feeling of compassion and a hope for a better existence that I believe are the common threads that wind through everyone," Pless said. "The positive spirit behind this song is a reflection of what birthed the movement and still exists at its core."

One song will feature the loosely-formed group of people that would beat on drums at the entrance to Zuccotti Park, much to the consternation of neighbors and even some demonstrators as they tried to get some sleep.

Musicians like Tom Morello, David Crosby and Graham Nash had impromptu concerts for some of the demonstrators.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/music/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111123/ap_en_mu/us_music_wall_street_protest

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Chiefs claim Orton off waivers; waive WR Colbert (AP)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. ? Kyle Orton has a new home in the AFC West.

Orton was claimed off waivers Wednesday by the Kansas City Chiefs, who were in the market for a veteran quarterback after losing Matt Cassel to a season-ending injury to his throwing hand.

Orton was released by the Broncos on Tuesday, six weeks after he was benched following a 1-4 start. The former Chicago Bears starter, who passed for 3,000 yards each of his first two seasons in Denver, became expendable when the Broncos opted to go with Tim Tebow as their starter.

The Chiefs will be responsible for approximately $2.5 million remaining on Orton's nearly $8.9 million salary this season, but they had plenty of space under the salary cap to make the move.

Orton can become a free agent after this season.

Several other teams were interested in Orton, including the Bears, but the Chiefs were highest in the order of waiver priority and landed him. He's expected to report to the Chiefs on Thursday, though it's unlikely that he'll be up to speed in time for Sunday's game against Pittsburgh.

If that's the case, Tyler Palko will make his second consecutive start. He was 24 of 37 for 230 yards and three interceptions in his first NFL start, a 34-3 loss to New England on Monday night.

"He never had a look that disturbed me before, after, during the game," coach Todd Haley said. "I know playing that position, there's no greater test, and getting thrown in to the fire on Monday night and, oh, by the way, six days later playing Pittsburgh, it doesn't get any harder."

Now it appears that Palko will have to fend off Orton to keep the starting job.

"Todd told me after practice that they claimed Kyle, and that's really it," Palko said. "He didn't tell me either way (about starting). Just full speed ahead for Pittsburgh.

"I've been the practice squad quarterback, I've been the No. 3, the No. 2, and the starter last week," Palko added. "I prepare the same way, with the same intensity, and that hasn't changed. I've never wavered or changed my mentality."

The Chiefs waived wide receiver Keary Colbert, who surprisingly earned a job out of training camp after spending three years away from the NFL, to make room on the roster for Orton. Colbert appeared in seven games this season, making nine catches for 89 yards.

Orton, a former Purdue star, was a fourth-round draft pick and appeared on the way to stardom when he assumed the Bears' starting job for 15 games as a rookie, winning 10 of them.

Often saddled with a reputation for being moody, Orton was demoted his second season in favor of veteran Brian Griese. He earned the starting job back late in 2007 and started 15 games for the Bears in 2008, passing for 2,972 yards with 18 touchdowns and 10 interceptions.

"He was a really good player," said Chiefs running back Thomas Jones, who played with Orton in Chicago. "He's a real good teammate."

His stock never higher, Orton was traded along with a package of draft picks to Denver for Pro Bowl quarterback Jay Cutler. In a curious twist of fate, it was an injury to Cutler that sparked Chicago's interest in claiming its former starter off waivers.

Orton excelled his first two seasons in Denver in an offense run by Josh McDaniels, throwing for 7,455 yards and 41 touchdowns with 21 interceptions.

McDaniels was fired late last season, though, and while Orton remained the starter when John Fox took over, things got off to a bumpy start. Denver lost four of its first five games, and Fox turned to Tebow as the starter, effectively demoting Orton to the third string.

Orton's career numbers bear a striking resemblance to those of Cassel, who was hurt near the end of the Chiefs' 17-10 loss to Denver two weeks ago. Orton's completed about 58 percent of his passes while making 66 career starts, with 79 touchdowns and 55 interceptions.

Cassel has started 54 games, completing 59 percent of his throws with 76 TDs and 46 picks.

The Chiefs, who are in the midst of a three-game skid that has threatened to eliminate them from contention in the AFC West, will try to get Orton up to speed quickly.

After facing the Steelers on Sunday night, they visit Chicago and the New York Jets, before returning home to face the defending Super Bowl champion Green Bay. A division game against Oakland follows before wrapping up the season at Denver, a game that suddenly has a few more story lines.

"Good for him. Congratulations to him. That will be fun to play him the last game of the year," Tebow said. "Obviously he knows (Denver's offense) pretty well, so he could probably give away a few things, but I think we'll be OK."

___

AP Pro Football Writer Arnie Stapleton in Englewood, Colo., contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111124/ap_on_sp_fo_ne/fbn_chiefs_orton

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Bing hitches holiday hopes to Rudolph the reindeer (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO ? Like Santa Claus on that one foggy Christmas Eve, Microsoft has summoned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to guide some precious cargo ? a holiday marketing campaign for its Bing search engine.

The advertisements, debuting online and on TV this week, star Rudolph and other characters from the animated story about the most famous reindeer of all. The campaign is part of Microsoft's attempt to trip up Google Inc., an Internet search rival as imposing as the Abominable Snowman was before Yukon Cornelius tamed the monster.

Google has been countering with its own emotional ads throughout the year. Most of Google's ads show snippets of its dominant search engine and other products at work before swirling into the logo of the company's Chrome Web browser.

The dueling ads underscore the lucrative nature of search engines. Although visitors pay nothing to use them, search engines generate billions of dollars a year in revenue from ads posted alongside the search results.

The holiday season is a particularly opportune time for search companies because that's when people do more searches ? to find gifts online, look for party supplies and plan nights out on the town. That means more people to show ads to. Advertisers also tend to be willing to pay more per ad because they know people are in a buying mode.

To capture that audience, Microsoft and Google are both thinking outside the search box to promote their brands.

Although the text ads running alongside search results do a fine job of reeling in some customers, they still lack the broader, more visceral impact of a well-done television commercial, said Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, a firm that rates the effectiveness of ads.

"It's instructive that these companies who are all about the Internet and doing things in real time are actually doing these emotive ads on TV," Daboll said.

Search engines are particularly difficult to sell because the sophisticated technology required to make them work isn't something "you can touch or feel in a store, so you need to bring some emotion to it," said Sean Carver, Bing's advertising director. "The storytelling is important."

Microsoft Corp. licensed the rights to the characters from Rudolph's 47-year-old holiday special after convincing their owners that the Bing commercials would add an endearing chapter to the reindeer's story. The rights to Rudolph and the rest of the cast are owned by the children of Robert L. May, who wrote the story in 1939 while working as a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store (May's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, later wrote the famous song).

Microsoft is far more experienced at marketing than Google.

For one thing, it's 23 years older than Google, which was founded in 1998.

More important, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were so contemptuous of traditional marketing campaigns that the company never bothered to advertise its search engine on national TV until the 2010 Super Bowl. Spending millions to be a part of TV's annual advertising extravaganza was so out of character that Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO at the time, heralded the Super Bowl ad with a post on Twitter that concluded "hell has indeed frozen over."

Since that breakthrough, Google has caught the advertising bug. Without breaking down its total ad budget, Google disclosed that it has spent $583 million more on television and other advertising during the first nine months of this year than it did at the same time last year.

The investment has won Google some respect in the advertising industry.

Google took five of the 10 top spots for most effective national TV ads that promote websites, based on Ace Metrix's study of viewer reactions to the commercials. Topping the list is an ad showing how a father used Google services such as Gmail to create an electronic journal of his daughter Sophie's life.

Three Bing ads also ranked in the 10 most effective, but it also had two ads on the least effective list.

"There doesn't seem to be a very coherent creative pattern to the Bing ads," Daboll said. "It's kind of hit and miss."

There's no mistaking the common theme in the four Rudolph ads produced for the Bing promotion. The ads are all done in the same stop-motion puppet animation used in the original 1964 TV special. One features Bumble the Abominable Snowman using Bing to get ideas for a more fearsome roar. Another shows some of the characters turning to Bing for suggestions on a vacation that leads to a getaway on an island of misfit toys.

Microsoft has bought seven slots on national TV to run those four 30-second ads. The company is going for high impact rather than high frequency and is placing those ads during holiday-themed specials, starting with "The Simpsons" on the Fox network on Thanksgiving night and ending on Dec. 21 during "South Park" on the Comedy Channel. Microsoft isn't buying time during the Rudolph special, though, which CBS is broadcasting next Tuesday and Dec. 10.

The ads also will be shown in more than 200 movie theaters before holiday films and will be available online beginning Wednesday at http://www.bingoriginals.com.

Microsoft declined to say how much it's spending on the Rudolph campaign.

Aaron Lilly, a Microsoft executive who helps conceive Bing's promotions, came up with the idea to build holiday ads around the Rudolph story two years ago. It didn't happen then because the Aflac insurance company had already bought licensing rights to the characters for that holiday season.

The ads will be a success for Microsoft if they help the company gain more ground and cut its losses in Internet search, an area that remains weak for Microsoft even after years of investing in better technology.

While the Xbox video game console and familiar software such as Windows and Office provide most of Microsoft's earnings, Bing remains a financial drain. The online division anchored by Bing has suffered operating losses totaling $7 billion since June 2008, when Microsoft introduced the latest overhaul of its search engine.

Google's share of the Internet search market has increased since Bing's debut, according to the research firm comScore. Google now processes about two out of three search requests in the U.S. and rakes in an even larger share of the revenue that rolls when people click on ads next to search results.

Bing's market share has climbed from about 9 percent in June 2008 to roughly 15 percent in October, but most of those gains have come at the expense of Yahoo Inc., which hired Microsoft to run most of its search technology two years ago.

For Google, the ads are aimed at not only maintaining its dominance in search but also driving adoption of other Google products, including its Chrome browser. Google says Chrome now has 200 million users worldwide, up from about 120 million at the end of last year. Despite those gains, Chrome still trails Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the Mozilla's Firefox.

But Chrome has been able to narrow the gap separating it from Internet Explorer more than Bing has been able to do in its pursuit of Google in search. Bing is still hoping to emulate Rudolph, a one-time laughingstock who overcame the skeptics to leap of the front of the pack.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111123/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_advertising_search_engines

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British police investigating climate email hackers (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? British police will examine a batch of email exchanges between climate scientists which appeared on the Internet on Tuesday as part of an inquiry into the hacking of the private documents, police said on Wednesday.

The University of East Anglia, whose Climate Action Research Unit is considered one of the world's leading institutions on climate science, said the emails appeared to be "a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change."

Negotiators from almost 200 countries meet from November 28 in South Africa for a U.N. climate summit, where only modest steps are expected toward a deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions despite warnings from scientists that extreme weather will likely increase as the planet warms.

An anonymous group or individual called FOIA posted a file on a Russian server, http:/files.sinwt.ru/download.phpfile=25FOIA2011.zip,

which included more than 5,000 emails.

Two years ago, a series of emails written by climate experts from the university were stolen by unknown hackers and spread across the Internet in what became known as "Climategate," just before a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The leaked emails contained private correspondence from 1995 to 2009. Climate change skeptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating data to support global warming.

However, independent inquiries cleared the university of all accusations of fraud and data manipulation, although they did recommend it change the way it handled requests for information.

"We are aware of the release of the document cache. The contents will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing," said police spokeswoman Nicola Atter.

"Nothing so far leads us to believe the emails raise any new issues. If, on closer study, we see anything that requires further investigation, that we will do," Edward Acton, vice chancellor of the university, told reporters on Wednesday.

"It may throw more light on the perpetrator rather than the victims of this invasion of privacy. I am very keen to know who did it," he added.

Police would not reveal information about suspects.

Acton said the way numbers appeared, using full stops instead of commas, was uncommon among British or American English speakers.

In addition to the 5,000 emails released on Tuesday, there are another 39,000 pages which cannot be accessed yet as they require a password, the vice-chancellor said.

Those seen so far include quotes on discussions between scientists over how to portray climate data, the workings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how to share information.

"I have looked at 100 or so and those highlighted are quite cherry-picked (...) They are quite representative of frank and honest discussion between scientists," said Phil Jones, head of the university unit.

In a statement immediately after the emails appeared on the Internet on Tuesday, the university said: "This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and a number of studies."

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/security/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111123/wr_nm/us_climate_emails

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'Ten Commandments judge' seeks top Ala. post again (AP)

MONTGOMERY, Ala. ? The former top Alabama judge known for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse said Tuesday that he's seeking to regain his old job as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Eight years after Roy Moore was removed from the post because of the monument dispute, he announced that he would run for the position again at a news conference on the steps of the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. The 64-year-old Republican addressed the dispute in his remarks to the media.

"I have no plans to move the monument to Montgomery," he said, but added that he will continue to acknowledge God.

Current Chief Justice Chuck Malone and Charlie Graddick, a former attorney general who's now a circuit judge in Mobile, are already running in the Republican primary on March 13. No Democrat has announced.

Moore has said that lots of people have encouraged him to enter the Republican primary. He has said he does not believe getting in the race behind the other two GOP candidates will hurt him, adding that he is well-known and voters know his judicial philosophy is conservative.

Moore became a judge in 1992 when Republican Gov. Guy Hunt appointed him to a vacant circuit judgeship in Gadsden. He attracted national attention in a legal battle with the American Civil Liberties Union over his practice of opening court sessions with prayer and displaying a homemade plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

After being elected chief justice in 2000, he had a 5,280-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments installed in the lobby of the state judicial building in Montgomery. That set off more legal battles, which he lost. A trial court for judges removed him in 2003 over his refusal to abide by a federal judge's order to remove the display.

The monument currently sits at a church and school in Gadsden.

Since getting kicked out as chief justice, Moore has made two runs for governor. He lost the 2006 Republican primary to incumbent Bob Riley and finished fourth in the GOP primary 2010.

In the spring, he formed an exploratory committee to consider a Republican run for president, but dropped it. Moore said he drew good crowds during speaking engagements in Iowa, the first caucus state, and South Carolina, an early primary state, but couldn't generate the money needed to seriously consider a campaign.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111122/ap_on_re_us/us_ten_commandments_judge

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