Christhild blog

Sprint Opposes AT&T Takeover of T-Mobile

T's proposed .Thecomes as no surprise, as Sprint CEO Dan Hesse criticized the recently announced merger last week at the International CTIA conference in Orlando,Florida.

During a keynote panel session, Hesse said the deal would hurt consumers by consolidating the majority of U.S. wireless subscribers and revenue in the hands of two companies: AT&T-T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.

Sprint continued its attacks with Monday's announcement.

"The transaction...would reverse nearly three decades of actions by the U.S. government and the courts that modernized and opened U.S. communications markets to competition," Sprint said in a statement.

The merger will need approval from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, and will likely spark contentious debates during U.S. Congressional hearings.

A combined AT&T-T-Mobile would create a wireless provider that's nearly three times the size of Sprint in terms of revenue. As a result, the mega-carrier "would entrench AT&T's and Verizon's duopoly control over the wireless market," Sprint argues.

"Sprint urges the United States government to block this anti-competitive acquisition," said Vonya McCann, senior vice president of government affairs, in the statement. "This transaction will harm consumers and harm competition at a time when this country can least afford it."

Calling the proposed merger a "new Ma Bell duopoly," Sprint vowed to fight the transaction "on behalf of our customers, our industry, and our country."

Verizon Wireless, currently the largest wireless provider in the U.S., is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone. Today's AT&T is a partial recreation of the original Bell System, which was split into seven regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) in 1984. One of those seven, Southwestern Bell (later SBC), changed its name to AT&T in 2005 after buying the remains of the original AT&T corporation.

Consumer groups have voiced their opposition to the AT&T-T-Mobile union as well.

"Don't believe the hype: There is nothing about having less competition that will benefit wireless consumers. And if regulators approve this deal, they will further cement duopoly control over the wireless market by AT&T and Verizon," said Free Press research sirector S. Derek Turner in a March 20th after the merger was announced.

"A market this concentrated -- where the top four companies already control 90 percent of the business, and two of them want to merge -- means nothing but higher prices and fewer choices, as the newly engorged AT&T and Verizon exert even more control over the wireless Internet," said Turner.

Contact Jeff Bertolucci via Twitter ) or at .

Dice-K donates $1 mn to quake aid

Boston pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka is donating $1 million to the Red Sox' official charity for victims of the earthquake and tsunami in his native Japan.

The Red Sox said Friday that his gift to the Red Sox Foundation will be sent to the Japanese Red Cross Society to aid response to the March 11 disaster, which also spawned an atomic crisis thanks to damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant.

Boston's other Japanese hurlers, Hideki Okajima, Junichi Tazawa and Itsuki Shoda, have also made personal donations and joined Matsuzaka, team captain Jason Varitek and others in collecting donations from fans at two spring training games in Florida.

The death toll from Japan's worst post-war disaster had topped 10,000 by Friday, and there was scant hope for 17,500 others still missing.

Matsuzaka, a native of Tokyo, was already a star in Japan when he joined the Red Sox in December 2006, inking a 52 million-dollar, six-year contract.

He became the first Japanese pitcher to start a World Series game as Boston won the Fall Classic in his first Major League season.

"Our efforts on the field are dedicated to all who are suffering from this catastrophe," Matsuzaka said in a videotaped message released by the Red Sox earlier this month. "We are in this together, so we must overcome tragedy together."

Jersey Shore Embarrassment: N.J. tells N.Y. to 'Take Them Back'

While at a Lincoln Park, New Jersey, town hall meeting, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has said that he plans to ask New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to repossess the always rowdy and often drunken cast members of the MTV reality show, Jersey Shore.

Although the show, which follows the lives of several hard partying twenty-somethings, has been set at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, the cast members all hale from New York.reported that Christie, who has never disguised his disgust with the hard partying image that cast members like Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi portray, is particularly eager to dispel any connection between them and the Garden State now that Polizzi has landed herself in the headlines following an episode showing her arrest.

Polizzi was arrested for disorderly conduct while even more inebriated than normal while filming the third season of the show. Christie told thethat, "Remember, Snooki is from Poughkeepsie and the Situation is from State Island. That's not New Jersey."

Christie said that his message to Cuomo was, "Take them back. We don't want them." Christie says that Jersey Shore "parachutes out of control New Yorkers into Seaside Heights." New Jersey natives familiar with the area can agree that day long or even week long benders like those gleefully portrayed by MTV are hardly de rigueur for the resort town.

More laughable than MTV's portrayal of New Jersey, however, was Christie's arrogant assertion that he was actively improving New Jersey's reputation among the rest of the country's citizens by turning it into a model of "fiscal discipline."

In the past few weeks alone, Christie's political blunders and financial missteps have been well documents.a bill that would have allocated $1 million of state money in order to access $15 million of federal Medicare and Medicaid funding to provide women's health services to low income New Jersey women.

Yahoo! News also reported a few days ago that New Jersey's bond rating was cut as the direct result of Christie's decision to not make any payment during 2010 into New Jersey's pension and employee benefit funds. According to the state's actuarial calculation's a payment of more than $3 billion should have been made in order to pay out the money that is or will be due to New Jersey's state workers. New Jersey's poor bond rating means that it will have to pay even higher interest rates the next time it issues bonds to finance its activities, and thanks to Christie's financial mismanagement, that is sure to be soon.

Instant view: Euro zone Q4 growth 0.3 pct q/q, 2.0 pct y/y

(Reuters) – The euro zone economy grew at the same quarterly rate in the fourth quarter as in the third, data showed on Tuesday, defying expectations of an acceleration.

ECONOMISTS' COMMENTS:

MARTIN VAN VLIET, EURO ZONE ECONOMIST, ING GLOBAL ECONOMICS

"It's in line with the consensus and it's matching also the pace seen in the third quarter, but I think the underlying growth picture is a bit more benign.

"As we all know there was a cold snap in December, which disrupted construction and trade activity, and the acceleration in industrial activity was insufficient to offset this, so the underlying picture looks more benign.

"All in all, today's figures show that although the economy experienced a weather-related impact at the end of last year, the recovery continued, so my guess is that growth will pick up in the first quarter as the weather-related impact unwinds.

"But then again fiscal tightening will increasingly kick in, so on balance we remain cautiously optimistic about the growth prospects for this year, and we retain the view that the euro zone economy will grow by a round 1.5 percent."

CHRISTOPH WEIL, EUROPEAN ECONOMIST AT COMMERZBANK

"It's in line with expectations, perhaps a little bit lower, but it's not dramatic. I think the figures are depressed by the hard winter weather.

"The interesting thing is the differential between the euro zone countries with strong growth, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, and then the peripherals such as Greece and Portugal, which are really lagging behind.

"For this year, in Germany we will expect stronger growth in the first quarter, and across the euro zone as a whole we will see growth of perhaps 0.4 to 0.5 percent in the first and second quarters."

LG Electronics' latest phone boasts 3-D screen

BARCELONA, Spain – As part of the quest to add more depth to electronics, LG Electronics Inc. on Monday demonstrated a phone with a 3-D screen and a 3-D camera, set to go on sale later this spring.

The South Korean electronics company's Optimus 3D drew large crowds eager to give it a test run at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The screen produces the illusion of depth without the need for special glasses, and includes a pair of five-megapixel lenses for taking 3D photos and video.

The phone must be held at the proper distance and angle in order for the viewer to perceive depth, much like Nintendo Co.'s 3DS handheld game console, which is based on a similar screen technology. Glasses-free 3-D is easier to achieve with small screens than with TV-size ones.

The Optimus 3D runs Google Inc.'s Android operating system. LG didn't announce a deal with a U.S. carrier, making it uncertain whether it would be sold in the U.S.

LG has already announced that a tablet with a 3-D camera, the G-Slate, will be sold by T-Mobile USA this spring. It won't have a true 3-D screen, so the user will need wear red-blue glasses to see depth when using the camera.