Become An Artist With Mixel’s Remixable iPad Collage App

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Mixel is a new iPad app that just hit the App Store, but it’s also a new art medium. Mixel allows users to assemble collages by manipulating images pulled from their device, Facebook photos, and Bing search. It’s different from glue and paper cut-outs and existing collage apps, though, because every finished Mixel creation is publicly available for other users to pick apart, remix, and share. Forget the sanctity of something hung in a gallery, Mixel’s tag line is “Please touch the art”.

The app has been in development in New York’s Dogpatch Labs since February by Lascaux Co., founded by former New York Times digital design director Khoi Vinh and MIT computer science grad Scott Ostler. The background of the founders mirrors the intention of the app — to combine art and technology to democratize creative expression. Vinh tells me he wants art to be something you can make “while you’re on the couch, you don’t have to be sitting at a desk or standing at an easel.”

Mixel is simple to use, but the remix feature provides depth so there’s always something to do. You start by cropping down some source images and adding them to a canvas. Then you resize and position the elements to create a finished Mixel before sharing it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. Links lead to a standalone web view of a Mixel, similar to Instagram. Mixels can also be browsed within the app by following friends or checking out a Popular tab of creations with the most Likes and Loves.

If you discover a single image or entire work you want to use, you can start a remix with it. These are threaded into a conversation with the original work in the app’s galleries and the web view. This lets you see how different people interpet the same subject, and lends the app to deep social interactions where you collaborate with strangers or play around with friends. Currently there are no privacy controls in Mixel. Everything’s public, which the app warns you of if you add your own photos.

Lascaux has secured $600,000 in seed funding from investors including Polaris Venture Partners, Betaworks, and Allen & Company, plus a $100,000 TechFellow award from Founders Fund and New Enterprise Associates. Its next steps include adding Flickr, Tumblr, and Pinterest as image sources as well as privacy controls for sharing Mixels with small groups of friends. Lascaux is also planning an iPhone app that instead of being a shrunk-down clone of the app will be a complement for browsing Mixels, leaving feedback, and saving images for later user. Collage creation will be reserved for the big screened iPad.

Built on an instantly familiar multi-touch display, those of all ages will soon be exploring the Mixel medium. Vinh explains that, “We don’t want art to be something monumental that makes people feel intimidated. Rather, we want to take people that would never really engage with art apps and turn them into engaged, passionate visual communicators.” Mixel is now available for iPad in the App Store.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/mixel/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Why Adobe Failed and Where Startups Can Swoop In

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Adobe has discontinued development of Flash-Player plugin for mobile browsers.

This is a very important moment in the history of the mobile internet. Since 1997, Flash Player has been an important part of the web. From flash games, to streaming video, to sound, and sockets, many of the most important and central components of the online web experience have leveraged Flash-Player technology.

However, Flash-Player has failed to make the transition to the mobile web.

How could this have happened? How is it that a company with the resources of Adobe could possibly fail to overcome this hurdle? The transition from the PC to the mobile web is arguably one of the most important inflection points in the history of the internet, and the value to Adobe is very obvious. The answer lies in the history of Flash-Player itself.

As Steve Jobs put it: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice”—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile.

Mobile devices are not always plugged in. They have to rely on small batteries, which need to last for days at a time. For this reason, mobile phones have slower, less power-hungry CPUs. The original iPhone had a 412 MHz CPU. That’s about how fast desktop CPUs were back in 1998. That was basically a 9 year setback in CPU speeds, which was more than Adobe’s Flash Player could handle.

You see, in Flash Player, everything is done in the CPU, including the graphics. That means that if you slow down the CPU, you slow down the graphics performance.

Back in 1997 when the Flash Player engine was created, the CPU was all that was available. It wasn’t until 2000 that normal PC computers started to get GPUs with hardware-accelerated transform and lighting.

The advent of the GPU changed everything. It’s several orders of magnitude faster to do graphics calculations in hardware over software. In addition to that, GPUs are able to perform multiple calculations in parallel. The original iPhone could do up to 16 simultaneous calculations, and the new A5 chip (iPad2 and iPhone 4S) can do up to 128. Most importantly, GPUs use less power to do the same number of calculations.

Over the last 10 years, AAA Console game developers have worked closely with companies like Nvidia to optimize the performance of video game graphics. Together, they have created standards like OpenGL for interacting with the GPU, and maximizing the graphical rendering capabilities of a system. It is because of this innovation that iPhones can run beautiful 3D games like “Infinity Blade”, and run them fast. The GPU in modern mobile devices is really powerful if you can just tap into it.

So why has Adobe failed to take advantage of the power of the modern GPU? The answer is backwards computability. Adobe is burdened down by history. There are millions of SWF files all over the web from all versions of Flash Players’ history. To play all of these, Flash Player needs to be capable of playing SWF files back all the way to version 1 (we are currently at version 11). It’s the same issue that plagues Windows. The only way to avoid the issue of backwards compatibility is to make a break with the past, stop supporting old versions, and go forward with a new format.

Adobe has added new APIs that can leverage the GPU (like stage 3D), but in order to ensure backwards compatibility for old code, their entire pre-existing API does not leverage the GPU. That means that Flash developers still need to re-write their existing games in order to get hardware accelerated graphics.

Now startups are thriving by solving the problems that Adobe could not. Solutions like a rendering engine designed for the mobile web that does take advantage of the power of the GPU, for high performance, hardware accelerated graphics. There is an opportunity for startups to come in and provide the same API as Adobe’s ActionScript 3 libraries, so Flash developers left out in the cold by Adobe now have a place to call home. Developers can bring their knowledge and skills with Flash to mobile by partnering with these new crop of companies.

Where Adobe can still succeed

Adobe may have failed with the Flash Player Plugin, but their art-creation tools are still the best in the industry. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional are the hands-down best options for creating 2D artwork (both vector and raster) and animation. The millions of artists and designers around the world who have learned the skills to use these tools need not learn any new tools to create content for the mobile web. Startups will fill the gaps left by Adobe and allow developers the ability to use these tools to create the user-interfaces, characters, animations, and other assets.

The end of the Flash-Player plugin is an inevitable consequence of history. Flash’s CPU-based architecture was on a head-on collision course with mobile devices. Now that Adobe has exited stage left, let’s see who swoops in.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/why-adobe-failed/

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Are We In A Series A “Crunch”? What CrunchBase Says …

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Remember that time the Wall Street Journal wrote an articleabout an influx of “start-up” companies raising seed/angel rounds and then all those companies subsequently trying to raise Series A rounds and failing hard? And then all these VCs and angels got in a fight about it, on Twitter, and on their own blogs?

Well, we pulled some rough funding data from CrunchBase(which come to think of it should be a National Treasure), and, as it turns out, more and more companies are raising seed and angel rounds (we’re counting both as the same) and less and less companies are raising Series A. In fact the number of seed deals went up 33% from 2008 to 2010, while Series A deals were down 9.6% during the same period.

In fact, we’re on track to have almost two times as many seed deals this year as Series A, while the two were neck and neck in 2008. It’s also worth noting the number of companies raising angel and seed rounds has gone up, but the dollar amount invested has either lessened or stayed the same. Last year, the cash invested in seed and angel rounds was $483 million, down 30 percent from 2009.  Whereas the cash invested in Series As was $4.1 billion, up 17 percent—which means that seed investments are getting smaller and Series A investments are getting larger.

But does this mean we’re in a “crunch”? Lightbank VC Paul Lee argues that the money is still there for Series A rounds – which would explain the investment amounts getting larger — just that the number of companies WHO NEED to raise Series A rounds has gone down, because they’re already profitable or have already been acquired — i.e. a good percentage of those startups in the seed/angel explosion we’re seeing don’t need to raise any further money.

But that doesn’t make complete sense, don’t people want to invest in successful startups? Are we supposed to look somewhere for an impending flood of successful startups that are “Series A” boot-strapped (we don’t track those in Crunchbase)?

“I think it’s pretty clear there is a flight to quality,” says investor Shervin Pishevar on what’s going on right now in the Valley, “And that’s not a bad thing. Facebook and Twitter have been such phenomenons that niche apps have been able to show up to pitch meetings with user growth charts up and to the right. [It was] easy to get a check written. By now though, investors have learned that a first day, week, or even month of user growth does not a sustainable business make and high churn can cause growth to flatten at even a modest sized base. Without a killer business model to fund paid acquisition, when viral growth stops so does overall growth and when growth stop investment stops. Even angels want big winners.”

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/crunchcrunch/

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Affordable Car Loans: A Look At The Winner(s) Of The Founder Showcase Pitch Competition

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Last night, over 500 people gathered in San Francisco for the eighth Founder Showcase, a quarterly startup pitch event that brings together technology CEOs, investors, and early-stage startups for a night of networking and pitchin’. The event is hosted by Founder Institute, but is an open competition — any early-stage business (less than two years old and with under $250K in funding) can enter. And they don’t have to pay.

Public voting reduces the applicants to a group of quarterfinalists, from which the finalists are chosen by Founder Institute, among others. At last night’s event, ten companies took the stage to pitch in front of a panel of judges that included VCs from Morgenthaler Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners,Blumberg Capital, and K9 Ventures.

Taking home the “Grand Prize” was Neo, a startup that finances car loans for first and second-time car buyers. While most consumer loans are dependent on credit scores, Neo is looking to go beyond these shaky indicators of creditworthiness by taping into financial and social data to better evaluate prospective loan applicants and to provide more affordable car loans.

Each year there are 6 million first and second time buyers with limited credit history looking for a loan, but 40 percent of those people are declined, while those that are approved generally have to struggle with interest rates that are 10 percent and higher.

While loan institutions are risk averse and shun away from offering money to those without significant credit histories, the default percentage even for subprime car loans is three percent, the founders say, because people simply need their cars and tend not to default on payments for this important asset. This is especially true for young, Gen Y car buyers, which make up 40 percent of the car buying population — a demographic which just doesn’t have significant credit histories.

FICO, one of the biggest credit scoring systems, tends to be an imperfect indicator of creditworthiness, so Neo’s underwriting technology assesses realtime credit risk based on numerous resources, refinancing loan applicants to as little as 6 percent rates. The startup is partnering with dealerships during its beta, which will send the startup 20 to 40 applications per month to assess their credit risk, on which Neo will make $600 per transaction.

Below, you can check out Neo’s pitch and the responses from judges:

The runner up was I-DISPO, a community for sharing and booking appointments online. The Paris-based startup recently secured a partnership with Bing in France to power all restaurant reservations directly on the search results page. At the event, I-Dispo also announced their entry into the U.S. market.

A quick look at the other startups pitching:

Be Scrappy is an online marketplace that connects people who need tools for home improvement and do-it-yourself projects with lenders that have them. The startup just launched with four tool rental locations in San Francisco and will soon enable peer-to-peer rentals.

ClientMagnet is an online service that helps SMBs drive retention by analyzing their customers and then recommending a marketing strategy based on hundreds of ready to run print, web and email campaigns.

Explorence makes outdoor video games, turning your phone into a Wii and you into the controller. (Read TechCrunch’s coverage here.)

Gushcloud is a social media platform where users get rewarded for promoting the brands they like, and companies can reach their target audience with any budget.

Pllop is an About.me for creative expression. It allows you to easily create touch-enabled micro-sites that work great on both tablets and desktops.

Say Mmm makes meal planning and grocery shopping simple with a set of online tools that do the work for you. The company’s latest feature will automatically convert any recipe or recipe URL into an organized grocery list with nutritional information.

Takeoff is an online tool that makes it easy to collaborate during video production. It’s like Basecamp, but for video.

TouchBase is a private family network that builds trust by enabling sharing of things like location and status, without tracking a child’s every move.

Also of note: Founder Institute announced last night that it will be “rebranding”, as it was able to secure the “fi.co” domain name, joining 500 Startups and Angel List startup resources operating under the “.co” domain.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/affordable-car-loans-a-look-at-the-winners-of-the-founder-showcase-pitch-competition/

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Virident Grabs $21 Million From Intel Capital, Cisco, Sequoia And More For Enterprise Storage Solutions

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Virident, a company that offers flash-based storage solutions for enterprise, announced today that it has closed a $21 million series C funding round. The investment was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with strategic investments fromIntel Capital, Cisco and contributions from existing investors, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. The series C round brings Virident to a total of $37 million in funding.

So why the interest in Virident? For starters, the startup’s management team counts former Google, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, SGI, and Intel employees among its ranks. So it has some talent. Second, the (enterprise) storage space is hot. And Virident has built flash solutions that are compatible with any servers and allow enterprises to enhance not only the speed of their applications but to ensure reliable performance under heavy workloads, specifically for data-intensive workloads, like databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Virident is operating under the belief that bringing flash memory to the storage space (both for data centers and enterprise storage) will fundamentally disrupt how information is stored. As Virident CEO Kumar Ganapathy told infoTECH, a future may well be coming in which the very flash memory chips that are built into billions of smartphones today force data centers “to adopt a completely new storage architecture with massive cost reductions and a significantly smaller footprint”. For Virident, the future is all about solid state devices.

Thus, the funding announcement today goes hand-in-hand with the company’s introduction of the next generation of its flagship product, Virident FlashMAX. The new product, according to the company, allows enterprise application performance to be optimized and, something that they reiterate over and over — consistent over time, across a wide variety of dataset sizes and diverse workloads — while “providing at least twice the performance of comparably flash-based solutions”. The product also comes with built-in, Flash-aware RAID.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/virident-grabs-21-million-from-intel-capital-cisco-sequoia-and-more-for-enterprise-storage-solutions/

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Social Analytics Platform Kontagent Raises $12M From Battery Ventures And Others

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Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analyticsplatform has raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Battery Ventures, with Maverick Capital and Altos Ventures participating. To date, Kontagent has raised$18 million in funding.

As we’ve written in the past, Kontagent’s real-timeplatform gives Facebook app developers, game studios and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social event interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

In July, the startup moved beyond simply tracking analytics for developers on Facebook and added tracking for web and mobile apps (not on FB) as well. The new platform, called kSuite, gives developers a way to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, and currency monetization.

Kontagent is now tracking over 1000 applications, over 150 million monthly active users and is handling over 1 billion messages per day. The company’s clients include EA, Warner Brothers, Popcap, Ubisoft, Gaia, and A&E.

The startup says the new funding will be used to support research and development efforts, and to expand into mobile. Kontagent is also going to be investing in further developing data
mining and predictive analytics capabilities.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/social-analytics-platform-kontagent-raises-12m-from-battery-ventures-and-others/

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Turkey: Quake kills at least 8, including Japanese aid worker

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Rescue workers with pickaxes and earth-movers searched on Thursday for survivors of an earthquake that leveled a downtown hotel in the same Turkish province that was hit by a deadly temblor last month. At least eight people, including a Japanese aid worker, were killed in the new quake.

Some 26 people were rescued in overnight digging in the provincial capital of Van in eastern Turkey. Some of those trapped in the rubble were foreign aid workers and Turkish journalists working in the aftermath of the powerful quake on Oct. 23 that killed about 600 people.

The Bayram Hotel survived that magnitude-7.2 quake with some cracks and a damaged elevator. But it toppled in Wednesday’s magnitude-5.7 quake, trapping an undetermined number of people under tons of concrete and twisted metal in a grim replay of the earlier destruction.

The quake knocked down 25 buildings in Van, but only two buildings, both hotels, were occupied because others were evacuated after the first quake, Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said.

“We focused on these two wreckage sites and are working with all our force,” to find survivors, he said.

Earlier, Atalay had said three buildings were occupied. He said some houses were damaged in nearby villages, but there were no casualties.

Turkey’s Anatolia agency said Atsushi Miyazaki, of the Association for Aid and Relief, Japan, died in a hospital after he was dug out from the rubble of the Bayram Hotel on Thursday. Rescue workers performed CPR on Miyazaki for about 15 minutes before taking him to the hospital in serious condition.

His 32-year-old female colleague, Miyuki Konnai, was rescued alive from the wreckage of the same hotel late Wednesday.

Ikuko Natori, overseas operations manager of the AAR Japan, said Konnai was in stable condition.

“We spoke with her briefly, she is in a hospital at the moment,” Natori told The Associated Press by telephone from Tokyo. “She had a slight injury, but it is not life threatening.”

Rescuers pulled at least two more people from the same wreckage earlier Thursday.

Two reporters from Turkey’s Dogan news agency, Sebahattin Yilmaz and Cem Emir, were still believed to be trapped in the hotel debris.

“The quake happened as our colleagues were trying to file their stories in the hotel’s lobby,” Dogan said.

Recep Salci, a member of the search and rescue group Akut, said sniffer dogs had indicated that more survivors might be under the rubble.

Some trapped journalists had sent text messages to colleagues asking to be rescued, Ozgur Gunes, a cameraman for Turkey’s Cihan news agency, told Haber Turk television on Wednesday.

He had left the hotel before the quake, but rushed back to collect his camera after it struck, only to find that the building toppled.

“There was dust everywhere and the hotel was flattened,” he said. He told Sky Turk television that the building had some small cracks before the quake, but that he and other guests were told that there was no structural damage.

Atalay, the deputy prime minister, said authorities had not been able to conduct a full inspection of the buildings for damage after the quake last month.

For the second time in a month, the government dispatched hundreds of rescue workers to the area. It was already trying to cope with the misery of thousands of homeless following the October temblor that destroyed at least 2,000 buildings in Van and in the worst-hit town of Ercis.

The exact number of people at the Bayram Hotel was not known. CNN-Turk television said a number of people were also said to be waiting at an office of an inter-city bus firm under the hotel when the quake hit, while some others were seen at an adjacent pastry shop.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake measured 5.7 and that its epicenter was 16 kilometers (9 miles) south of Van. It struck at 9:23 p.m. (1923 GMT, 2:23 p.m. EST) on Wednesday.

About 1,400 aftershocks have rocked the region since the massive earthquake on Oct. 23. Many residents had been living in tents, despite the cold, too afraid to return to their homes.

Dogan Kalafat, a senior official from the Istanbul-based Kandilli observatory, warned that more tremors could follow in the region, which is crisscrossed with many fault lines.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/57-earthquake-in-turkish-province-collapses-damaged-buildings-from-previous-temblor/2011/11/09/gIQAlFox5M_story.html

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Charlie Hebdo front cover depicts Muslim man kissing cartoonist

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Charlie Hebdo magazine offices firebombed

French cartoonist Luz outside the Charlie Hebdo offices after they were attacked. Photograph: Revelli-Beaumont/SIPA/Rex Features

Its offices have been firebombed, its website hacked, its Facebook page suspended for 24 hours and its staff targeted with death threats, so you might have thought the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo would have tried – just for a while – to avoid upsetting anyone.

Mais non! After provoking all the above with last week’s special edition “guest edited” by the prophet Muhammad, entitled Charia Hebdo, which took pot-shots at radical Islam, the publication is set to raise a few more hackles with this week’s edition, published on Wednesday.

On the front page of the latest edition is a drawing of a male Charlie Hebdo cartoonist passionately kissing a bearded Muslim man, under the headline: L’Amour plus fort que la haine (love is stronger than hate).

In the background of the cartoon, signed Luz, are the ashes of the magazine’s offices, completely destroyed in the Molotov cocktail attack last week.

Unlike the previous edition, which featured a front page carton of the prophet and a speech bubble reading “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter”, there is no suggestion that the character on the magazine cover is Muhammad.

After the firebombing, French Muslim groups who had been highly critical of Charlie Hebdo, condemned the destruction of its offices. Dalil Boubakeur head of the Paris Mosque, told journalists: “I am extremely attached to the freedom of the press, even if the press is not always tender with Muslims, Islam or the Paris Mosque”.

The editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier, said at the time: “We thought the lines had moved and maybe there would be more respect for our satirical work, our right to mock. Freedom to have a good laugh is as important as freedom of speech.”

Since then, the magazine’s staff have been given a temporary home in the offices of France’s leading leftwing daily newspaper Libération, which has also been subject to threats from the Turkish hackers who are said to have pirated Charlie Hebdo’s site.

Luz, the cartoonist, refused to condemn extremists for the attack.

“Let’s be cautious. There’s every reason to believe it’s the work of fundamentalists, but it could just as well be the work of two drunks,” he wrote afterwards.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/08/charlie-hebdo-muslim-kissing-cartoonist

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Justin Bieber blasts baby claims

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Justin Bieber blasts baby claims

The ‘Baby’ hitmaker was devastated when he had legal papers filed against him by 20-year-old Mariah Yeater last week claiming he is the dad of her four-month-old son and told his close pal Max George from British boy band The Wanted that the story is a complete fabrication.

Max – who toured South America with the 17-year-old singer earlier this year – told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “He is really cut up by being accused of being a father.

“He said it’s absolute bulls**t lies and that it didn’t go down like that at all. I told him to keep his head up, we’re right behind him.

“He’s had the worst time of his life and handled it so well. Doing the paternity test shows how grown-up he’s being about it.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for Mariah, 20, have claimed they tried to settle out of court with Justin before filing the paternity claim and claimed he is now worried the outcome of the case could be affected because it has become so “high-profile”.

Attorney Jeffrey Leaving said: “It could have been done painlessly, with the media never knowing about it. Access to justice should not be a luxury only the rich can afford, especially in a society where people are so enamoured by celebrity status and wealth.

“There has to be a sufficient chain of custody. Now it’s a high-profile case, and there’s motive to corrupt this. People are so enamoured with Justin Bieber, you could have someone change samples in a lab because of love for this guy.”

Leaving also claimed his client has been “bullied” saying, “she’s an unemployed single mother struggling to make a future while being intimidated and bullied. She has a right to make her case without threats of being sued or jail time. This is outrageous”.

Source: http://entertainment.stv.tv/showbiz/278495-justin-bieber-blasts-baby-claims/

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Iran supreme leader warns against attack

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Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2007.Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2007. (Getty)

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s supreme leader says that if the United States and Israel attack Iran, Tehran’s response will be tough.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says such a strike would provoke Iran to respond with “a strong slap and an iron fist.”

His remarks were broadcast on Thursday by Iran’s state radio — two days after the U.N. atomic agency released a report that for the first time said Iran is suspected of conducting secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of nuclear arms.

The report was the IAEA’s most unequivocal yet in suggesting Iran is using the cover of a peaceful nuclear program to produce atomic weaponry. Iran insists it is pursuing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday also slammed the IAEA report.

Iran won’t retreat “one iota” from its nuclear program but the world is being misled by claims that it seeks atomic weapons, Ahmadinejad said Wednesday in his first reaction to the U.N. report.

Ahmadinejad strongly chided the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, saying it is discrediting itself by siding with “absurd” U.S. accusations.

“This nation won’t retreat one iota from the path it is going,” Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in Shahr-e-Kord in central Iran. “Why are you ruining the prestige of the (U.N. nuclear) agency for absurd U.S. claims?”

The 13-page annex to the IAEA’s report released Tuesday included claims that while some of Iran’s activities have civilian as well as military applications, others are “specific to nuclear weapons.”

Among these were indications that Iran has conducted high explosives testing and detonator development to set off a nuclear charge, as well as computer modeling of a core of a nuclear warhead. The report also cited preparatory work for a nuclear weapons test, and development of a nuclear payload for Iran’s Shahab 3 intermediate range missile — a weapon that can reach Israel.

Ahmadinejad repeated Iran’s claims that it doesn’t make sense to build nuclear weapons in a world already awash in atomic arms.

“The Iranian nation is wise. It won’t build two bombs against 20,000 (nuclear) bombs you have,” he said in comments apparently directed at the West and others. “But it builds something you can’t respond to: Ethics, decency, monotheism and justice,” he added in his speech, which was broadcast live on state TV.

The U.S. and allies claim a nuclear-armed Iran could touch off a nuclear arms race among rival states, including Saudi Arabia, and directly threaten Israel. The West is seeking to use the report as leverage to possible tougher sanctions on Iran, but Israel and others have said military options have not been ruled out.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57322114/iran-supreme-leader-warns-against-attack/

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