China’s flood of iPad flankers

    A number of iPad-like slate computers have become available in China, including these two systems that are about half the size of Apple’s device.

    China has rather quickly emerged as the home of the iPad Flanker.

    An iPad Flanker is a device that’s not really good enough to “kill” the iPad but is different enough to challenge the iPad with certain audiences. Most of the flankers seen to date run Google’s Android software, have touch screens and cost less than the iPad.

    The China education boom on U.S. campuses

    Americanized Li Wanrong, a Drew University freshman from southern China, says her New Yorker roommate is helping her adjust to Western ways.

    “China is going to matter greatly to all students in the 21st century,” says Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew, which has increased its international enrollment by 60 percent in the past five years. “We feel it is important to provide the opportunity for American and Chinese students to learn from one another.”

    While China’s students have long filled American graduate schools, its undergraduates now represent the fastest-growing group of international students. In 2008-9, more than 26,000 were studying in the United States, up from about 8,000 eight years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education.

    China surges past India as top home of foreign students

    The number of Chinese students studying in the United States surged 30 percent in the 2009-10 academic year, making China the top country of origin for international students, according to “Open Doors,” the Institute of International Education’s annual report.

    The report found that a record high of 690,923 international students came to the United States last year -- nearly 128,000 of them, or more than 18 percent, from China. Over all, the number of international students at colleges and universities in the United States increased 3 percent for the 2009-10 academic year.

    Beyonce and Taylor Swift offer Thanksgiving specials

    In 2009, when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech to say Beyonce should have won the award for best female video, perhaps he planted an idea with prime-time programmers. Thanksgiving night brought successive specials by Ms. Swift, at 8 p.m. on NBC, and Beyonce, at 9:30 on ABC. Both featured billowing golden hair, live performances and pop image-polishing: Ms. Swift as careful as could be, Beyonce confident enough to loosen up.

    Obama gets 12 stitches in lip

    U.S. President Barack Obama had to get 12 stitches in his upper lip after being hit by an opposing player’s elbow during a basketball game Friday morning, White House officials said.

    “After being inadvertently hit with an opposing player’s elbow in the lip while playing basketball with friends and family, the President received 12 stitches today administered by the White House Medical Unit,” the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement. “They were done in the doctor’s office on the ground floor of the White House.”

    Source: www.nytimes.com