Biodun@bbcnews.com

3 January 2011 Last updated at 15:00 ET

Jerry Brown takes the inaugural oath, watched by his wife Anne Gust-Brown, 3 Jan 2010

Jerry Brown promised Californians a "painful" but honest budget proposal

by Rochelle van Amber, BBC News, for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

Jerry Brown has been sworn in as the new governor of the US state of California, taking over from the departing Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mr Brown, a Democrat who also served as California's governor from 1975 to 1983, will be only the second person to lead the state for three terms.

He said the year ahead would "demand courage and sacrifice" if California was to overcome its fiscal problems.

Among his first tasks will be to present a new budget plan.

The state faces a $28bn (£18bn) budget shortfall over the next 18 months.

Voters may be asked to agree to the extension of temporary taxes that were brought in in 2009 and are due to expire in July.

Mr Brown, 72, will need the backing of some Republicans in the state legislature if he is to put any tax measures to voters.

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Brown faces huge challenges. California, which would be eighth in world economic ranking if it was a country, faces bankruptcy”

Mark MardellBBC North America editor

Read Mark's thoughts in full

Speaking at his inauguration ceremony in the state capital, Sacramento, Mr Brown urged the state's politicians to "rise above ideology" to take the action needed for the good of the state.

"There's no other way forward in this crisis. We simply have to learn to work together as Californians first and members of a political party second," he said.

While vowing to tackle waste in government, Mr Brown pointed out that government spending on services would also have to be scrutinised.

He promised to be truthful about the state's finances, saying there would be "no more smoke and mirrors", to put any proposed tax rises before voters and to return more powers to local bodies.

"The budget I present next week will be painful but it will be an honest budget," he said.

Mr Brown defeated billionaire Republican candidate Meg Whitman in the November US mid-term elections to win office.

When he last held the governorship, Mr Brown became known as "Governor Moonbeam" for what were then viewed by some as outlandish ideas.

In the intervening years he twice pursued the Democratic nomination for president, campaigned for the US Senate and most recently served as state attorney general.

Mr Schwarzenegger, a Republican, leaves after seven years at the helm of the country's most populous state.

The 63-year-old former action movie star, best known for his role in the Terminator films, has not yet confirmed what he plans to do next.

He was not eligible to run for governor again because of term limits.

3 January 2011 Last updated at 09:20 ET

Laurent Gbagbo (L) with Presidents Boni Yayi of Benin (R) and Ernest Koroma of Sierra Leone (C) on 28 December 2010

Will West African leaders convince Laurent Gbagbo (left) to cede power?

Ivory Coast crisis

by Rashida Adjani, BBC News, for the BBC's Biodun Iginla

A delegation of African leaders is in Ivory Coast in a new effort to persuade its incumbent president to step down following disputed elections.

Leaders from Benin, Cape Verde, Sierra Leone and Kenya are expected to make an amnesty offer to Laurent Gbagbo if he quits, the BBC has learned.

West African states have said they will remove him by force if he does not.

The UN and the African Union regard Mr Gbagbo's rival, Alassane Ouattara, as the winner of the 28 November election.

The heads of state who travelled to Ivory Coast are Benin's Boni Yayi, Sierra Leone's Ernest Bai Koroma and Cape Verde's Pedro Pires - who represent the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

It is their second visit in less than a week. Last Tuesday they flew to Abidjan, Ivory Coast's commercial capital, but failed to convince Mr Gbagbo to stand down.

On Monday they were joined by Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, representing the African Union.

"He will seek a peaceful settlement to the election crisis... and seek an assurance of safety and security for Mr Laurent Gbagbo and his supporters, if he agrees to cede power," Mr Odinga's office said in a statement.

He was one of the first African leaders to call for military intervention to oust Mr Gbagbo.

Guarantees

Sierra Leone's Information Minister, Ibrahim Ben-Kargbo, said the leaders would tell Mr Gbagbo to step down and did not intend to negotiate with him.

But a source within the African delegation told the BBC that the incumbent would be offered a legal amnesty, as well as a guarantee that his financial assets would be secure if he left office.

Analysis

John JamesBBC News, Abidjan

Few observers have any hope that a compromise can be found that would see Laurent Gbagbo hand over power to his rival, Alassane Ouattara.

The Ecowas mission will almost certainly go over the various deals that have been offered for exile and amnesty but, in his New Year message, Mr Gbagbo said he would not cede power and insisted that he was the rightfully elected president.

He still has control of state television and the public backing of the army, but Mr Ouattara has the support of most West African leaders, who have already told the West African central bank to give him control over the state accounts.

The leaders will report back to the current chairman of the Ecowas region, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, on Tuesday, at which point a decision will be made on the way forward.

However a spokesman for Mr Gbagbo, Ohoupa Sessegnong, told the BBC the offer would be rejected.

"It's not about Laurent Gbagbo seeking some sort of offer. It's about Laurent Gbagbo having won the elections in the Cote D'Ivoire," Mr Sessegnong told the BBC. "Now it appears that the opposition supported by the French and their allies do not want to accept that."

The UN says some 200 people have been killed or have disappeared in the past month - mostly supporters of Mr Ouattara.

UN peacekeepers in the country say security forces have twice blocked them from visiting the site of one of two alleged mass graves.

The UN has also expressed concern that some of the homes of opponents to Mr Gbagbo have been marked to identify the ethnicity of their occupants.

The Gbagbo camp has denied sanctioning abuses.

UN peacekeepers are protecting Mr Ouattara, who is holed up at a hotel in Abidjan. Mr Gbagbo has called on the 10,000-strong UN force to leave the country.

The election was intended to reunify Ivory Coast - the world's leading cocoa producer - which has been divided since a 2002 conflict.

Mr Ouattara was initially proclaimed the winner by the country's election commission - a verdict backed by the UN, which helped organise the poll.

But the Constitutional Council, headed by an ally of Mr Gbagbo, said he had won, citing irregularities in the north which is controlled by former rebels supporting Mr Ouattara.

Both men have been sworn in as president.

Reports of the death of the phone call are greatly exaggerated

Dec 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHILE the computing cloud expands ever more, the humble phone call is in terminal decline, thanks to text messaging and the mobile internet. So, at least, say commentators in Silicon Valley. Some have already penned obituaries. “The phone call is dead”, read a recent headline inTechCrunch, a blog and currently the central organ of the high-tech region. But is it really time to hang up?

There is no doubt that landline calls are past their prime. The time people spend talking on a fixed telephone has gone down in recent years in nearly all rich countries for which the International Telecommunication Union has data. Yet in most, this fall is more than offset by the increase in mobile calls, according to a recent report by Ofcom, the British telecoms regulator (see chart).

Ofcom also found that cost, more than anything, determined how long people talk for and whether they prefer a landline or a mobile call. Should Germany’s rates for wireless conversation—currently twice the rate of landline calls—come down, people would certainly spend more than 112 minutes per month talking on handsets.

The strongest support for the notion of the disappearing phone call comes from America. Nielsen, a research firm, reports that the amount of time mobile subscribers talk has dropped to 700 minutes per month in 2010. That includes incoming calls. A survey by CTIA, a trade group, shows that the average length of a mobile call has dropped from just over three minutes to one minute and 40 seconds since mid-2007.

Less talking does not necessarily mean less phone use. According to Nielsen the number of paid texts per subscriber has grown rapidly over the same period, recently surpassing 700 per month. This is mainly thanks to the restless fingers of teenagers, who are also buying more smartphones—essentially hand-held computers that let them send messages via social networks. Facebook, the world’s biggest such network, recently announced that a third of its nearly 600m members access the service on their mobile phones.

Yet in Britain, where teenagers have been texting for longer, the spread of smartphones has not had the same effect, says Steve Alder, the general manager for devices at Telefonica Europe, which operates the O2 brand. British subscribers with smartphones talk 11% longer than owners of simpler handsets, Mr Alder says. The young are both more talkative and more text-hungry.

New technologies often fail to displace old ones. Research from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that young Americans are watching more television even as they spend more time on the computer. And an old form of communication may stage a comeback in a different form. Skype, the internet phone service, is growing rapidly. In the first half of 2010 users racked up 95 billion minutes in voice and video calls.

Odds are that the conventional phone call will be just one of many forms of telecommunication. And for most people outside of Silicon Valley, where some entrepreneurs allegedly do not even know how to use their smartphone to place a phone call, it will remain the most important one for some time to come. That should be welcomed by all those who relish the gentle art of conversation—and dreaded by parents who pay the bills.

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