Apple’s victory over Samsung could mean more lawsuits
Some predict the ruling will force manufacturers back to the drawing board, as they seek to design smartphones and tablets that wouldn’t violate Apple’s patents.
By Dawn C. Chmielewski and Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times August 26, 2012
Steve Jobs didn’t live to see the outcome of the bruising war that pitted his iPhone and iPad against mobile devices that use Google’s Android software.
But he issued the call to arms.
“I am going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson, author of a posthumously published biography of the Apple co-founder. “They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty.”
Lebanon fears a firestorm as old rifts that led to civil war open up again
Violence spilling over from Syria revives ancient resentments
Martin Chulov Beirut
The Observer, Sunday 26 August 2012A respite from almost a fortnight of clashes in Lebanon’s second city, Tripoli, raised hopes yesterday that the release of some kidnapping victims would ease a growing threat of unchecked violence spilling over from the Syrian civil war.
But the lull failed to douse an enduring fear elsewhere in Lebanon that the enmity in the north will inevitably spread to other parts of the country. Another day of soaring violence in neighbouring Syria instead fuelled concerns that the raging civil war would further spill beyond the borders of its unstable neighbour.
Ghana’s witch camps: last refuge of the powerless and the persecuted
Four hundred years after the notorious Pendle trials, in some countries women accused of witchcraft are still being beaten, killed or hounded from their homes. And in Britain, claims of possession have been used to justify abuse
SARAH MORRISON SUNDAY 26 AUGUST 2012
Alizon Device, an 11-year-old girl, from Pendle, Lancashire, was hanged, along with nine others, after admitting she was a witch who often met the devil in the company of her 80-year-old grandmother. Her grandmother was also hanged.
Mercy Gigire was 25 years old, and nine months pregnant with her first child, when she was chased out of her village in northern Ghana for being a witch. Days earlier, she had bought four corn cakes from a woman at her door, who then became sick. It was assumed Ms Gigire had bewitched her.
In Marlboro country, smoking ‘nurtures talent’
John Garnaut, Beijing August 26, 2012
FEW people outside China have heard of the world’s biggest tobacco company, which is so powerful it can brazenly engrave false advertising in huge letters on primary school walls.
“Tobacco nurtures talent,” says the slogan on the quadrangle wall at a school in Guang’an city, which is co-sponsored by the China Tobacco Corp and the Hope Project of the Communist Youth League.
When the students at Sichuan Tobacco Hope School reach the peak of their careers, in about 2050, the number of smoking-related deaths in China will have tripled to about 3 million a year, according to the World Health Organisation.
Cities turn to innovative ‘green infrastructure’
From Seattle to Sweden, city and regional governments are using roof gardens, specially designed wetlands, and other forms of ‘green infrastructure’ to rein in pollution – and to save money.
By Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360
In Puget Sound, one of America’s great estuaries, killer whales, seals, and schools of salmon swim not far from more than 3 million people who live in the Seattle region. The presence of such impressive marine life, however, belies the fact that the sound is seriously polluted.
When it rains, storm water washes into the same system of underground pipes that carries the region’s sewage, and 1 billion gallons a year overflow into the sound when area sewer systems contain more water than can be treated. In addition, motor oil, lawn chemicals, PCBs, heavy metals, pet waste, and many other substances run unabated into the sound, both through the storm water pipes and from roads and other shoreline structures. “The biggest threat to Puget Sound is non-point sources [of pollution],” says Nancy Ahern, Seattle Public Utilities deputy director.
The return of the Indian Pale Ale
“A mug of ale please,” calls Kanishk Goswami across the solid wood bar-top.
By Andrew North
BBC News, DelhiArsenal and other English-football team logos on the walls add to the atmosphere.
The barman returns with a large glass tankard of brown ale.
Two hundred years since English brewers started shipping strong, extra-hoppy beer to colonialists on the subcontinent, India Pale Ale (IPA) is making a tentative comeback here – in a handful of microbrewery pubs emerging in Gurgaon, the fast-growing business hub on the edge of Delhi.
Its main customers so far are the vanguard of the new thrusting India – people like Mr Goswami, a corporate headhunter who set up his company’s London operation and got a taste for British beers while there.
Recent Comments