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.”

Support Grows in Germany for Vote on Giving Up Power to European Bloc

　

By MELISSA EDDY

It has become the buzzword of the summer in Berlin: referendum. The foreign and finance ministers as well as opposition leaders have all come out in favor of allowing Germans to have a direct say in whether to give up more power to European Union institutions.

Although the idea of a referendum is for the moment more notional than concrete, it is gaining currency in Germany’s political debate. Approving it would amount to the exceptional step of a national vote to change the Constitution to allow Germans to relinquish some executive authority to Brussels.

Proponents say that if such a referendum were approved, it would send a strong signal of Germany’s commitment to the euro. It would also streamline the steps needed to save the common European currency, they argue, and appease mounting complaints by Germans that even as they are being asked to pay more to bolster or bail out their troubled euro zone partners, they have no say in where their taxes are flowing or how they are being spent.

Iran quakes death toll rises to 250, as search goes on

　Rescuers in Iran are searching through the rubble of collapsed buildings for survivors from two strong earthquakes which left at least 250 people dead.

The BBC   12 August 2012

The 6.4 and 6.3 quakes struck near Tabriz and Ahar on Saturday afternoon, and more than 2,000 are believed injured, many in outlying villages.

Thousands spent the night in emergency shelters or in the open and there have been more than 55 aftershocks.

Relief agencies are providing survivors with tents, bread and drinking water.

The numbers of victims is expected to rise.

Reports say phone lines to many villages have been cut off, confining rescuers to radio contact.

“The quake has created huge panic among the people,” one resident of Tabriz told the BBC. “Everyone has rushed to the streets and the sirens of ambulances are everywhere.”

MUCHO MOJO

Two women in western Japan are suing the operator of a yoga studio for threatening them with possession by evil spirits if they didn’t fork over millions of yen. They’re being supported in their efforts by the delightfully named National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales.

A professor at Keio University has developed a robot that can pass along the sensation of the things it touches to human hands.

A trio of climbers was arrested for attempting to scale Nachi Falls in Wakayama Prefecture. The falls and a nearby shrine are both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which led the head of the shrine to say the stunt was “an insult to our religion.”

Meanwhile, a delegation from UNESCO will travel to Gunma to judge whether the Tomioka silk mill is worthy of World Heritage status. The mill was established by the government way back in 1872.

As Syrian War Roils, Sectarian Unrest Seeps Into Turkey

　

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

ANTAKYA, Turkey – At 1 a.m. last Sunday, in the farming town of Surgu, about six hours away from here, a mob formed at the Evli family’s door.

The ill will had been brewing for days, ever since the Evli family chased away a drummer who had been trying to rouse people to a predawn Ramadan feast. The Evlis are Alawite, a historically persecuted minority sect of Islam, and also the sect of Syria’s embattled leaders, and many Alawites do not follow Islamic traditions like fasting for Ramadan.

The mob began to hurl insults. Then rocks.

“Death to Alawites!” they shouted. “We’re going to burn you all down!”

Then someone fired a gun.

Syria: Opposition in call to arm rebel fighters

　The head of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) has called for foreign states to arm rebel fighters.

The BBC   29 July 2012

Abdulbaset Sayda was speaking as Syrian forces continued their assault on rebel-held areas of the city of Aleppo.

Mr Sayda also said that President Bashar al-Assad should be tried for “massacres” rather than be offered asylum.

Western nations have warned of a potential bloodbath in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city.

“We want weapons that would stop tanks and jet fighters. That is what we want,” AFP quoted Mr Sayda as saying at a news conference in Abu Dhabi.

He urged Arab “brothers and friends to support the Free [Syrian] Army”.

Rebels have so far not received any overt foreign military support.

U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels

　

 By CHARLIE SAVAGE and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON – In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling – like Mexico and Spain – have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.

 THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

  A newly released poll found that 66 percent of Taiwanese people feel ties with Japan have “deepened” since the March 11 disaster.

At the same time, 51 percent said they “plan to refrain from traveling to Japan for the time being.”

An investigation by officials in Saitama uncovered 1,257 cases of welfare fraud in 2011, worth a total of ¥610 million.

A newly unveiled supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US has supplanted a Japanese machine as the world’s fastest. The new record holder, named Sequoia, can process 16.324 petaflops of data. (One petaflop is the equivalent of 1 quadrillion operations per second. Please don’t ask us how many zeros that is.)

Where Obama failed on forging peace in the Middle East

　

By Scott Wilson, Sunday, July 15, 12:57 PM

It was their first meeting with the new president, and the dozen or so Jewish leaders picked to attend had made an agreement among themselves: No arguing – either with each other or their host.

The pledge would be hard to keep.

Five weeks earlier, President Obama had traveled to Cairo to ask for a “new beginning” between his government and an Islamic world angry about the United States’ wars in two Muslim nations and its perceived favoritism toward Israel. Now, he was calling in these influential Jewish leaders to explain his thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

TECHNOLOGY & ITS DISCONTENTS

   A Japanese man who claims he’s being defamed by Google’s autocomplete function filed suit against the US-based tech giant in Tokyo. The suit says that entering the man’s name into a search bar leads to a display of candidate words “evoking criminal acts.”

   A Tokyo man who’s upset at DoCoMo’s decision to end its mova 2G service was arrested for placing 964 phonecalls to one of the carrier’s shops in Chiyoda-ku between December and February. The man also visited the store, “yelling angrily and begging for continuation of the service.”

   A huge dock that was set loose by the March 11 tsunami washed up on the coast of Oregon-along with “hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish, all native to Japan.” US scientists are describing the potentially invasive species as a “very clear threat.”

   Proving that a fondness for bureaucratic regulation runs deep in Japanese culture, archaeologists in Fukuoka unearthed strips of wood dating from the 7th century that are believed to be the earliest known evidence of a family registry system.